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Pacific Press 2.qxd 10/11/01 1:39 PM Page i Pacific Press Pacific Press 2.qxd 10/11/01 1:39 PM Page ii Pacific Press 2.qxd 10/11/01 1:39 PM Page iii Pacific Press The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver’s Newspaper Monopoly MARC EDGE NEW STAR BOOKS VANCOUVER 2001 Pacific Press 2.qxd 10/11/01 1:39 PM Page iv Copyright 2001 Marc Edge All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means — graphic, electronic, or mechanical — without the prior written permis- sion of the publisher. Any request for photocopying or other reprographic copying must be sent in writing to the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (CANCOPY), Suite 1900, 1 Yonge Street, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5. New Star Books Ltd. 107 - 3477 Commercial Street Vancouver, BC V5N 4E8 www.NewStarBooks.com Cover by Rayola Graphic Design Typeset by New Star Books Printed & bound in Canada by Transcontinental Printing 1 2 3 4 5 05 04 03 02 01 Publication of this work is made possible by grants from the Canada Council, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Department of Canadian Heritage Book Pub- lishing Industry Development Program. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA Edge, Marc, 1954- Pacific Press ISBN 0-921586-88-4 1. Pacific Press — History. 2. Newspaper publishing — British Columbia — Vancou- ver — History — 20th century. 3. Canadian newspapers (English) — British Columbia — Vancouver — History — 20th century. I. Title. PN4919.V362E33 2001 070.5’722’0971133 C2001-911329-3 Pacific Press 2.qxd 10/11/01 1:39 PM Page v This book is dedicated to the memory of John Allan “Jack” Edge (1919-1985), who was there in Victory Square. Pacific Press 2.qxd 10/11/01 1:39 PM Page vi Pacific Press 2.qxd 10/11/01 1:39 PM Page vii Each paper has assured its readers that it will retain its former character. Since the chief characteristic of each paper was its bitter competitive spirit toward the other, this character-retention will be quite a trick, something like watching a wrestling match between Siamese twins. SCOTT YOUNG, Globe and Mail, 1957 Pacific Press 2.qxd 10/11/01 1:39 PM Page viii Pacific Press 2.qxd 10/11/01 1:39 PM Page ix CONTENTS FOREWORD by Pierre Berton xi PREFACE xiii INTRODUCTION: Moving to Mornings 3 1 The Deal 13 2 The Tower 27 3 The Balance Wheel 41 4 The Sell-out 59 5 The Times 78 6 Siamese Twins 98 7 The Legend 113 8 The Showdown 128 9 The Express 14 7 10 The Perpetrator 16 6 11 The Power Struggle 183 12 The Bulldog 201 13 The Reluctant Prince 219 Pacific Press 2.qxd 10/11/01 1:39 PM Page x 14 The Shutdown 239 15 The Combination Man 255 16 Black Wednesday 274 17 The Ayatollah 293 18 Going Tabloid 311 19 The Cheesecake Rebellion 330 20 Buying the Competition 350 21 The Stolen Newspaper 370 APPENDIX 1: Pacific Press Circulation 387 APPENDIX 2: Pacific Press Greater Vancouver Market Penetration 389 APPENDIX 3: Vancouver Newspaper Timeline 390 NOTES 392 BIBLIOGRAPHY 429 INDEX 436 Pacific Press 2.qxd 10/11/01 1:39 PM Page xi FOREWORD by Pierre Berton Marc Edge’s fascinating study of the rise (and fall) of Pacific Press is invaluable for several reasons. First, it is a welcome and much-needed chapter in the ongoing history of journalism in Canada. Edge has filled in the blanks and provided the details for future historians who chronicle the newspaper world of the twentieth century. Second, it is also an important chapter in the continuing history of British Columbia — a magnificent source for those who will focus on the story of this province during the period under review. Most important, however, Edge’s carefully researched investigation provides a case study of that flawed concept the business world calls “synergy.” Vancouver, when I knew it, was perhaps the liveliest newspaper town in Canada, if not in North America, reflecting the ebullient nature of the West Coast. The city rejoiced in three lively, indeed vivacious daily news- papers, all competing with one another to be first with the news. In my day — circa 1946 — the Vancouver Daily Province set the stan- dard for responsible, informed journalism. Look at it now, a sleazy tabloid, with few redeeming qualities. The Vancouver Sun was its feisty and aggressive rival, proudly boasting of its local ownership and fitting neatly into the ebullient city that it served. The smaller News-Herald, on which I cut my teeth, was formed by the staff of the failed Vancouver Star and managed, through sheer persistence and a few bright ideas, to hold its own against the competition. xi Pacific Press 2.qxd 10/11/01 1:39 PM Page xii xii PACIFIC PRESS We were not ruled by the bottom line in those days. After all, the pub- lishers themselves were journalists (like Robert Elson, who went on to become managing editor of Life magazine) or were the intimates of jour- nalists. The Cromie brothers, who ran the Sun, hobnobbed with their reporters and editors; the Province hierarchy drank with their underlings in the beer parlour of the Commercial Hotel. No man better epitomized that bubbling era than Hal Straight, the hard-drinking, hard-driving Sun managing editor. His whole purpose was to beat the Province in the circulation war that marked those days. We used to gather in his kitchen of a Saturday night and plot the defeat of our enemy. “Don’t worry,” Straight used to say, “one day there’ll be an act of God, and we’ll be ready.” And when that time came — in the form of a printer’s strike — Straight was ready. With Don Cromie’s help he kept the Sun publishing, while the Province closed down. Straight believed in competition. It kept us on our toes and he rewarded us for it. One day an irate citizen marched into the Sun office demanding that a reporter be fired for filching a photograph from his bureau drawer during a police investigation. “Fire him?” cried Straight. “I’m going to give him a raise.” Television helped to change all this. When the screen carried instant news, the newspaper scoop was dead. But the real enemies of aggressive (and sometimes costly) Vancouver-style journalism have been the large, semi-anonymous corporations that swallow newspapers whole, merge them, water them down, and in the interests of greater and greater profit, all but destroy them. That is what happened in Vancouver, as Marc Edge’s book shows. It began after Don Cromie sold the Sun following his brother’s death. But the real death knell was administered by the news conglomerate, Pacific Press. At that point, the two surviving Vancouver dailies were no longer at arm’s length. How ironic that the very daily newspapers which, in their editorials, praised free and unfettered competition in the market place, should themselves be the victims of the opposite concept. Free enterprise? Marc Edge’s remarkable study quotes chapter and verse to make it crystal clear that, in Vancouver, that vaunted ideal is as tattered as yesterday’s front page. Pacific Press 2.qxd 10/11/01 1:39 PM Page xiii PREFACE Two events that occurred during the fall of 2000 while I was researching the history of Pacific Press pointed me toward an increas- ingly inescapable conclusion. The more I delved into the past, the more clearly recent events surrounding the partnership of the Vancouver Sun and Province came into context. As the most egregious example of the trend toward concentration of ownership that characterized the Cana- dian newspaper industry during the latter decades of the twentieth cen- tury, the amalgamated Vancouver dailies suddenly stood as a harbinger of what could be expected in the future. As objects of commodification, the news media have increasingly become the possessions of business people with overt political loyalties. It was perhaps inevitable that media outlets under such ownership would become instruments of political persuasion in what seems to be a return to the days of the “party press” from which newspapers evolved a century ago in their quest for a mass audience. Some scholars have noted that in the 1990s the press became transformed by a renewed political purpose. Paul Mongerson has dubbed the latest version the “power press,” because it acts not as a neutral con- veyor of objective information but as an advocate of political propa- ganda; not as a watchdog on powerful institutions in society, but as a “vigilante” and arguably the most powerful institution of all.1 The first event was an opportunity to question Neil Reynolds, the new editor of the Vancouver Sun, about his Libertarian beliefs and how they would affect news coverage by Vancouver’s leading daily. A journalist of enormous reputation, Reynolds made no secret of his political leanings or xiii Pacific Press 2.qxd 10/11/01 1:39 PM Page xiv xiv PACIFIC PRESS the fact he was once national leader of and a federal candidate for the Lib- ertarian Party of Canada, a right-wing fringe group devoted to the elimi- nation of government regulation. According to author Doug Fetherling, Reynolds, the son of a Methodist minister, “is fond of saying, with just a pinch of hyperbole, that like all sons of Methodist ministers, he was a communist at 16. He came to libertarianism from the left, rather than from the right, as is usual.”2 Fetherling, whom Reynolds had installed as “writer-in-residence” at the Kingston Whig-Standard back in the 1970s, recalled that his boss once announced he was “proud to be Canada’s most conservative newspaper editor at the head of Canada’s most left-wing daily newspaper.”3 Fetherling, now writing for Reynolds at the Sun under the name George, described the political position of libertarians in his 1993 history of the Whig-Standard, which was a respected and vigorous if somewhat quirky independent Ontario daily until its 1990 purchase by Southam.