Pressing Rock Bottom. Media Sleaze And CanWest Global Communications

Pressing Rock Bottom. Media Sleaze and CanWest Global Communications. Maclean’s Magazine prints other things than advertising and propaganda for the Right. We’re told. But when it isn’t being paid to advertise, it seems to do so for free, stretching truth sometimes until it snaps. And almost always on behalf of the Big Leader – the George Bush view of “Liberty” administered by For-Profit Anybody. Fidel Castro, for instance, turned Cuba from being an illiterate, oppressed whorehouse and gambling den for the rich of the U.S. into a country with one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world and almost full literacy. He did it while holding off hundreds of assassination attempts by the U.S. and an ugly, inhumane, on-going trade-and-other embargo. Maclean’s gives the story to you straight. “The long life and brutal times of the world’s last true Communist dictator” (March 3 08). Maclean’s doesn’t say the U.S. is almost the whole reason there’s a Fidel Castro story to tell. The magazine doesn’t say Castro rose out of the U.S. dominated sewer called Cuba to give it some life and hope. The U.S., then as now, was psychotically determined to destroy that Nobody on an island of six million people with few natural resources. Castro dared to champion a non-capitalist, co-operative society. And so the U.S. raised him to the level of a major world figure as the demon of the century.

The idiot policies of the U.S. guaranteed Castro’s heroism, his survival, and his centrality to twentieth century and, so far, twenty-first century politics. (If you’re reporting facts and history, Maclean’s seems to say, and it hurts our propaganda, don’t report.) Then there’s the Maclean’s love affair with the convicted felon who founded The National Post. If Jesus Christ had been discovered alive and at work in Canada over the last two years, Maclean’s would have given more column inches to Conrad Black. Why? Read on…. Consider Black’s most deliriously fawning disciple at Maclean’s. As a friend of mine remarked: “whatever Mark touches, he leaves a steyn”. In a brief respite from working on the apotheosis of Conrad Black, Steyn “gives himself” to a review of a book by Robert Harris, a former close ally of ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Harris has written a novel with some barely disguised actual people to show who Tony Blair really is, as Harris sees him. Steyn writes a totally cock-eyed, reactionary take on the Harris novel. Is that what’s bad? Or is it that Steyn is farther Right (as they say) than Attila the Hun? Neither. What matters is Steyn’s (to put it gently) looseness with truth and the facts. None – except major columnists for The National Post perhaps – will accept Steyn’s outright fantasy offered as simple truth – that Tony Blair forced the Bush Bunch through six months of negotiations at the UN in 2002-03 while “Saddam snuck all his WMD off to Syria or wherever….” (March 17 08 p. 63) What’s more, Steyn treats the pre-war Iraq peace movement as a cancer, for it “metastasized” into a “seething mass of global discontent”.

The fact that the U.S. was seen more and more to be faking a reason to attack Iraq doesn’t cross Steyn’s mind – though it obviously crossed the minds of those who made up that “mestastisized” peace movement. To Steyn, Tony Blair did it all. Please. The sane world now knows – despite all attempts to fake – that Saddam Hussein did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction. So Mark Steyn simply fabricates, creates a Saddam Hussein who did have them. By damn! Of course! Not exactly fronting for Rogue State lunatics, Tony Blair gave Saddam Hussein (that man of magical cunning) time to sneak out (under the noses of total U.S. surveillance) his arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and deliver them … “to Syria”…”or wherever”. An editor - in this case Mark Stevenson of Maclean’s - who allows such crappola to pass as fact can’t pretend to be running a serious magazine. Call it Macphantasy’s. Call it Maclie’s. Don’t call it Maclean’s. Two points: first, if its history and fact, and it hurts our propaganda, don’t tell it. Secondly, fabricate anything you need to support the contemporary Attila the Hun world view.

Don’t consider the truth secondary. Don’t consider it at all. Maclean’s is a bellwether, a canary in the Canadian coal mine. From a great Canadian national magazine it’s become an intellectual serial rapist of many of the issues important to Canadians. And – as bellwether – it’s only one among the major “journalistic” pack. Just look at the book by Marc Edge about the founding and growth of one of the sleaziest media concentration monsters in Canadian history: CanWest Global Communications. The book by Marc Edge is called ASPER NATION, Canada’s Most Dangerous Media Company (New Star Books, 2007). The evidences of CanWest’s scandalous near-monopoly position are visible across Canada. But they are most dreadful in B.C. where B.C.’s three major dailies, the dominant TV station, and a heavy list of community papers are Asper-owned. That might not matter if policy were something else than a rigid Attila the Hun’ism apparently enforced by tacit policy, self-censorship, and fear. Only a few weeks ago CanWest fired the decades-long publisher of the Vancouver Courier, Peter Ballard, for, it is said, not being “corporate” enough, meaning, I take it, not sacrificing truth enough to CanWest policy. Never mind that several people told me they couldn’t see any difference between the Courier and anything else CanWest. Its tiny shade of difference was considered so important that tiny protests were made in remaining tiny independent publications. Nevertheless, I still remember a year or so ago one of the Courier’s bold columnists writing about a major group wanting to save B.C. Hydro and B.C. ownership of B.C. rivers – that are being sold out secretly at breakneck speed by the Gordon Campbell Attilas. The columnist reported that no invited government person would attend the group’s meeting – empty chairs kept visible to make the point. Wait till next week, the columnist wrote. I’ve more to tell about the occasion and the issue…. And so I waited. I looked. I hunted. No second column on the subject appeared that I could find. Why? Need you ask?

That’s the “good” CanWest paper, said to be worth protecting. It gets worse. B.C. Mary is the person who has kept the on-going internet site to cover everything about the corrupt sale of BC Rail by the Gordon Campbell government, the scandal involved, and the court action arising out of it – for years now. She was (commendably) worried about CanWest’s apparent complicity with forces trying to kill the story – especially B.C.’s major CanWest paper, the Vancouver Sun. So in August she wrote to ask why the Sun hadn’t covered a court event in what is perhaps the most important court case in B.C. history – one that could well show the Gordon Campbell government is illegitimate and bring it crashing down. Showing her innocence, B.C. Mary asked for “an intelligent summary of what’s happening”. Managing editor of the Sun, Kirk LaPointe responded with a casual note: “Hi Mary. The truth is, nothing much has happened in the process, so we haven’t been consuming resources during this heavy holiday season on non-news. But we are at work on a piece that will move in the next two or three days, so bear with us.” Mary waited 12 days for the new piece and then wrote back. Out of his cage sprang Kirk LaPointe, furious that B.C. Mary had published his casual note, fuming about confidentiality, discourtesy, and on and on. “There is nothing further to discuss”, he wrote. But not before he told her he would never help B.C. Mary again in the future. Help? Again? A joke?

Why the sudden anger? Because, I suspect, that deeply sunk in CanWest, Attila the Hun culture, Kirk LaPointe casually wrote – as I read his note – that a move in the most important trial in B.C. history is “non news”. (How did he know, anyway, if his paper didn’t cover the event?) His note also confirms, it seems, the personnel slashing policies of CanWest. It’s summer, and so B.C.’s largest newspaper has no one to cover the on-going BC Rail Scandal. And then… and then…LaPointe gently seems to mislead B.C. Mary, saying the Sun would have news in two or three days. To shut her up? Anyhow, she didn’t “shut”. And so LaPointe – it would seem – used to CanWest methods, went ape, spilling ego and little else in all directions. That would be funny, except as Marc Edge shows in ASPER NATION, the destruction of journalistic integrity in Canada has been a mission of Canada’s “Attila the Hun Club” for some years. Conrad Black – as what used to be called a Social Darwinist, meaning, in brief, someone who believes in the survival of the fittest - was early into the mission. Showing nature to be, one might say, Black in tooth and claw, he set about major media concentration, personnel slashing, and intense profit-seeking – and he frankly admitted his intention to serve the Right. All the while he crowed about improving Canada’s journalistic standards. Some have actually been taken in by Black’s persistent self-promotion.

But wait. Hasn’t The National Post under Conrad Black, and then as a part of the Asper Corporation, had propaganda and service to The Attila the Hun Club as its primary roles? At the sacrifice of everything else, like even profit? In the ten years of its life the National Post has lost millions of dollars every year. Why keep it going then? Why, to elect Stephen Harper. And aren’t these its other goals? – to destroy Canadian Social Insurance. To destroy Medicare. To make Private Corporations Canada’s government. To join the U.S. and fight its wars. To keep people like the people of B.C. in the dark about the BC Rail Scandal. In short, to keep in power people like Gordon Campbell of The Attila the Hun Club. Marc Edge’s book should be required reading by every grade ten class in Canada so that every literate Canadian learns how journalism in Canada has been dragged toward the sewer by Conrad Black and the Asper family’s CanWest Global Communications.

If I were to begin quoting from Marc Edge’s book, I might not be able to stop. But to shorten the matter, Izzy Asper’s statement: “Let commerce rule … not the law” about sums it up (p. 60). (And perhaps Conrad Black followed the idea a little too closely.) As Sociologist Larry Patriquin wrote after studying The National Post (2004), in its coverage of taxation issues, the Post’s material fits “the classic definition of propaganda”. It was, he said, “a discourse in which incomplete information is presented to people with the purpose of distorting their view….” (Edge, p. 97) As if to show how bad it can get, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter – from the Land of the Bland where killing and slanting news is a Major National Pastime – commented in 2005 about CanWest’s B.C.: “News coverage has been so slanted that Vancouver’s daily papers should be read at a 45-degree angle …. With its blatant biases and recent cuts in staffing, CanWest demonstrates the perils of having a daily paper monopoly”. (p. 222) Perhaps the ugliest story in Edge’s book is the one about Izzy Asper with the staff of a New Zealand newspaper just purchased. Asper asked one staff member and than another and then another what they did, and each, apparently, was happy to say things like they were pleased that their task was “to make sure our audience gets the most carefully researched news and information possible.” That wasn’t what they were supposed to say according to Asper. “Wrong,” said Izzy, “You’re all wrong and that’s why you’re bankrupt. You’re in the business of selling soap.” (p. 52) If Asper had added they were now also in the business of selling Right wing propaganda for The Attila the Hun Club, his statement would have been “all in”. Something else Marc Edge conveys to this reader is perhaps more troubling than all noted so far. Black and CanWest have harassed, fired, and fought with so many good Canadian journalists that a real question is left about the ones who remain.

Even if they have talent and lots of integrity, they might as well not have. That seems to be the message of ASPER NATION, Canada’s Most Dangerous Media Company. Sleaze is the name of the game in present journalism in Canada. It would be wonderful if one could say, “except of course for the newspaper or news chain X”. But one can’t. Even the review of Edge’s book in the Globe and Mail (Feb 9 08 D11) calls it “partisan if comprehensive”, and “unabashed polemic”. The book, ASPER NATION, gave the Globe and Mail room to do a major piece, to editorialize, and to say loudly and clearly how it rejects the Black/CanWest mode of operation and how it wants a full scale rebuilding of media ownership in Canada to return responsibility to the Fourth Estate and what we call ‘the electronic media’. The Globe and Mail chose not to do that. And we know why.