Media Freedom Act Motion for Local Councils

Please email your local councillor to ask them to submit this motion for endorsement by your  local council.

To find out who your local councillor is just type your post code into this website and it will take you to your local council website, which will have the councillors email address. 

https://www.gov.uk/find-your-local-councillors

Many thanks.

This XXXX Council Notes That:

  1. Ownership of the United Kingdom’s national news media (press, broadcast and online) is concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of individuals and corporations, most of them based outside the UK, giving them enormous unaccountable power to dominate and control our politics.

  2. Parliament has taken a very modest step to bar foreign states from controlling more than 15% of a UK newspaper company, but no equivalent rule applies to individuals or companies not resident in the UK.

  3. The loss of local newspapers has left much of the country without reporting of its courts, councils and communities, as advertising revenue has moved to a small number of offshore technology corporations, leading to a seriously destructive democratic deficit. 

  4. The use of dark-money funded think-tanks allows billionaires and foreign corporations to anonymously and unaccountably impact British government policymaking. 

  5. The UK’s billionaire and corporate owned media have refused to join the post-Leveson complaints authority, which is independent of government and media owners. 

We believe:

  1. For Britain to have a genuinely free press and a free and fair democracy, our media ownership must be free from capture and domination by a tiny billionaire minority and that the  remedy for concentrated power is to disperse it.

  2. That our current billionaire and corporate media monopolies restrict our press freedom almost as much as a state press monopoly would.

We therefore endorse the Media Freedom Act that contains the following 5 measures and we call on the UK (or Scottish government / Senedd) to do likewise:

  1. Requires the owners of national media organisations to  be legal UK residents.

  2. Frees media ownership from domination by billionaires and corporations:

    1. Maximum ownership share of a national media outlet for one individual or family shall be 20%.

    2. Companies can only own one national media outlet.

  3. Distributes the power of media ownership across society via a  levy on social media billionaires to fund local, independent and cooperatively owned media.

  4. Obliges the media to be members of a Leveson-compliant press-abuse complaints authority, independent of government and owners.

  5. Requires think-tanks covered by the media to disclose donations in real time.