The Guardian newspaper had started to ask questions about the dinner in January last year, just a month after it had taken place, without success.

The timing appeared suspicious. News Corp, the Murdoch family media empire which owns 39 per cent of BSkyB, was at the time wanting to buy the remaining 61 per cent for £7.8billion.

The Government was deciding whether to block the deal. Any meeting between the key players, however informal, could have been crucial.

Much to The Guardian's frustration, "the most open Government in the world" was failing to provide direct answers.

In a blog post on 4 February, the newspaper’s deputy editor Ian Katzwrote: “Here’s what the most open government in the world told us: first, No 10 categorically denied the PM had visited Brooks on Christmas day itself; then, when we asked instead if the PM had been entertained chez Brooks over the Christmas period it declined to confirm or deny.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/9223600/How-Downing-St-dodged-questions-about-THAT-Christmas-dinner.html

Concerns are growing that the UK's Conservative government is trying to reshape and influence Britain's media landscape as it continues to befriend media mogul Rupert Murdoch's empire.

Shortly after David Cameron's outright election victory in May, his government announced a review of finances at the BBC, an organisation some Conservatives had denounced for harbouring a liberal agenda, slashing one-fifth of the publicly owned broadcaster's annual budget.

Just weeks before making that announcement, Rupert Murdoch - a long-time critic of the BBC and owner of News Corp, which includes pro-Tory newspapers The Sun andThe Times as well as SKY TV - met senior members of the government twice.

Murdoch's UK newspapers have a long history of lending support to the Conservatives, and in recent months have joined ranks in deriding Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

And in the past week, Trevor Kavanagh, a former political editor at The Sun who had deplored the investigation of Sun journalists over the phone-hacking scandal while at the paper, has been appointed to the board of a new press regulator - the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO).

Despite talk from a few years ago of the need for greater press regulation, the appointment of a Murdoch loyalist to IPSO has had critics talking of foxes in the hen house.

Talking us through the story are: Natalie Fenton, a director for the campaign group Hacked Off; Tim Fenton, a blogger at Zelo Street; Matt Tee, the CEO of IPSO; and Charlie Beckett, a professor at the London School of Economics.

red more: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2015/12/rupert-murdoch-empire-david-cameron-bbc-151226084952790.html