It’s almost exactly six years since Vince Cable was taken off the Sky merger case after he was secretly recorded saying that he had declared war on Rupert Murdoch.” History shows that he was right then and he has been vocally opposing the latest attempt by Murdoch’s Fox to take control of Sky.

Coincidentally, before the takeover hit the headlines, Vince gave a lecture in which he explored the relationship between media ownership and plurality of opinion and explained why it mattered:

Whatever our views about particular opinions expressed in the press and about particular owners, the health of the press and of democracy itself depends on there being a range of independent providers: in other words, plurality as opposed to competition which may be intense but fails to provide a range of competing opinions and information sources. Pluraity matters in the words of the Journal of Media Law because “where a few firms dominate the media landscape they exercise considerable control — there is now a convincing body of evidence to suggest that particular corporate or political affiliates can lead to media bias or the suppression of information.” Ofcom, the media regulator, has stressed the importance of plurality “by preventing too much influence over the political process.”

Later on, he talked about the need for more “checks and balances” to prevent future scandals:

Suffice to say that the type of scandals which prompted Leveson will happen again in the absence of effective checks and balances. A particular threat is the increasingly casual treatment of truth and fact. This is a world where ‘Elvis Presley is alive and well on the moon’ or’ Princess Diana was murdered by Royal Family’ are presented not as spoofs but as serious news propositions. The existence of websites constructed in order to present untruths as truths should alarm even those at the populist end of the press. This phenomenon underlines the importance of a self-regulatory mechanism for identifying serious error and correcting it. The recent case of the industry’s self-regulatory body finding serious fault with the Sun over the high-profile misreporting of immigration facts and then obtaining a diffident retraction on page 2 justifies the scepticism about the effectiveness of the current regime.

Later, when the news about Sky came out, Vince took to Twitter to voice his concern:

Murdoch Sky bid raises big media plurality issues as when I blocked with competition reference 6 years ago. DCMS minister must act.

— Vince Cable (@vincecable) December 9, 2016

He has then appeared all over the media, in print and on broadcast programmes like Newsnight on Friday night. He said that such a big corporation could be a bad thing where plurality was concerned. He said it was a matter for OFCOM and the competition authorities to decide whether there would be genuine independence for Sky if the takeover went ahead. He added that media oversight was no better than it was in 2010 before the phone hacking scandal happened.

He told the BBC:

The way Theresa May’s government deals with this is a test of their independence from the influence of large proprietors.

And he again talked about that issue of plurality in the Guardian:

This is yet again a threat to media plurality, choice, just as it was six years ago when I referred this to the competition authorities and it should be investigated. The ownership of the media, whether you’re looking at press, radio, television is very highly concentrated and this makes it even more concentrated.

This all prompted Andrew Neil, former editor of the Sunday Times and hardly a friend of the Liberal Democrats, to say:

Muted political response to Murdoch’s bid for Sky. Only Vince Cable robust. Labour timid. Murdoch will be encouraged.

— Andrew Neil (@afneil) December 10, 2016

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