There is a tendency in some leftish quarters to quietly enjoy the agonies of the Telegraph and the Spectator as they contemplate the possibility of being owned by a fund controlled by the United Arab Emirates. It’s a bit rich, this line of thinking goes, for the titles – and others with hopes of bagging the loose assets – to be fussy about ownership or the operation of a free market.
Aren’t they part of the unlovely over-representation in UK medialand of non-doms and foreign and domestic billionaires? If the UAE is deemed a suitable owner of Manchester City and, possibly, a slice of Sizewell C, why not trust its assurances that it’ll be a passive operator in the UK and won’t try to throttle free expression as it does at home?
Well, the answer is surely simple: UK newspapers should not be owned by undemocratic foreign states. Indeed, even if the UAE were a paradise of fair elections and human rights, it would still be bizarre to allow a foreign government to own a major UK newspaper group. To state the bleedin’ obvious, the media is more important to free speech, public debate and UK values than a football club or a nuclear power station.
The Redbird IMI bidding vehicle is majority-owned by International Media Investments, which is controlled by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE vice-president. So there’s no doubt that power would ultimately lie with the ruling family of a country that ranks 145th out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index.
In an interview in the Sunday Times at the weekend, Jeff Zucker, the former boss of CNN who heads Redbird IMI, tried to allay worries. None of his arguments was convincing. His promise to resign should editorial independence be compromised cannot possibly be considered a serious governance safeguard; executives come and go all the time, for many reasons.
As for the idea that it’s in the UAE’s own commercial interests to ensure editorial independence, any owner could make that boast in the abstract. Nobody imagines that editorial diktats would be issued from Abu Dhabi on day one. Rather, the worry is that the field of journalistic inquiry and opinion would narrow over time in subtle ways that are more akin to self-censorship.
The UK culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, who has triggered an Ofcom inquiry by issuing a public interest intervention notice (Piin) and will ultimately decide the outcome, should listen in particular to the many female columnists on the Telegraph who have voiced concerns. The associate editor Camilla Tominey has written of her fears that “a newspaper that promotes women as key columnists may struggle to operate under the guise of any authoritarian regime that implements sexist laws”. The worries go wider, obviously, but that column is a good place for Frazer to start.
A parallel point applies to Zucker’s idea of creating an independent editorial advisory board. Very few arm’s-length creations ever truly live up to the hype. The danger is always that protections are diluted via the natural cycle of appointments and inevitable second-guessing of how the owners would view X or Y as a trustee. It is notable that Redbird IMI has not outlined a specific structure for an advisory board so far. One fears its approach is to test the political waters and see how little it may be able to get away with.
If the government ultimately blocks the takeover, there’s a separate issue of where the Telegraph titles would end up. Would the Barclay family, now back in temporary control (thanks to the UAE loan that allowed repayment of a £1.16bn debt to Lloyds Banking Group), be obliged to sell to a buyer that can pass the Piin test? It’s unclear, but that is a question for another day.
In the meantime, those on the left who deplore the lack of diversity in UK media ownership should resist the urge to draw wry amusement from the Telegraph’s predicament. Instead, they should be roaring their objections to a plainly unacceptable deal.
