Media Monopoly in BC

By Robert Mangelsdorf

Moves by one of Canada’s media giants to swallow another major media corporation have once again raised the obvious questions about media monopolies in Canada and in B.C. in particular.

By gobbling up Alliance Atlantis, Can West Global plans to add 13 specialty television channels to its already vast media empire, which nationwide includes 7 specialty channels, 16 local television stations, 13 daily newspapers, more than 25 community papers, and Canada’s largest internet portal, giving them unparalleled media control.

While CanWest contends this consolidation is just good business and ensures the survival of small market news outlets, many feel it is detrimental to Canadian journalism, and as a result, Canadian democracy.

Paul Schneidereit, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, is among them.

“If you have people in a local market and all of their media choices are controlled by one corporate interest then that really limits the diversity of voices available to them,” he said. The result is that Canadians aren’t getting the whole story.

David Beers, editor of the independent Vancouver-based news and comment site the Tyee, agrees.

“If you don’t have different forms of media ownership then you’re not going to have different questions being pursued in the media. You’ll get a monochromatic view of the world from a publisher that is only interested in chasing big advertising bucks,” he said. “When you have only one skewed view upon which you’re making your decisions, then you’re not likely to make the best decision.”

Nowhere is media concentration more evident than in the newspaper industry.

According to the Canadian Newspaper Association, in 2005 close to 75 per cent of Canadian newspapers were owned by four corporations.

However, this limited diffusion of market share gets worse on a local basis.

In New Brunswick, the powerful Irving family has a virtual monopoly over the English language print media, while here in B.C., Black Press and CanWest control more than 70 per cent of the province’s print media.

In the Lower Mainland alone, CanWest owns both dailies, 12 community weekly and bi-weekly papers, and the most popular local television station. And the Black Press news chain owns the remaining 20 community papers, leaving only one major independent news publication, the Georgia Straight.

“Vertical” or cross-media concentration, where one company owns many different types of media in a single market, as CanWest does in the Lower Mainland, only compounds an already bad problem, Schneidereit believes. Often, a reporter will file stories for more than one outlet, further decreasing news diversity.

“You can have the world’s greatest reporter filing those stories but you are still limited to that one person’s ability to gather news and they can’t be everywhere at once,” Schneidereit said.

Beers believes the concentration of media ownership fools people into thinking they are getting varied news coverage when they are not.

“On the surface there is diversity, but if you look below that it is a mirage,” he said.

“You are going to get people turned off to the media as they realize they’re newspaper and television station is nothing but a thin gruel,” said Beers. “And in a 21st century democracy, this distortion of information is unacceptable.”

Kalle Lasn, editor of the Vancouver-based media literacy and social advocacy magazine Adbusters, is frightened by what he sees.

“Vancouver is arguably the number one media concentrated city in the whole of North America,” he said.

When CanWest refused to sell the magazine commercial airtime, Adbusters launched a legal action against them. Because of B.C.’s monopolistic media environment alternative voices and viewpoints are being stifled, Lasn contends.

“The advertising industry can buy as much time as they want for any kind of message they have, but when a citizen or group tries, all of a sudden we are censored,” Lasn said. “I think is really very sad, for a small number of people to have the power to decide how British Columbians or Canadians think.”

Adbusters aren’t the only ones who have found themselves silenced. Greenpeace has also had difficulty getting its ads aired on CanWest, and the lack of diversity in media ownership means they are left with few options.

Part of motivation for the lawsuit, Lasn said, is to put the issue of media ownership under the microscope so Canadians can see for themselves the reality of media monopolization. With the exception of the Toronto Star’s Antonia Zerbisias, the mainstream media gives almost zero coverage to the issue of severe media monopoly.

“Once the Canadian people understand how we have been misinformed and how media concentration is the antithesis of a vibrant democracy then something can be done [to fix the situation],” Lasn said. “On really big important issues like climate change, or the battle between Israel and Palestine, the issues get distorted in a major way.”

One example of this came in 2004, when CanWest changed the wording of Reuters wire copy to convey a decidedly anti-Palestinian slant.

The CBC reported one case in which the original text, “the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which has been involved in a four-year-old revolt against Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank,” became, “the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a terrorist group that has been involved in a four-year-old campaign of violence against Israel.”

Reuters denounced the changes, but in an editorial in the National Post, CanWest described the original language in the story as the “misleading gloss of political correctness” and declared that CanWest “owe it to [their] readers to remove it before they see it in their papers each morning.”

“These issues are all being spun and distorted in various ways,” Lasn said. “On a larger level I think if it continues to go on then our democracy becomes distorted. After all, information is the oxygen of democracy.”

Schneidereit agrees that, while media corporations are in business to make money, the effect they have on society cannot be underestimated.

“Meat packing plants aren’t mentioned in the constitution, but freedom of the press is, because it has a fundamental role,” he said.

In 2003, the Canadian government, responding to public concern about cross-media concentration, dwindling news diversity and newsroom layoffs, launched a senate committee into yet another probe of the Canadian news media.

It was pointed out to the committee that since acquiring the Southam newspaper chain in 2000, CanWest cut its foreign bureaus from 11 to 2. Additionally, Quebecor-owned Sun Media Corp., the owner of the Calgary Sun and SUN TV in Toronto, announced it was cutting 120 positions coast to coast last year.

In its presentation to the senate committee, CanWest maintained that, “there is no place for government in…the determination of staffing levels at private sector media companies,” claiming that all business decisions should be determined “by the need to produce the product consumers and clients demand, the need for efficiency and cost effectiveness,” and not by what is in the public’s best interest.

However, while this practice of reducing labour costs may increase the profitability, and in turn viability, of a paper, it has a profoundly negative effect on the quality of journalism, and on Canadian society, the senate committee found.

In its report released in June 2006, the committee recognized that while media organizations are in business to turn a profit, they are only too quick to claim to be motivated by the public’s best interest when seeking greater access to information or protecting their sources.

Furthermore, the report states that, “the media’s right to be free from interference does not extend to…a conclusion that proprietors should be allowed to own an excessive proportion of media holdings in a particular market, let alone the national market.”

The report clearly recognizes cross-media ownership and consolidation as a significant threat to Canadian news media, as newsrooms are whittled down, reporters are shouldered with increased workloads, investigative journalism declines, re-written press releases become news, and the diversity of voices is choked.

The Senate committee concluded there should be a limit on media ownership and monopolies, broadcast regulations should specifically encourage a diversity of news and news outlets, and start-up media should receive government funding assistance to increase diversity of media.

The call for renewed government regulation to increase media diversity was virtually ignored, by most of the Canadian news media. Instead, reports on the Senate committee report focused on recommendations that the CBC abandon its $300 million take in advertising and avoid competing directly with private sector broadcasting.

“If you rely only on the Vancouver Sun for your information, you wouldn't know that media concentration in Vancouver is a big issue,” said Donald Gutstein, a senior lecturer at the School of Communications at SFU, in an article for the Tyee.

Scheidereit supports the report’s findings, and would like to see laws similar to those in the United States and Europe, which limit the concentration of media ownership in a single market, established here in Canada.

“You can’t look at the CanWest’s or the Irving’s or anyone else specifically, you have to look at the environment in which all these companies operate,” he said.

“What’s needed is specific recognition that media companies have to be looked at a little differently than other companies because they play a fundamental role in our democracy.”

However, David Gollob, vice president of public affairs for the Canadian Newspaper Association, an advocacy group for Canadian daily newspaper publishers, balks at the idea that the government should have any say in how newspapers are run.

“We are of the view that Canada is a free society and we are not of the view that governments should regulate the press,” Gollob said. “Pierre Trudeau said the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation. We say the government has no business in the newsrooms of the nation.”

In the CNA’s presentation to the senate committee they affirm that, “the right of any owner or publisher to influence content should be celebrated as a strength of Canadian law…not a weakness.”

Presently in B.C., that right is largely in the hands of just two people, Leonard Asper and David Black.

Founded by patriarch Izzy Asper and now led by son Leonard as president, the Asper family’s CanWest media empire as often been been criticized for pushing a own personal political agenda in their papers.

In 2001, CanWest began a policy of forcing its papers to publish uniform corporate editorials drafted at CanWest headquarters in Winnipeg. Reporters, editors and columnists at CanWest papers across the country who offered differing views quickly found themselves out of work.

CanWest backed off on the policy in late 2002, however, after other reporters, particulary in Montreal, began to pull bylines and walk off the job.

David Black (no relation to former Hollinger head Conrad Black), owner and founder of Black Press, followed a similar career arc to Asper, building his chain from the ground up. Throughout the 80s and 90s, Black bought up small, struggling community papers and now owns more than 70 publications in B.C. with substantial holdings in the U.S. and Alberta as well.

Black has generally taken a hands-off approach to editorial content, letting the papers more or less run themselves.

However, in 1998, Black had his papers run a series of editorials critical of the Nisga’a Treaty, then being negotiated by the NDP government, and not allowing his editors to run editorials in support of the treaty. Black claimed the editorials were in response to what he believed was widespread NDP propaganda promoting the deal. The NDP government complained to the B.C. Press Council that Black’s actions constituted “a breach of the duty to act in the public interest,” but the council ultimately decided in Black’s favour.

While the monopolistic nature of media ownership in B.C. may preclude independent voices from establishing themselves in traditional media, grassroots change is coming.

“The main issue is not creating more opportunities for corporate owners to compete with each other,” Beers said. “The main goal is to create opportunities for other forms of ownership in our media sphere.” The Internet is paramount among these for its inexpensiveness, and its accessibility.

In 2003, Beers founded the Tyee as an online independent source of regional investigative journalism in B.C. With more than 115,000 viewers per month, it has given voice to issues that would have otherwise gone unreported.

Schneidereit believes the Internet will enrich the diversity of voices as it becomes a more mainstream source for news.

“Even though it has been around for more than a decade we are only just beginning to see the impact the Internet will have,” he said. “It’s fundamentally altering information flow in our society.”

For Beers, it all comes down to media acting in the public interest, “a lively, problem solving media that accurately reflects the concerns of the whole.”

“Otherwise our democratic decision-making is flawed.”

A Very Patient Man

By Robert Mangelsdorf

At the back of a dusty church in Mount Pleasant, in a room no larger than a garage, sits a soft-spoken, tired-looking man quietly fixing old radios and cell phones.

His name is Amir Kazemian and he is a fugitive. Though he has committed no crime greater than basic self-preservation, he remains wanted and he remains scared.

At one end of the room, Kazemian has built himself a small altar, cloaked in an embroidered cloth and adorned with crosses and candles. He prays here for an hour every morning that he might be released from the limbo he has found himself in, and this brings him strength.

“God has a place for me,” he smiles, looking away for a moment. “I am not worried.”

His optimism is admirable. He has not left this church in 976 days.

After six years of trying to appeal his rejected refugee claim, Kazemian came to St. Michael’s seeking sanctuary on the day he was to be deported to Iran. He hadn’t even packed a toothbrush.

Kazemian, who spent his 41st birthday here last June, is swaddled in fleece and wearing a toque. The room is cold and drafty, and he warms some tea on a hotplate, his makeshift kitchen.

“I had two choices,” he explains in a cautious, broken English. “I could be at the airport at 10 o’clock or come here [to the church].”

Returning to Iran, he believes, would be a death sentence, so he has chosen life in a self-imposed prison.

It is a situation not entirely unfamiliar to him.

In 1984, when he was 19 years old, Kazemian was thrown in jail for distributing pamphlets on the streets of Tehran critical of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s brutal Islamic fundamentalist regime. After the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, Iran was not a safe place for those who spoke freely. Kazemian’s father was jailed three years earlier after founding the Federal Democratic Opposition Party.

Every day was a living hell for the 16 months Kazemian spent imprisoned. He was beaten constantly, hung upside down, and even sodomized with a Coke bottle. At night he would be woken by gunshots as his fellow prisoners were executed, and would wonder if would be next.

But Kazemian’s release from this living hell brought him no peace. He was made to report to Iranian intelligence authorities every 45 days, their vicious interrogations culminating in a beating so severe it caused his brain to hemorrhage and put him in a coma for nine days. He has no sense of smell as a result.

His father remained in jail for much of the next decade. Kazemian dutifully visited him until one day his father told him to leave Iran, and he did.

Kazemian came to Canada, he says, so he could live like a normal human being. But even that, it seems, is impossible.

He arrived in Toronto in July 1997, and promptly moved west to Vancouver to avoid the bitter cold of Eastern Canada. His mother joined him soon after, while his father and sister fled to the United Kingdom. His aunts and uncles fled to all corners of the world, and he has no family left in Iran.

He sees his mother now every day when she comes to cook for him.

However, it’s been nearly a decade since Kazemian has seen his father. Still in the United Kingdom, he is currently battling cancer and too sick to travel to meet his son. Kazemian, meanwhile, remains trapped.

His eyes swell when asked what it is he wishes he could do if he were free.

“I would be so happy just to see him and hold him in my arms just once before he dies,” he says, his voice falling to a fragile whisper. “I love him very much.”

When Kazemian was a free man, he repaired antique Persian rugs for a living. It was prolonged, patient work, but he loved it and is proud of his accomplishments. He smiles as he shows off photos of his handiwork – beautiful, intricate pieces, some as large as the room he lives in.

Suddenly, he bangs his fist down upon the blonde wooden desk in front of him. “This too I made,” he beams proudly. The desk is sturdy and doesn’t so much as shiver when he hits it. He is almost giggling as he shows off the many features he has designed, including a retractable keyboard shelf.

The room is full of examples of how he spends his time. Computers, cell phones, he has taught himself to repair them all.

“No lessons, no school,” he announces.

But his aptitude for putting things back together betrays the many pieces his life has been shattered into. He takes the anti-depressant Paxil daily to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder from the torture he suffered in prison.

Not long after he arrived in Canada, Kazemian converted to Christianity and found himself both empowered and accepted.

He says what first attracted him to the religion was the peaceful message it brought, a message quite the opposite of what he experienced in Iran. To Kazemian, Islam is a religion of intolerance.

“It is the policy of Islam when you convert from Islam to any other religion that you are not allowed to live,” he says. His eyes narrow as he leans close and whispers, “They are going to kill you.”

His fear is palpable. And warranted.

Abdul Rahman, an Afghan man who converted to Christianity 17 years ago, was facing a death sentence in Afghanistan for renouncing Islam until international outrage over his fate prompted the Italian government to offer him asylum earlier this year.

Kazemian slowly leans back in his chair and looks away. His arms are crossed and his leg begins to tap as the expression on his face curls into a bitter scowl. Suddenly he turns, squinting with disgust.

“They treat animals better here than they treat human beings in my country,” he spits.
He pauses.

“Jesus,” he says calmly, “He never fought, he never raised a sword.” A gentle smile creeps back across his lips. “He was just teaching and preaching about love and peace.”

The conversation demonstrates two of the reasons Kazemian is in such danger should he return to Iran. His conversion to Christianity guarantees him persecution, but his frank and damning criticism or Iran and Islam put a much larger target on his back.

The fate of Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi, who was brutally raped, tortured and murdered by Iranian officials after she photographed a student protest at a prison in Tehran, remains fresh in Kazemian’s mind, as does the Canadian government’s inability to help her family.

Despite demands for an open trial of the two intelligence agents charged with her death, and for her remains to returned to her son in Canada, Iran offered only a cursory acknowledgement of the Canadian government’s concerns. The two agents were promptly acquitted and Kazemi was buried in Iran.

“What did the government do? Nothing. They just talk, talk, talk, talk,” Kazemian laments. “There was no solution. And her son still carries the pain of his lost mother.

“When they send you back, maybe you have a chance for the first day, maybe the second, but on the third day, they’re going to get you. And the [Canadian] government can’t trace the person when they send them back. They are powerless.”

His frustration with the Canadian government is understandable.

In Nov. 1998 Kazemian lost his bid for refugee status. In the Immigration and Refugee Board’s decision, Kazemian’s demeanor was characterized as argumentative, boastful, tense and flamboyant. Kazemian, having been in Canada for barely a year, remembers feeling confused and humiliated at the hearing. At one point he became upset because he thought the judge was laughing at him.

Frances McQueen, coordinator for the Vancouver Association for Survivors of Torture, has spent decades dealing with people who have suffered fates similar to Kazemian’s. She first met him eight years ago when he came to VAST for counselling and isn’t surprised by what happened at the hearing.

“It’s very common with people who are traumatized, that they can’t consistently tell their story,” she says. “Often, when refugees go into a hearing, they may not be believed because thay are unable to tell their story in a way that can be understood. They go to a place without words and it’s very, very painful to that call up and remember.”

At his mother’s hearing two years later, Kazemian apologized to the court and testified on her behalf. Her refugee claim was granted because of the torture her family had endured in Iran, which Kazemian’s testimony was vital in proving. Yet Kazemian himself remained unable to appeal his own case.

To McQueen, it illustrates a major problem with Canada’s immigration laws. While appeals are permitted based on the technicalities of a case, there is no way to appeal a refugee board decision based on the merits of a case.

“There are no safeguards in place,” she says. “Humans make mistakes, and sometimes judges make mistakes, yet there is no appeal based on merit. So if there is a mistake, it can be a death sentence for these people.”

There is no doubt in her mind that Kazemian would be in danger should he be returned to Iran.
McQueen recalls the case of a man she met some years ago. His refugee claim was denied and so he had come to VAST five days before his deportation to Iran for help. He had cigarette burns all over his body.

“You can’t mistake that,” she says. “It’s a very specific thing. Cigarette burns are cigarette burns.”

But despite obvious signs of torture, his claim was denied and he was unable to appeal.
It was too late for him.

He was sent back to Iran, and it was a year before she heard from him again. He called her from an Iranian prison, desperately begging for any kind of help.

He had been picked up as soon as he got off the plane and held in the airport for a week before being released. His freedom was short-lived, however. Iranian authorities again imprisoned him, this time for months. He called McQueen for help, crying and pleading for it, but there was nothing she could do. Calling her, she told him, would only endanger his life further, as the authorities were surely monitoring the prison phones.

She has never heard from him since.

Kazemian knows all too well what will happen to him if he is to be returned, and he is prepared to do the unthinkable if that happens.

“I will kill myself,” he states matter-of-factly. The statement hangs in the air and a dark silence descends. He says he would rather die on his own terms then let the Iranian authorities torture and kill him.

“God will understand.”

As Kazemian’s deportation date loomed, VAST contacted St. Michael’s Church in an effort to secure him sanctuary and very well save his life.

Archbishop Andrew Hutchison, head of the Anglican Church of Canada, agreed to take up Kazemian’s cause.

“It’s our conviction that of the many requests we have for sanctuary, this one does have merit, and we believe its worthy of review on that basis,” he explains.

Kazemian calls the congregation at St. Michael’s who took him in his “guardian angels.”
“We pray together every Sunday and I love them very much,” he says, closing his eyes. “They saved my life.”

McQueen agrees whole-heartedly.

“The church has been absolutely fantastic,” she says. “They are an amazing group of people. How they’ve rallied around Amir and supported him I find is very consistent with thir faith. There’s a lot of love and warmth and a real sense of community.”

Christian Churches have offered sanctuary to the innocentfor millennia, as Exodus 21:13-14 designates the altar of god as a place for the innocent to flee, and the situation is becoming a common one in Canada. Asylum seekers are often faced with a life-and-death decision after being denied by Canada’s increasingly stringent refugee process, and have nowhere else to turn.

There have been 36 cases of sanctuary in Cnada between 1983 and 2003, the majority of which have been refugee claimants. There are eight churches currently providing sanctuary across Canada.

Despite this, Hutchison says the Canadian government has no hard and fast policy on respecting the sanctity of the church. While no efforts have been made to arrest Kazemian, others in his situation have not been so lucky. In 2005, police dragged Algerian asylum seeker Mohamed Cherfi from a church in Quebec City.

Hutchison is part of a small group of people who are currently lobbying the government on Kazemian’s behalf. He is hesitant to speak on the issue because he believes the group is very close to a solution and doesn’t want to jeopardize hat.

Hutchison visited Kazemian last year and said his feelings about him were instantly confirmed.
“He is a very patient man.”

And so Kazemian waits. He waits for the day his appeal is granted, or the day the police finally burst through the door and come to take him away. But he is patient and he is hopeful that God will find a place for him, here in Canada.

“I love this country very much,” he says. “And I would be proud to be a Canadian.”