Letter: BSkyB damaged the industry

Sam Keogh
Sunday 30 January 1994 00:02 GMT
Comments

Your support helps us to tell the story

This election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.

The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.

Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.

I HOPE BSkyB's Director of Public Affairs, Ray Gallagher, (Letters, 23 January) is paid a lot of money to cast BSkyB in a favourable light. It must be very difficult work. Whatever technical arguments he might come up with to make BSkyB seem to belong to Britain, the facts are that it's a foreign intruder that has done serious damage to our broadcasting industry.

Lest anyone forget, Britain spent a lot of time and effort planning and franchising a truly forward looking satellite service, which was dashed from the skies by a combination of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, the connivings of the international money markets and the then Thatcher government's inaction.

Mr Murdoch's 'Sun in the Sky' seemed a more comfortable option for the Tories than an organisation founded on similar principles to the BBC and Channel 4. Too many liberals prevailed in BSB for Tory tastes, and it was left for dead.

Had Sky Television been set up by a wealthy French socialist media mogul, Margaret Thatcher would probably have had it strangled at birth, and BSB and the British television industry would have thrived. Peter Brooke's recent assertion that Mr Murdoch's cross-media ownership is acceptable is sheer humbug. Yet another example of the complacent arrogance that allows all Tories to re-write any history they find embarrassing or inconvenient.

Sam Keogh

London W13

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in