The United Kingdom’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn  said that better funding for the media would help to support public investigative journalism without the pressure of big business interests. He said that a Labour government would aim to shake up Britain's media by levying a tax on big tech firms like Google and Facebook to help fund public interest journalism,

The tax would also help fund the introduction of a digital BBC licence fee to supplement the current fee and reduce the cost for poorer households. Without major changes to Britain's media sector a "few tech giants and unaccountable billionaires will control huge swathes of our public space and debate," Corbyn told the Edinburgh TV Festival. He appealed for bold thinking to address what he called a public crisis of trust in media in the era of "fake news".

Corbyn also added that a  digital licence fee, supplementing the existing licence fee, collected from tech giants and internet service providers, who extract huge wealth from  shared digital space, could allow a democratized and more plural BBC to compete far more effectively with the private multinational digital giants like Netflix, Amazon, Google and Facebook, Currently  the BBC is funded by an annual fee of  150.50 pounds ($192) which everyone watching or recording live TV programmes will have to pay. Last year it brought in around 3.7 billion pounds.

The Labour Party leader opined this in the wake of the proposals which came from  France and Germany to push Facebook and Google to pay more tax in the European Union. But European Union had taken a lenient stand on tech giants over the issue of sharing revenue with publishers, broadcasters and artists. This issue had raised severe criticism from the artists’ community. The Labour Party had a difficult relationship with the mainstream print media in U.K