Canada's Newspapers Were In The Tank For Harper, Media Analysis Finds

[mentalfloss]

Canada's Newspapers Were In The Tank For Harper, Media Analysis Finds

Canadian newspapers overwhelmingly supported Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in the past two elections, much more so than they would have if they had reflected public opinion, a new study finds.

The report from the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project found that 95 per cent of newspaper endorsements in the 2011 election went to Harper. That’s every daily in Canada that endorsed a party, except for the Toronto Star, which endorsed the NDP that year.

It was “roughly three times [Harper’s] standing in opinion polls at the time,” Carleton University Prof. Dwayne Winseck wrote in the report.

In the 2015 election, things weren’t quite as monolithic, but 71 per cent of all newspapers endorsements still went to Harper. Seventeen of 23 newspapers that endorsed a candidate endorsed the Tories, the study found.

Postmedia came in for criticism after running full-page, front-page negative ads for the Tories across its newspapers the weekend before the Oct. 19 election.

The analysis came in the context of a new report aiming to assess whether concentration of media ownership in Canada has increased over the past three decades.

The report says it has. It notes that the arrival of new media hasn’t lessened media concentration in Canada. In fact, the new digital media platforms are more concentrated than the old, the study says, pointing to the dominance of brands like Facebook, Google and Netflix in their respective fields.

But the report gives Canada’s uniform newspaper endorsements as an example that control of traditional media remains a concern to this day.

“Whilst we must adjust our analysis to new realities, long-standing concerns also remain alive,” the report said.

The issue of newspaper endorsements was particularly contentious in the most recent election. Perhaps most controversially, Postmedia and Sun Media newspapers (now part of the same company) ran full-page, front-page ads for the Conservatives the weekend before the election.

That led to calls for a boycott of Postmedia by some people on social media who argued the newspaper chain had overstepped ethical bounds with the ads.

Canada's Newspapers Were In The Tank For Harper, Media Analysis Finds

 

[tay]

The CPC reached the grand conclusion that their demise came down to adopting the wrong tone — an odd description for ten years of lying, cheating and delivering bad policy. There was their stone-age approach to the environment, the ruinous TPP trade deal, the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, and so much more. I hate to say it, but if anything revives the Conservatives, it won’t be Big Hair or fake civility.

The New Democrats are asking themselves how they could have fumbled the ball on the opponent’s five yard-line. Tom Mulcair was within a whisker of making history — becoming the first NDP prime minister of Canada. He already had the keys to Stornaway, a substantial lead in the polls in Quebec, and pots of money. He also had a lot of quality candidates, like celebrated author and journalist Linda McQuaig.

Then Mulcair somehow reinvented himself as the guy to the right of Justin Trudeau — avuncular Tom, the balancer of budgets, rather than fiery Tom, who brilliantly scorched the former government so many times in question period. The price for that metamorphosis was third-party status and a shadow cabinet where the shadows cast by its members aren’t quite as long. No Dewar, no Stoffer, no Leslie. Sooner or later, that kind of carnage on your front bench and the collapse of a party’s vote usually costs the leader his job.

But there’s another group with an even greater need to reinvent itself in the wake of the recent election — the country’s mainstream media.

The biggest print players in the country simply disgraced themselves.

But nobody earned that disgrace better than the Postmedia brass.

The company’s CEO, Paul Godfrey, violated the core principle on which journalism is built: free speech. His offenses were multiple.

The National Post spiked a piece from columnist and then-editorial page editor Andrew Coyne, presumably for writing something that didn’t conform to the Post’s program.

Coyne was smothered for having the wrong opinion. I have news for Mr. Godfrey: There is no such thing as the wrong opinion — not in a free society and not in a good newspaper.

In my opinion, Godfrey had a Pravda moment. While it’s customary for the owner of a newspaper to decide the issue of editorial endorsements at election time (the so-called proprietor’s prerogative), Godfrey imposed support for Stephen Harper on all of the sixteen major papers in the chain.

His idea of press freedom? He allowed each paper to express his choice for PM in their own words. In so doing, he turned them into meat puppets delivering what Toronto wanted. Torstar Chairman John Honderich was only partly right when he said that Godfrey’s editorial puppeteering let down Postmedia readers; it also let down Postmedia journalists

Godfrey committed what the late senator and Globe and Mail editor Richard Doyle said was the unpardonable sin of the industry: he held up the newspapers he runs and got a reflection of himself. And remember how this was done. On the weekend before the election, Godfrey disfigured the front pages of all his newspapers with a full-page attack ad in support of the Harper Conservatives.

Godfrey’s forced march of Postmedia editors through the swamps of political partisanship could cost the chain dearly.


The National Post is already floundering under a $650 million debtload, kept afloat by U.S. hedge funds that extract big interest returns on their “investment.” No one is happy about that and many others in this besieged industry are taking on water.

But if the good old days don’t return, the funds ultimately will exact their price — the dismemberment of Postmedia and the selling off of its parts at a profit. In the meantime, Godfrey is totally out of touch with the people who hold the chain’s fate in their hands — his dwindling band of subscribers.

In 2011, 95 per cent of newspapers that offered endorsements endorsed Harper — after the contempt of Parliament ruling, after the lies about the F-35 costs, and after the shuttering of various investigations into Canada’s still unresolved Afghan detainee issue. Whose interests were they serving in endorsing that?

In 2015, Harper still got 71 per cent of newspaper endorsements. Godfrey endorsed Harper 100 per cent, even though the soon-to-be-defeated PM was barely above 30 per cent in the polls. That disconnect tells me that Postmedia’s endorsement was the corporate elite talking, not the interests of the Canadian people — including a lot of Post readers — who overwhelmingly rejected the Conservatives.

The funny thing about a newspaper’s credibility is how easily it can be lost. Godfrey’s most recent dubious decisions should be seen in the context of the deals Postmedia has done in the past with the petroleum industry.

When publishers start talking about ‘leveraging their editorial efforts’ in the interests of an industry sector they should be reporting on, it’s time to re-read the Davey Report and Tom Kent’s 1981 Royal Commission on the perils of media concentration. Paul Godfrey might find the section on the newspaper industry’s responsibility to the public particularly relevant — especially the part that says that the profession’s primary duty is “searching out and reporting the truth.”


Citizen Shame: Politics, Paul Godfrey and Postmedia’s humiliation

 

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Both of the Ottawa Citizen’s editorial writers have decided to leave the newspaper.

“It gives me great displeasure to announce that both members of our editorial board, Kate Heartfield and James Gordon, have decided to leave the Citizen,” editor Andrew Potter said in an e-mail to staff on Wednesday.

Ms. Heartfield declined to give an interview, and Mr. Gordon did not respond to messages requesting comment.

Postmedia drew criticism in advance of last month’s federal election when the company confirmed its executives dictated that all newspapers in the chain – which includes the Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald and Vancouver Province, as well as the flagship National Post and the Sun papers – must endorse the Conservatives and Stephen Harper.

The newspapers wrote separate editorials, but each backed the Tories. However, within days, prominent political columnist Andrew Coyne resigned his job as the National Post’s editor of editorials and comment, citing “a professional disagreement” with Postmedia’s leadership after he was told he couldn’t write a column disagreeing with the Post’s editorial endorsement.

Ottawa Citizen’s editorial writers decide to leave newspaper - The Globe and Mail