UK government to rule on Sky merger

Britain's culture secretary will rule today on whether Twenty-First Century Fox can take full control of the Sky pay television and broadband network in an 11.7 billion pound ($15.2 billion) deal critics say would give Rupert Murdoch too much power in UK media.
Murdoch's media group is trying to buy the 61 percent of Sky it doesn't already own, giving Twenty-First Century Fox easy access to Sky's 22 million customers in the UK, Ireland, Austria, Germany and Italy.
Culture Secretary Karen Bradley is scheduled to release her decision later Thursday, announcing whether she has cleared the deal or referred it to competition regulators for further review.

Ofcom, the communications regulator, last week submitted a report to Bradley on the deal's implications for media competition and Sky's compliance with broadcasting standards.
A separate report looked at whether Twenty-First Century Fox is "fit and proper" to hold a broadcasting license.
Critics argue the takeover would give Murdoch too much influence over British media because his company already owns two of the country's biggest newspapers, The Sun and The Times. Women who allege they were sexually harassed at US- based Fox News also say the takeover should be blocked.

An earlier attempt to buy Sky was thwarted by the 2011 phone-hacking scandal that rocked Murdoch's British newspapers and led to the closure of the 168-year-old News of the World tabloid. A campaign group challenging the merger, Avaaz, compared the sexual harassment scandal at Fox to phone hacking, in which journalists were alleged to have illegally tapped into the phones of public officials, crime victims and members of the royal family.

"This emerging scandal, and the denials and obstruction by senior people at Fox, are analogous to the industrial-scale phone hacking in the UK," Avaaz campaign director Meredith Alexander said in a press release. Murdoch "is directly implicated in this, as he has been acting as CEO at Fox News since former CEO Roger Ailes was ousted in July 2016."
Sky reported operating profit of 1.6 billion pounds (USD 2.1 billion) for the year ended June 30, 2016, on revenue of 12 billion pounds. The company offers more than 600 pay TV channels, which include programming such as Premier League soccer, news and the popular US series "Game of Thrones," which attracted an average of more than 6.5 million viewers per episode.