You know, when the CRTC is talking about looking at "undue preference" online, I think this page is the kind of stuff that might come up.
In case it isn't obvious, Canoe is highlighting (literally) Quebecor-owned channels in its TV listings, including, hilariously, its only anglo cable channel, Men TV (owned jointly with Canwest).
UPDATE (June 8): The Telegraph-Journal responds. See below.
The media concentration outrage of the week (Hitler comparisons and all) concerns Matt McCann, an intern at the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal who wrote an article about teachers' reaction to the University of New Brunswick giving an honorary degree to premier Shawn Graham.
You'd think such a thing would be a conflict of interest, an academic institution presenting an honour to the man responsible for the government that funds them, but apparently UNB does this as a matter of routine.
The story made the front page. It included quotes from professors and students (none of which were anonymous) who were upset at the move. It quoted a university spokesperson who explained the policy and made counter-arguments, as well as a note saying that Graham's office did not wish to comment. In all, a fairly standard newspaper political conflict story, and a pretty good one for an intern.
After the story was published, the newspaper fired him.
According to McCann, he was told his story was "seriously unbalanced and severely underplayed the university's side of the story" and that "the newspaper has worked hard to establish a good relationship with UNB and that I had damaged that relationship". The newspaper refused to give its side to the CBC, so we have only McCann's word on this.
On Saturday, the Telegraph-Journal, which had refused to comment because it was a "personnel issue" (a policy many companies have to avoid lawsuits and such), decided that policy has a scandal-annoyance exception clause to it, and published an unsigned Page 3 story with an inflammatory headline that falsely accuses the CBC. (Thanks Josh) In it, the paper said McCann was fired because he misspelled a name, got a title wrong (his "university secretary" was actually a "university secretary" ... wait, what?), and didn't correctly list the premier's degrees. It also repeats that that McCann didn't "adequately portray" both sides of the story and "did not seem to fully grasp the seriousness" of his errors.
Bullshit.
Are we to believe that the Telegraph-Journal has such absolute integrity that minor factual errors lead to immediate dismissal? If it was, why haven't the errors been corrected on the original story online? Is balance in stories so important that a 149-word rebuttal to a 368-word argument is so outrageously biased it constitutes an error in judgment? (And just what part of the university's argument did McCann leave out of his story?) Shall we go through Telegraph-Journal stories with minor factual errors and where the word counts of both sides of an argument don't exactly match and demand those journalists be fired too?
This isn't just wrong, it's cartoonishly-evil wrong. The kind of stuff you see on TV and scream "that wouldn't actually happen in real life." It's so bad, in fact, that Premier Graham took pity on the kid and asked for his CV. Even Graham, who the newspaper considered the victim of McCann's "reckless" reporting, thought the punishment was too severe.
This is an abhorrent act and needs to be condemned in the strongest terms. Other than the minor factual errors, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that story.
A little context is necessary here: The Telegraph-Journal is owned by the Irving family, a very powerful family that owns almost all news media in New Brunswick (the exceptions are a Transcon-owned community paper, L'Acadie Nouvelle and sister francophone media, bureaus of Global Halifax and CTV Halifax, CBC/RadCan stations, private radio music stations and small community publications). Of note is the fact that outside of CBC New Brunswick, there hasn't been any original reporting of this story. Not only is this kind of monopoly unique in Canada, but unlike Canwest or CTVglobemedia, the Irvings also have non-media corporate interests, including big-money forestry and oil businesses. Their media holdings have been repeatedly accused of being soft on the Irving empire.
And now a young reporter has been dismissed because he made the premier look bad.
New Brunswick needs a media revolution. The Irvings' control over the province needs to be pried off with a crowbar.
CBC media ownership network map
The CBC has played with cool new technology from IBM to create a network map of media ownership in Canada as part of a special section dealing with the future of television.
While it does look cool, it's not particularly useful for understanding media ownership. For one, large corporations are represented by tiny dots, and the network looks a lot more incestuous than it should because of things like CPAC (which is financed by all Canadian cable and satellite providers) and other joint ownership situations.
That data behind it, however, are publicly available and can be used to create other visualizations. Making the size of the dots proportional to gross yearly revenue might make it more interesting.
24 Heures, Feb. 20, 2009, Page 20
From Friday's 24 Heures. Neither of these sound like news stories (even entertainment news stories), but when you remember that Quebecor owns 24 Heures and also owns TVA and Videotron, the advertorials make sense.
This, I can only assume, is what Quebecor wants to see in the Journal de Montréal.
After Canwest announced it was cutting jobs and CTV announced it was cutting jobs, Rogers is now announcing it is cutting jobs, about 100 of them, including staff at Maclean's, Sportsnet and CityTV.
You know what these three megacorporations have in common? They all thought they could get rich by acquiring other media companies.
Canwest was still paying off the debt it took on when it bought the Southam newspaper chain (which includes my employer, The Gazette) when it decided it needed more cable channels and acquired Alliance Atlantis. This gave them channels including Showcase.
Bell Canada responded to Canwest's consolidation by planning a megacorporation of its own. Bell acquired CTV and the Globe and Mail and eventually most of CHUM's assets. In exchange for the latter, BCE sold shares in the company to the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Torstar and the Thomson family, and BellGlobeMedia became CTVglobemedia.
A lot of Rogers's acquisitions have been in the form of CTV's sloppy seconds (oh wait, can I not use those words?). This includes Sportsnet, which CTV had to dump when it acquired TSN, and City TV ($375 million), which CTV had to dump when it acquired CHUM. It also acquired the Blue Jays, Fido, as well as specialty TV networks and radio stations within the past decade.
I'm no financial expert, and I don't have a very clear idea of the balance sheets of these three companies, but this is a really bad time to have debt, especially risky debt (say, holding a bunch of assets in an industry that might disappear entirely in 10 years). The economic downturn that the mortgage debt crisis precipitated is certainly affecting these companies and worrying their management, but I think the debt problem is more significant here than the advertising or subscription revenue problems.
Perhaps this might serve as a warning that consolidation isn't always the best way to go.
Or perhaps not.
UPDATE (Dec. 9): The New York Times, which I can only assume got the idea from this blog post, has a similar analysis of U.S. newspapers (though in that case, it was taking on debt to acquire other newspapers that got them into trouble).
The CRTC has given final approval for the "Journalistic Independence Code" proposed by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, a self-regulation body of Canada's private broadcasters.
The code is designed to replace CRTC rules about the independence of TV and newspaper newsrooms, which affect Canada's three largest private TV broadcasters:
Currently, the CRTC has rules that the television newsrooms and the newsrooms of affiliated newspapers cannot be mixed or merged. They must be completely independent of one another.
As if to underscore how bureaucratic everything is at the CRTC and CBSC, only three of the ten points in the code actually deal with rules for broadcasters. The rest deal with how the code itself should be administered.
The new rules are:
The CRTC's rules on cross-media ownership date back to 2001, when Quebecor Media bought Videotron, which then owned TVA. The transaction meant that Quebecor would own the largest private television network in Quebec, the largest newspaper (the Journal de Montréal) and the largest cable TV company. The CRTC decided that some journalistic rules would need to be in place to protect the diversity of voices in the newsroom.
Those rules were just as vague as the new ones proposed. Newsrooms and news management decisions must be separate.
Though they sound simple, the application of those rules is all about interpretation. For example, while newspapers and TV stations can't decide on the other's coverage, nothing prevents the parent company of both from dictating news. In fact, under the new rules, nothing discourages TV stations and newspapers from "co-ordinating newsgathering resources." This could mean, for example, having TV journalists file both TV packages and newspaper articles on stories that have video, and having newspaper journalists file texts to both newspaper and TV on stories that don't.
Journalist unions, who also protested the original Quebecor takeover, also spoke out during hearings about this code, saying it didn't do enough to really separate newsrooms. But it seems the CRTC thinks it's enough for them, and with the new code approved it is allowing networks to modify their licenses to remove the original rules (TVA was first off the bat)
We'll see over the coming years how many loopholes can be found to cut down costs and introduce "efficiencies" by reducing "duplication" in the two media.
UPDATE (Nov. 25): TVA's union has objected to the request to use the new rules, saying it threatens journalistic independence.
Oh, and Pauline Marois is flapping her gums again about creating a Quebec CRTC, further needlessly duplicating government institutions and burning through our tax dollars.
I've always admired Patrick Lagacé. The way he works hard, the way he does his homework before putting together insightful commentary (instead of knee-jerk reactions), his hair, and the fact he puts me on his blogroll.
But more importantly, I admire the impact he has. Like being able to piss off the entire management team at TVA.
Yesterday, La Presse published a really long letter signed by four executives at TVA which accuses Lagacé of not checking his facts in a recent column about the network burying embarrassing news about itself and friends of owner Quebecor.
As Lagacé mentions at the end of the column, TVA is suing Gesca and Lagacé personally for his previous remarks on this issue.
For the benefit of those who don't want to read the long letter, or whose French is rusty, here's TVA's main points:
Left unmentioned by both parties is that Lagacé used to be part of the Quebecor family when he worked for the Journal and blogged for Canoe. To say there's bad blood between the two might be considered an understatement.
But, of course, Quebecor doesn't control TVA. So this silly conspiracy theory has no basis, right?
This is why people don't trust the media anymore: La Presse says TVA isn't covering the Journal de Québec situation fairly, because both are owned by Quebecor.
There's this thing with the media that's always annoyed me:
La Presse isn't immune to this. Neither is The Gazette (the paper I work for), nor any other media outlet I can think of. And the larger the corporate empire, the worse the problem gets.
Why can't they be more honest about themselves? Giving a union boss criticizing a platform to criticize you makes you look bad, but denying that union boss a voice makes you look worse.
Remember: It's not the crime, it's the cover-up.
It's over. TQS has been bought by Remstar Corporation, or as Steve Proulx puts it, a bunch of garbage collectors. The union seems happy with the news.
There's something about the idea of big media companies owning student newspapers that really disturbs me. Probably because Canadian student newspapers tend to be run by volunteers, and exploiting volunteer labour for profit sounds, you know, wrong.
An aberration, or a growing trend?
Everyone's falling over themselves talking about the CRTC's new rules for media ownership, saying it's about time the regulatory commission did something.
The new rules basically come down to three limits:
Enough exceptions have been made already that nobody is affected right now. These include:
You can see the CRTC's press release and a public notice outlining the well-thought-out rationale for the decisions they made and those they decided against.
A second, related decision which isn't getting so much attention is a loosening of restrictions on news gathering. Previously, Quebecor was forced to separate news gathering divisions in its print and television properties. Reporters for TVA and the Journal de Montréal couldn't so much as talk to each other.
The problem with that restriction is two-fold. First of all, other media like CanWest and CTVglobemedia had lesser restrictions which only required them to manage the news outlets separately. Second, the Internet has forced the CRTC to realize that the medium is irrelevant. Newspaper reporters are shooting video, and TV reporters are writing text. The lines between media are blurring.
So the CRTC has decided to harmonize its rules to the looser CTV/Canwest system, which restricts news management but not news gathering directly. Management of one outlet cannot be involved with managing the other. The reporters themselves, however, are unaffected.
This will come as welcome news to Quebecor, who can now take frame grabs from TVA to fill Journal de Québec pages have more flexibility in its media management.
La Presse has a rumour (and CBC/CP rewrites that rumour) that Rogers is going to be buying the Montreal and Quebec City TQS stations, while Radio Nord (which already owns TQS stations in Outaouais and Abitibi) would buy stations in outlying regions.
Rogers won't comment and Radio Nord denies they're buying the stations.
I suppose it makes sense. Rogers owns what's left of Citytv, a network without a station in Canada's second-largest city. (I can just imagine the kind of outcry we'd have if they tried to convert TQS into an anglophone City station.) And if they are buying TQS out, chances are it would be for a significant discount.
TQS's creditor protection lasts until Thursday.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, at Le Devoir, Paul Cochon looks at the blame game, and wonders why Quebecor (which owns TVA) isn't being blamed in the same way Radio-Canada and the CRTC are.
UPDATE (Jan. 16): TQS gets its extension, and now has until Feb. 29 to decide what to do with itself. Meanwhile, Steve Proulx doesn't think La Presse's "scoop" is any more than idle speculation, and he thinks the CRTC is more to blame for TQS's troubles than Radio-Canada.
Transcontinental, which owns 61 community weeklies in Quebec (22 of them on the island of Montreal), has decided to reverse its position banning brown people from its papers.
At least, that's the best I could figure out from this editorial, which is running in all of Transcontinental's newspapers this week. In it, the general manager of Transcontinental Newspaper Group, Serge Lemieux, has finally clued in to the idea that covering community issues involves covering cultural communities as well. Apparently it took the Bouchard-Taylor Commission into reasonable accommodation for him to figure this out.
The article doesn't mention exactly what they're going to do, only that they'll be "celebrating cultural diversity." In fact, it goes into more detail about what they're not going to do, specifically that they won't be publishing articles in "all the world's languages" because they find it "undesirable" to do so. Instead, they'll publish articles "exclusively in French or English (as the case may be)" (French versions of this editorial don't mention articles in English).
We'll see what they have in mind.
Speaking of nonsensical Serge Lemieux columns, this one, which in the same breath blames the media for oversensationalizing the issue of reasonable accommodation and says the commission looking into the issue has been a good idea, is also appearing in Transcontinental papers this week.
Ironically, both these articles serve to remind us, in case we didn't know already, how little local journalism actually comes out of Transcontinental weeklies. A large amount of content is syndicated across many papers, their websites are identical and even most of their logos have the same design elements. All that's left are some fluff stories about aging grandmothers, rewritten press releases about local events, and a couple of local issue stories written by overworked, underpaid journalists.
But I guess "celebrating cultural communities" will fix that.
I was tuning into TVA this evening to catch the series finale of Vlog, when I stumbled on a documentary about the Journal de Montréal called Québec à la une.
The documentary is an interesting look at the history of the newspaper known for its attention-whoring headlines, spending its first episode concentrating on the October Crisis that brought it into the mainstream and launched its Sunday edition.
But I can't get over the fact that this is airing on TVA, which is owned by the same company that owns the Journal. In fact, Quebecor is run by Pierre-Karl Péladeau, and his father Pierre Péladeau is the guy getting a posthumous public blowjob in this rather one-sided documentary. (No mention of the Philadelphia Journal here.)
The appearance of the younger Péladeau on screen after the end of the documentary talking about how great Quebecor and the Journal de Montréal are sealed the deal. I'm still not sure if that was a paid advertisement or part of the documentary. Of course it doesn't matter, because Péladeau would have just been paying himself.
It's unfortunate, because a look at the big Montreal newspaper upheavals of the 1960s and 70s makes for interesting storytelling.
Québec à la une airs Tuesday, Dec. 4 and 11 at 9pm on TVA. The show is also available for free for Videotron Illico digital TV subscribers on its video-on-demand service (Channel 900, under "TV on demand" -> "TVA on demand").
This week in Quebec City, unions for various media outlets met to denounce the "Montrealization" of French-language media in Quebec. Much like the Torontoization of English media in Canada, it's all about big media companies reducing "redundancy" and centralizing similar services in one location.
The problem, of course, is that eventually the disconnect between this remotely-produced journalism and the local environment becomes apparent. We start seeing "regional" newscasts instead of local ones, to save money. A story about a province-wide issue is covered by a single journalist out of a big city and then copied to regional news outlets with no local spin added.
Newspapers are being split into two categories:
The problems of local journalism are having a backlash effect though: Former Minneapolis Star-Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer-Press employees are producing a local news website called MinnPost, which is filling the gap created when the big papers failed in their commitment to local news (via).
The site has just launched, so it's hard to say if it's financial model is going to work (it probably won't), but it's still good to see things like this. One thing I've learned writing this blog and covering local issues is that people are very interested in what's going on around them.
The problem is that local journalism will never make you rich. And big media is obsessed with making itself rich. But fortunately some journalists have a higher calling.
Despite cuts at their newspapers, CanWest has plenty of money to buy up media properties. Today it added six new community publications in the Windsor area, bringing its total up to 30.
CanWest, the largest newspaper publisher in Canada, called the acquisition "yet another example of CanWest's commitment to developing strong community voices across this country."
Also today, CRTC hearings into CanWest's bid to take over Alliance Atlantis are being held.
In an effort to fool reassure the public that their purchase of Standard Radio to create an even huger media megalopoly isn't a bad thing, Astral Media ran full-page newspaper ads this weekend:
The ad, which implies that Mix 96, CHOM FM and CJAD won't ... uhh ... change the logos they put on their baseball caps, I guess... includes this bit of hilarity:
... Please be assured of our commitment to continue providing the same great listening pleasure you have come to enjoy. Respect for our broadcast audience and the public in general is a core value of Astral Media...
I can only guess from this that Astral Media haven't actually listened to CHOM or Mix 96 for more than a few minutes.
(The fact that CHOM and Mix 96, two radio stations that should be competing directly, are controlled by the same owner, is an entirely different issue.)
Just when you thought concentration of media ownership wasn't such a bad thing, CTVglobemediaempire is asking the CRTC for the power to threaten to pull its cable channels off the air as a negotiating tactic with cable and satellite providers. This includes channels like Bravo!, the Comedy Network, CTV NewsNet, Discovery, MuchMusic (and the entire Much family), Space and TSN/RDS.
Aside from the outrageousness of punishing viewers as a negotiating tactic (as well as the legal ramifications of not giving us something we've paid for), most of these channels are licensed in a way that prohibits direct competition from other specialty channels.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If CTV wants to treat these channels like they're private property to do with as it pleases, then the CRTC should allow free competition from other services.
Le Devoir (somewhat snobbishly) reminds us why they're independent in criticizing the idea of "selling news" being more important than fair, objective reporting.
Frankly, I think major media outlets far underestimate the intelligence of their news consumers when they cross-promote between shows on a network or between different media that they own. When Global TV does a story on The Gazette that CBC and CTV don't touch, we know why. When TVA talks about a story in the Journal de Montréal that morning, we know why. When Radio-Canada reports on what was on Tout le monde en parle the night before, we know why.
These transparently corporate maneuvres overriding solid news judgment only serve to erode confidence in journalists' objectivity. I think that's worth a but more than some free advertising.
UPDATE (Oct. 23): TVA gets a slap on the wrist for doing a news story on Le Banquier. I'm actually quite surprised by this, considering how widespread such reporting is. But good for the Quebec press council for pointing it out.
Quebecor Media is getting a slap on the wrist from a committee setup to oversee the separation of its newsrooms. They found three instances where the Journal de Québec took photos from TVA, which violates the promise Quebecor made to the CRTC to keep their newsrooms completely separate.
I think the cat's out of the bag when it comes to merging newsrooms. Quebecor has already combined its online properties into the monster Canoe. They'll just keep finding ways to consolidate their assets without pissing off the CRTC too much.
Another thing that's interesting about this situation is that two of the three instances happened while the Journal de Québec was in a labour disruption (which is still going on, by the way). The union might have something to say about that.
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