Break Up Postmedia Or Else

On This Canadian Cancer

If you picked up a National Post today – a physical newspaper, not the website – do you know where you’d find the first news article about the Auditor General’s report into Doug Ford’s Greenbelt land swaps that are due to make his developer friends $8B in profit? Page 5 of the front section.

Also on Page 5 of that section, you’ll find a column about it from *checks notes* a former Progressive Conservative candidate and on the front page is a very tiny blurb about where you can be directed to find out about “What the Auditor General had to say about opening up protected lands for housing”, a euphemism for the ages. (Again, for those who missed it: Ford let developers who had bought protected Greenbelt land for pennies on the dollar petition to ask for the land to be declassified, so that they’d make billions.)

Oh, and on Page 9? A op-ed from “Doug Ford”, aka his staff, defending his position that this is necessary for housing, despite his own task force saying it’s not. And, as if that’s not bad enough, on the Post’s website, the first two stories about this – if you scroll for a while – are the two Op-Eds, not the hard news story. So, given this, can we finally dispense with the idea that Postmedia is a news organization anymore and bust it at the seams as the anti-trust violation it is?

…

Postmedia should not exist in its current form, but I suspect I’m one of the few Postmedia haters who will actually concede it was once a valuable part of the media landscape. Before the Post launched, we had 1.5 “national” newspapers (I’m half counting the Star for what should be understandable reasons), and the main one was essentially a Liberal Party in kind contribution. The need for a paper with a less liberal and Liberal mandate was valuable, especially since the Globe was acting as a Liberal mouthpiece and the Star acted as the Comms shop for the various failed NDP leaders from Broadbent to Layton. The Post was a necessary antidote.

That said, we have to acknowledge that it’s no longer valuable. On the Post’s website right now it is easier to find yet another column about the Trudeau divorce than it is to find anything about the AG’s report. The Friday after the Trudeau separation, the front page of the Post asked why Sophie was the one moving out of Rideau Cottage. This article required half the front page and quotes from experts, as if “Prime Minister Stays In Prime Ministerial Residence” is front page news.

If this were one newspaper, I’d care less, but they own almost every single daily in this country, and are trying to buy the Star now too. At a bunch of different stages of this the consolidation should have been stopped – when the Citizen and Gazette were sold to them, when the Sun papers were, when the Irving holdings out east were – but they weren’t. Now, we need to have the conversation we should have, but didn’t, have before.

Postmedia as a company is a failure – it keeps buying assets, stripping them to become essentially mini Post operations with a tiny bit of local news, and then finding out that nobody reads them in part because there’s no actual point to reading the Gazette if all anglo Montrealers are getting is Torontonians’ writing. In theory slashing costs at the local dailies and then pocketing the savings is a good idea, but the part they miss is that the slashed costs end up reducing readership, which means they just end up in a death spiral, propped up by Federal subsidies that clearly aren’t buying their editorial independence, as some claimed it would when they started.

At this point it’s a shell of whatever value it had in the past, a failed company trying desperately to keep the show on the road by doing the same thing that’s failed for so long. This is definition of insanity shit from them, but moreso it’s killing this country. Having almost all our great media assets under this decrepit shell of itself, more concerned with protecting friends and attacking foes than reporting news, letting the partner of Doug Ford’s Comms Director have a column in the Toronto Sun without ever disclosing it when he defends Ford, and generally acting like the protection arm of the CPC and PCPO needs to end. Either Postmedia can start acting as journalists again, or we should break up the company.

I’ve long said that the best thing that ever happened to Canada is the fact that Murdoch never came to Canada, but at this point he might as well have. When was the last time the Post had a major scoop on a story of consequence? It’s been a while – the Globe got all of the actually legitimate Chinese interference scoops and the original reporting on developers buying Greenbelt land that ended up getting swapped, the two biggest news scoops in recent times. What’s the last thing the Post broke?

It's been a while because they’ve decided to become less of a traditional Canadian newspaper and more of a British-style Mail or Sun equivalent, which is bad enough but don’t forget, Murdoch also funds the Times, so there’s a selection for those who actually want the news from that company. Here, we’re seeing the death of independent journalism because Postmedia has given up, and is dragging down legacy brands that still mean something.

As I’m writing this, La Presse has reported that the Liberals have gotten someone to agree to head the inquiry into foreign interference (although not announcing who yet without opposition agreement on the name), and my initial reaction is to be unsurprised that a media company that actually cares about journalism were the ones to break this. The Post has abandoned all pretense of caring about journalism as an end to itself, and we need to understand their actions accordingly.

Would I hate Postmedia as much if they were this extremely partisan for the left? Who knows, because we’d never have had Stephen Harper allow the country to have all our best newspapers fall under the control of TorStar. But we let this country get gutted by the ghouls of Postmedia, and it must end. Break it up at any cost, because Postmedia is killing this country every time it distorts truth to defend its friends. Anything else is fiddling while Rome burns.