If the Varsity had the resources to publish pompous and wildly self-serving corporate proclamations and edicts under the guise of national editorials, we would. It’s just a given. Luckily for this nation, the Varsity is kind of the little media engine that can’t. No one has to rein in this newspaper’s excesses and indulgences. Size and economic reality does that quite handily, thank you very much.
But things would be a little different if, instead of being owned by students, the Varsity was owned by CanWest tycoon Izzy Asper with his freshly squeezed barony of the Southam chain of 135 Canadian newspapers. (You heard right, that’s a whopping mouthful of 14 major English-language dailies, 120 daily and weekly papers from smaller communities and one of only two national papers, the National Post.) We wouldn’t exactly be able to publish self-serving corporate proclamations, but we would be able to publish Aspers.
You see, a guy like Asper isn’t reined in by the same type of limitations that the Varsity is. He’s different. He’s rich and powerful. Which brings us to corporate editorials…. And, as you may have heard, Asper has been enforcing a corporate (or national) editorial policy at his major Southam dailies for over a month now. Which isn’t very surprising. You can’t really give a man superpowers and expect him not to use them. No new information there.
In the first week of December Southam’s major daily newspapers began running lead editorials assigned by the editor-in-chief of the chain’s news service. The publication of these editorials will increase in frequency until they are being served up three times a week.
Ostensibly, the idea is to allow the editor-in-chief to provide a “national” perspective. (Hence the questionable nomenclature “national” rather than the more accurate “corporate.”) And these are perspectives that, presumably, local editors and writers wouldn’t be able to come up with on their own. Of course, the whole idea is silly. (How are writers in one city supposed to have a better idea of national issues than editors in Montreal?) But a lot of folks are seriously upset.
What most have pointed out is the self-serving nature of the editorials that have already appeared. Once again, no new information. Did someone expect benevolence and altruism? The editorials have discussed tax breaks for private charities. Guess what business the Aspers are also in. Private health treatment is another issue. No doubt more so for those who could afford it, etc.
Fifty-five writers at the Gazette, the English-language Southam daily in Montreal, were so upset that they mutinied. They withheld their by-lines from stories, set up a website (now closed) to voice their grievances and submitted a signed letter to the Globe and Mail.
They felt the freedom of the press was being threatened and the strength of local editorial voices undermined. And they felt this both because of the editorials themselves and because they were instructed not to dispute them in print. Which are valid points. Their freedom was compromised. In a speech, Izzy’s son David Asper countered that as the owners of a business his family should have some say in how things operate. The fact that the business is newspapers shouldn’t give employees carte blanche to do whatever they want. And this, though incredibly alarming, was also quite a good point.
If McDonald’s employees have to wear hairnets, why shouldn’t Montreal hacks have to take instructions from their higher-ups? Are journalists special or something? Freedom of the press, as important as it is, is dependent on the benevolence of newspaper owners. Owners allow freedom in this flawed media system we have.
So the problem isn’t freedom of the press. It’s freedom of the press from the economy. As A. J. Liebling famously said, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” And again this is nothing new. We went through all of this when Conrad Black was in charge. Southam is the largest newspaper publisher in this country. It owns more than a third of the market, as well as a monopoly, or virtual monopoly, in many of the places it publishes (Especially is you don’t count Sun tabloids as “newspapers.”) That’s a big problem.
This national editorial controversy itself points out one of the many concerns that media empires pose. Why? Well, ironically, one of the problems is limited national exposure. Globe and Mail readers know about the controversy, Torontonians know about it, ditto Montrealers (in both languages, in most papers). Parisians even know about it, thanks to the French daily Liberation, which published a story about it December 15. But at least 134 other papers, owned by Southam, aren’t really interested in publicizing the controversy. So much so that a column midly critical of the national editorials was spiked from the chain’s Halifax Daily News (the writer promptly resigned). And that means people who don’t read the Globe and Mail or live in Toronto, Paris or Montreal are much less likely to have heard about it at all. So the bad news is that media monopolies and corporate editorials are probably here to stay. …and there just hasn’t been any good news yet.
