Ed Miliband says News Corp should be forced to sell the Sun or the Times

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jun/12/ed-miliband-news-corp-sell-sun

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Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation should be forced to sell either the Sun or the Times because the publisher's leading market share gave it a sense of "power without responsibility", Ed Miliband told the Leveson inquiry on Tuesday.

Giving evidence before the inquiry into press standards, the Labour leader said he did not believe that one person should "continue to control 34% of the newspaper market" – and said he would like to examine "whether we should have lower [ownership] limits" for publishers.

In a clear reference to Murdoch's company, Miliband said "we should have no worries of somebody owning up to 20% of the newspaper market" but that he believed "I think there is then a question of between 20% to 30% where you should set a limit."

News Corporation is easily the largest UK newspaper publisher, with Enders Analysis putting its share of national newspaper sales at 37%, slightly higher than the figure Miliband referred to. The next biggest publisher is the owner of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday with a 22% share.

Miliband chose not spell out how the reduction in market share could be achieved, although the only way to achieve this would by a forced sale of titles, mostly likely the Times titles which account for 5%. Murdoch has owned the Times titles since 1981, when News Corp was allowed to buy them without a referral to the competition authorities.

Earlier Miliband said he believed News Corp had a sense of "power without responsibility" which meant that some of the firm's papers had a "sense of immunity" – and so employees thought they could get away with practices such as phone hacking, as at the News of the World.

He insisted his aim "was not to stifle one particular organisation or another" but said he wanted to foster "plurality and a sense that … one organisation does not exercise overweening power".

Last summer in the wake of the Milly Dowler hacking furore, Miliband was the first of the party leaders to call for the Commons vote against News Corp's bid for BSkyB, forcing Nick Clegg and David Cameron to follow, and leading to the takeover's eventual collapse.

With the Lib Dem and Conservative leaders due to give evidence on Wednesdayand Thursdayrespectively, Miliband's comments again position him apart from the prime minister and his deputy.

Miliband also called for a review of the existing cross-media ownership rules that prevent a publisher with more than 20% of the newspaper market owning more than 20% of ITV. But he offered few details beyond questioning whether "you should have an overall limit about how much control one organisation has on the market".

His call for a reduction in Murdoch power met with a cool response from Lord Justice Leveson, who said it was not clear that the terms of reference of the inquiry allowed him to investigate competition matters. "I am concerned about the extent to which it is appropriate for me to start to opine about percentage market shares, because that involves all sorts of competition issues which would require quite detailed analysis," the judge said.

Miliband also said he believed that some form of statutory regulation of the press was necessary, the first major political leader to argue that the successor to the Press Complaints Commission should be recognised by law.

But he said he would not back statutory regulation of content of newspapers, saying he thought the successor to the PCC should be independent, and offer "fast-track justice or redress for individuals".

The Labour leader argued that he would support "statutory support" for a reformed PCC – an apparent reference to the model of statutory recognition of an independent press regulator as adopted in Ireland. But Miliband said any PCC-related law would have to include "constitutional safeguards on the freedom of the press".

Miliband said he had anxiety about proposals being put forward by the chairman of the PCC, Lord Hunt, who has argued against the introduction of any kind of legislation. Hunt has warned that MPs could insist on the introduction of all sorts of restrictive amendments if a press reform bill were to be debated on the floor of the Commons.

Miliband conceded that Labour had got too close to News International in the past and had been slow to act on the phone-hacking scandal. Miliband met Murdoch at a News Corporation summer party in June 2011 – a month after the revelation that Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked, but said they spoke only about US politics. "I believe I should have raised the issue of phone hacking. I didn't," he told the inquiry.

Earlier the inquiry heard how the former chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks, phoned the opposition leader the day it emerged that Vince Cable had said he had declared war on Rupert Murdoch's bid for BSkyB. Leveson, on hearing the story, concluded it was evident that Brooks was trying to use the Cable incident to leverage "political muscle" for the campaign to get the BSkyB bid through the regulatory process.

Appearing immediately after the Labour leader, Harriet Harman, the party's deputy leader and shadow culture secretary, blamed a sense of impunity and invincibility among newspapers for creating the "ugly" culture in which abuses such as phone hacking could occur.

In her written evidence to the Leveson inquiry, she said there were "two deep-seated problems which are the basis for the abuses which have become evident – a lack of redress for press complaints which led to a sense of impunity, and a concentration of ownership which led to a sense of invincibility". She added that a statutory basis for future press regulation did not mean people had to fear "armageddon or Zimbabwe".