Fleet Street is a raging, under-reported battlefield. For most of the time it's hard to discover what is going on, and even harder to know how much will be left of Britain's national newspapers, or what state they will be in, at the end of the current battle of the tycoons. Most of these tycoons have little or no knowledge of owning or managing newspapers, and many of them are foreigners. There is no rule to prevent any foreigner from buying a British national paper, and Colonel Qadhafi himself tried to do so in the case of the Observer.

LRB 19 July 1984 | PDF Download