Upstart Paper Cracks Irving Media Monopoly

"David fought Goliath and David won," said Erin Steuter, a professor at Mount Saint Allison University who has studied New Brunswick's media monopoly. "The Irvings lost this latest battle about crushing the alternative publication," Dr. Steuter told IPS. The battle over the Carleton Free Press started on Sep. 27, when a team of four forensic accountants hired by CanadaEast News Inc., a media holding company owned by the Irving family, barged into Langdon's home in Woodstock, New Brunswick, a small town of about 5,300 people. Under a little known criminal code provision related to industrial espionage, the private agents scoured Langdon's residence. "They even rooted through my wife's lingerie drawer," Langdon told IPS. Days before the search, citing a poor relationship with his immediate supervisor, Langdon had resigned his post as publisher of the Bugle-Observer, a paper owned by the Irvings, where he had worked for four years. In his resignation letter, Langdon expressed his intent to start a new paper. ... The Irving family's fortune is valued at 5.9 billion dollars and its 300 companies directly employ eight percent of New Brunswick's 750,000 residents, according to figures from Kim Kierans, director of the journalism school at the University of King's College in Halifax. The Irving companies are private firms, rather than publicly traded companies, so their internal information isn't reported. "The whole idea of freedom of the press implies that media are a check on powerful economic interests," Isabel Macdonald, the communications director for the New York-based media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, told IPS. "When the media are incorporated into a powerful monopoly, it's very disturbing." While media rights activists are hopeful about the Carleton Free Press, Irving still dominates the province's public sphere. The company has big plans in the works, including a seven-billion-billion dollar oil refinery and a new liquefied natural gas facility and pipeline in the city of Saint John. These mega-projects have raised the ire of environmentalists who say the province should be decreasing rather than increasing its production of greenhouse gases. "There is no credible reporting by anyone who understands the science behind these proposals," said Inka Milewski, science advisor to the Conservation Council of New Brunswick. "There is no credible capacity of any Irving media outlets to cover these stories," Milewski told IPS. "Media concentration is worse in Canada than in other industrialised countries -- and in New Brunswick, way worse," Robert Picard, a U.S. media economics expert, told a 2003 conference in Moncton, New Brunswick. According to 2003 figures from Enn Raudsepp, head of Concordia University's journalism programme in Montreal, 84 percent of Canadian media is owned by five companies. As of 2005, one company, CanWest Global, owned by the Asper family, accounted for 28.5 percent of total daily newspaper circulation in Canada. ... http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39962

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