Guest post by Tim McMillan, of the SLAIS LIBR 561 Information Policy class.

I was fortunate to participate in the discussion of media concentration in Canada and North America at “Jumpstarting the Public Sphere.”  Our group was lead by Dr. David Skinner, a professor of communications studies at York University.  The other participants included students from the Langara College library program, a journalism student and community radio organizer from Simon Fraser University, a librarian from Vancouver Public Library (VPL) and yours truly: a graduate student studying library science at the University of British Columbia and a part-time reference librarian at VPL.  Sean Connon, the editor of the Vancouver street magazine Megaphone, moderated.

David began by noting the steep decline in Canadians’ belief in the credibility of traditional news media; only 1/3 believes it to be fair and balanced.  Instead, the prevailing opinion is that big news serves big business.  One of the participants noted that thirty years ago Vancouver sported three independent news dailies, whereas today the Vancouver Sun and the Province are controlled by the same corporation.

David traced the history of media concentration in Canada from the concern expressed in 1970’s Davey Report to the apathy of the mid 1990s when the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) acquiesced to industry demands for cross media ownership.  With this latter decision, conglomerates could control media in a multitude of genres: television, radio, and newspapers.  This model made economic sense as resource pooling cut down on overhead and seemed to make Canadian media more competitive in a global market.  Of course the downside was the loss of a diversity of voices in Canada’s news media and a heavy blow to media democracy in the country.

While public advocacy groups and information policy watchdogs have pushed these negative aspects of media concentration to the CRTC and other policy-makers, the response has been that the commission is not in the business of putting businesses out of business.  As participants in our group noted, the government and its regulatory bodies shy away from restricting businesses’ rights to own private property and are all the more wary of interfering with opinion-makers for fear of creating a media backlash.

With this avenue for policy change seemingly blocked, our group looked at alternative methods for pressuring policy makers to step in and regulate the concentration of media.  It was suggested that the new media be utilized in order to draw attention to negative consequences of media concentration: the Micheal Geist Bill C-61 model.  This seemed a viable method, but complimentary action was needed as again and again the issue of financing cropped up.  In the USA, there are charitable foundations to be appealed to and media watchdogs are well represented in the public sphere on both the right and the left.  Here in Canada, there is less of a tradition for the former as the government has long taken the role of subsidizing Canadian media; media watchdogs are equally scarce.

One suggestion gained consensus as the most actionable: an online portal of alternative media outlets.  This would allow the multiplicity of independent voices to band together as a means of mutually increasing traffic to a variety of news sources.  Although this is a long way from counteracting the domination of a few media outlets, it represents a start in the right direction of encouraging media democracy.