Subscriptions
Brian Cathcart argues that, while journalism is in crisis because of COVID-19, subsidies to untrustworthy newspaper proprietors are not the answer.
The press billionaires want your money. Or, to be precise, they want the Government to give them your money. They are taking a financial hit and they smell public subsidies in the air for other industries damaged by COVID-19 so, greedy as ever, they want a share.
To achieve this, they are playing their usual tricks. First, they tell you they are vital and trusted sources of information in imminent danger of collapse. They often accompany this with a reference to the comparative evils of ‘social media’.
Second, they hide behind the stricken local press and pretend that this is really about the worthy, hard-up, understaffed newspaper around the corner that struggles to serve your community, year in and year out.
And third, they try to make it about the jobs of their journalists – hard-working, highly-skilled people dedicated to public service who have families and who will go hungry if the Government does not provide them with a big bail-out.
When Rebekah Brooks, the Murdoch CEO, ‘resigned’ briefly in 2012, her compensation was £10.9 million. Piers Morgan was actually sacked from the Daily Mirror in 2004 and he received a pay-off of £1.7 million.
We need a reality check here. The truth is that much of our newspaper industry is corrupt and it is never right to subsidise corruption.
In other words, not one penny of public money – that is to say the money paid in taxes now and in the future by you and me – should be given to support the corporate press in this country until a lot of things are cleared up, in particular, until we have a much better picture of who is genuinely needy and worthy of support.
Billionaires in Need of Cash?
We need to remember that the biggest titles – the Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph and the Times – have proprietors who are genuine billionaires; that they are individuals and come from families worth thousands of millions of pounds. And those billionaires and their companies pay their taxes only where it suits them, which means that they pay the least they can manage in the UK.
Before we hand them any money that has been paid as taxes by nurses and bus drivers in this country, we need to be certain that (a) none of the cash will swell the personal coffers of the Murdochs, Rothermeres and Barclays, (b) they themselves have spent everything they can afford to keep their newspapers going, and (c) in the future, they will pay all the tax that they should in this country – no more Channel Islands, no more Bermuda, no more Delaware.
Bear in mind here that these companies already benefit from a very big tax break which you and I have generously been giving them for decades. Newspapers are zero-rated for VAT, which means that we waive the tax revenue we might have had from their sale. That alone is worth hundreds of millions to the press industry every year and the same bonus has just been extended to online operations.
Bear in mind too that they pay some very high salaries and throw money around when it suits them. Boris Johnson, we know, received in excess of £250,000 a year to write once a week for the Telegraph and there must be at least a dozen columnists currently in that pay grade.
Big-name political and sportswriters also tend to be very well rewarded as, of course, are executives including legal executives. When Rebekah Brooks, CEO of the Murdoch News International (now NewsUK), ‘resigned’ briefly in 2012, her compensation was £10.9 million. Piers Morgan was actually sacked from the Daily Mirror in 2004 and he received a pay-off of £1.7 million.&