Corporate Clampdown

Media ownership and editorial interference has been a hot topic in Canada this year, and for good reason. Yet the controversy surrounding CanWest Global Inc. has focused too much on the chain’s decision to supply its major papers with editorials written at headquarters. The idea is certainly questionable, but it’s nothing next to the clampdown on columnists who don’t share the owners’ views.

Winnipeg-based CanWest Global owns 17 daily newspapers. They include one of two national dailies (the National Post), one of two dailies in the national capital (the Ottawa Citizen) and newspapers in most of Canada’s major cities. The company also owns one of Canada’s two private television networks.

Late in 2001, CanWest Global management announced plans to supply a corporate editorial, written at company headquarters in Winnipeg, to all daily newspapers in the chain once a week. Newspapers must run these editorials, and locally written editorials may not contradict positions established in the national ones.

Originally CanWest said the editorials might run as often as three times a week. Instead, almost none have run since the public outcry over CanWest’s firing of Ottawa Citizen Publisher Russell Mills in June.¹

But don’t open the champagne yet. CanWest Global maintains its national editorials only exercise a recognized right of newspaper proprietors by determining the editorial voice of its papers. The company argues it should have a national voice on issues of national and international concern, rather than letting each paper take its own view. CanWest also claims local editorial writers are free to go their own way as long as they do not contradict the centrally written editorials, that columnists and other writers of signed opinion pieces are encouraged to present their own views, and that news coverage will be objective.

So the company seems to acknowledge the ethical principle that while unsigned editorials supposedly reflect the view of the newspaper — which arguably could mean the editors, the owners or some combination of the two — news stories are presented as factual reports, columns as the opinion of the columnist. The evidence, however, indicates columns and news are being influenced by head office.

Item: Lawrence Martin, one of Canada’s top journalists and a critic of the ruling Liberal Party, of which CanWest Global Chairman Israel Asper is an active supporter (and a personal friend of the Prime Minister), was removed as a columnist for the CanWest papers in July, 2001. CanWest said the decision not to renew his contract was a cost-cutting measure. ²

Item: In November, 2001, television critic Peggy Curran wrote a column for CanWest’s Montreal Gazette about a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. documentary that reported on Israeli troops shooting Palestinian journalists. The Aspers are staunch supporters of the Israeli government. Curran was told to rewrite the column, and initially asked to label the documentary as one-sided. She reached a compromise with her editors and described it as a “point-of-view documentary.”³

Item: Editors at the CanWest-owned Regina Leader-Post rewrote a news report on a speech by Haroon Siddiqui, editorial page emeritus of the Toronto Star, in which Siddiqui criticized the CanWest corporate editorial policy. The published report started off: “A Toronto Star columnist says it's OK for CanWest Global to publish its owners’ views, as long as the company is prepared to give equal play to opposing opinions.” ⁴

Item: In a move that finally appears to have got the public’s attention, CanWest Global in June fired Russell Mills, publisher of the Ottawa Citizen, after the capital-city newspaper ran an editorial calling on Prime Minister Jean Chretien to resign (a sentiment expressed in a number of other Canadian newspapers at about the same time). CanWest first said straight out that Mills had been fired for failing to submit the editorial to head office for approval, then later added the accusation that Citizen coverage of the government under Mills had been one-sided.⁵ Mills is suing CanWest for libel over that accusation.

There are more such incidents, several involving columnists who criticized the corporate editorials plan. CanWest management shrugs them off, claiming columns were spiked because of factual errors, dismissals had nothing to do with columnists’ viewpoints and, most outrageously, that critics of the rewritten story on Siddiqui’s speech don’t know the difference between censorship and editing. Were there factual errors in some suppressed columns and altered reports? It’s not clear there were, but it’s possible. Journalists make mistakes. Good newspapers try to catch those mistakes, but never with total success. One way of preventing mistakes that newspapers usually avoid, though, is allowing people or institutions they write about to approve or alter their reports before publication. The reasons should be obvious: “Mr. Bradlee, this story about my people breaking into the Watergate hotel is completely inaccurate and you shouldn’t publish it.” “Oh, well then of course we won’t. Thank you very much for your help, Mr. Nixon.” Yet that’s exactly what happened when CanWest management suppressed commentary on the corporate editorials controversy.

Ultimately, though, the fracas over corporate editorials is less important than the other forms of interference. The uproar has brought calls for a government inquiry into media ownership. Legislation against concentrated ownership would limit the damage that any individual proprietor could do, but might also open the door to government interference in newsrooms. And forcing chains to divest newspapers won’t help if there are no buyers. Yet the status quo is not working well in Canada right now, and the issue is not one of internal dissent about who writes the editorials — it’s an issue of major media outlets’ objectivity on the very issues where media objectivity is most important: national politics and international affairs.