Mirror takes over Express - some people will be very disappointed

It's a standard part of the British political discourse that media ownership is too concentrated. This is codespeak for "don't let Murdoch buy any more." There is always an amusement that the concerns of concentration never include the BBC's share.

The underlying intuition here being that newspapers, TV stations and so on direct the opinions of their consumers. Thus if there's some horrible foreigner, with right wing opinions even, then he shouldn't be allowed to teach people to be horribly, foreign influenced, right wing. We can guess which sector of the political compass such complaints come from.

At which point Trinity Mirror takes over the Express newspapers. This should cause great rejoicing in such quarters. Ownership of avowedly populist and rightie papers move over to the people who publish the great left wing tabloid of the country. Huzzah! Victory and all that. The people will be guided to GoodThink!

Except it doesn't work that way:

 In comments to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Fox insisted that "the Daily Express is not going to become left wing, the Daily Mirror is not going to become right wing".

Media outlets do not create the prejudices of their consumers, they chase them. Fox News, for example, does not laud guns and God because it, or its owners, desire to so laud. Rather, they've spotted that many millions of Americans will watch advertisements inserted into news shows which laud God and guns*

Which rather puts the kibosh on the argument about the views of which proprietors should be allowed to own media outlets, doesn't it?

This should not be a surprise, however much it is to those who just don't grasp the basics of the system. Capitalists in general aren't designing society, they're chasing it. Profits come from giving people what they already want, after all. It's the things we don't want that have to be subsidised....

*We might not be describing the channel's output all that subtly here..