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| 2010 - In the desert, ignoring all news. |
A piece of news I missed in 2010:
I’ve just learned something shocking
about the newspaper business in Canada.
In 2010, Darrel and I were living
on CanKata, spending our time in Malaysia and mostly Thailand and then a good
chunk of time on the hard while CanKata was repainted. It was a busy year, a
year where we took a long-awaited trip to Canada, a year which saw our son and
his family move from PEI back to Alberta and which saw us taking an eventful
trip to India. In 2010, we had a number of visitors to CanKata, we started to
learn the Thai language, Darrel used Expedia for the first time, and for the
first time I did our taxes online. It was a sad year in many ways; close family
members died and I learned that two brothers were dying of a rare lung disease.
While all this was happening, I
missed some important news. On July 13, 2010, the Manhattan-based hedge fund,
Golden Tree Asset Management, acquired the CanWest media empire. Our Canadian
newspapers haven’t been the same since … and they keep changing (see HISTORY
below).
The new company, which now owns a
staggering amount of newspapers in Canada including the Sun Media papers, is called
Postmedia and while it looks like a Canadian company, 66 percent of its shares
are now owned by an American media conglomerate which has close ties to the
Republican Party.
Why am I paying attention now?
It was just an innocent remark.
One of my Facebook friends said something about the Ottawa Citizen that made me
wonder, “What way does the Ottawa Citizen lean these days?” My first question
to Google was “Who owns the Ottawa Citizen” and the answer led me to a whole
bunch more questions about the owner – Postmedia.
(NOTE: If you want more details or want to know my sources, you can
click on anything with a light-grey highlight. This will take you to the web site that
provided the information.)
What Postmedia owns
Here are a few of the Canadian
daily papers that Postmedia owns: National Post, Calgary Herald, Calgary Sun,
Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, Kingston Whig-Standard, Leader-Post, The London
Free Press, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa Sun, The StarPhoenix,
Toronto Sun, Vancouver Sun, Winnipeg Sun and the Financial Post Magazine, plus
a number of other dailies and weeklies. Postmedia’s media outlets represent a
far greater concentration of news media ownership than exists in any other
major economy (a degree of foreign ownership of the free press that would not
be tolerated in the U.S., France, Japan or Germany for instance).
Foreign Ownership
Canada once had strong laws to
protect us from foreign ownership. But in 2010, the ruling party – the
Conservatives – signed off on Postmedia’s creation and tried to make it look
Canadian by selecting Canadian
Paul
Godfrey as Postmedia’s CEO. Godfrey immediately took away local editorial
autonomy and ordered all Postmedia publications to endorse the Harper
government’s bid for re-election.
One of the Board Members
Here is the name of one someone
who once sat on the Board of Directors of Postmedia:
David Pecker – who
headed up the most infamous tabloid in the United States – The National
Enquirer, and who is a close friend of Donald Trump. He was appointed in
October 2016 but he resigned in August 2018 after his interactions with Trump
were heavily reported. Those “interactions” were his “catch and kill”
operations to buy exclusive rights to stories that might embarrass Trump and to
prevent negative stories from becoming public during the 2016 presidential
campaign.
Are these newspapers biased?
Here is what Media Bias Fact
Check says about one of the Saskatoon papers:
“The StarPhoenix typically sources poorly
as they source through quoting rather than providing links to their assertions
in opinion pieces, whereas they utilize credible media sources when publishing
national and international news stories such as the Canadian Press and
Associated Press, therefore we rate them high for factual news reporting
overall, but mixed for local reporting and right-center biased based on
editorial and opinion positions”. A check of all the Postmedia papers
shows that they are all right-center.
I wondered what Media Bias Fact
Check says about
Fox News
– not a newspaper but probably a key source of news for a few of my friends.
“Overall, we rate Fox News strongly Right-Biased due to
editorial positions and story selection that favors the right. We also rate
them Mixed factually and borderline Questionable based on poor sourcing and the
spreading of conspiracy theories that later must be retraced after being widely
shared. Further, Fox News would be rated a Questionable source based on
numerous failed fact checks by hosts and pundits, however straight news
reporting is generally reliable, therefore we rate them Mixed for factual
reporting.”
"
Questionable source based on numerous failed fact checks by hosts and pundits" is really all that matters to me here. I never have and never will watch Fox News because I think that was pretty evident from the get-go.
This is what Media Bias Fact
Check says about CBC:
“Overall, we rate CBC Left-Center Biased based on editorial
positions that leans slightly left and High for factual reporting due to proper
sourcing and a clean fact check record.”
Finally, let’s look at CTV:
“Overall, we rate CTV News Least Biased based on balanced story selection and
minimal use of emotional language. We also rate them High for factual reporting
due to proper sourcing and a clean fact check record.”
Of course, Media Bias Fact Check
might be biased itself, and perhaps a little unscientific, but it was the only
rating system I could find for these papers. I would love to hear from anyone
who disagrees with the ratings.
Editors resign
On October 19, 2015,
Andrew
Coyne resigned as the National Post editor of editorials and comment. The
National Post endorsed Stephen Harper and the Conservatives in the upcoming
election, and Coyne wrote an editorial dissenting from the Post’s endorsement.
They pulled his editorial (an unprecedented intervention), so he then resigned
the editorial position to protect his reputation and to preserve his editorial
freedom as a columnist. In case you weren’t aware, Stephen Harper did not win
the 2015 election.
In November of 2015, the Ottawa
Citizen’s
two
editorial writers, Kate Heartfield and James Gordon, announced that they
were leaving the newspaper. Neither gave reasons similar to Andrew Coyne, but
the timing is suspect. The Citizen, like the National Post (and all its other
daily newspapers), was instructed by Postmedia to post editorials endorsing
Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. I can tell you this - Kate Heartfield was
not a fan of Mr. Harper. Here’s
a
couple of quotes from her from 2013:
“Stephen Harper … is a man who puts a lot of effort into
making sure no Conservative ever says the wrong thing – never says anything of
substance at all, if he can help it. He’s trained himself and his party to
never get into trouble”.
“Almost everything Harper’s government does … is media
strategy”.
“If there was ever a political party in Canada deserving of
being called the Media party, it’s the Conservative Party of Canada in 2013”.
Yup, I can see why she resigned
when she was instructed to endorse Harper.
Murdoch
I’m not overly alarmed at what I
read about Canadian newspapers. I don’t think a lot of people read them these
days anyway. I’m much more concerned
about what is happening on TV and how much influence Fox has. Oh Rupert
Murdoch, you crotchety old man. Another spoilt boy who inherited family wealth.
I was interested in what
Encyclopaedia
Britannica said about him. He
“briefly worked as an
editor on the London Daily Express, where he first gained practical experience
in the sensationalist journalism that would be a major influence early in his
career as a publisher. His father having died, he returned to Australia in 1954
to take over his inheritance, the Sunday Mail and The News; he quickly
converted the latter into a paper dominated by news of sex and scandal. … The
News’s circulation soared, and he then went about instituting similar changes
in papers that he bought in Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, and Brisbane.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica gives
Murdoch’s formula for boosting circulation: “an emphasis
on crime, sex, scandal, and human-interest stories with boldface headlines,
prolific sports reporting, and outspokenly conservative editorializing”.
And people just gobble this stuff up. And they think they are keeping
themselves “informed”.
Am I Misinformed?
I have three key ways of staying
informed – via television, through my Facebook newsfeed, and by listening to
Darrel read news items to me while I’m making breakfast.
I usually turn on the television
so I can watch YouTube or Netflix. While we’re getting settled into our chairs
with our bowls of popcorn, and much to Darrel’s displeasure, I will watch a bit
of news. CNN sometimes has good stuff but usually I get annoyed with their
distortions so I switch to the BBC, which is much more balanced. Still, it does
an incredible amount of reporting about the USA and has way too many videos of
the US president, so, much to Darrel’s relief, I switch to YouTube. We use
YouTube to watch the CBC National – we both find it balanced and upbeat – and to
watch the late-night comedians. We’re always up for a laugh. They all tend to
pick on the US president and we’re fine with that. They pick on any world leader when they have the
opportunity, and we’re fine with that too. Our favourite YouTube activity is watching
music videos and they are a refreshing diversion from news and politics.
My Facebook newsfeed is very
diverse and includes feeds from such sources as the CBC, Globe and Mail, the
Economist, Bloomberg Asia, The Thaiger (Thai), Phuket News, and the New York
Times. The only ones I can read regularly for free are CBC and the Thai news
sources, while the others let me read a limited number of articles. So I am
somewhat informed by headlines. When something grabs my attention, I turn to
Google to do a more in-depth review. I am often dismayed at the crazy posts
that some of my friends share, and so I usually spend a bit of time each day
blocking sources. Some of you might think that I should see this other stuff,
but I’m afraid that some of the false information might stick in my head and in
later years I might wonder if it was really true that the coronavirus was made
in a Winnipeg laboratory. For me, changing the channel or blocking a Facebook
friend is the safer route. Darrel feels comfortable with just the CBC and the
Thai news sources. He helps me stay on the straight and narrow (but is
certainly willing to explore off the pathways from time to time).
It wasn’t that long ago that I
was a faithful reader of the Saskatoon StarPhoenix and later the Ottawa
Citizen. It saddens me that, under new ownership, they are not the same papers
that I once enjoyed so much. And it is ten years later that I am learning this …
so while I might be doing my best at not becoming misinformed, perhaps I am
quite uninformed.
~~~~~ The End ~~~~~
On October 6, 2014,
Postmedia's CEO Godfrey announced a deal to acquire the English-language
operations of Sun Media.[5][6] The purchase
received regulatory approval from the federal Competition Bureau on
March 25, 2015,[7] even though
the company manages competitive papers in several Canadian cities; while the
Sun Media chain owns numerous other papers, four of its five Sun-branded
tabloids operate in markets where Postmedia already publishes a broadsheet competitor.[6] Board
chair Rod Phillips has cited the Vancouver market, in
which the two main daily newspapers, the Vancouver Sun and The Province, have had common
ownership for over 30 years, as evidence that the deal would not be
anticompetitive.[6] The purchase
did not include Sun Media's now-defunct Sun News Network.[6] The
acquisition was approved by the Competition Bureau on March 25, 2015,[8] and closed on
April 13.[9]
Margo Goodhand, a former Edmonton Journal editor-in-chief, wrote in a 2016 Walrus article that Postmedia executives were behind
outsourcing of Postmedia content to produce “Regina Leader-Post sports
pages, Arts fronts for the Montreal Gazette, editorial pages for
the Vancouver Sun” to a site within an office in Canada. [10][11]
In 2016, the company
sought to restructure its compensation plans and reduce spending by as much as
20%, after reporting a net loss of $99.4 million, or 35 cents per diluted
share, in the fourth-quarter ended Aug 31, compared with a $54.1 million net
loss, or 19 cents per diluted share, in the same period a year earlier. This
resulted in 90 newsroom staff losing their jobs.[12]
On November 27,
2017, Postmedia and Torstar announced a
transaction in which Postmedia will sell seven dailies, eight community papers,
and the Toronto and Vancouver 24 Hours to Torstar, in
exchange for 22 community papers and the Ottawa and Winnipeg versions of Metro.
Except for the Exeter
Times-Advocate, St. Catharines
Standard, Niagara Falls Review, Peterborough
Examiner, and Welland Tribune, all acquired papers will
be closed.[13][14]
On June 26, 2018, Canadian Press reported that,
by the end of August, Postmedia will be closing the Camrose Canadian in Camrose, Alberta, Strathmore
Standard in Strathmore, Alberta, Kapuskasing Northern Times in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Ingersoll Times in Ingersoll, Ontario, Norwich Gazette in Norwich, Ontario and Petrolia Topic in Petrolia, Ontario. It will also cease
printing the Portage
Daily Graphic in Portage La Prairie,
Manitoba, the Northern News in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, and The Daily Observer in Pembroke, Ontario while
maintaining a digital presence for the three publications. As well, the High River Times in High River, Alberta will go from being published twice a week to once a week.[17]
On November 27,
2018, The Competition Bureau applied
for a court evaluation contesting Postmedia’s claims of solicitor-client
privilege, for records seized by the bureau during raids at the company's
offices.[18]
On June 2019, Kevin Libin,
the National Post and Financial Post comments editor
and editorials editor and a founding editor of Western Standard, was assigned “executive editor of Postmedia politics". [3] The role
focuses on coverage for federal politics in the Post. In
addition, it focuses on coverage of federal and provincial politics within all
of the dailies owned by Postmedia.[10]
