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.”