Coon: It’s also not just the way that Brunswick News is covering the stories but also what they’re not covering . . . Like in BC, the land has never been ceded by the First Nations in New Brunswick, but you would never know that was the case or that there were even First Nations in New Brunswick by reading Brunswick News.
Brown: The [proposed] legislation is directly contrary to the interests of the Irvings, and they did cover it in their paper. Your complaint is that it’s on page 5, it’s marginally covered, and the way it’s covered characterizes it as something of interest to fringe voices and nothing to be taken too seriously. Is that accurate?
Coon: Media tends to talk to the powers that be and tends to reflect the conventional wisdom. If you are not connected to the powers that be, or if you are not speaking in the narrative or the voice of conventional wisdom, then you don’t tend to have much of a place in the media.
Or much of a place in New Brunswick society at all if you are an Aboriginal person whose existence, according to Coon, is effectively unacknowledged by a media monopoly whose owners happen to have a competing interest in the land and its uses. As for an Aboriginal narrative contributing to the province’s conventional wisdom, let alone being acknowledged as part of Atlantic Canada’s traditional wisdom, or Canada’s, that evidently is in no danger of occurring through New Brunswick’s conventional media channels.
In a way, the Black and Irving newspaper oligopolies serve to rather tidily bracket a Canadian media landscape that is shockingly out of step with developments occurring around the world, and that profoundly ill serves Canadians. The West and the East aren’t the only places where media concentration exists in Canada (more on that below), but they are arguably where its worst effects manifest themselves in the connection between powerful industrial, natural resource, and other economic interests; those interests’ ownership of local media; their subsequent authorship of dominant local, regional, and national narratives; and their overt use of that confluence of interests to comfort themselves and afflict Canadians, a mari usque ad mare, with a narrow, self-serving, pro-business (theirs), monocultural view of Canada. If Keith Davey were alive today, he might be heard to utter, “Plus ça change.”
Newspaper ownership concentration mattered in 1970, when the Davey Report was issued, it mattered in 1981, when the Kent Commission recommended breaking up monopolies, and it matters now. Ownership concentration harms democracy, which thrives on a free press. But “in a country that has allowed so many newspapers to be owned by a few conglomerates, freedom of the press means, in itself, only that enormous influence without responsibility is conferred on a handful of people,”12 as the Kent Commission concluded 35 years ago. The commission also said flat out that “Industrial conglomerates produce poor newspapers.”13 Twenty-five years later, a Senate report on the state of Canadian media revealed how little things had changed, referring to the Irvings’ holdings as an “industrial-media complex.”14
Dancing with the Devil
CONCENTRATION DOESN’T JUST allow owners and publishers to peddle their impoverished (but self-enriching) views of the world; it also gives rise to brazen political interference. Look at the notorious directive made in October 2015 by Postmedia CEO and president Paul Godfrey that a ll 1 6 major newspapers in his stable endorse Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives in their doomed bid to retain power in Ottawa.15 Even more egregious was what John Barber described in the Guardian as “the company’s chain-wide blitz supporting Harper [that] culminated a few days before the election when virtually all Postmedia publications replaced their front pages with a pro-Conservative advertisement masquerading as an official notice from Elections Canada, the independent agency managing the vote.”16 This struck many Canadians as a new low for newspaper journalism, or at least for newspaper publishing. In fairness, says Margo Goodhand, who was editing the Edmonton Journal at the time, “while Godfrey ordered up pro-Tory editorials in all four of his papers in May [during the Alberta provincial election] and across the country federally in October, he was willing to sell any and all front pages to any political party that asked . . . Because the Tories bought so many front pages that day in the East, it has become some kind of urban legend that Godfrey gave away his papers to the Tories in a political move. Purely fiscal.”17
Meanwhile, also on the eve of the federal election, the Globe revealed the extent to which it has become little more than an oil-soaked rag when it plumped for the Conservatives in its pre-election editorial. Its former editor, John Stackhouse—then recently departed to the hallowed halls of Canadian banking—writes in Mass Disruption, a memoir that came out in October 2015, that “editorial boards at major newspapers . . . [remain] the high church of journalism,”18 stating that a “well-argued editorial” helps define an organization, by which measure the Globe confirmed its status on October 16, 2015,19 as Canada’s village idiot for the day—on arguably the most important day of the year for political journalism save election day itself.
For working journalists, how their paper’s owners spend their editorial coin can be utterly demoralizing, and decrees like Godfrey’s only illustrate how downright desperate the business prospects are for major newspapers—some would say deservedly so, given the soul-selling behaviour of the Postmedias of the world. “Eight of Canada’s daily newspapers disappeared last year,” Barber wrote in 2015, “and the leading titles are all operating at [a] loss.”20
Godfrey’s Postmedia already owned the most major city newspapers/web portals in Canada before it earned federal approval in March 2015 to greatly expand its empire by acquiring Quebecor’s Sun Media national chain of 173 titles.21 Postmedia gained its dominance when, backed by a US hedge fund, it acquired much of Canwest’s newspaper holdings, which were already saddled with merger debt22 that had pushed that media conglomerate (TV, print, and digital) into bankruptcy. Since acquiring Canwest’s print assets, Postmedia (itself more than $670 million in debt),23 has bled money and staff24 while cashing out its real-estate assets. Canada’s ever-somnambulant Competition Bureau, at least under Stephen Harper’s gimlet-eyed control, saw nothing wrong with the Postmedia/Quebecor transaction,25 blithely concluding there was no real competition between Postmedia’s broadsheets and Sun Media’s tabloids, so, by implication, ownership concentration would do no harm. The bureau also said there was an “incentive for the merged company to retain readership and maintain editorial quality in order to continue to attract advertisers to its newspapers,” that there was healthy competition “from digital alternatives in an evolving media marketplace,” and best of all, there was “existing competition from free local daily newspapers,” which, I believe, are those things that people in coloured bibs thrust at commuters when they’re struggling to work every morning. That’s like saying you really don’t need modern medicine because we’ve still got leeches.
Results that speak volumes
BRAZEN POLITICAL INTERFERENCE? Check. But is ownership concentration the only way to maintain quality and commercial viability in these tough economic times? What would Conrad (not David) Black say? Well, Conrad Black did say this: “Some of [Postmedia’s] newspapers have deteriorated a long way from what I remember. Some of it you can’t avoid. Some of it you can. But please build the quality. Otherwise, you’re going to retreat right into your own end zone, if you’ll pardon the sports metaphor.”26 Or continue your death spiral, if you’ll pardon a metaphor from the insurance industry. By the time December 2015 came around, the Globe and Mail’s business section sported a fetching headline: “Postmedia’s S&P credit rating is now the same as Greece’s.”27 Postmedia had earlier announced plans to cut an estimated $50 million in operating expenses over two years, much of them salaries, but meanwhile had forked out $69 million