Maclean’s is the real threat

Having just heard from newly-neocon Maclean’s magazine that they are declining to publish my response to a particularly execrable opinion piece by Andrew Coyne, I suppose I will have to publish it myself. Thanks heavens for the blogosphere. Now, will anyone notice?

Dear Editor,

Andrew Coyne sets up a classic false dichotomy in arguing against broadcasting regulation in the age of the Internet. ("The CRTC isn’t just a nuisance now, it’s a real threat," Feb. 25.) By framing the "conundrum at the heart of CanCon" as between two alternatives only – "was it about art, or was it about politics?" – he conveniently omits a third possibility that better justifies what he would remove. Canadian content regulations have always been more about preserving our culture, which is continuously at risk of being drowned out by the cacaphonous American media machine next door. Of course Canadians have no valid claim to producing better art than anyone else, but we do by definition produce better Canadian culture. Or, at least, we will as long as Canadian artists are allowed to flourish without being subjected to the type of deregulation Coyne urges. As for his contention that politics are behind CanCon, Coyne might be right. The
historical motive he ascribes to Canadian artists – "to instill the proper feelings of loyalty to the Canadian nation-state in its citizens . . . because that was where the money was" – is cynical in the extreme, however.

Marc Edge
Department of Mass Communication
Sam Houston State University
Huntsville, Texas

A, E! IOU? Call their bluff!

A couple of commentators with considerable insight into the Canadian television industry recently hit the nail right on the head about the CTV and CanWest Global networks cutting back at and threatening to close down local stations. According to Globe and Mail TV critic John Doyle, the moves are “part of a strategy to force a radical redrawing of the Canadian TV landscape.” People still watch TV, noted Doyle – lots of them. It’s just that in an economic downturn advertising revenues drop, making for a short-term imbalance with expenses. In good times, to paraphrase Lord Thomson, TV stations are a licence to print money. “The television industry is not in crisis,” Doyle pointed out. “The economy is in crisis.” Retired BCTV reporter Harvey Oberfeld agreed in a particularly pointed blog post, equating the local programming cuts and threats to close stations with “blackmail attempts or extortion theatrics.”

What CTV and CanWest have done is equivalent to cutting off a hostage’s ear or finger and sending it to the CRTC as a message, warning that unless they get what they want, the hostage takers will exact even more . . . maybe kill off their captives. In this case the captives are their Canadian television channels. They would never do it. It’s all a farce aimed at scaring the CRTC into acquiescence.

The networks, MEthinks, want to take full advantage of their short-term pain to ensure even more long-term gain once the economy recovers. They would like nothing more than to have their obligations to provide Canadian content reduced so they could spend even more on Hollywood programming already carried on the U.S. networks. That’s the part of the Canadian television model that’s “broken.” Our domestic networks (with the obvious exception of the CBC) don’t even want it to be Canadian. At least the CRTC has apparently cottoned on to that fact and has even bruited forcing the networks to spend as much on Cancon as they do on Americon.

The networks also want the CRTC to reconsider (for yet a THIRD time) its plea for money from the cable companies to carry their signals. The CRTC has twice nixed this boondoggle, known as “fee for carriage,” which would see the networks add 50 cents to cable bills for each over-the-air channel carried on cable, which could add up to about $10 for some subscribers. But with their licence renewal hearings upcoming, the networks are pulling out all the stops in pleading poverty and cutting back on local programming to put political pressure on the CRTC.

Last but not least, CTV and CanWest Global are hoping to use this opportunity to also revisit the CRTC’s refusal to allow them to merge their newspaper and television newsrooms in order to save more money by cutting even more jobs. The CRTC drew the line at this aspect of “convergence” at the last licence renewal hearings in 2001, shortly after CTV partnered with the Globe and Mail and CanWest Global gobbled up the Southam newspaper chain from now-jailbird Conrad Black. The feds insisted the networks maintain separate “news management structures” in their print and TV operations, but now the networks want to also have that requirement overturned on the basis of economic necessity.

CanWest CEO Leonard Asper himself admitted recently in a memo to employees that the company is still very profitable. Its problem is its heavy debt load assumed in acquiring the Southam chain and, more recently, a baker’s dozen specialty cable channels from Alliance Atlantis. With the recession, not only have revenues dropped, but so has the company’s stock price (I know, because I’m now a CanWest shareholder), boosting its debt-to-equity ratio above acceptable levels and making its lenders nervous. “These businesses are strong,” Asper assured CanWest staff as media reports of its imminent demise swirled. “They will continue to operate.”

In all the media coverage what is often overlooked is that Canwest's businesses are highly profitable and generate well over $500-million a year in operating profits. Our issue is that in this recession, those profits have been reduced by a serious downturn in revenue so our "mortgage" is too high for our lenders liking.

I always tell my students that the stock market is less a thermometer that takes the temperature of a company than a barometer that responds to indications of what might happen to it in the future. Media companies always get hit first and hardest in a recession because investors realize that advertising is the first discretionary expense to go. They’re always the first to bounce back at any sign of recovery, too. CanWest is in a double bind because the market seems to strongly disapprove of the Asper heirs expensively using the media empire left to them by their late father Izzy to further his political agenda and extend it globally. They not only prompted a public relations disaster by imposing a strong neoliberal and pro-Israel viewpoint on their Canadian media holdings, they have also invested in dubious foreign adventures. They bought the hawkish but money-losing New Republic magazine in the U.S. a couple of years ago (which they recently sold back to its former owner at an undisclosed but doubtless bargain price) and have also expanded into the Middle East by acquiring radio stations in Turkey. With economic storm clouds on the horizon, CanWest also declined recently to unload its majority ownership of Network TEN in Australia, which may turn out to be the misstep that takes CanWest down, or at least Asper family control of it.

CTV and CanWest are threatening to close down their subsidiary networks, alphabetized respectively as A and E!, if the CRTC does not give in to their demands. I say the CRTC should call their bluff. If the big networks don’t want those station licences any more or are not prepared to live up to the promises they made to get them, let them turn them back in. I’m sure the CRTC would find more than a few willing takers at their usual price. Which is, of course, free.

Get used to Tory governments

It’s a bit difficult, all the way down here in Texas (where it may hit 80 degrees again today), to get a handle on how Canada’s news media covered the recent federal election. But from my recent research on the country’s converged media landscape, I’m not surprised by some of the rumblings I have gleaned online. The Harper Conservatives, after all, blessed convergence of television and newspaper ownership as a business model despite the warnings of the 2003 Lincoln report on broadcasting and the 2005 Senate report on news media. It should be no surprise if Big Media in Canada returned the favor by doing its best to return the deregulationist Tories to power, albeit with another minority government. Globe and Mail columnist Rick Salutin commented on how the decade-long rightward shift in Canada’s media has arrayed an impressive list of media allies behind Harper.

We now have a clear pro-Harper tilt from the two big private TV nets, CTV and Global. . . . There's the National Post, the CanWest papers under the stern Asper thumb, the Suns and Maclean's, the sole national newsmag. Outside the tent are just the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, which more or less defines the centre and has always been a conservative business-oriented paper, and the CBC.

Even the public broadcaster, noted Salutin, is hardly as small-l liberal as in the past, given the political and media climate that might see it privatized just as soon as Harper can pull a majority in Parliament. “Public broadcasters tend to run scared under right-wing governments,” noted Salutin. “The BBC did in the Thatcher years and the CBC did in the Mulroney era.” Still, as he pointed out, it was “striking that majority voter opinion has remained statistically firm,” with the social democratic vote remaining at 60-65 percent, albeit split between four parties.

More worrying to me is the rightward shift in coverage on the Left Coast, from where I hail. One of the few non-conservative print publications in Vancouver, the Georgia Straight weekly entertainment giveaway tabloid, noted the trend and promised to do what it could to oppose it. “Vancouver is not a conservative city,” moaned news editor Charlie Smith. “And Vancouver doesn’t need another conservative paper telling us we should vote for a guy who relied on a plagiarized speech in 2003 to explain why Canadian kids should be sent to their deaths in Iraq.” Smith professed astonishment at the Vancouver Sun’s coverage of that embarrasing mid-campaign disclosure, which was buried on the inside pages. Coverage of the environment, traditionally a hot topic in Beautiful British Columbia, had received similar short shrift, from what Smith could see.

Climate change is perhaps Harper’s weakest issue. By not hammering away at this, the Canwest media and its columnists are helping to ensure that the environment flies somewhat under the radar during this campaign. No wonder the pollsters are saying it’s not very high on the list of public concerns at the moment.

Smith nicely encapsulated an example of agenda-setting theory, which posits that issues not covered prominently in the news media are not perceived as important by citizens, and vice-versa. Pioneered by media theorist Max McCombs of the University of Texas, with whom I spent some time this summer at a conference in New Zealand, it is a theory that truly demonstrates media power over the public mind. Its wonderfully succint bottom line is that while the media cannot tell us what to think, they can greatly influence what we think ABOUT. The phenomenon has been deomonstrated in replications that have numbered in the hundreds worldwide in the four decades since McCombs and Donald Shaw conducted their first agenda-setting study in North Carolina. (The results of which, Max told the Australia New Zealand Communication Association conference, were first rejected as a conference paper before being published in Public Opinion Quarterly.)

This is where the perils of concentrated media ownership become apparent. A few large media owners, as in Canada where they now own both newspapers and television, are both more powerful in molding public opinion and more susceptible to political influence. If there is anything I have noticed down here in the Excited States, it is that coverage of this presidential campaign has been much more diverse that four years ago, when I was teaching at another school in Texas. The emergence of MSNBC as a liberal alternative, led by the riotous rants of Countdown’s Keith Olbermann, has re-stretched a media spectrum that once crowded the right side of the dial to emulate the jingoist popularity of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News – or “Fixed Noise," as Olbermann now calls it. As a result, Americans will tomorrow elect a president who is for a change more liberal that Canada’s leader. It is a testament to the power of media diversity. Will the pendulum swing back to the left north of the border? Not until the Canadian media becomes more (wait for it) Fair and Balanced. We could be waiting for awhile.

CanWest slide good for media democracy?

I might be out several hundred dollars, but I’m willing to take the hit if it means the breakup of Canada’s largest news media company, which dominates in the western part of the country, where I come from. As speculated in my Tyee article, and bruited on radio, asset sales may be the only way for the Asper boys to keep their heads above water in this economy. That could mean them selling the National Post, or even the Southam dailies they bought from Conrad Black in 2000. This is good news, especially as this past weekend saw Media Democracy Day marked in several cities across Canada.

Perhaps illustrative of CanWest’s questionable journalism ethics has been the complete lack of coverage in its newspapers of this major business story, as journalism educator – and media blogger – Mark Hamilton pointed out. “This makes no sense to me,” he admitted after barely being able to find any coverage at all online. “It is, perhaps, not surprising that none of the CanWest-owned newspapers appear to be covering this story. What is surprising is that very few others seem to be covering it, either.”

I’ve been tracking this, and the stock has underperformed market averages every day this week. Yet when I do a google search on the words “CanWest” “share” and “price,” the top three hits are news story from January 2007 and July 2008, and a blog post I wrote about this a couple of days ago. Really? We have what appears to be a significant Canadian business story here, and in the general Google search category the results throw up two outdated stories and a small blog post. When I hit the “news” tab at Google I get a single relevant story.

Hamilton’s search efforts later turned up a Reuters article, and a day later he admitted he “may be over-reacting to this,” but he continued to express amazement that not only had CanWest dailies been silent on the subject, but that there had been barely a peep out of the rest of Canada’s business press. “I’m still puzzled why a story about a company of this size and importance to the Canadian media scene seems to have attracted so little attention,” he admitted. Well, it’s just a symptom of the problem, Mark. CanWest newspapers are more than eager to publicize any Asper good deed done for PR value. They trumpet press releases from CanWest headquarters about every deal, donation, and honor the company cares to publicize. But you won’t ready anything negative about the company on their pages. For that, you’ll have to rely on the CBC, the Globe and Mail, and alternative media.

Memo to Lawrence Martin: Facts matter

No matter how insightful your analysis, mangling the facts leaves you wide open to criticism. That's why I was moved to write a corrective to the Globe and Mail columnist's piece of Aug. 7, "The sale of the National Post would reverberate in political circles." Martin is absolutely right that Conrad Black's acquisition of the Southam newspaper chain and founding of the National Post changed journalism in Canada. My survey of scholarly research on the subject for Asper Nation showed how the Post fiddles the facts to suit its ideological agenda, which is not so much journalism as propaganda. But it is wrong to characterize Black's acquisition of Southam as a "purchase," or to suggest that Southam family members willingly sold him their historic newspaper chain. Instead, as I state in my letter to the editor, it was a "classic hostile takeover." That was for the sake of a 200-word limit. In my book, I characterized it as "a work of high-finance artistry." But for the full story, you have to go back to an article I wrote in 2003 for the International Journal on Media Management, "The good, the bad, and the ugly: Financial markets and the demise of Canada's Southam newspapers." It told how the Southams had been scheming for years to keep Black from getting his hands on their newspapers before he finally outsmarted . . . or outlasted them.

By the mid-1980s, stock in Southam was widely held. Southam family members, by then into a fourth generation of ownership, had sold off so many shares that together they owned only about 30 percent of the company. When a mystery buyer began buying up large blocks of shares, family members panicked, figuring it was Black. It may instead have been Toronto real estate developer George Mann, but that didn't mean Conrad didn't have designs on Southam. He did, and had been steadily acquiring shares in it. Share prices rose on speculation of a takeover attempt, and family members became frantic. The attempted a couple of measures to ward off predators before finally settling on a "share swap" arrangement with Torstar in 1985. Southam traded 20 percent of its shares for 30 percent of the smaller Torstar in a "near merger" that made a Southam takeover nearly impossible for any other potential acquisitor. Part of the deal was that neither Torstar nor Southam would attempt to take over the other for a "stand-still period" of 10 years. Black sold his Southam shares for a tidy profit and bought the Daily Telegraph in London, which became the cornerstone of the worldwide newspaper empire he built over the next decade.

Meanwhile, back in Canada, shareholders disgruntled by the share swap found that Southam had failed to provide sufficient notice for a vote on the arrangement, and went to court in an attempt to have it struck down. An out-of-court settlement shortened the stand-still period to five years, which meant Southam became a takeover target again in 1990 instead of 1995. By then, Black had made millions by cutting costs (read staff) at the Telegraph and numerous other newspapers he had acquired. He talked Torstar out of its 20 percent stake in Southam, and family members panicked again. They sounded out Paul Desmarais, one of Quebec's largest press owners, on his support for quality journalism, and thinking they had an ally issued him a similar 20-percent block of shares from the company treasury. Desmarais and Black, however, were neighbors in Palm Beach, where they conspired to break up Southam. Black would get several of the smaller dailies for his 20 percent. Independent directors of Southam blocked that move, only to be branded an "obdurate rump" by Black. Instead, Desmarais sold to Black, who gained effective control over Southam as a result and fired the independent directors. Over the next few years, he made repeated offers to other Southam shareholders (of which, as a result of the Southam employee stock purchase program, I was one) in an attempt to acquire enough stock to take the company private. First, he used his de facto control to disperse Southam's considerable cash reserves, declaring a special dividend that enriched him most of all. Then he used Southam's considerable credit rating to borrow for another special dividend. It was difficult not to admire the kind of mind capable of such scheming, but by 2003 Black had outsmarted even himself and his house of cards came down around him.

Before he turned his back on Canada, however, and well before he was incarcerated for fraud, Black craftily cashed in on his ingenious takeover of Southam by inculcating it with the very kind of neoconservative agenda the moderate founding family had feared. Unlike the Aspers, however, Black knew enough about newspapers to realize he would encounter stiff resistance if he tried to impose a radical new political agenda from on high, and that doing it gradually from the bottom up, through hirings and promotions, would take many years. Instead he did it in short order by giving Southam the flagship daily it had always lacked. Only the "right" journalists were selected for the Post, and the direction was thus set for the rest of the chain. When he quit the country to take his seat in the House of Lords, Black took pains to pass his hard-won newspapers to a like-minded owner in Izzy Asper. If the continued losses of the National Post force the Aspers to sell in order to keep CanWest afloat, you can be sure they will do likewise and ensure the newspaper ends up in the "right" hands.

A whirlwind of publicity

A return to my Home on Native Land to spend the summer aboard my boat has brought a series of appearances in support of my latest book, copies of which my beleaguered publisher is desperate to unload. In an eight-day period earlier this month, I gave two speeches, appeared in-studio for two radio interviews, and attended the Canadian Communication Association conference in Vancouver, where I presented a paper on my favorite media company, CanWest Global Communications. Unfortunately, Asper Nation didn’t win the CCA's annual Gertrude Robinson book prize, for which it was short-listed, but the book that won looks like a doozy, so I was just glad to be considered in such company. Sure, right. I’m sulking, and you know it.

My busy week began with an appearance on CBC radio in Montreal, for which I had to travel downtown to the Mother Corp’s Vancouver bunker, which is STILL under renovation. It was in similar disarray last summer when I was in studio. The program was Radio Noon in Montreal and I was on for their second hour, from 1-2 p.m. their time, or 10-11 a.m. in Vancouver. The host was Anne Lagacé Dowson, and we had no shortage of things to talk about, as CanWest has been just as active there with the Gazette as it has been elsewhere in Canada. Find the interview archived online here.

The next day, the CCA conference began out on the Point Grey campus of UBC, where the Learned Societies basically took over for two weeks or so. Unfortunately, the weather this first half of June has been just horrid, cold and wet, with high temperatures only in low double digits. I was actually in the belly of the beast for a confab at the School of Journalism on whether to set up a Journalism Studies offshoot of CCA. I was pleasantly surprised when one of the speakers actually referenced my writings on journalism education in Canada. I presented my paper the second day of the conference in the rickety old Math building. It was raining cats and dogs when I arrived, but by lunchtime it had abated somewhat. My publisher had a booth at the book fair on campus and reported selling all of two copies of Asper Nation. The awards reception was supposed to run from 7-10 p.m., so I decided to be all west coast about it and show up fashionably late, figuring the hardware wouldn't be handed out until at least 8. As I arrived about 7:45, I heard the awards being presented, and by the time I got there the whole thing was over. Maybe it’s best that I didn’t win, for I wouldn’t have been present to accept.

On Friday, I gave a speech at a rally outside the Vancouver Sun and Province offices downtown in support of Mordecai Briemberg, the activist who is being sued by CanWest for helping to distribute a parody issue of the Sun that lampooned their pro-Israeli coverage of the Middle East conflict. It was again gray and chilly, but just as we got going with songs and speeches the sun started to come out. You can watch video of the event here. An interesting historical footnote: Mordecai was one of the infamous “PSA 7” faculty members at SFU who were fired in the late 1960s for radicalism. As a result, the university was under censure by the Canadian Association of University Teachers the entire time I was an undergraduate there in the mid-1970s. He ended up teaching at Douglas College and has since retired. While I was waiting to go on, a former colleague slipped me a copy of a memo publisher Kevin Bent circulated to all employees that morning giving the company’s side of the dispute. I passed it to one of the event organizers and it ended up in the Georgia Straight.

The next morning, I had to get up early to appear on Co-op radio. Their studios are on the Downtown Eastside, and it was rather daunting to pull in about 9 a.m. just as multitudes of street people were pulling up their bedrolls on what must qualify as the world’s largest outdoor dormitory. I was a little bit nervous about parking my car there, but she was still intact when I returned. You can listen to a podcast of the interview here.

I then caught my breath for a couple of days before my next appearance, which was for a speech at the Planetarium to a group of retired executives and professional people called Probus. I merrily rattled on for 40 minutes or so, aided by PowerPoint, about CanWest’s stranglehold on local news media and their naked political agenda, assuming my impassive audience would be sympathetic. Instead, once the questioning started, it became apparent that most of them figured the media had a flaming liberal bias, CanWest notwithstanding. Oh, well. I put it down to demographics, as the crowd was exclusively Old White Males. The worst part was that we sold only a few books afterward, which was the main reason I was there. At least they bought me lunch and a couple of beers afterward and I didn't feel so bad.

I now look forward to relaxing for a few weeks. I brought about two dozen books back with me that need reading, plus I have a mountain of boat work to do. The weather just changed yesterday, and the forecast says that we may even hit 20 degrees this afternoon. I have to get some sun on my lilywhite, and I hope to even get out sailing soon.

Press freedom ranking falls again

For the third time in the past four years, Freedom House has downgraded Canada’s press freedom ranking in its annual survey of world media. While our press is still firmly ensconced in the “free” category, it dropped one point in the past year to rate an 18 on the Freedom House scale, which considers legal, political, and economic pressures on press freedom. Canada now ranks tied for 25th in the world, behind such countries as Estonia, Monaco, and St. Vincent & The Grenadines. Canada took a two-point tumble a few years ago as a result of CanWest’s intimidation of its own journalists, but had recovered somewhat recently. Here’s the bottom line over the past few years.

2002 16
2003 17
2004 15
2005 17
2006 18
2007 17
2008 18

In dropping Canada by a point in its most recent ranking, Freedom House deemed legal constraints on the press to have increased. Its report noted that cases continue to be brought under a 2004 law forcing reporters to present documents to the police if deemed vital for a criminal case.

In June 2007, Ottawa Citizen reporter Gary Dimmock was ordered to produce his notes regarding allegations of bribery against Mayor Larry O’Brien. The appeal also continued of Ken Peters, a reporter for the Hamilton Spectator who was found in contempt of court in 2006 and fined C$31,600 for refusing to give up a confidential source, though the source later came forward voluntarily.

Freedom House also noted the shroud of secrecy under which Ottawa currently operates due to the perception management policies of the Harper Conservatives. That was nicely illustrated recently with the revelation that government MPs have been issued with wallet-size laminated cards instructing them on what to do if approached for comment by a reporter. According to the Toronto Star, the instructions to MPs include first clamming up, then asking a series of questions before going to the PMO for permission to speak to the journalist. The Freedom House report also notes threats against Canadian journalists made by religious extremists, a nasty example of which was recently revealed by Vancouver Sun reporter Kim Bolan, who has been the subject of death threats over the years from Sikh extremists due to her dogged reporting of factional violence in the Indo-Canadian community.

Despite the increasing vitriol, I was still startled two months ago to find a photo of myself posted on a Facebook page that had been started a few days earlier to attack me. A bullet hole had been photo-shopped onto my forehead, blood dripping from the wound, my left eye sliced open and more blood flowing from my nose and mouth.

RCMP traced he Facebook page to a Calgary man and the offensive image was quickly removed. CBC reporter Terry Milewski has also been subject to death threats and online vilification, noted Bolan in her chilling account of the perils of journalistic persistence. As World Press Freedom Day passes for another year, it’s important to remember that in Canada, despite the intimidation from a small minority – including some owners of the media – many journalists are still willing to hold the public’s right to know above their own personal welfare.