Kings of Convergence: The Fight for Control of Canada's Media - Hardcover

Gordon Pitts is a business reporter at The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business. His bestselling Storming the Fortress and In the Blood were finalists for National Business Book Awards. Gordon Pitts lives with his wife and two daughters in Toronto.
From the Hardcover edition.

Introduction

The Gang of Five

Izzy asper is under fire, and he isn’t backing down an inch. Standing on the stage in a conference room at Vancouver’s Bayshore Hotel, the portly, combative chairman of CanWest Global Communications is confronting allegations that he is trampling on the independence of his local newspapers, which constitute by far the largest chain in Canada. The 2002 annual general meeting of CanWest, one of Canada’s major communications companies, is unusual for the crush of non-financial journalists in attendance. On this late January day, the mass of reporters are not here to learn about CanWest’s profit outlook -- they want to hear what Izzy Asper has to say about freedom of the press–notably, freedom from its own proprietors. As new arrivals on the newspaper scene, Izzy and his family -- including his sons David and Leonard, who is CanWest’s president -- have suddenly become hot copy for their apparent willingness to flout Canadian journalistic tradition. According to their critics, the Winnipeg-based Aspers are centralizing editorial opinion and stifling diversity in their major newspapers. But in Izzy’s view, it is a matter of rights -- the right of the newspaper owner to express his own views, and to run his own newsrooms. “No owner would back off from what we are trying to do -- there is nothing to back off from,” Izzy snaps, as he answers questions from a union official in the audience. In this battle of words, the Aspers have managed to alienate much of Canada’s journalistic community, including a large number of their own employees.

The controversy flared up soon after the Aspers -- until then, known mainly for their Global TV network -- gained control of the Southam newspaper chain in a spectacular $3.2 billion deal announced in the summer of 2000. The properties they bought from newspaper baron Conrad Black included fourteen major daily newspapers, a number of Internet sites, and 50 percent of Black’s beloved National Post -- which, in a year, they would own entirely. The Aspers, reputed supporters of the Liberal Party, immediately stirred up controversy when David, in an open letter, criticized the press’s handling of conflict of interest allegations against Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. The temperature rose in late 2001, when Southam began issuing centrally produced editorials from Winnipeg, as many as three a week, to run in its papers. It was a radical move in an industry where local papers in a chain were usually left free to chart their own editorial policies. Journalists at the Asper-owned Montreal Gazette withdrew bylines, and many signed a petition demanding the policy be revoked. Journalists’ associations and academics decried CanWest’s micromanaging of the local editorial pages, arguing that this practice struck at the heart of a regional paper’s role.

The dispute took on a new complexion when Stephen Kimber, the head of journalism at University of King’s College in Halifax, announced that he was resigning as a columnist with the Southam-owned Halifax Daily News because, in his view, CanWest was “slicing and dicing” his work and that of other columnists. In Kimber’s final column, which was killed by The Daily News, he wrote that “the Aspers support the federal Liberal party. They’re pro-Israel. They think rich people like themselves deserve tax breaks. They support privatizing health care delivery. And they believe their newspapers, from Victoria to St. John’s, should agree with them.” The spiking of the Kimber column raised the concern that the Aspers were not just imposing their own editorials, but restricting the diversity of views in their newspapers. There were more reports of columns killed, stories allegedly changed to fit the CanWest agenda, and journalists rising in protest against what they deemed to be corporate censorship and demanding a government inquiry into media concentration.

Izzy, of course, was not the first Canadian newspaper owner with strong views and a compelling need to express them. After all, he had bought his Southam newspapers from Conrad Black, a man whose mission was to bring a conservative ideological perspective to Canadian political life. But before the Aspers, there had never been owners who enjoyed such broad access to Canada’s mainstream media -- through the ownership of most major newspapers (commanding nearly 35 percent of the country’s daily newspaper circulation), its second-largest private television network, and Canada.com, a significant Internet news source. Thirty years ago, when the Davey Commission studied the concentration of mass media, the two largest chains -- FP and Southam -- together totalled about the same percentage of daily newspaper circulation -- but they had no significant holdings in other media.

In Izzy’s opinion, the Aspers were not imposing their views, they were encouraging dissent by offering an alternative viewpoint to the Eastern Canadian soft-left consensus. In his view, he and his family were the outsiders, even though they have emerged as the most powerful force in the Canadian media, even though they are insiders with the party in power in Ottawa. The Aspers’ paradox -- their sense of power and powerlessness -- became the most fascinating, and frustrating, issue in Canadian journalism. The debate would spark broader questions: Have the media, as Izzy contends, become fragmented to the extent that CanWest’s “dominance” is just a myth propagated by his enemies? Or would a free and independent press be one of the casualties of the tidal wave of convergence and consolidation sweeping the communications industry?

Indeed, the firestorm over the Aspers’ growing clout in Canadian media was just a sideshow to the powerful global changes in the first two years of the twenty-first century. The seminal event was the blockbuster US$165 billion merger of AOL and Time Warner, announced in January 2000. The merging parties were two of the United States’ best-known companies. America Online -- or AOL, as it had become known -- was a corporate comet that had blazed out of nowhere to grab a big chunk of the new Internet economy. The other player, Time Warner, had parts that could be traced to the beginning of the century, the company of Time magazine legendary co-founder Henry Luce and Daffy Duck.
From the Hardcover edition.