The irreplaceable Paul Wells has a piece in the latest issue of Macleans on Christopher Waddell’s testimony last November on the state of journalism in Canada.
Waddell cites massive cuts in newsrooms and bureaus — some pared back, some closed entirely:
The upshot, in Waddell’s succinct and chilling formulation: increasingly, politics is covered “as though everything that happened that day has never happened before and will never happen again.”
How do you cover a story you’ve been dropped into the middle of? You emphasize what any other stranger would notice: personality (that Danny Williams sure is colourful) and conflict (my, he’s angry at Paul Martin). We can’t hope to make sense of government, so we cover shouting.
Yet both Waddell and Wells offer a prescription that doesn’t strike me as even a little promising: relaxing foreign ownership regulations. True, I can see the appeal: the print and broadcasting industries have extremely high costs of entry; unlike most of our domestic players, foreign competitors could bring that kind of capital to bear readily.
Wells writes, “I can hear the squealing from the vested interests already. My first question for them isn’t economic, it’s moral: apart from getting rich and gutting newsrooms, what have Canadian owners done in the past 15 years to deserve further protection?”
And the answer is, not a hell of a lot. But the first question I’d shoot back is, what have our would-be foreign competitors done to suggest they’d be any better? The gutting of newsrooms and the pre-eminence of personality-based coverage aren’t purely Canadian phenomena; Wimblehack and the last U.S. elections made that pretty clear.
Maybe the problem isn’t that Rupert Murdoch, Clear Channel and Viacom have too little reach in our market, but rather that a very few players have far too much. CanWest Global is deservedly a punching bag for Canadian media ownership activists; the situation in Quebec is even starker, with two companies accounting for 97 per cent of French-language daily newspaper circulation.
For that matter, the folks lobbying for relaxed foreign ownership regulations are the big Canadian media companies (including Rogers, publishers of Macleans). Leonard Asper was quoted in The Globe and Mail as supporting looser rules in the entire media sector: cable, satellite, telecom and broadcasting. There’s gold in that thar briar patch, and the “squealing” Wells hears is the sound of Canadian media executives begging to be thrown in, not out.
Which brings me to the second question: what have Asper et al done to deserve the windfall they’ll get when relaxed ownership rules drive their stock options through the ceiling?
The protection they’ve sought and received from Ottawa isn’t from foreign ownership; it’s from the kind of prudent regulation that could have and should have kept competition alive in the news business.
Spot on as usual, Rob. I’d also note that loosening foreign ownership restrictions isn’t likely to lead to new American or British or Australian owned dailies springing up in Toronto or Vancouver or Halifax. They’d surely want to move into the Canadian market, but it’d be done in a kind of “Wal-Mart buys Woolco” sort of way. There’s likely to be even less competition once everything shakes out, and the trends in coverage that Wells, Waddell, Cottingham and I all find so disturbing would merely be exacerbated.
Even when I disagree with Wells (e.g. on this issue, on tuition hikes), I enjoy reading him. He challenges my thinking. And, he knows how to use the English language.
Well put. (As always, the mutual admiration society requires a quorum of only two…)
I get the most out of Wells when I disagree with him the most strongly (although god knows it’s great to watch him go in slugging for a position you agree with). And to coin a badly abused phrase from the last election, much of what he stands for springs from the same well I drink from… flowing in some very different directions at times, but that’s what keeps things lively.