Thomson-Southam
deal tightens press

Stranglehold

By SEAN GRIFFIN

_ The action last week by the press
giants Southam and Thomson
Newspapers in carving up the daily
newspaper market, and closing two
century-old journals has given Ca-
nadians a dramatic demonstration
of the consequences of monopoly
Control of the press in this country.

For the journalists, those who
worked on the now-defunct Winni-
peg Tribune, closed down by
Southam, and those on the Ottawa
Journal, the consequences spell un-
employment. The same is true for
those on FP News Service, just ax-
ed by Thomson, and some 61
others on the now-merged Victoria
Times and Colonist, putting the
total jobless at somewhere around

00 people.

_ For newspaper readers, the ac-
ton will mean that four major Ca-
Nadian cities — Vancouver, Win-
nipeg, Ottawa and Montreal — will
be reduced to one English language
Paper, owned by one or the other of
the giants. Vancouver, at least for
the moment, will have two, but
both are now owned by the same
corporation, Southam Press.

But perhaps most disturbing is
the fact that one of Canada’s most
vital sources of information — the
daily newspapers — will be con-
trolled, in all but a few parts of
Canada, by two huge, diversified
corporations who have just com-
pleted dividing their spheres of in-
fluence in four major cities. ;

Bill McLeman, the Canadian di-
rector of The Newspaper Guild, in
calling on the federal government
to seek an interim injunction pro-
hibiting the closures and the Sou-

-Thomson sales deals, warned
of the dangers if further corporate
concentration were allowed.

“The spectre of fewer and fewer
chains controlling more and more
of Canada’s local newspapers is a
particularly chilling one, precisely

ause these papers are no longer,
as in the old days, just news-
papers,”’ he said.

“They are news monopolies run

as Corporate enterprises, governed
by different considerations from
those which influenced papers in
the past.
_ “We face the very real danger,
NO less real because it has yet toma-
terialize, of a vast newspaper chain
controlling the news that reaches
the largest portion of the nation’s
population, manipulating power
for self-serving political or eco-
nomic purposes,’’ he warned.

Ever since the 1950s the concen-
tration of the press among only a
handful of corporations has been
on a level virtually unprecedented
in the capitalist world. Only in
West Germany where the powerful
Springer interests and the West-
deutsche Allegemeine Zeitung
(WAZ) group dominate the in-
dustry was the degree of monopoly
control even close.

But the corporate manoeuvres
of the last year, culminating in the
closures and market division car-
ried out last Wednesday, gave Can-
ada the unenviable distinction of
having the most monopolized press
in the capitalist world.

Heading the list of the giants is
Thomson Newspapers which has
carried out a massive acquisition

drive, utilizing the profits gleaned
from its North Sea oil operations in
Britain. With the takeover of FP
(Federated Papers) Publications
Ltd. in September, 1979 — an ac-
tion which was followed by the
closure of FP’s Montreal Star and
the sale of the Calgary Albertan —

it increased its already extensive .

control of Canadian daily
newspapers to take in more than
half of the daily papers published in
Canada. Thomson now controls
51.3 percent of Canadian daily
newspapers from Charlottetown,
P.E.I., to Victoria in this province
—and more thanascore of cities in
between.

In addition to those holdings,
the huge Thomson empire controls
several weekly, bi-weekly and tri-
weekly provincial newspapers in
this country. as well as more than
100 daily and weekly newspapers in
Britain and more than 70 news-
papers in the U.S.

Southam, whose president Gor-
don Fisher apparently spent several
months working out the division of
the market with Thomson lawyer
John Tory, controls most of the re-
maining half of the daily news-
papers across the country.

With its newly-acquired owner-
ship of the Vancouver Sun and full

‘ownership of the Montreal Gaz-

ette, it now controls 22.3 percent of
Canadian dailies, including the on-
ly newspapers in Vancouver and
Ottawa, and the only English lan-
guage daily in Montreal.

What few are left of the dailies
are owned by companies which are

H

BILL McLEMAN ..
real danger.”

-“a very

themselves substantial corpora-
tions including: Sterling News-
papers which operates 11 smaller
dailies in B.C. and other provinces;
the K. C. Irving group which con-
trols all five English-language
dailies in New Brunswick; Toronto
Sun Publishing, which has recently
expanded its growing interests into

_ Alberta; and Torstar Publishing

which owns the largest circulation
daily in Canada, the Toronto Star
(over half a million readers), and
which has extensive, diversified
holdings in book publishing (in-
cluding the lucrative Harlequin ro-
mance), television and film as well
as weekly newspapers. A smaller
company is Armadale Publishing
which puts out the Regina Leader-
Post and the Saskatoon Star-Phoe-
nix and also has interests in the
broadcasting and the aircraft in-
dustry.

But thetwo giants, Southam and
Thomson, clearly dominate the
newspaper publishing in this coun-
try, between them controlling 74
percent of the daily newspaper pro-
duction.

For Canadians, that monopoly
domination can only mean that
newspapers will less and less be an
important source of information
and a reflection of the community
and the country in which they live,
and more and more a reflection of
the primary concern of the corpor-
ations which own them — profit,
and first and foremost, profit from
advertising.

The division of the newspaper’

market in Vancouver, Winnipeg,
Ottawa and Montreal will now en-
sure that the advertising dollars in
those cities will not be divided, ef-
fectively guaranteeing greatly in-
creased revenue for the papers that

remain.

Thomson’s aggressive acquisi-
tion of both newspapers and de-
partment stores — he now owns
Simpson’s, Zeller’s and The Bay —
is part of that quest for greater pro-
fit. The increasing integration
through advertising of the two will
ensure a substantial rate of return
for the huge conglomerate.

Coupled with that is the increas-
ing trend in daily newspapers to-
wards lighter features, lifestyle ar-
ticles and ‘soft news,’’ with a cor-
responding reduction in news, an-
alysis and investigative journalism.

Although publishers claim that the
change — already evident in papers
across the country — is based on
reader surveys which show “‘it’s
what people want,” it also helps to
orient the reader more to the main
advertising focus of the newspaper,
the retail store.

Vancouver Sun publisher Clark
Davey put it plainly in a speech last
month, noting that newspapers
would have to ‘‘turn more to the
consumer. — the rising wave of
consumerism is going to demand
lhe,

Obviously, news — whether of
the province, country or the world
— is going to suffer in a paper
which is intended to sell products
for another part of the corporate
empire.

Jobs too, will inevitably suffer as
those who were laid off at the Ot-
tawa Journal, the Winnipeg Trib-
une and the merged Times-Colon-
ist in Victoria know only too well.
But those layoffs may only be the
beginning.

Already plans are well advanced
to produce a national edition by
satellite transmission of the Globe
and Mail, utilizing newly develop-
ed laser technology.

The development will enable the
newspapers to compete more ef-
fectively with the electronic media
but it will also enable a huge chain
like Thomson to produce several
papers across Canada with far
fewer journalists and printers.

A graphic example of that pro-
cess comes from France. Accord-
ing to the Syndicat National des
Journalistes, 10,000 jobs were
eliminated in the French newspaper
industry between 1975 and 1977,
with the advent of new technology
which allowed for the simultaneous

. publication of newspapers in Paris

and other provinces.

There, too, concentration of the
press has been accelerating, with
the result that in 1977, only 90 dail-
ies remained from 203 that were in
existence in 1946.

Significantly, this country, with
its huge area, and several distinct
regions has less daily newspapers
than France. And now that two
companies between them control
nearly three-quarters of them it
demonstrates the extent of their
power — and their ability to up-
hold their own vested interests.

KEN THOMSON:
His empire
controls. half
of Canadian
dailies.

&

Publishers of papers in both
chains have given the inevitable glib
assurances that the commitment to
good journalism will remain,
despite the new corporate owner-
ship and the demise of the compe-
tition. But the news coverage of the
labor movement, the news (or lack
of news) about Latin America
where Canadian companies — in-
cluding some in the Thomson chain
— have considerable interests, and
the continuing trend to profit-dic-
tated ‘‘consumer journalism” in-
dicate how empty those assurances
are.

Last week, the B.C. Federation
of Labor called for a parliamentary
inquiry into the corporate manip-
ulation with the newspaper in-
dustry. That call was echoed by the
international presidents of the in-
ternational unions in the industry
who demanded government inter-
vention to stop the deal. And this
week, Senator Keith Davey, who
10 years ago headed the royal com-
mission on corporate concentra-
tion in the media also called for a
federal inquiry.

Ottawa had better be listening.
That inquiry should be launched
immediately.

But any inquiry cannot end, as
Davey’s did, with a recommenda-
tion for a review agency that was
never established. And it cannot
end without firm recommenda-
tions for action.

It’s time to revamp existing
Combines legislation to prevent
such mergers and market division
as Thomson and Southam have
carried out. It’s time to restrict the
power of the press giants to close
down a newspaper arbitrarily,
throwing hundreds out of work
and altering significantly the flow
of information.

And perhaps it is also time to
begin considering measures that
will expand press freedom, meas-
ures such as grants to Canadian
newspapers, made in inverse pro-
portion to advertising revenue; the
creation of a public sector printing
industry to allow wider access to
printing facilities; and assistance to
cooperatives and others in
establishing newspapers.

Without those actions, the press
in this country will be free only for
Thomson and Southam.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE— SEPT. 5, 1980—Page 3