Where is our media going?Antonia Zerbisias
Yesterday's appointment of Konrad von Finckenstein, former head of the federal competition watchdog, to chair the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) was pure synchronicity.
That's because, as the news came out, C. Edwin Baker, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the foremost authorities on how media concentration hurts democracy, was delivering the Grafstein Annual Lecture at the University of Toronto.
His talk? Media Ownership and Media Markets: A Democratic and Economic Evaluation.
A dry title for a crucial subject.
My translation? Don't be fooled by all those TV channels and all those Internet sites and all those blogs and all those so-called choices. There are not, as the ideologues who think the airwaves should be unregulated claim, thousands of flowers blooming out there.
"You have to ask, who owns those flowers," said Baker in an interview. "If the audiences are concentrated, it doesn't matter."
In fact, he emphasized, online audiences are more concentrated than offline audiences, with the top few blogs commanding the major share of hits and the Top 10 news sites outpacing all others.
So fans of deregulation who believe that it's safe to let the barriers come down and let the market run free have it wrong. The question is, where does Finckenstein stand?
"The current regulatory model is not sustainable in the evolving communications environment," he told a Commons committee while head of the Competition Bureau. "The bureau expects that, within the next five to 10 years, the system will experience substantial pressure as the result of potential North Americanization of the television rights market, the advent of online broadband technologies delivering non-Canadian programming into Canada on an unregulated basis, the increasing popularity of new media technologies and services, and the ongoing fragmentation and possible reduction of broadcasting viewership."
But Finckenstein's record on media mergers doesn't necessarily bode well for those looking forward to the takeover of CHUM by CTVglobemedia, and the deal between Canwest Global, Alliance Atlantis and New York investment bank Goldman Sachs.
A few years ago, for example, the bureau blocked Astral Media's $225 million bid to buy 17 radio stations from Telemedia – even though the CRTC approved it – because it would have allowed Astral to dominate Quebec's radio advertising market.
That said, much has changed since then. The way things are going, we could soon be looking at an English-Canadian media landscape made up of CTVglobemediaCHUMCanwestGlobalAllianceAtlantisTorstar and the shell of CBC.
Think I'm kidding? On Tuesday, this paper reported that Bay Street was rubbing its money-grubbing hands together over the prospect of a marriage between Rogers and Shaw.
"The key value, which I think people recognize, is that democracy means that power should be distributed among the population broadly rather than concentrated," says Baker. "Concentrated media is just a form of concentrated power in the public sphere – and that should be objectionable."
Baker rattles off all the benefits of widely held media: "If you have more watchdogs, you're more likely to catch wrongdoing. That's a democratic gain.
"If you have more media entities, it would be more difficult to corrupt them or turn them over to your particular interests. There would be too many to get to follow your line.
"If you have more media, it reduces conflicts of interests. One can get over a media entity by exercising power over a portion of it," he says, citing examples of how a newspaper might be held hostage to advertisers because of other corporate interests.
Most important, says Baker, is to avoid what he has dubbed "The Berlusconi Effect," the situation in Italy where one man, Silvio Berlusconi, runs all the media and the government.
"The structure of the industry is crucial and the structure is a matter of government policy," Baker insists. "Trying to prevent concentration is just one of many things. You also need journalists committed to having sensible government policy.
"If you want to prevent the downward spiral of public knowledge, you need to have people committed towards changing the structures of the media and that requires political action.
"What you need is a powerful public movement for reform."
Trouble is, Canadians, ill-served by too many of their hometown papers and their concentrated media, aren't even being told about the situation.
And few of them recognize the need for a broadcast regulator.
But who would when you have one that rubber stamps every media merger deal that crosses its desk?
Over to you Mr. von Finckenstein.
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