Enders Analysis concludes that News Corp and Sky will produce 22% of all the news that Britons consume daily

Guardian

Discussing the implications of the News Corporation-Sky transaction can easily get lost in an irrelevant point. It is the "do you hate Rupert Murdoch question" which is fun to debate, particularly after a night catching up with Fox News. But when you consider whether media regulators should - or should not - block the News Corp-Sky deal it is best to put some facts into play. Because the question here is not whether you like Rupert or not - but simply whether News Corp/Sky is too large.

Those who have dealt with Ofcom, the communications regulator grappling with the merger issue, say that the anoraks are trying to grapple with the issue by producing some data that determines media power and dominance in the UK. It is the kind of exercise that has been attempted elsewhere, by the FCC in the US to assess local media concentration, and most notably in Germany where the KEK regulator blocked the proposed takeover of broadcaster ProSiebenSat.1 by Axel Springer back in 2005.

So, we ought to expect some serious data in Ofcoms report when it goes up to Jeremy Hunt tomorrow. Which leads onto the next question: how do you measure cross media power or otherwise. Enders Analysis made an attempt in its submission delivered to Ofcom delivered last month, and you can see the key figures below. Essentially what Enders has done is taken the number of minutes a day the average adult (aged 15+) consumes news from various newspapers, radio, TV, magazines and online. The TV data is taken from BARB; the newspaper data from the National Readership Survey.

We can argue endlessly about the methodology here. Many people believe the NRS data exaggerates the amount of time people spend reading newspapers; on the other hand time is not the best measure to determine the influence of the printed word. Each media is weighted the same and you can argue about whether that is fair (in Germany TV is weighted more heavily on their analysis). Oh, before you leap into say that Sky owns no radio stations, bear in mind that Sky has displaced IRN to become the dominant supplier of news to commercial radio.

Here is what the figures tell us. News Corp has a 14.6% share of news consumption; Sky another 7.4% (mainly because of its position in radio). Together they are 22% - or 22.6% if you count the Five News bulletin that Sky produces for Richard Desmond''s channel. Nobody in the commercial sector comes close - next up is the Daily Mail group with 10.5%, then ITN at 7.6%. In fact, what is being proposed is a merger of the number one and four commercial media groups, which is the sort of thing that in most other markets would be questioned hard.