Newspaper Attacks UK Government For Its ?Closeness? To Google

UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail, has decided to raise the issue of Google's influence on the UK government, after uncovering the fact that Conservative Party ministers have held meetings with Google an average of once a month since the General Election two years ago. There have been 23 meetings between Tory ministers and Google since June 2010, with Prime Minister David Cameron meeting Google three times and George Osborne - who as Chancellor of the Exchequer is supposed to meet with business leaders - four times in two years. The story needs to be a seen in a wider context. The Conservatives have recently come under fire for having too close a relationship to another powerful entity, News Corporation (as did the Labour party during its tenure). A huge inquiry into Press standards has in large part focused on the ties between Rupert Murdoch?s media giant and the Conservatives. But what the report buries way down in the article, is the number of times the newspaper itself has met with the Government. A Google spokesperson told us: "It's absolutely right that governments speak with companies about issues that affect their citizens. The British Government makes the list of those meetings publicly available - including the Daily Mail?s 34 meetings over the same period." In other words, the Daily Mail has met with the Government almost one and a half times a month (on average) since they entered office - that's quite a bit more than Google has. It's likely those were high-level meetings, not editorial ones.

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