Media spat: profit vs. free speech
In the past three months, three journalists in Canada have resigned after critical columns were spiked.
Last month, Stephen Kimber, columnist for the Halifax Daily News in eastern Canada, wrote an opinion piece criticizing his newspaper's owner, CanWest Global Communications Corp. Editors at the local paper spiked the column. Kimber, who'd written for the paper for the past 15 years, resigned. Two colleagues - writing about the aftermath - had critical columns pulled and resigned.
At about the same time, in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, Doug Cuthand, an aboriginal columnist, wrote an opinion piece comparing the treatment of Native Canadians and Palestinians for another CanWest-owned paper - knowing his company supports Israel. The piece was killed.
Over the past three months, Canada's largest newspaper owner has been at the eye of a nationwide controversy, accused of suppressing diverse opinion in its papers. Moreover, for the first time among big newspaper owners in North America, CanWest has introduced weekly editorials that all its newspapers, from coast to coast, are required to run.
There's nothing new about newspaper proprietors airing their views through their papers. What sets the CanWest example apart is just how much the Winnipeg, Manitoba-based company dominates the Canadian market, critics say.
CanWest owns 14 big-city dailies, one national newspaper, and 126 other dailies and weeklies - as well as a television network, radio stations, and Canada's third-most popular Website. CanWest also has television and radio interests in Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
With newspaper circulation reaching up to half of Canadians, CanWest has the second-highest concentration of papers in the Western world, after Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. chain in Australia, according to John Miller, head of the newspaper journalism program at Ryerson University in Toronto.
CanWest's actions in recent months have been "unprecedented and dangerous,' " Mr. Miller says. "With the freedom of the press comes the responsibility to reflect diverse opinion, and CanWest is stomping all over that.''
Concern about the national editorials has spilled over the border. Fred Fiske, past president of the US National Conference of Editorial Writers wrote a letter to CanWest in December urging it to rethink its decision.
"What concerns me most is this limits the abilities of local editorial writers to comment on national and international issues that are covered from this central editorial board,'' says Mr. Fiske in an interview. "This won' t please readers, and it's bad for business - readers want to think their newspaper is produced locally.''
CanWest was known as a television company. But that changed last summer when CanWest bought the National Post and 135 other dailies for C$3.5 billion (US$2.2 billion), the biggest media transaction in Canadian history.
CanWest, headed by the Asper family, says it introduced the editorials to encourage national debate. So far, the topics have ranged from property rights to privatizing health care and fighting the war on terrorism.
"People can huff and puff but look, it's only two months old, and we're still developing it,'' says Murdoch Davis, editor-in-chief of CanWest's Southam News, who oversees the national editorials. "Let's give it a chance to see if it can become something that's interesting for readers. What we want to do is have a discourse.''
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