UK official lobbied PM for Rupert Murdoch

A British minister in the hot seat for his alleged close ties to Rupert Murdoch's media empire lobbied Prime Minister David Cameron to back the tycoon's bid for satellite broadcaster BSkyB, according to a memo made public Thursday.

Media Secretary Jeremy Hunt, whose close links to Murdoch's News Corp. have cast a cloud over his career, said in a Nov. 19, 2010, letter to Cameron that Murdoch's son James was "pretty furious" about the obstacles being put in the way of the Manhattan-based company's bid for the lucrative British pay-TV provider.

Hunt said in the memo that James Murdoch hoped the multibillion-pound bid would shake up Britain's media industry the same way his father had done in the 1980s by revolutionizing newspaper production when he battled the printing unions.

"He wants to create the first multiplatform media operator," Hunt wrote. "If we block it our media sector will suffer for years."

Hunt's memo was written about a month before he was given responsibility for ruling on whether to refer Murdoch's bid to competition regulators -- a vital quasi-judicial function that he had promised to carry out impartially.

The existence of the memo was disclosed in testimony to a long-running United Kingdom inquiry into media ethics.