What is the Media Freedom Act campaign?
To have a free and fair democracy, media ownership must be freed from billionaire capture and spread across all sections of our society.
Tackling our climate, poverty, nature and democratic crises with the urgency needed requires a media freed from billionaire domination.
The purpose of the Media Freedom Act campaign is to free us from this capture of our media by the 0.0001%.
Our parliamentary petition launching the Act received over three times the 10,000 signatures needed to trigger the Labour government’s response!
The Act has 5 measures:
Media owners must be legal UK residents.
Free media ownership from domination by billionaires and corporations:
The maximum ownership share allowed of a national media outlet by any one individual or family is 20%.
Companies can only own one national media outlet.
Distribute media ownership across society, with a levy on social media billionaires to fund local, independent, and cooperatively owned media.
UK media must be members of a press-abuse complaints authority independent of government and owners.
Requires think tanks covered by the media to disclose donations in real time.
Please check out our Take Action pages, supporter and fundraising pages to see how you can help get the Media Freedom Act passed asap.
The Origin of the Media Freedom Act
The Media Freedom Act will complete three centuries of democratic reform.
The 19th century saw the Great Reform Acts, which transferred some power from the landed gentry to a wider part of the population.
The 20th century saw Universal and Women’s Suffrage legislation passed, transferring more power from the aristocracy and the billionaire class to the wider public.
But as long as the billionaire class holds onto their domination of our media ownership, then true power will not rest with the people.
The campaign for the Media Freedom Act was founded in November 2025 by two experienced climate and transport campaigners, Donnachadh McCarthy and Caspar Hughes, with the drafting assisted by Liz Pendleton.
Having seen how the billionaire-owned media repeatedly served as the primary political power blocking action on a range of climate and transport issues, we decided it was time to stop whinging about the destructive political capture of our democracy by these billionaires and to do something to end it.
Thus was the campaign born.
Our vision is to replace the current billionaire media ownership model with one in which every single section of society has a stake.
We are not here to reform the billionaire-owned media but to end it completely.
It is crucial, no matter what our politics are, whether right or left, progressive or reactionary, green or liberal, it is crucial for a healthy democracy that our media is owned by the 99.999%, not by the 0.001%.
Thus, we embrace all political voices in our campaign.
We do this with full knowledge that only a national, cross-party, united grassroots campaign can take on the existing political power of this tiny group of media billionaires.
This is because they frequently try to abuse their media power to divide us across so many lines, whether race, gender, class, nationality or politics.
By rising above the divisions they seek to sow, we unite, take on their power, and end their climate and democratic destructiveness.
Please join and support the Media Freedom Campaign in whatever way you can.
A new Britain free from enslavement to the foreign and domestic billionaire media clique is possible.
Let us take back control.