Students: Take Action!

The Media Freedom Act is looking for local students willing to submit the Media Freedom Act to their local student union branch for submission to the National Union of Students national conference.

Actions You Can Take

  1. Contact your student-union branch secretary to submit the Media Freedom Act motion below for endorsement by your local branch and get them to submit it for endorsement by the National Union of Students conference.

  2. Share a link to this Media Freedom Act page on your social media.

  3. Join our supporters page on Facebook.

  4. Join our supporters' email list.

Please email caspar@MediaFreedomAct.org if you have submitted the motion. Let us know the result of the vote, if one was taken.

Media Freedom Act Motion for Student Union local branches:

This XXXX Students Union Branch 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. Dark-money funded think-tanks enable billionaires and foreign corporations to anonymously and unaccountably influence 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. The remedy is to disperse this power among more owners.

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

We endorse the Media Freedom Act and call on the NUS 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.