The Kent Commission conclusions

The Kent Commission conclusions and recommendations were directly related to its mandate, but should have come as no surprise to anyone who read the entire report. The proverbial breadcrumb trail was developed throughout the text of the final report. Those conclusions and recommendations are summarized in Press Notes version below.

Chapter 13 — “Conclusions and Suggestions”

The commission opened this chapter with the statement that its finding supported the conclusion that chains and increasing concentration of ownership was just one cause of the demise of newspapers, but there was another cause also at play: old-style competition due to economics. Canadian newspapers competed in markets with limited advertising and a limited audience and therefore one paper was bound to fail and die. As advertising crept to one outlet, the other lost its source of revenue and had no way to replace it, especially in small markets. (This was the same argument Chomsky and Herman made in Manufacturing Consent, which was published years after the Kent Commission report.)

What the country had allowed over the years was to let a vast number of newspapers fall into a few hands. These hands were mainly interested in profit, the commission said, and not in providing high-quality editorial content: “For the heads of such organizations to justify their position by appealing to the principle of freedom of the press is offensive to intellectual honesty” (p. 217). While the commission understood the dangers of the state meddling too much in the area of press freedom, it felt that the state needed to do something:

It is important as ever that the press should be free from the interference of the state. But it should be free from other pressures too. The purposes of freedom can be achieved only if freedom is undivided, if it withstands all the forces that tend to restrict information and opinion. (p. 217)

Why did the commission believe this? It had something to do with something the Davey Committee wrote in its report about the state of Canada’s news media. The Davey Committee found that “most Canadian newspapers were boneyards of broken dreams” (Kent Commission, p. 218). The Kent Commission took the analogy further: “Our investigations lead us to think that there are now fewer dreams to break” (p. 218). Journalists’ confidence in their publishers was plummeting, many were confused and frustrated and their malaise, the commission wrote, was “part of the price we pay for conglomerate ownership” (p. 218).

The industry needed to change, the commission wrote, including having papers financially support journalism schools, become more active with in-house training programs and more active in press councils and develop more ombudsman positions. These steps, which have been adopted to varying degrees, were required to make the news better for the public.

The public interest in the editorial content, in the fulfillment of the newspaper’s professional responsibility to the community, is that editorial judgment should be free from outside financial interest.

This is the basic conclusion of our inquiry. The conglomerates should be kept out of the newsrooms. (p. 233)

How to make this happen? Simple: Government intervention.

Chapter 14 — “Recommendations”

The proposed Canada Newspaper Act is affirmative legislation designed to separate the editorial content of a newspaper from business interests outside that newspaper. (p. 252)

The commission recommended one course of action that it felt could address its conclusion and belief that newspapers should have a degree of freedom from commercial interests. That course of action was a proposed “Canada Newspaper Act”, a piece of legislation that would prohibit concentration and control of newspapers in tandem with other media outlets. The legislation would have corrected what the commission called the worst cases of concentration, create incentives for new owners to purchase newspapers, thereby widening the pool of owners, develop tax credits for newspapers that invest in content and create grants to promote Canadian news services at home and abroad. The commission also believed the proposed act would be written in such a way to protect the rights of journalists and promote the voice of local readers in discussions about improving the quality of newspapers. A “Press Rights Panel” was proposed to oversee implementation and monitor effectiveness of the act.

Ownership rules

The proposed act would prohibit companies or individuals from purchasing newspapers if the total net value of the buyer’s non-newspaper assets exceeded the net asset value of the paper being purchased. As well, the act would have ended chain ownership by limiting to five the number of papers one person or company could own, or limiting the papers’ combined circulation to no more than five per cent of the overall Canadian newspaper circulation, and that papers were not within 500 kilometres of each other (about the distance between Edmonton and Saskatoon).

The act would have also prohibited daily papers from owning weekly or biweekly papers in the same market (so the Toronto Star, through TorStar via Metroland, would not be allowed to own The Missassauga News, or the Whig-Standard, through Sun Media, would not be allowed to own Kingston This Week).

The freedom of the editor

The act would have required that if the proprietor of a newspaper has other interests of great value than the assets of the newspaper, the editor-in-chief would be appointed under a written contract, which wasn’t done at the time of the commission’s report. The editor-in-chief, or managing editor, or editor — title notwithstanding — would be responsible for all editorial expenditures within a budget determined by the proprietor that is adequate to report news accurately and comprehensively, be responsible for filling the daily news hole and all personnel decisions. At the same time, the editor would be responsible for aiding the paper’s profit margins. In return, the proprietor would leave the editorial department alone.

A second aspect of the editor-in-chief’s job was their relation to a proposed advisory committee that every newspaper would have. The advisory committee would be made up of two members appointed by the proprietor of the paper, two members from the newspaper’s editorial department, and three members from the community at large. The editor-in-chief would have been required to write an annual report of the paper’s finances, content and projects that would first be given to the advisory committee and then printed in the paper.

Press Rights Panel

The panel would oversee the effectiveness of and implementation of the legislation. The commission proposed that the Press Rights Panel would be contained within the Canadian Human Rights Commission to ensure that it was beholden to Parliament and not to the newspaper industry. At the same time, it would be at arm’s length from Parliament to avoid the hint of any conflict-of-interests between a particular ministry or minister and the newspaper industry. The panel would be made up of a chair and two members appointed by the Governor-General and would regularly report to Parliament. It would also provide guidance to each newspaper’s advisory committee and evaluate every newspaper purchase and divestment. 

Tax credits and surtaxes

The Canada Newspaper Act would also make it easier financially for newspapers to invest in content and reportage. The commission proposed that as part of each newspaper’s tax return, each paper would have to show a statement of the ration of editorial costs to its total revenues. If the ratio was higher than the industry average, then the government would provide the publication a 25 per cent tax reduction on the difference between the paper’s investment and the industry average. If the paper under-invested — meaning that the ratio was less than the industry average — there would be a 25 per cent surtax on the deficiency. The aim was simple: Invest in your product and the government will reward you financially.

So what?

There was expected backlash from the newspaper industry when the report was released. Unfortunately, the Canada Newspaper Act never came into existence. The commission’s report and recommendations floated around Parliament Hill, but eventually were placed on a shelf and left to collect dust.

In a 1984 piece for the Ryerson Review of Journalism, the head of research for the Kent Commission, Tim Creery, outlined how the commission’s recommendations faded into darkness, never to be seen again.

As the Commission’s public hearings got under way, it became clear that there was no great public constituency for action against concentration. The Consumers’ Association of Canada took a firm position in favor of diversity and competition, as it had before Davey. But no newspaper in Canada was about to rally opinion under this banner, and the issue proved of no great interest to the other mass media.

It seems to me that this absence of organized public concern was the critical factor in sending the Kent recommendations to the boneyard. The newspapers themselves unleashed a tremendous barrage against the Commission’s recommendations as well as lobbying furiously against them. One public official told me he was “astonished by the vehemence of feeling against Kent personally.” He felt the publishers and editorialists had for the most part failed to recognize genuine concerns about lack of newspaper accountability to the public and the consequences of too much ownership in too few hands. Even after the government had sought to meet their objections concerning “intrusionist” recommendations, the papers had continued with exactly the same objections they had had to the original Kent recommendations.

The newspaper industry has changed since 1981. During that time, the Canadian news industry has adopted some of the commission’s to varying degrees. Some outlets provide in-service training. Some invest in journalism schools. But the march to ownership concentration continues and there is little hope that the federal government will renew its interest in this area.

“I regret that my answer to your question, whether government will do anything about ownership concentration, has to be a gloomy ‘not in the presently foreseeable future,’” Tom Kent wrote to me in an e-mail. Why not? Well, Kent answered that question and others in an e-mail interview in advance of the 30th anniversary of the commission’s report.