In Italy, three of the four main private TV channels are controlled by one man, who also happens to be the country’s prime minister. Some, in fact, suggest that’s how Silvio Berlusconi got to be prime minister. During the 2001 national elections, his Mediaset TV channels put Berlusconi’s image on their screens almost twice as much as his center-left rival (1,427 minutes versus 887). While Italy may be the obvious example of what can happen when too much media is in the hands of too few people, it’s only one of many countries debating how – or whether – to control media ownership. The United States, Britain and Australia have all been under intense corporate pressure of late to loosen existing rules designed to prevent media companies from monopolizing major markets. The US Federal Communications Commission has already bowed to those pressures.

In Canada, regulators didn’t have to buckle – the country already has some of the world’s most lenient media ownership rules. That makes Canada a canary in the mine shaft for global media deregulation.

Generations of swashbuckling international media barons – Lord Beaverbrook, Lord Thomson and most recently, the blustering, egomaniacal Lord Conrad Black – got their starts in the northern nation. Since the 1970s, in spite of much hand-wringing and issuing of royal commissions, little has been done about Canada’s lack of media competition. Which is why, on July 31, 2000, CanWest Global Communications Inc. was able to buy virtually all of Conrad Black’s Canadian newspaper assets and instantly transform itself from a Winnipeg-based private television network – whose chief claim to fame was a knack for knowing which US sitcoms would attract audiences – into the most influential media company in the country.

CanWest’s assets suddenly ballooned to include not only Global Television, the country’s second largest private TV network, which reaches more than 90 percent of Canadian households; but also the National Post, one of just two national newspapers; 14 metropolitan dailies in every major city except Toronto and Winnipeg; 126 smaller papers from coast to coast; Canada.com, Canada’s third most popular Internet portal; and a raft of specialty cable TV channels and production companies.

In many communities, CanWest Global is now the only media game in town. 

CanWest is controlled by the Aspers, a powerful, politically connected Winnipeg family. Their personal agenda is now the shared obsession of all its media outlets: unquestioning support for Israel; forceful opposition to the Palestinian cause; blind loyalty to Canada’s governing Liberal party; mindless enthusiasm for their own television network; uncompromising opposition to the continued existence of Canada’s public broadcaster; and blatant cheerleading for globalization.

After three years of CanWest’s oppressive hand to the throats of its nationwide slate of editors, columnists and reporters, Canadians know well the havoc media cross-ownership and concentration can wreak on the most basic notions of a free, unfettered press.

Reporters have had news stories rewritten to toe the company line and been suspended or threatened with dismissal when they objected. Columnists’ “wrong” opinions have been edited or eliminated, and at least a dozen have quit or been fired (I was one of the quitters). Even the usually complacent publisher of the Ottawa Citizen, one of the chain’s largest and most successful dailies, was fired after permitting a column critical of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to be published in the paper. 

In spite of public protests, CanWest continues to tighten the editorial noose. It recently opened a centralized news desk in Winnipeg with an internet-based datebook system to allow editors in Winnipeg to track every reporter on every assignment in every CanWest paper, while “bat” phones provide Winnipeg with direct entry into every newsroom in the chain. At some point, the news desk is expected to begin providing its homogenized hodge-podge of news, features and opinions to the chain’s TV and Internet outlets, too.

Although a parliamentary committee recently expressed alarm at Canada’s media mayhem and called on the government to “issue a clear and unequivocal policy statement” by July 2004, no one is holding their breath. The Aspers have too many friends in high places.

Ironically, the best – and maybe only – hope for Canadian citizens now is that the free market may eventually do what governments won’t. To acquire Conrad Black’s media empire, CanWest took on a staggering $4-billion debt that has already forced it to sell off some newspapers. But giving free rein to the market is no answer. It’s what got Canada’s media into this mess in the first place – which should be a lesson to those countries still searching for that elusive ideal, a truly free press.

-Stephen Kimber

From the September/October 2003 issue of Adbusters magazine.