Jim Armitage: Frustrated Fox can only watch as Netflix steals a march

Forget the Sky PR spin, Tuesday’s ruling against Rupert Murdoch is yet another humbling for the man who has invested more in the UK news industry than anyone else in history.

Twice he has tried to buy his beloved Sky outright for Fox, and twice he has been stopped.

His publicity minders tried to put a positive gloss on the Competition and Markets Authority’s findings: at least they agree we’re not running a gangster news operation any more, they spun. The changes we made since the News of the World crisis are recognised to have cleaned up the place.

But that is cold comfort when set against the overarching finding that the Murdochs should never be allowed to control both Sky News and The Times and The Sun newspapers.

Even if they set up a new Sky News editorial board with a majority of independent members, the CMA doesn’t believe the broadcaster would be adequately independent. It’s hard to disagree. As Ofcom points out, under Sky’s proposals, editorial board appointments would still be made by a Fox subcommittee.

Highly damaging to the Murdoch family brand is the CMA’s focus on Ofcom’s worries about Murdoch’s form on such “independence” pledges. He said there’d be editorial independence in 1981 when he bought The Times and The Sunday Times, and again in 2007 when he took over Dow Jones. Both deals led to “perceived ineffectiveness” of those commitments.

Obviously, the whole Sky-Fox story seems irrelevant when the Aussie tycoon has agreed to dump Sky to Disney anyway. Today’s slap will smart that much less.

But the Disney deal could take well over a year to be approved by regulators. It may not happen at all if Washington cuts up too rough on monopoly conditions (unlikely under a Trump White House).

Murdoch now faces the equally unpalatable choice of: conceding defeat over his Sky dreams and scrapping the deal; handing over editorial control of Sky News to an independent board; shutting or selling it altogether.

I can’t see him carrying out the threat of closing Sky News after nearly 30 years when the Disney escape pod is so close. And I can’t see a ready buyer. Far more likely is that he’ll thrash out an indy board remedy with Culture Secretary Matt Hancock.

But whichever of these routes he takes, serious questions should be asked of his advisers, PJP, Morgan Stanley and Barclays, if they didn’t warn him it would come to this.

Meanwhile, as his management’s time is absorbed in dealing with it all, Netflix’s stock market value shot through $100 billion overnight. Eight million new subscribers signed up in the last three months. As the Sky sale stands still, its rivals speed ahead.