Nick Clegg has signalled it’s time to “look again” at media plurality rules, after Labour leader Ed Miliband called for new media ownership rules.
"I think that we've got to look at the situation whereby one person can own more than 20% of the newspaper market, the Sky platform and Sky News... I think it's unhealthy because that amount of power in one person's hands has clearly led to abuses of power within his organisation. If you want to minimise the abuses of power then that kind of concentration of power is frankly quite dangerous."
Asked about the claims, the deputy prime minister said it was time to look at media power and plurality, as well as press regulation.
He told the BBC: “It’s undoubtedly true that when you give one individual or a whole number of people a huge amount of power without properly accountability, things go wrong. That’s happened here, it has of course in other walks of life.
“And that’s why we do need to look again, in the round, at the plurality rules to make sure there’s proper plurality in the British press.
“A healthy press is a diverse press where you’ve got lots of different people, different organisations competing. That’s exactly what we need. But I would add that even if you get the plurality rules right, which I hope we will now - it’s something that my party has been calling for for years - none of that really will matter unless you also hold people to account in the media.
“At the moment you’ve got the ludicrous situation where editors of our national newspapers can make or break the reputation of often innocent individuals in the blink of an eye, judge people day by day and yet themselves are not held independently to account. In fact even worse than that, if anything goes wrong the people who… Guess who decides how the standards of a newspaper should be policed? It’s the editors themselves. In no other industry, in now other area of walk of life do you have people acting as judge and jury in that way.”
But in an indication of a Coalition split on the issue, Defence Secretary Liam Fox cautioned against politicians over-reacting, saying the issue should be examined “without hysteria.”