Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB takeover bid must be challenged – Lord Puttnam

David Puttnam, the film-maker and Labour peer, has called on the government to limit the ambitions of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in the proposed takeover of BSkyB. He said there were growing concerns in Britain and in Europe about the close links between the media and politics. Lord Puttnam, who chairs the joint parliamentary scrutiny committee for the Communications Act 2003, appealed in particular to Vince Cable, the cabinet minister with the power to refer the proposed deal to the media regulator Ofcom, which in turn could refer it to the Competition Commission. Cable, he said, had been disillusioned in the past by the apparent "seduction" of politicians by lobbyists pushing the interests of the Murdoch group. "The desire of News Corporation to buy the 61% of pay-TV operator BSkyB which it doesn't already own goes straight to the heart of arguments about media plurality in a modern democracy," said Puttnam. "The scope for ensuring that news is manipulated to reflect a particular viewpoint, across different media is very considerable," he said. "Especially since, if the other shareholders were driven out, News Corporation would for the very first time have untrammelled control of Sky News." In 2002 Lord Puttnam chaired the committee which recommended an amendment to prevent ownership of British terrestrial TV stations by companies with a significant share of the newspaper market, widely seen as aimed at stopping News Corp from buying Five. When the government opposed the amendment, Puttnam brokered a compromise — the introduction of a "public interest" test to be applied by the new regulator Ofcom. It was quite clear, Puttnam told the Observer this weekend, that competition law "and specifically the plurality test, is the only real safeguard we have against the abuse of media power and the continuing attempts to erode the diversity of informed opinion in our democracy".