By: John Miller
Joseph Pulitzer once made an important distinction about newspaper people. A journalist, he said, was "on the lookout bridge of the ship of state." He was there to watch over the welfare of the people who trust him, not to fret over the profits of his owners.
Pulitzer believed there was a fundamental difference between "real journalists" and men who do a kind of newspaper work that requires neither culture nor conviction, but merely business training.
Those men, the people in the counting rooms, were in the "newspaper business." Journalists were not. They had a higher calling.
Today, as the imperative for profit has fuelled the corporatization of Canada's newspaper industry, Pulitzer's walls have come tumbling down. Publishers and editors now speak of "shareholder value" and "return on investment" to such a degree that no one who owns the press can articulate this higher calling. The losers are journalism, good citizenship and even democracy itself.
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Despite a massive give-away campaign by the National Post, the readership of all newspapers in Toronto actually declined by 2.5 per cent since last fall. Readers clearly don't like what the corporate press is feeding them. |
According to U.S. media critic Todd Gitlin, courageous journalism is losing out to right-wing populism, produced by what he calls the "fun-loving demagogues" like Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch who control the "entertainment-industrial complex." His idea is that, in the overarching quest for more eyeballs, these owners feed us diversions, gossip, celebrity news and infotainment.
Black is attempting to lock up the press in Canada, with control of all the daily newspapers in three provinces and a substantial share of the readership in Ottawa and eight of the 10 provincial capitals.
Why should we care about this? I would answer this by posing three questions back:
1. In the battle for freedom of the press, how free are its footsoldiers?
As the strike by journalists at the Black-owned Calgary Herald nears its fifth month, nearly 100 journalists are without work, and - with Black owning so much else - they have little prospect of working in their field again. The owner's public statements suggest that the strike won't be settled without capitulation or decertification of the fledgling union.
And his publisher, Dan Gaynor (a man who graduated from pruning twigs in St. Catharines to "amputating gangrenous limbs" in Calgary), says Calgary is a sign of what's in store for Hollinger's other 57 newspapers. Gaynor is the personification of who or what tends to get ahead in the Black empire.
Despite Black's claim that the Calgary strikers can give up and return to work, it's just Blackspeak. Anyone who wishes to cross the picket line now is questioned at length about his or her activities during the strike, confronted with evidence gathered by videotape, and strongly urged to make amends to the managers who loyally stayed in to put out the paper.
This misplaced paternalism was evident recently at the Regina Leader-Post (another Black paper) where a clock fell off the wall in the pressroom and revealed a surveillance camera.
2. Has press ownership become far too concentrated?
Thomson's decision to put five of its six remaining newspapers up for sale raises the very real possibility that one or two will be unable to find buyers. Why? Black is keenly aware that he owns so much that a bid to purchase the Winnipeg Free Press might raise political problems. The next biggest owner of Canadian newspapers, Quebecor, already owns the rival Winnipeg Sun. And a leap to Manitoba seems a leap too far for the only other corporate giant, Toronto-based Torstar.
Will it serve good journalism to have these papers languish under an owner who has lost interest?
3. Are the seduced losing respect for their seducers?
The aforementioned diet of celebrity fluff infotainment is designed to attract readers, but every indication is that it is turning them off. How else to account for the devastating readership figures released in Toronto recently? They showed that the percentage of Torontonians who had read any newspaper had declined by 2.5 per cent since last fall. That's on top of a 5 per cent overall decline the year before.
To put that in its shocking perspective, Conrad Black has launched his National Post, he has engaged in a massive free giveaway campaign with his main competitors to force newspapers into hands in Canada's most competitive newspaper market, yet overall readership has declined substantially over the past two years.
Why?
Readers are saying they don't like what is being served up for them in the corporate press. The National Post, Conrad's pulpit, is lively and intelligent in its news columns, but mean-spirited and reactionary in its opinion pages. No self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in a Post editorial.
The familiar Black political agenda is being trumpeted from its pages - unite the alternative; cut back on immigration; stem the non-existent brain drain; and cut taxes.
The only optimistic news is that Canadians appear to be more fair-minded and compassionate than Conrad Black gives them credit for.
John Miller is director of newspaper journalism at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto, and author of "Yesterday's News: Why Canada's Daily Newspapers Are Failing Us." (Fernwood 1998).
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