The Department of Communications will mark Halloween by taking charge of the new dual-notification system for media mergers, as government responsibility for the area transfers from the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation to its domain.
Minister for Communications Alex White will make the call on whether or not a media merger is in the public interest, while the new Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) will determine if a deal can go ahead on competition grounds.
The legislation governing media ownership and control was updated earlier this year in Part 4 of the Competition and Consumer Protection Act, 2014, which commences tomorrow.
White’s department is still working on the guidelines that will underpin how the media mergers process will work in practice. These guidelines are expected to address “the levels of media ownership that would be regarded as contrary to the public interest”.
They may also detail the indicators that will be used to assess diversity - both of content and ownership - in the media sector and determine whether a merger should go ahead.
The guidelines will be published in draft form in early November, the Department says.
They are unlikely to prove too spooky for Independent News & Media's biggest shareholder, Denis O'Brien, who also owns the Communicorp radio group. O'Brien is officially deemed by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland not to control INM.
But there are some who find O’Brien’s growing media influence a concern. Communicorp station Newstalk is now the largest supplier of radio news in Ireland after last week signing a contract to provide news to six UTV radio stations. The agreement prompted Séamus Dooley, Irish secretary of the National Union of Journalists, to call on White to “cry halt” to what he described as “this latest threat to media diversity”.
In Dublin alone stations either owned by Communicorp or already supplied news by Newstalk’s syndicated service have a combined market share of 39.1 per cent, while UTV’s music stations FM104 and Q102 have a combined 18.5 per cent share of listeners.
This means the deal takes the Dublin market share for stations carrying Communicorp news output up to 57.6 per cent – far in excess of the 41.7 per cent share held by RTÉ stations in the capital.
Newstalk also supplies news to 18 local radio stations under agreements due to run until 2018. It has provided news to these stations since shortly after the collapse of Independent Network News (INN) in 2009, seeing off a bid by UTV to provide a replacement syndicated news service.
