On Sunday (23rd November 2025), Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail & General Trust announced that it had reached an agreement to buy the Daily Telegraph and its associated titles, from RedBird IMI. This follows the long-running attempts by RedBird, a UAE-backed US consortium, to acquire the Telegraph titles against widespread opposition.

This £500m takeover would be catastrophic to media plurality in the UK, and would significantly worsen the already-excessive levels of media concentration in the national newspaper industry. The Government must use its legal powers to intervene in and block this merger.

As our 2025 ‘Who Owns The UK Media?’ analysis has shown, Lord Rothermere’s DMG Media – which publishes the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, the i and the Metro – already controls 43% of the national newspaper market. DMG Media titles also account for 10% of the combined online reach of the UK’s 50 most-used ‘newsbrands’ – an outsized share of online market reach for a single publisher. The Mail’s significant presence online makes this power to influence our media landscape even more intense.

Add the Telegraph titles to this, and Lord Rothermere would control nearly half of the UK press, with a weekly circulation of 11,400,000 and an even more entrenched online reach. No single individual or corporation should hold this much power.

This sale would enhance Lord Rothermere’s unaccountable power and the power of the DMG Media group, at the expense of the public’s interest in a diverse and accountable media industry.

DMG Media – together with Rupert Murdoch’s News UK and regional publishing giant Reach – is already responsible for a dangerously concentrated newspaper market, in which these three companies together control 90% of daily print circulation and three-fifths of combined online reach. DMG Media currently manages advertising for the Telegraph, but the proposed Telegraph purchase raises the spectre of creating a single consolidated group of titles that would represent the majority of right-wing media in the UK, all under the ownership of one corporation and, effectively, one individual.

The Government’s responsibility to block the deal

The Government must investigate the proposed purchase with all the tools at its disposal and challenge it in the interests of the public, not the markets. The Enterprise Act 2002 empowers the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to halt media mergers and require full public interest and market investigations by the media regulator Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority.

The Secretary of State can issue a ‘public intervention notice’ when there are reasonable grounds to believe a merger threatens media plurality & standards. In particular, the DMG Media/Telegraph deal raises serious challenges to many of the ‘specified considerations’:

• The need for accurate presentation of news, and free expression of opinion – both titles have long track records of breaching editorial standards & stifling free expression within their operations.
• The need for a sufficient plurality of views in news media – the merger would further entrench the dominance of right-wing voices and editorial perspectives that are already over-represented across the national press, not least by the Mail and Telegraph titles.
• The need for a sufficient plurality of persons with control of media enterprises – Lord Rothermere’s control of the UK media is already extensive, and the merger would increase his singular control over the newspaper market to almost 50% – more than News UK and Reach combined.

Media plurality is vital, but the influential news platforms in the UK are controlled by a tiny handful of billionaires and vested interests. Already, the levels of consolidation in our media industries mean the prospect of a ‘free’ and vital media sector, capable of speaking truth to power and protecting the public interest, is a distant dream.

This post will be updated with further news about the merger and any future regulatory action by the Government.