The Truth About Canada (23 page)

Kim Keirans, director of the School of Journalism at the University of King’s College, Halifax, writes:

Canada is said to have a free press. But the three “C”s — concentration, convergence and cross-ownership are eating away its foundation.

Media in Canada are among the most concentrated in the world. In 2004, three companies controlled 63.3% of all daily newspapers in Canada.

Canada has 102 English and French daily newspapers. Only six of those newspapers remain truly independent.

Bear in mind that this is many years after the Davey Report, the excellent Kent Commission, and other government studies on media concentration, including, more recently, a 2006 report from the Senate. Almost every prediction and warning about growing media concentration in these reports has come true. As Kierans writes:

Residents of cities such as Vancouver and provinces such as Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Newfoundland live with “monopoly” and “multiple media” ownership. For example, in Vancouver the media company CanWest owns both daily newspapers and has a 70.6% broadcast share with its television stations. This domestic monopoly situation puts into question the role of media as an agency of democracy in the lives of Canadians; a point repeatedly made in various studies.

As others have observed, powerful corporate control of the media sharply narrows their role as critics. American media critic Ben Bagdikian points out it also often allows advertising values to dominate the news process where, as Kierans writes, “the basic business system” isn’t criticized.
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The 2006 Senate report said, “No real democracy can function without a healthy, diverse and independent news media to inform people about the way their society works. The argument is that in a democracy, government should foster healthy and independent news media.” For
Kierans, “What we see is a move from public interest to market interest. Other countries such as France, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States, take broadcasting regulation and an independent media more seriously.” In these countries, there are stringent controls limiting concentration of media control and restricting cross-ownership in broadcasting and newspapers.

For quite some time, there has been concerted pressure to allow increased foreign ownership of the media in Canada, including the telecommunications carriers and broadcasters. Whatever you may be told to the contrary, inevitably editorial and news decisions would be controlled outside of Canada.

The final report by the Senate in 2006 once again criticized the high level of concentrated ownership, convergence, and cross-ownership of the media and suggested new rules to curtail it in the future. Since the Senate report, CTVglobemedia has taken over CHUM, Rogers has purchased five CITY-TV stations, and Astral Media, which now has 81 radio stations, has taken over Standard Radio.

Peter Desbarats, of the University of Western Ontario, writes, “My own experience at competitive newspapers in Montreal, Winnipeg, and Toronto from the 1950s through the 1970s, and that of the majority of my colleagues, convinced us that competition was the
sine qua non
of a responsive and responsible press. And as competition lessened, more and more journalists found themselves muzzled.” Meanwhile, “the Harper government muzzles the Press Gallery in Ottawa by cutting off information at the source and, after a few squawks last spring, the media accepts this!”
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For Kim Kierans, what has been happening to the media in Canada means that

public dialogue is taking a back seat to a profit-driven business model.

The Senate report bluntly blames the CRTC and the Competition Bureau for not using “the process available to them to limit concentration.”

True to form, the Senate final report generated little media coverage (of course!) and hence little public discussion.

A few final words from Kim Kierans:

If you want to find out about Canadian media, go to the business pages of your national newspapers. That’s where you’ll read about media mergers, stock prices and industry changes. In the past 40 years, independent newspapers, television and radio stations have been gobbled up and are part of converged, concentrated and cross-owned media conglomerates. Just consider Bell Globemedia, CanWest and Quebecor. These conglomerates own newspapers and magazines, television and radio networks, production houses, cable, satellite and Web portals. Canadian media are now big business driven not by public interest but by financial interests. Their main clients are shareholders, not viewers, readers or listeners. The results are fewer diverse sources of local information and less public dialogue which undermine the health of our democracy. A handful of locally-owned and independent media remain. They are an endangered species.

The successful lobbying of private media has been at the expense of the public broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.… The CBC suffers from unstable and declining federal funding. The [Senate’s] 2006
Final Report
recognizes “in a world of media concentration and cross-media ownership, the importance of the CBC as an alternate source of news and information programming is greater than ever.” …

Concerns about media concentration, consolidation and cross-ownership appear to be confined to the halls of academe and the Senate. The issue is not on the agenda of the public or public policy makers. So Canadians are in for bigger media and can look forward to diminished public discourse as the public agenda is issued from corporate boardrooms.

Meanwhile, contrary to many reports and to the perspective they so often present to politicians and regulatory authorities in Ottawa, Canadian newspaper owners are still doing well. In 2003, they had an operating profit margin of 15.1 percent, in 2004 it was 14.2 percent, and in 2005 13.3 percent. Operating profits in 2005 were $696-million, and advertising revenue increased 2.2 percent to almost $3.9-billion, while circulation revenues rose 5.2 percent to $871-million, despite declining circulation numbers.
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While an increasing number of Canadians are reading their newspapers online, some 47 percent say that they read a paper every day. And, while circulation in the United States has been dropping, in Canada the overall picture is better. I can think of dozens of industries that would love to have operating profit margins similar to those in the Canadian newspaper business.

Further to Lawrence Martin’s comments about the media and the American missile-defence plans, while most Canadians opposed Canada’s participation in the invasion of Iraq, most Canadian newspapers supported it.

It’s notable that while Canadian newspapers invariably refer to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives as “left-wing” or “left-leaning,” they never call the C.D. Howe Institute “right-wing,” and rarely describe the far-right Fraser Institute as what it is. Meanwhile, the right-wing Institute for Research on Public Policy is supposedly a “non-partisan think tank” and, incredibly, the National Citizen’s Coalition is also a “non-partisan organization.”
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The pattern affects how news events are covered. When the important, years-in-the-making World Peace Forum was held in Vancouver in 2006, with some 5,000 people from 78 different countries in attendance, the press coverage ranged from appallingly bad to totally nonexistent. The focus of the
Vancouver Sun
was a negative, ignorant attack on the forum, and the coverage by CTV and Global Television was minimal, with little or no positive comment. Highly regarded international experts from many countries who attended and participated in the forum were not interviewed and for the most part were completely ignored by the media. The range of important topics — such as the
growing proliferation of nuclear weapons, the weaponization of space, the increasing dangers of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons, and many other vitally important topics — was virtually ignored by the Canadian media.

In the preface to this book I briefly mentioned the mostly unreported secret meetings to discuss plans to further integrate Canada into the United States, a story largely ignored by the media. This being the case on such an important issue, how can we possibly respect the judgement and motives of our media owners and their editors?

Aaron Paton, the young Canmore, Alberta, journalist who helped break the story, won a prize for best story at the Canadian Newspaper Awards, while almost all of Canada’s major newspapers, our two national papers, and our three television networks distinguished themselves by largely ignoring this huge story.

Five months after the top-secret Banff meetings, documents released through the United States’ Freedom of Information Act included the official minutes of the meetings and plans for increased integration of Canada into the United States. In my interview with Aaron Paton I said

If I was concerned before when I read the initial documents about those who were planning to attend, I am definitely much more concerned now. What we are looking at is an elite that is getting together to try and set an agenda for the political economy for the three North American countries. They refer to governments as “weak,” and they are determined to dramatically alter the direction of the three countries, putting into place a series of policies that will very much be of benefit to big business.

It’s a very scary scenario and they are obviously well-funded. Here’s a high-powered group of people getting together in secret and they’re not interested in letting the public know what they’re doing, even though it’s of such enormous importance.

Is this interesting? Apparently not. Almost all of the media in Canada ignored the news story once again. But then again, consider this. If our media had reported the secret Banff meetings they would likely have had less room to keep us so very well informed about the activities of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Mel Gibson, and Anna Nicole Smith.

This is not the place for a long essay on the media in the United States, but it’s worth noting that most Americans still believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded and that Iraq was directly involved with al-Qaeda in the World Trade Center attack. Moreover, a steady stream of George W. Bush White House lies created a pro-war climate that the media either contributed to or was painfully slow to counteract. As Amy and David Goodman wrote in the
Seattle Times
, “Media monopoly and militarism go hand in hand.” A September 2007 poll showed that when asked whether “falsifying stories is a big problem in the U.S. news media,” 62 percent of Americans agreed, while 34 percent disagreed.
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And so what if CBS was owned by Westinghouse and NBC by General Electric, two major weapons manufacturers producing materials for the war, a fact that seemed to be reflected in their TV support for the Iraq invasion? In the words of former TV host Phil Donahue, “There really isn’t diversity in the media any more. Dissent? Forget about it.”

Given what we all know now, and what many of us suspected at the time — that day after day, week after week, month after month, the Bush administration was lying to its own people, and to the world — how can you account for the fact that most major U.S. newspapers published the Bush claims on their front pages virtually unquestioned? Even Bob Woodward wrote a book that seemed to accept virtually all that his White House sources gave him. The
New York Times
asked, “How could all this have happened? How could some of the best, most fact-checked, most reputable news organizations in the English-speaking world have been so gullible? How can one explain the temporary paralysis of skepticism?”
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In 2002, Reporters Without Borders ranked the United States 17th of 167 countries in its press freedom index. In 2004, the United States fell to 22nd place. In 2005, it was all the way down at 44th.

For a final word on the media in the United States, let’s turn to former CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. In a keynote address at Columbia University he said that

no longer could journalists count on their employers to provide the necessary resources to expose truths that powerful politicians and special interests often did not want exposed. Instead they face rounds and rounds of job cuts and cost cuts that require them to do even more with ever less.

It’s not just the journalist’s job at risk here. It’s American democracy. It is freedom.
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In Canada, in the case of the secret Banff Springs Hotel meetings, or the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, about which you will read more in the conclusion of this book, it’s not just a question of a biased, blinkered, overly concentrated media, it’s in fact the very survival of our country that’s at stake.

I can’t end this chapter without praising the many first-class journalists that we have in our country. And aside from those that are well-known nationally, within every community across Canada there are other hard-working perceptive writers that do not get the exposure they so often deserve. But for the media owners I have little respect.

A word about the
Globe and Mail
. I more often than not find an editorial or a column or two in the paper that I truly dislike and with which I strongly disagree. This said, I think the
Globe
for the most part has excellent daily national and international coverage. If only its editorial slant was more balanced.

We already have the huge Quebecor media conglomerate of newspapers, magazines, and television, the Rogers Communications empire of television, radio stations, and magazines, the Astral Media/Standard Broadcasting group of over 80 radio stations plus television and movie
networks, the CTVglobemedia/CHUM newspaper, television, and radio group, Corus and Shaw Communications with their TV and radio assets, and CanWest Global with their huge newspaper and television networks, all mostly dominated by a plutocracy on the far-right of the political spectrum.