I see that an all-party committee chaired by a conservative has administered a verbal kicking to the Murdoch paper the News of the World and also to the toothless tiger the Press Commission, and Murdoch has attacked the committee process. This could line up to be a right humdinger on the power of press bias to influence elections.

There are also suggestions of reform to UK libel law, but IMHO any decrease in the power of UK courts to hear disputes on libels hosted on foreign servers would at the least need to be balanced by an obligation, an automatic obligation, on the server operators to disclose the identity of those posting material there, as otherwise (for example) those libelled by the BNP on Facebook are unable to confront their superficially anonymous defamers without first having to litigate against longpockets Facebook. Those in the public eye would be effectively subjected to the ludicrous US "actual malice" rule, and US law would come to colonialise UK law because most servers are in the USA (although China and the old SovBloc are rising fast). Similarly it seems to me that a "first publication" rule for limitation periods would be quite wrong, since harm flows from each publication.