Canadian Media Concentration        
Justin Dupuis – Masters Journalism Student
Critics worry new CTRC rules don't go far enough.

Media is a lucrative business in Canada. Today twelve empires control most of the Canadian media market, which is worth more than $10 billion. Most Canadian media empires were built through a series of mergers which have made Canada into the industrialized world’s champion in media concentration. Mergers continue today, constantly shrinking Canada’s media landscape. In 2007, Astral Media bought Standard, CanWest acquired Alliance Atlantis, Quebecor bought Osprey Media while CTV Globemedia and Rogers now share CHUM.

Concerns over media ownership and concentration have been the source of heated debate in Canada. Critics worry that when the control of information is held by a handful of corporations, democracy and freedom of speech are compromised

Last January the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) released a new set of  guidelines to renew its approach to ownership consolidation and Canadian media diversity. It decided to cap television ownership at 45% of the total national television audience share, prohibit one person from controlling all media in any given market, and prohibit cross media ownership, which means one person cannot own a TV station in a market if he or she already owns a newspaper in the same market.  Most critics say these new guidelines fall short of the measures needed to solve media concentration problems in Canada.

Marie-Linda Lord, a professor in the Information and Communications Program at the University of Moncton also criticizes the CRTC policy. “The regulatory body claims their new guidelines will counter concentration in television by capping one owner's share of the TV audience at 45% , but since CTV Globemedia already owns 37% of the audience share,  they actually make room for more concentration,” she said.

CRTC spokesperson Denis Carmel justified the 45% cap, pointing out that similar ownership limits exists in other industries such as Banking. “The CRTC doesn't believe that diversity is threatened until concentration exceeds 45%,” he said.

In print media, ownership is also heavily concentrated by a small number of corporations.
Quebecor, the second largest commercial printer in the world, recently acquired Osprey Media, and now controls Sun Media, nine daily newspapers in Quebec, in addition to twenty dailies in Ontario. A recent study by Marc-François Bernier, assistant professor of Communications at the University of Ottawa, found that the majority of journalists working for Quebecor feel their employer negatively affects news quality and diversity of opinion. The journalists expressed concerns about Quebecor promoting a corporate agenda in its news reports. Quebecor declined to comment on the study.
 
Uncertainty about media concentration dates back to the 1960s, when public concern over newspaper mergers led the Senate to commission the Davey Report. Similarly in 1981 the government created the Kent Report. Both investigations found that media mergers had a negative impact on news quality, and the committees put forth recommendations to limit the process.

Another wave of mergers in the 1990s, most notably by Conrad Black’s Hollinger International, renewed  worries of  a loss of news quality and objectivity. In 2006, the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications also looked into the issue. Despite the numerous public inquiries, few recommendations were put into legislation. Today the Canadian media landscape is controlled by a handful of media empires.

Lord thinks the government has missed opportunities to solve problems with concentration. The Kent Report recommended that no company own more than 5% of national newspaper circulation. Today, Canwest Global’s dailies have a national circulation of 34%.

Although they present some viable solutions, Lord says, the CRTC guidelines have an important flaw: quotas are based on national market shares, ignoring regional concentration. She said that while New Brunswick is faced with “the worst concentration in the entire country.” Brunswick News, owned by the Irving family, controls 85% of the province’s daily printed press. “Because Brunswick News' national circulation is only 3%, it slips through the nets of the national quota system,” said Lord. Many other media empires, such as Quebecor and Shaw, have national market shares that don’t reflect their regional shares. The CRTC chose not to adopt a regional based quota system because it “would be hard to put into practice,” explained Carmel.

While the CRTC and public officials try to find ways to slow concentration without slowing big business, Lord thinks the problem might lie in the industry itself. “If media is about information, newspapers shouldn’t be about making money”.-R