Canadian Newsgathering Is Not Like Japan’s, Except In All The Ways That Really Matter

Differences in newsgathering around the world are remarkable. We may think every country wants its media to be locally owned. Yet in Eastern Europe many journalists are grateful for foreign ownership because it insulates them from local political pressure. Who thinks about Al Jazeera’s enormously positive impact in the Arab world when we can fulminate about how it is and isn’t received in the West? Who really understands why there is such a strong newspaper tradition in Scandinavia, or Britain or Japan?

Right now, there’s a lot of talk about a print-media Armageddon. What will really happen? Some answers lie beyond our own borders. Looking abroad also allows journalists to revel in an emotion they know well: schadenfreude, especially when it involves our own bosses. What Canadian journalist isn’t delighted that our most famous newspaper magnate
has been given a six-year timeout in a Florida prison?

As such, here are some reflections on the state of Canadian media – some for helpful insight, some for guilty pleasure.
CANADIANS READ, BUT NO ONE READS LIKE THE JAPANESE

Okay, so 92 percent of Japanese adults read newspapers regularly, and the Yomiuri Shimbun has a circulation of 14 million. In Canada, we’re also literate and wealthy, yet just 77 percent read a paper in print or online last week, and less than half read yesterday’s news. Canada has a quarter of Japan’s population, yet its largest-circulation daily paper, the Toronto Star, clocks in at 635,000 copies on Saturday.

Put it down to the far-flung cities across the Canadian landscape, where the two so-called national papers, The Globe and Mail and the National Post (both based in Toronto), can’t get their circulation above half a million. And put it down to Canada’s ethnic and linguistic diversity. Canada is not a relatively monocultural island nation, as Britain was and Japan is. At least Canadians can gloat that we’re not like those subliterates in the United States, where newspaper readership is about half of Canada’s – just 25 percent read a newspaper yesterday, with another 9 percent reading current news online.

Canadian newspaper readership is actually rising (albeit infinitesimally), in keeping with a surprising global trend. According to the World Association of Newspapers, increased literacy and wealth has contributed to a 14 percent increase in newspaper readership in the last five years. In Canada, credit goes to the free dailies that moved into the Canadian market from Europe less than a decade ago. The skinny commuter-oriented papers pioneered in Scandinavia by Metro International may be read for all of about, say, 38 seconds, but for many Canadians that’s a
good start. Some of the free sheets, which have a strong working-class female readership, are quickly approaching established traditional dailies in their read-yesterday stats.

Canada’s overall newspaper market, though, is grim, as creatively moribund papers become even duller as they cut costs. Blame corporate debt, the current recession and the classified ad-sucking Craigslist, which with a staff of about 30 is currently the United States’ eighth-most-visited Web site. In Western Europe and especially in the United States, where everybody loves to talk about an apocalypse, many people think newspapers will all be gone in 10 years. High-quality broadsheets are certainly suffering, but that’s hardly a concern for Metro and the other free sheets, which now control 23 percent of European newspaper circulation and are making inroads around the world.

Everyone frets about the Internet, yet free papers might also soon have a big impact on the Japanese market. Canada, for its part, could (but won’t) learn anything from Japan about the vitality that comes with real newspaper competition.

CANADA DOESN’T CARE ABOUT JAPAN’S NATION OF READERS
Until 2001, Japan was Canada’s second-largest trading partner for both imports and exports. Rest assured, Canadians did not notice the relationship, notwithstanding the brand names on their TVs and hybrid cars. With Chinese immigration, Quebec separatism and the elephant known as the United States to preoccupy us, reporting on Japanese affairs in Canada is close to nonexistent.

Most Canadians couldn’t tell you a thing about Japan’s portentous financial-system calamity, or name a Japanese pop star, or a controversial war shrine or even Emperor Akihito, despite his visit to Canada earlier this year. We’ve got our own irrelevant royalty to ignore, and when we think of Japan we’re trying to understand the Japanese obsession with Anne of Green Gables, or honeymooning under the Northern Lights or why Vancouver has so many great sushi bars and Toronto has none.

In fact, Canadian reporting on Asia is terrible in nearly every instance, although the Hong Kong connection fostered by common British roots and strong immigrant links requires some semblance of attention to matters Chinese.

That said, Vancouver does have two Chinese-language dailies, at least as many Punjabi radio stations, and even a Japanese-language tabloid called Oops! You can read about Asia in Canada, but you may have to do it in a language other than English.

CBC IS NOT LIKE NHK, WHICH IS BOTH GOOD AND BAD
The chairman of the board of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (Canada’s equivalent of NHK) is a political appointee. But that doesn’t prevent the CBC – which operates a general-interest TV station, an all-news cable channel and two radio networks, in two parallel English and French organizations – from maintaining real editorial independence and challenging its masters. In fact, CBC public-affairs programming is generally more provocative and open to left-wing perspectives than that of its rivals. On the main English-language TV station, however, news programming makes up just a small fraction of the broadcast schedule, as it tries to compete for (and with) populist United States programming. That broad mandate, along with the profusion of cable channels, has effectively paralyzed English-language public television. CBC’s strengths are its cable-news programming and its news-oriented radio stations, which often dominate local markets. In a media universe where radio seems to have a brighter future than old-school television stations and newspapers, this offers Canadian news junkies at least a little hope.

CANADA DOESN’T REALLY NEED KISHA CLUBS
Canada has nothing resembling Japan’s kisha-club system of accreditation for journalists. However, you could argue that self-censorship in the highly concentrated Canadian commercial media market is still just as rife.

The concentration has reached appalling levels. In Vancouver, for example, there was a transitional period a few years ago where the acquisition-crazy Canwest Global owned all or part of four of the seven dailies widely available in the city, along with half the weeklies and three regional television stations, including the dominant one. While the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) regulates TV-station ownership, domestic concentration of newspaper ownership is only restricted when a paper is deemed to have a monopoly on advertising, and those laws are almost never enforced.

The result of this concentration is that reporters, particularly outside of the competitive Toronto market, feel real pressure to conform to conservative political and commercial orthodoxies. As decent mainstream jobs become increasingly scarce, that pressure is increasing.

Those covering politics must be accredited if they wish to sit in the often-empty press galleries in the national parliament or provincial legislatures, however, and then certain rules must be obeyed. In B.C., those rules resulted in the arrest of a journalist and his editor in 2002 after the reporter refused to abide by the jacket-and-tie dress code imposed on members of the legislative press gallery.

Mind you, the journalist, Brian “Godzilla” Salmi, is a serial provocateur. He was once accused by police of inciting a hockey riot after he proposed one in a piece of satire. He ran for election to the federal parliament in the B.C. Bible-belt community of Abbotsford using his legal name of Sa Tan. So when he protested the legislative dress code and spent the night in the clink for his trouble, most people understood the event to be his triumph.

CANADA HAS TURNED JOURNALISM EDUCATION INTO A MINOR INDUSTRY
While Canada has no comprehensive system of accreditation for journalists, in the last quarter century a plethora of journalism schools has emerged to educate people for a profession in which there are few jobs. Twenty-five years ago, there were just two journalism schools in Canada’s four western provinces. Now British Columbia alone has nearly 10 in various guises to serve its 3.5 million residents, and there are more in the planning stages.

Canadian journalism schools really train people for jobs in public relations, which often require journalism experience or education. Fewer than a third of those graduating from Canadian journalism schools actually spend a substantial period of time working in the profession for which they were trained.

CANADA’S MOST FAMOUS PRESS BARON GOT OUT WHILE THE GETTING WAS GOOD
The Thomson family, which Forbes ranks as the world’s 24th-richest, with $13 billion in assets, used to own an enormous number of Canadian newspapers, big and small. The family still owns the Reuters news service, but they got out of the print business, except for a token share in their old flagship, Toronto’s Globe and Mail. Unlike most other news barons in English Canada, the Thomsons made their money in order to keep it.

CANADA’S MOST NOTORIOUS PRESS BARON WEARS AN ORANGE JUMPSUIT IN A FLORIDA PRISON
Canadians aren’t quite as polite and deferential as people from Japan, but there’s an old joke that you know when a Canadian has been in your house because there’s an extra quart of milk in the refrigerator. The most commonly heard greeting from a Canadian mouth is “I’m sorry.”

Canadian newspaper magnate Conrad Black, however, is so unlike his compatriots that he had to renounce his citizenship. Technically, he did that so he could be appointed to Britain’s House of Lords, an opportunity presented to him not long after he bought London’s Daily Telegraph. Canada’s prime minister at the time, Jean Chrétien, whom Black despised, refused to give him special dispensation as a Canadian citizen to accept the appointment.

The funny thing is, notwithstanding Black’s penchant for pretension when he opens his mouth – he once said he is “basically more Nietzschean than Hegelian” – his brashness marks him as truly American. The brashness, at least, should help him out in the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex near Florida’s Disney World, where he’s serving six-and-a-half years for fraud and breach of trust.

His 2007 conviction in a Chicago court resulted from a variety of excesses, mainly the habit of Black and his colleagues of selling corporately owned papers and then pocketing some of the proceeds as personal non-compete payments. In one instance, Black and longtime partner David “The Refrigerator” Radler, who turned state’s evidence, sold papers owned by their Hollinger International empire to a small company controlled by themselves. Did they deserve to be paid out of the proceeds not to compete with themselves?

Hollinger board members such as Henry Kissinger signed but didn’t bother to fully comprehend documents that could have allowed them to make their own decision on the ethics of all that.

Black was guilty of other excesses, of course, some involving his wife, magazine columnist Barbara Amiel Black, who once declared that her “extravagance knows no bounds.” She is a good quote. “I have been a bitch all my life and did not need the authority of money to be one,” Amiel once declared on BBC Radio 4. During Black’s trial, she referred to journalists as “vermin” and one reporter in particular as a “slut.” She herself is simply a former pothead Marxist with a Marie Antoinette fixation who repeatedly fulfilled her ambition to “marry up” and didn’t really have anything to do with that $42,000 birthday party thrown for her in New York, or the holiday in Bora Bora taken on a private jet, both of which showed up on Hollinger International’s tab.

Black, however, insisted in a piece he wrote for the Telegraph that she is not “grasping, hectoring, slatternly, extravagant, shrill and a harridan.”

They made an interesting couple when they were at the heart of the Canadian scene as owners of most of the country’s major English-language dailies. After the Telegraph purchase and a major foray into the U.S. that include the Chicago Sun-Times and a raft of smaller papers, they even became subjects of international interest. The British press dubbed them “Lord Con and Lady Barbarella” and “Mr. Money and Attila the Honey.”

In Canada and abroad, Black avoided (except to sell into it) the convergence mania that swept through the media at the turn of the millennium. He was strictly a newspaperman, well-read and attentive to detail, and his passion showed in the quality of the National Post, the paper he started in 1998. Under talented editor and Black protégé Ken Whyte, the Post was the liveliest, best-written, best-looking, and most innovative newspaper in the country. Since the departure of Black and Whyte, its only remaining distinguishing characteristic is its relentlessly right-wing outlook.

BLACK’S SUCCESSOR ISN’T CRIMINAL, JUST BROKE
Pity young Leonard Asper. First, his father bought the dominant Southam chain of English-Canadian dailies from Black at the height of the convergence frenzy. Israel “Izzy” Asper borrowed much of the $3.2 billion he needed to do it, way back in 2000, just after AOL bought Time Warner.

Then his dad, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking former tax lawyer and failed politician who had built a Canadian TV network from scratch and whose holdings included a network in Australia, was discourteous enough to die. Not a lot of journalists shed tears over the demise of a man who, after acquiring a stake in New Zealand’s TV3, told a Kiwi journalist, “You’re in the business of selling soap.”

Still, the overbearing Izzy, who ensured his papers showed more fealty to Israel’s Likud governments than does the editorial board of The Jerusalem Post, was at least half smart. Poor dim Leonard and his even stupider brother David were left in charge of a collapsing Canwest Global empire. At one point, the entire company was worth just $20 million. Now, with nearly $4 billion in debt, it’s bankrupt and about to be sold off in pieces.

When media barons fall, they fall hard.

CANADA’S MEDIA HAVE SOMETIMES CHAMPIONED THE RIGHTS OF ACCUSED TERRORISTS
Japanese media coverage of accused terrorist Mohamed Himu Islam was not to its credit. Canada’s record of covering innocent people accused of terrorism also began badly with the case of Maher Arar, a textbook example of how the obligation of journalists to protect anonymous sources can become a very messy business.

Arar was arrested on Sept. 26, 2002, at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport on his way home to Canada from a family visit in Tunisia. Two weeks later, he was taken by American agents to Syria, where he was tortured in a rat-infested prison. His only documented “offense” was that an acquaintance alleged to have radical links had witnessed the lease agreement for Arar’s apartment.

Canadians complicit in Arar’s rendition to his native Syria then leaked all sorts of nonsense to the media smearing the soft-spoken telecommunications engineer. When 20 Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers raided the home of an Ottawa Citizen reporter who had received some of those leaks, the ethical issues became really muddy. Many journalists felt some reporters whose work allowed Arar to be smeared used journalistic privilege to excuse themselves and protect those who had leveled false allegations.

The debate obscured a more fundamental issue: the slowness of Canadian media and politicians to protect the interests of those falsely accused in the fallout from the events of Sept.11, 2001. Some media supported Arar from the outset, but it was only when the baselessness of the anonymous smears became apparent that real clamor arose to bring Arar home and clear his name.

Arar is hardly alone. Just two years ago, Canadian media began to report on the case of Benamar Benatta, an Algerian refugee with training in aeronautical engineering who had the misfortune to seek refugee status in Canada on Sept. 5, 2001. Canadian authorities arrested him and illegally drove him back across the border into the United States, where he was accused of training the 9/11 terrorists and held in solitary confinement for five years, despite the fact that he was cleared by the FBI of any involvement in terrorism just two months after his arrest.

CANADA’S FORMER CBC BOSS NOW WORKS FOR AL JAZEERA
Canada effectively prevented Al Jazeera from being broadcast in Canada when in 2004 the CRTC, which regulates the Canadian airwaves, required cable carriers to monitor, edit and take legal responsibility for the content broadcast by Al Jazeera, a requirement not applied to any other station. The furor over whether to allow the Arabic station to broadcast in Canada was whipped up by the Aspers’ Canwest Global and abetted by Canada’s shift to the political right with the election of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s minority Conservative government that same year.

No Canadian cable or satellite service picked up Al Jazeera, which since its founding in 1996 has become one of the world’s most recognized media brands. However, the groundbreaking Arabic station, which makes up for its anti-Israeli rhetorical excesses with daring reporting that challenges censors in both the Arabic and Western world, expects to deliver its English programming in Canada soon. The CRTC’s anticipated approval has been slow in coming, however.

Should it finally occur, it will be a relief to Tony Burman, the former CBC editorial director who is now the managing director of the three-year-old Qatar-based Al Jazeera English-language station. Burman, who epitomizes the old-fashioned international newshound, sees his station as being more akin to the BBC than, say, Fox News, where star commentator Bill O’Reilly once called Al Jazeera a “terrorist organization.”

CANADA’S ALTERNATIVE MEDIA ALMOST MATTER
In some major Canadian markets, left-wing independently owned alternative newsweeklies actually have large readerships that represent a real challenge to the corporate dailies. This peculiar North American phenomenon, which has antecedents in New York’s 54-year-old Village Voice and the radical weeklies of the late 1960s, exploded in the late 1970s on the strength of smart coverage of pop culture that dailies were not providing. The papers were also usually free, which is one reason many of them are holding up well in the downturn that is devastating many dailies. Another is their attention to niche local interests – theater, alternative music, left-wing politics – which gives them content that’s not easily duplicated elsewhere. Is it only a matter of time before such newspapers arrive in Japan, or will existing competition and the Internet shut the door on a phenomenon that’s been a small but important part of the North American newspaper dynamic?

CANADA STILL HAS NO IDEA WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE INTERNET
Cultural nationalism is a big deal in Canada, even though few on the English-speaking side of the country will rush to declare that. While most of Canada’s celebrities are American, Canadian values are not. Our support for public health care at home and our distaste for American adventurism abroad are just two examples. However, when you live next to the biggest economy in the world, and share a language with Americans, you have to work hard to protect your cultural institutions. Canada’s music industry has succeeded in that regard, while film and TV have not. Canada’s newspapers have succeeded, while the same cannot be said of its magazines.

What will Canada do about the Internet, which threatens to explode all the tools of protectionism that cultural nationalists have come to rely on, and which most Canadians accept as entirely justified? In Canada, it’s not just the economic foundation of complex newsgathering that’s at risk.

Of course, we’ll all get by. The fourth estate will be changed by, but survive the Internet juggernaut, just as it evolved with the advent of radio and television. The big issue for the vastly expanding pool of so-called journalists will be the same as it’s always been: Are we here as dogged information-gatherers and incisive commentators in service of modern democracy, or are we here to sell soap?