Donald Trump is already at war with the BBC. Now an American takeover deal increases the likelihood of ITV becoming a new target in his vendetta against mainstream media.
The UK’s largest commercial broadcaster is in talks over a possible £1.6bn acquisition by Sky, owned by American media conglomerate Comcast. The deal – overshadowed in the news by the crisis at the BBC – would give the Philadelphia-based company control of ITV’s media and entertainment division, its streaming service ITVX, and its stake in ITN, which makes ITV News, Channel 4 News and 5News. Comcast, already owner of Sky News, would be a giant in UK broadcast news.
“The danger at the moment, when it comes to an American company owning ITV and [a major stake in] ITN, is Donald Trump,” says Julian Petley, professor of screen media at Brunel University. “Because who knows what they might do under pressure from Trump?”
Trump despises Comcast’s chief executive, Brian L Roberts, who he denounced as a “slimeball”, a “lowlife”, and a “disgrace to the integrity of broadcasting” in personal attacks on his Truth Social platform. But what Trump really hates is the coverage of his administration by Comcast’s news divisions, NBC News and MS Now (formerly MNSBC), which he deems “the world’s biggest political contribution to the Radical Left Democrats”. He has promised to make Roberts “pay for their illegal political activity”.
Such threats are real. Trump’s lawyers took $15m from Disney over disparaging comment made by an anchor on its ABC News network. Paramount was forced to pay $16m to settle Trump’s lawsuit over the editing of a documentary by CBS show 60 Minutes. Both payments went towards Trump’s planned presidential library. He has threatened to sue the BBC for “between $1bn and $5bn” over misleading editing of a speech that proceeded riots at the Capitol in 2021. The BBC apologised for its error but refused Trump compensation.
Trump has not taken legal action against Comcast. But last month it emerged that the company made a donation – reportedly of millions of dollars – to Trump’s project for a giant ballroom at the White House. Some Comcast journalists were shocked to see their employer on the donor list. “Public-facing companies should know that there’s a cost in terms of their reputations with the American people,” said Rachel Maddow on her MS Now show. “This is Trump’s Washington,” said Chuck Todd, former presenter of NBC’s Meet The Press. “None of this helps the reputations of the news organisations that these companies own, because it compromises everybody.”
In British media circles, there are concerns for the independence of public service news. “What happens if Trump suddenly goes absolutely crazy and gets angry about something at Comcast and Brian Roberts, and then maybe downstream somewhere ITV is producing a programme around Trump?” said Dan Thomas, Financial Times global media editor, on Roger Bolton’s Beeb Watch podcast. “You can sort of create scenarios where there might be questions and uncomfortable situations.”
ITV News led the world in its reporting of the 2021 riots at the Capitol, with its correspondent Robert Moore mingling with angry Trump supporters as they gatecrashed the building. “This has been fuelled by the President’s rhetoric,” reported Moore in an ITV News documentary, Storming the Capitol, which won multiple awards.
Channel 4 News, made by ITN, played a key role in exposing the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which questioned Trump’s victorious 2016 election campaign. ITV is the major shareholder in ITN, with smaller shareholders being Thomson Reuters, Informa and the Daily Mail General Trust (publisher of The i Paper).
Comcast has owned Sky for eight years and has invested in transformative technology, film studios and a theme park. It has honoured its commitment to fund and maintain the loss-making Sky News service. The output of 85-year-old NBC News and the more obviously liberal-leaning MS Now suggests its newsrooms are not cowed by Trump’s bullying and Roberts is not involved in editorial decisions. But what of the future, when media companies change hands?
“The people in the news divisions are highly professional individuals, I don’t think British broadcasting has anything to fear from them – the question is: ‘Who are their masters, and to a certain extent, who are their political masters?’” said Stewart Purvis, former chief executive of ITN. “We all need to wake up to the realities of how that might develop.”
Comcast depends for licences on American regulators led by Trump appointees. It this week failed in a fierce auction to buy Warner Bros Discovery, a conglomerate that includes CNN, which is another news outlet Trump hates.
Purvis calls for enhanced “mechanisms and structures” to protect “the news plurality that exists in the UK today”, such as potentially an independent editorial board and regulator scrutiny of contractual commitments to ensure news outlets are kept separate.
Steven Barnett, professor of communications at the University of Westminster, says Sky’s bid should face intense scrutiny from media regulator Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority. “The question is what commitment could Ofcom demand that would protect ITV from any political interference,” he said. “There is a real potential issue here and it would need investigation by the regulatory authorities.”
Although Comcast is American, Sky’s roots and its management are firmly based in the UK. ITV’s public service licence is protected until 2034. Sky’s £1.6bn interest is not focused on news but on more lucrative parts of ITV that would enable it to scale up. Potentially, a merged Sky and ITV could create a UK national streaming competitor to compete with Netflix, Prime and Disney+. And talks are at an early stage.
Yet with Reform UK leading polls and Nigel Farage, a GB News presenter and Trump acolyte, eyeing the door of Number 10, the real prospect of a greatly-defunded BBC increases unease over the future of public service news. Farage has promised to scrap the BBC licence fee, while funding its news output through “subscription, adverts or general taxation” at a “tiny fraction of what the BBC currently costs us all”.
“If the BBC were to decline as a news force, the biggest player in the UK new market could be an American-owned streamer, owning or supplying the rest of the public service broadcasters,” notes Purvis. “One cannot think that through without thinking of what protections are needed.”
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