Media ownership: Too exclusive a club?

It has been 40 years since the federal government first became interested in the future of newspapers and journalism in Canada. In that time, there has been one Senate committee report and a Royal Commission to find a new path for the news media so that it could thrive and be the backbone of a healthy democracy.

Forty years. That’s a long time, long enough that very little has happened and the future of journalism doesn’t seem to be on the public agenda anymore.

Maybe it’s time we revisit the ideas Parliament rejected all those decades ago. It may be the only way to save the industry from itself.

Let’s start by going back 100 years when there were 143 daily newspapers in Canada. Since that time, the number of dailies has only gone down (Jackson, 1999).

As competition among papers for advertising revenue increased during the 1950s and 60s, the number of independent owners decreased. Fewer owners meant less competition in the race “toward merger and monopoly.” (Jackson, 1999) Once the dust began to settle on the new media ownership landscape, Parliament took notice and wondered aloud what would happen in the coming years. The Davey Report, released by the Senate in 1970, believed things would only get worse, both for the concentration of ownership in Canada and the quality of journalism being produced.

” ‘What matters is the fact that control of the media is passing into fewer and fewer hands, and that experts agree that this trend is likely to continue and perhaps accelerate’ (Vol. 1: 6). The Committee held that ‘this country should no longer tolerate a situation where the public interest in so vital a field as information [is] dependent on the greed or goodwill of an extremely privileged group of businessmen’ (Vol. 1: 67).” (Jackson, 1999)

The committee recommended that a review board be established to decide whether any media merger was in the public’s interest. That would have given the federal government a perceived heavy hand in the free-market world of newspaper ownership, but one the committee believed was vital to the future success of newspapers. Publishers opposed any government intervention, and nothing happened.

Just over a decade later, the Kent Commission looked into the state of journalism in Canada, believing that the increasing concentration of ownership had dramatically reduced the level of reporting. Some of the key findings included (all from Jackson, 1999):

• “most conglomerate owners tended to spend a smaller percentage of their newspaper income on editorial content”
• Ownership’s management of newsrooms was “driving good journalists out of the profession because of inadequate pay, failing to train newsroom managers properly, and sometimes prioritizing economic considerations at the expense of responsible journalism.”
• And, that “the newspaper industry and Canada as a whole (needed) to develop adequate programs for taking advantage of developments in electronic news technology” so the industry could adapt to the electronic age

The Commission’s recommended limiting the size of newspaper chains, guaranteeing editorial independence for managing editors, tax breaks to those interested in getting into the newspaper industry, and a “press rights panel” that would report directly to Parliament and have the powers of a court in matters relating to the industry. Again, nothing happened.

And so we come to today. Convergence of media ownership has meant that television, radio and newspapers can all be owned by the same company. An example of what happens as concentration grows is how work becomes centralized in a bid to save money. Local autonomy is lost and editorial independence is eroded as content comes in from one location far removed from the consumers.

Maybe it’s time Parliament finally look into this. True, those in power may want to see the press’s power diminished, so the impetus for change must come from the grassroots. If Canadians are truly interested in saving their democracy, they’ll demand something be done about the state of the news media. In 2002, Tom Kent, who headed the Kent Commission, wrote that it was time for the government to enact reforms for the media industry. It still wasn’t too late to reverse the downward slide of Canadian journalism, he wrote in the October issue of Policy Options: “It can be cut now. In the name of a free democratic society, it must be.”