J-Topics

In this opinion piece for rabble.ca, Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, links the April 2007 lockout of le Journal staff to policies stemming from Sun Media newsroom consolidations.

Some excerpts of recent stories about this week's CRTC hearings:

Federal broadcast regulators revealed anxieties over delving into journalistic standards and independence as they heard complaints from unions on Wednesday about the negative consequences of cross-media ownership. Canadian Press story on CBC.ca

-- Canada's broadcasters should be required to compete for their licences when they come up for renewal, which would make incumbent companies more accountable and ensure new players can break into the industry, regulators were told Wednesday. Grant Robertson, in the Globe and Mail, reports that a media union wants licence renewals opened to competition to bring more diversity in an era of consolidation.
In context, commercial networks argue that Canadian companies need to grow through mergers and takeovers to compete on a global stage being reshaped by the Internet. On the other side, media guilds, arts advocates and production industry groups argued that consolidation is dangerous to the diversity of broadcast voices in Canada.

-- The federal broadcasting regulator is learning quickly that if it wants to impose new rules to restrict market concentration, it will do so over the vehement opposition of the country's big media companies.  The Canadian Press.


-- The debate over media consolidation in Canada is turning into a fight over who controls access to the millions of television sets across the country. Grant Robertson, the Globe and Mail.

- Should the CRTC choose to limit the growth of Canadian media companies, domestic players will be at risk of being swept away by giants such as News Corp. and Google, Quebecor Media Inc. told the broadcast regulator on Tuesday. Paul Vieira, Financial Post

"The level of consolidation in the Canadian media industry has reached levels that “in any other country would be considered unacceptable,” Canada's public broadcaster told regulators Monday at the start of federal hearings into the state of ownership concentration in broadcasting," reports the Globe and Mail's Grant Robertson, live online. "“Our view is, generally speaking, the level of concentration is too high,” said Richard Stursberg, executive vice-president of English language operations at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation."

Predictably, Stursberg's comments were instantly contradicted by the  Canadian Association of Broadcasters, which wants no new rules. Robertson's story quoted Glenn O'Farrell, president of the CAB, which represents the industry, including commercial broadcasters such as CTV, Global, TVA and others.: "We see no diversity deficit in the Canadian system.”

In Vancouver, where I live, citizens subsist largely on a commercial diet supplied by CanWest, which for years has controlled three of the four daily papers (Sun, Province, National Post), two of the main provincial television stations, most of the other dailies in the province including Victoria's Times Colonist, nearly all of the free "community" newspapers (ie, wrapping for large piles of flyers) that land on local doorsteps, and has been involved in the still-evolving transit newspapers. It's not quite a CanWest monopoly -- options include the Globe (not easily available in  many outlying areas), CTV, CBC in its various forms and a handful of alternative papers and not-quite-mainstream television broadcasters -- but anyone who claims there's no diversity deficit is plain wrong, especially in British Columbia.

BTW, kudos to the Globe and Mail for consistenly reporting on this issue; there has been a deficit of reporting about it in most CanWest papers. (In the past six months the Globe has run 200 stories citing Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, compared to 76 in CanWest's National Post, which is that chain's paper of record on financial and national stories. The Toronto Star -- which is the country's largest paper but can be partly excused because it doesn't claim to be a national paper of record, ran 49 stories.) I think the failure to report on this, including failure to report without bias, is a dereliction of duty and shows why CRTC regulation is needed. Media -- specifically journalism  -- is of critical public importance and the fact that it's often almost ignored as a subject by Canadian media, with a few outstanding exceptions, weakens our democracy.

A Canadian Press story by Merito Ilo takes a look at the international media coverage of Conrad Black's conviction, noting that "stories published Saturday in the U.S., British and Canadian media, including some newspapers that belonged to Black's former media empire, Hollinger International, differed only in their choice of words, but not in their "he got what he deserved" attitude."