Off the mark

The Tyee's Donald Gutstein points out that the much-discussed Senate report from last week which centred on the CBC was supposed to have a different focus entirely:

In February 2005, the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications visited Vancouver as part of its cross-country study of the Canadian news media. It heard nearly a dozen presentations bemoaning the fact that one company -- CanWest Global Communications -- has a near stranglehold on Vancouver news media. And it heard nearly a dozen complaints that this unprecedented concentration limits the diversity of sources and opinions available to Vancouver news consumers. "Frighteningly powerful" and "debilitating for voices" were how two presenters framed the situation...

The committee wrote that the "core" of its work concerns the "influence on news and information of media ownership in Canada." The senators began looking at the industry after CanWest acquired most of Canada's major dailies and Bell Globemedia took control of the CTV television network and the Globe and Mail.

But the study's release was framed around the alleged failings of Canada's public broadcaster.

The senators did a classic bait-and-switch ploy: say you're going to do one thing and then do something else to take attention away from your original goal. And in this case, their original goal was to examine media concentration...

Volume Two of the report contains 135 pages of testimony from witnesses and additional studies prepared by the committee. About 10 pages are devoted to CanWest's hold on the Vancouver market. Yet not one word of this background made it into Volume One, which contains the report's essential analysis and recommendations. CanWest gets off scot-free.

Instead, the report talks about future mergers and take-overs. It recommends a review of a proposed merger if one company reaches 35 per cent of a particular audience. There are precedents for this figure. It is a limit used by Canada's Competition Bureau in triggering a review of a merger or acquisition. It is also a cap imposed by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

Canadian Press estimates CanWest's control of the Vancouver market at 70 percent, twice the proposed limit. But the Senate Committee suggests no remedy for the long-suffering Vancouver audience. It merely documents the history of how this sad state of affairs came to pass.

I'll grant that the CBC issues were important ones as well, and certainly worth the time spent commenting on them by the committe and others. But tinkering with the funding structure or programming goals of Canada's public broadcaster is bound to have far less impact on the country's media scene than the continuing expansion of an already-powerful media empire which already controls huge swaths of the market, and which is increasingly willing to avoid any semblance of fair coverage.

While the Senate committee was far too willing to get sidetracked from its core mandate, it's not too late to start discussion of what needs to be done to ensure some semblance of media diversity. But as Gutstein points out, that could easily change...and judging from the lack of any major media attention to the committee's real purpose, the point of no return may not be too far away.