Television in the United Kingdom 4 Corp, according to BARB's viewing figures for January 2018. On 18 January 2011, then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Jeremy Hunt announced his intentions to set up a network of local television stations across the UK. The initial plan was to create a network of local television stations, connected through a national backbone. This plan would create a television network similar to that of the network-affiliate model in the United States and Canada. In June 2011, however, it was announced that the national spine plan would be scrapped, and a 'bottom-up' approach would be followed instead,
News Corporation takeover bid for BSkyB likely (according to a later Telegraph investigation) by two former Telegraph employees who had moved to News International, a News Corporation subsidiary. Hunt was much more sympathetic to the takeover bid than Cable. The second turning point was the series of revelations in early July of the hacking of the phones of non-celebrity victims by the "News of the World", a tabloid newspaper published by News International. Details of the activities, especially regarding the paper's hacking into the voicemail of murder victim Milly Dowler, sparked widespread outrage against News Corporation. Attempts to defuse the scandal by closing the "News of