The exposure of the Coulson phone-hacking scandal has done all of us a favour. It has shaken off a complacency about the culture of our media and focussed the spotlight on its driving force, its ownership.

Scandal mongering and dirt digging has always been a preoccupation of the press, but its growth in Britain has been perpetuated by the two red-tops belonging to Rupert Murdoch’s News International. They are of course The Sun and The News of the World and they are respectively the top circulation daily and Sunday papers. And this same proprietor owns two “quality” and very influential papers, The Times and The Sunday Times. Within his vast empire, also lies a large chunk of British television and he is currently bidding to take over the 61% of BSkyB that he does not already own.

This should strike deafeningly loud warning bells, particularly at a time when Murdoch Junior is attacking the size of the BBC. Are we to be subjected to the emergence of a British version of Murdoch’s Fox, the broadcaster that supports The Tea Party? As has been widely reported, Business Secretary, Vince Cable, must now decide whether to intercede. His actions will be crucial to the plurality of media ownership.

But the problems do not end with Sky. There is the prospect that regulator Ofcom will further relax the rules relating to cross media ownership. This will mean that one single proprietor – possibly Mr Murdoch again – could be the sole owner of all the newspaper and broadcasting media in any locality.

Respected media analyst, Claire Enders, predicts that within five to ten years more than half of British newspapers and television will belong to the Murdoch stable. And, for those who were making comparisons with Berlusconi’s empire, according to Enders, we have already surpassed that here. It would seem that our laws on media ownership and are not only lax compared to most other democracies, but they are also even behind those of Berlusconi’s Italy.

In early September Will Hutton wrote a powerful piece in The Observer about, what he called, the “Berlusconisation” of Britain. He warned of the danger the current state of media ownership to our democracy. He spelt out the need for a media commission, on the lines of the Banking Commission, to look at ownership and competition rules.

Because political parties and individuals and the press are afraid to speak out against Murdoch, it seemed important for ordinary people to make a stand and put pressure on the government to appoint a media commission. We formed DemocracyFail, for this very purpose. With limited resources, we launched ourselves on Twitter on 6th September, and swiftly gained the endorsement of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom.

We also have a blog: http://democracyfail.wordpress.com Following the Dispatches broadcast last week about the phone hacking saga and its implications, it received over 1300 visitors in one day. There is clearly a huge amount of concern among ordinary people about the way a media corporation is allowed to interfere with and contaminate our democracy.

Will Hutton did not believe that the Conservatives, Murdoch’s current beneficiaries, would be interested in establishing a media commission. And he lamented that Labour had been reticent on the matter. His hope was that the Lib Dems, with their proud traditions of defending democracy, would take up the call and press it on their coalition partners at their party conference.

Conference may have passed, but the campaign has just begun. Please follow us on Twitter, visit our blog and persuade your party that changes in the rules governing media ownership are essential to our democracy and that a media commission must be established without delay.