Quebecor's myth-fighting www.lheurejuste.ca

Quebecor, tired of the “misinformation” being put out by the union representing locked-out Journal de Montréal workers, has responded with a website of its own at www.lheurejuste.ca. It features management responses to union talking points, though nothing we haven’t heard in the media and in articles in the Journal over the past week.

It also has PDF copies of those two-page spreads from the employer repeatedly re-explaining its position (one of the links is broken – the rest are giant images rather than properly-created PDFs). And you can download copies of ads saying how great Quebecor Media is at creating jobs, complete with stock photos of happy employees.

It’s kind of hard for Quebecor to play the victim here since they started the lockout without even making a contract offer. Their reverse-talking points are also less than convincing (they won’t say how much the Journal makes, though they admit that it’s still profitable).

Tout le monde en écrit

Last night was the big night with Richard Martineau and union boss Raynald Leblanc on Tout le monde en parle. There are plenty of summaries, analyses and just plain ranting of what happened:

• Rue Frontenac (naturally)
• Raymond Viger
• Hugo Dumas (La Presse)
  
• Martin Croteau (La Presse)
• Showbizz
• Cécile Gladel
• Cécile Gladel again
• Patrick Dion
• misspotin
• Le Journal Logique
• Temps et fiction
• Chroniques de Gradlon
• Dave Lévesque (Musique Plus)
• MafiaRose
• The best rundown comes from TV critic Richard Therrien, who criticizes Martineau for siding with the Journal against the union and for saying that the Journal and TVA have editorial freedom to criticize each other.
• The most unintentionally funny one comes from Pour un monde à droite, a blog with pictures of Stephen Harper and Conservative Party logos all over the place. Naturally, they see the show as a huge win for Richard Martineau against the evil unions and Radio-Canada. It’s one of the few blog posts defending Martineau’s appearance on the show.
• Matt Ouellett-Boucher’s blog is also worth reading. He writes a long piece about how Richard Martineau changed when he moved from Voir to the Journal, and how he’s become insufferable since.

Sadly, Radio-Canada still doesn’t put TLMEP online, so if you were busy watching the Super Bowl, you’re out of luck.

UPDATE: Therrien points out that TVA’s Le Banquier (which had Quebecor boss Pierre-Karl Péladeau on board in what I can only assume is a funny coincidence) had better ratings than TLMEP.

And in other news…

• The union is collecting evidence of scabbing at the Journal, according to the one-sentence lead of this paywall-blocked Le Devoir piece.
• Premier Jean Charest says his government shouldn’t encourage the Journal and discourages his ministers from giving interviews, but he says they won’t kick the paper’s journalists out of press conferences.
• The Association des journalistes indépendants du Québec says articles from Quebecor-owned alt weekly ICI have found their way into the Journal, thanks to a new we-take-all-your-rights contract that ICI forced its contributors to sign and disgusted at least one columnist enough for him to leave.
• La Presse says Gilles Proulx will be the next freelance columnist to leave the Journal, following in the footsteps of Bernard Landry, Geneviève Lefebvre and others.
• Patrick Lagacé speaks of the Journal this morning, pointing out that many of the newly-hired managers look more like journalists than managers (I noticed that too), and that layout being done in Toronto is what’s keeping the Journal publishing – if they had to do that as well, their jobs would become a lot more difficult.
• Blogger Ken Monteith writes an amusing anecdote (complete with Google-bombing links) about how he’s been trying to stop the Journal (a paper he never subscribed to) from delivering to his home. (Lagacé also says he got a Journal this morning, despite not being subscribed for a while.)
• Today is Buy a Newspaper Day, which won’t help the workers at the Journal much.