{"id":408,"date":"2007-04-27T12:21:00","date_gmt":"2007-04-27T18:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=408"},"modified":"2007-04-27T12:21:00","modified_gmt":"2007-04-27T18:21:00","slug":"playing-business-politics-with-tv-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/04\/playing-business-politics-with-tv-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing business politics with TV news"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcaps\">I<\/span> own a few <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Sky<\/span> shares so I wasn&#8217;t exactly thrilled when <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">James Murdoch<\/span> decided to buy a chunk of <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">ITV<\/span>. Still, the following <a href=\"http:\/\/www.londonstockexchange.com\/LSECWS\/IFSPages\/MarketNewsPopup.aspx?id=1470966&#038;source=RNS\" target=\"_blank\">announcement<\/a> had me choking on my chips: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Ofcom&#8217;s advice is that there are public interest issues, in relation to sufficient plurality of news provision for both cross media and television news in the UK.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Wow. \u201cSufficient plurality of news provision.\u201d The guys at <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Ofcom<\/span> never worried about <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">poverty<\/span> of news provision when news budgets were slashed at ITV and <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Five<\/span>. But now they&#8217;re worried about plurality.<\/p>\n<p>The bottom line is a single independent news organization might just have the cash to compete toe-to-toe with the <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">BBC<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>Ofcom meanwhile might need reminding that digital TV viewers can get <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CNN International<\/span>, <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Al Jazeera English<\/span>, <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Bloomberg<\/span>, <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">France 24<\/span>, <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Deutsche-Welle TV<\/span>, <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Euronews<\/span> and a host of other news services should they so desire. There might be good reasons to stop this deal, but Ofcom&#8217;s advice? That ain&#8217;t one of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I own a few Sky shares so I wasn&#8217;t exactly thrilled when James Murdoch decided to buy a chunk of ITV. Still, the following announcement had me choking on my chips: Ofcom&#8217;s advice is that there are public interest issues, in relation to sufficient plurality of news provision for both cross media and television news [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[139,200,86,19,25,119],"class_list":["post-408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","tag-al-jazeera-english","tag-euronews","tag-france-24","tag-itn","tag-itv","tag-uk-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}