Canada's newspapers are being plundered by monopoly capitalism
CBC
This opinion piece is by Patricia W. Elliott, a distinguished professor of investigative and community journalism at First Nations University of Canada.
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In the morning dark, before coffee is made and cats are stirring, you'll find me awkwardly leaning out my front door, one arm reaching for the mailbox and the comforting touch of newsprint.
In truth, I've already spent at least an hour awake in bed, phone-scrolling through a cacophony of news stories from around the globe, along with their trails of deranged comments. Algorithms have tagged a few of my interests, meaning I'll know what happened in Southeast Asia overnight along with a thin smattering of Ukraine news, but precious little about my hometown.
Those hometown stories are now spread out on my kitchen table: births, deaths, celebrations, laneway closures, tax arrears notices, city hall shenanigans, the latest provincial gossip, and the triumphs and tragedies of ordinary citizens, finished off with a brain-sharpening crossword.
Tweets and broadcast spot news are fleshed out in print with more voices, more history. A human editor has arranged stories front to back not in order of my personal tastes, but in order of public significance, arrived at through a combination of experience, reader feedback and heated newsroom discussions.
Sometimes I read the online edition or follow the paper on social media. The physical form matters not. What matters is its purpose — providing accurate information to help an informed citizenry make decisions, hold power to account, know each other and ensure the wellbeing of their city.
Frustratingly, this purpose is being steadily dismantled by the paper's own masters.
Last week's announcement of Postmedia staff cuts and property fire-sales is but the latest outrage in a scenario foretold by decades of federal commission testimonials: if you allow our newspapers to fall into the hands of a few debt-ridden would-be tycoons fronting for foreign hedge funds, the failures will be catastrophic.
Canada's Competition Bureau has miserably failed to avoid this path, greenlighting monopolistic newspaper purchases against all public interest and common sense. Meanwhile, federal officials tasked with guarding Canadian ownership stood by as the fate of more than 100 Canadian newsrooms was handed off to foreign shareholders.
The true owner of my local newspaper is Chatham Asset Management, a hedge fund in New Jersey.
The second-largest shareholder, Allianz Global Investment, has offices from Shanghai to Frankfurt. Its main U.S. fund was shut down over securities fraud and ordered to pay back billions to bilked investors.
The third-largest investor, Leon G. Cooperman, survived insider trading allegations by taking the Fifth Amendment in court and handing a $5-million settlement to the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission.
I wonder how much of my local paper's revenues helps pay for such peccadillos.
