Murdoch’s Puppet Show: Pulling on the Strings of Government

A Hacked Off analysis of Government transparency data has revealed the extent of press and Government interactions over the 12 month period from September 2022 to September 2023 (which is when the most recently published transparency data runs to).

The key findings for this one year period are:

• 534 meetings recorded between the Press and the Government
• 218 interactions recorded between Murdoch interests and the Government
• Rupert Murdoch personally met with Government representatives 12 times over this period; on 6 occasions with the Prime Minister himself
• 62% of all meetings with news providers (including the BBC, other broadcasters and radio) were with the press
• Despite over 200 newspaper publishers joining an independent regulator, the Government did not meet with a single one of them; all recorded meetings were with the unregulated press
• Three private calls between the Secretary of State and newspaper editors on the date the draft Media Bill was published, which included plans to undermine Leveson

The minutes of these meetings have not been published.

The full data is available here.

This post originally appeared on the Hacked Off Blog and is reproduced with permission and thanks