Asper Nation other books by marc edge Pacific Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver’s Newspaper Monopoly Red Line, Blue Line, Bottom Line: How Push Came to Shove Between the National Hockey League and Its Players ASPER NATION Canada’s Most Dangerous Media Company Marc Edge NEW STAR BOOKS VANCOUVER 2007 new star books ltd. 107 — 3477 Commercial Street | Vancouver, bc v5n 4e8 | canada 1574 Gulf Rd., #1517 | Point Roberts, wa 98281 | usa www.NewStarBooks.com | [email protected] Copyright Marc Edge 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (access Copyright). Publication of this work is made possible by the support of the Canada Council, the Government of Canada through the Department of Cana- dian Heritage Book Publishing Industry Development Program, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit. Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Printing, Cap-St-Ignace, QC First printing, October 2007 library and archives canada cataloguing in publication Edge, Marc, 1954– Asper nation : Canada’s most dangerous media company / Marc Edge. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-55420-032-0 1. CanWest Global Communications Corp. — History. 2. Asper, I.H., 1932–2003. I. Title. hd2810.12.c378d34 2007 384.5506'571 c2007–903983–9 For the Clarks – Lynda, Al, Laura, Spencer, and Chloe – and especially their hot tub, without which this book could never have been written. CONTENTS Preface ix Introduction : The Asper Disaster 3 Chapter 1: Citizen Asper 9 Chapter 2: CanWest Rising 27 Chapter 3: Going Global 50 Chapter 4: The Black Plague 70 Chapter 5: Media Power 86 Chapter 6: Convergence 109 Chapter 7: The Gazette Intifada 131 Chapter 8: L’Affaire Russell Mills 152 Chapter 9: Dishonest Reporting 170 Chapter 10: Like Father, Like Children 190 Chapter 11: Media Bias 208 Chapter 12: The Press We Deserve 228 Conclusion: The Pictures in Our Heads 246 Appendix: The Asper Agenda 265 Notes 268 Bibliography 310 Index 320 v ii PREFA C E his book follows from my first –Pacific Press: The Unauthorized TStory of Vancouver’s Newspaper Monopoly – which was pub- lished in 2001. Because it was my doctoral dissertation, I had to end that narrative sufficiently far in the past for it to qualify as an aca- demic history. The end point I chose pushed the limits at only ten years earlier, and since 1991 momentous events had transformed the Vancouver Sun and my alma mater, The Province. Pacific Press had changed hands twice with Conrad Black’s 1996 takeover of par- ent Southam Newspapers, which he sold four years later to CanWest Global Communications. I was only able to touch on those develop- ments briefly in an updated preface to my dissertation. Many of my former colleagues at the Province confided that journalism at the Vancouver dailies had deteriorated sharply as a result. They urged me to write a sequel that would chronicle the regime of Black and his Vancouver-based lieutenant, David Radler. With my hands full writing the history of Pacific Press, I was only able to briefly research current events by chronicling some apparent political favoritism during the 2000 federal election.1 The following spring, David Asper’s infamous National Post col- umn defending prime minister Jean Chrétien from his accusers was published. The spectacle of a newspaper owner publicly scolding his own journalists for daring to delve into a scandal surrounding the prime minister was daunting indeed for press freedom. I had already accepted a position teaching at a university in Singapore, however, where I would spend three years. From that distance it was difficult to keep up with events back home. I managed to read reports, depressing as they were, on the Internet. Byline strikes broke out across the country and columnists quit in droves to pro- test the draconian editorial practices of the Aspers. Amidst the furor over the firing of Russell Mills in mid-2002, I returned home i x • asper nation on leave fully intending to go sailing and to stay out of the contro- versy. Instead, I began research into a money trail that led from the Aspers to journalism schools that should have housed their tough- est critics. In fact, as the beneficiaries of CanWest funding, some faculty members served as their staunchest supporters. I never did get out sailing that summer. A year teaching in Texas followed, during which I did some research into Black’s imploding newspaper empire. He and Radler had personally pocketed millions in questionable “non-compete” payments as part of the sale of Southam to CanWest, among other deals. The newspaper business in Canada, I well knew from my research, was non-competitive enough without owners paying each other to ensure their monopoly profits and political influence. A workshop on corporate governance of media companies hosted by media economist Robert Picard in Sweden was the perfect venue for presenting that research. My paper chronicled Black’s battle with the independent directors of Southam, who did what they could to block his takeover only to be branded an “obdurate rump.” The irony came in the subsequent collapse of Black’s house of cards. Hollinger International was the antithesis of good corporate gov- ernance, with Black’s wife Barbara Amiel and his political cronies, such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle, installed as directors. Perle, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defence, sat on Hollinger’s three-member executive committee but admitted to not even read- ing documents Black and Radler gave him to sign. Instead Perle spent most of his time masterminding the invasion of Iraq as head of the Pentagon’s volunteer Defense Policy Board.2 Thus, while I had no idea as yet that I would be asked to write a book about the intertwined tale of Southam, Black and the Aspers, I had already done much of the research. It was also published in such academic journals as Textual Studies in Canada, for which I chronicled Senator Keith Davey’s conclusion that Canadians get “the press we deserve” for failing to demand better. The Inter- national Journal on Media Management in Switzerland carried my account of stock market effects on Southam ownership. 3 Journalism & Mass Communication Educator ran my exposé of Canadian jour- nalism schools in 2004. The late Margaret “Peggy” Blanchard pub- lished my book review of Hidden Agendas in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. Its blaming of media bias on individual journalists, while absolving media owners, just didn’t fit with my Preface • xi understanding of the subject. Once I examined the research more closely, I understood why. David Spencer of the University of Western Ontario invited me to present my research on the 2003 Lincoln report on Canadian broad- castingto the 2005 Canadian Communication Association confer- ence, which his school hosted, and he even billeted me during my stay. He also published my paper earlier this year as “Convergence and the ‘Black News Hole’” in his new online peer-reviewed Canad- ian Journal of Media Studies.4 I am fortunate to have Dr. Spencer as a mentor. When I returned to Canada full-time that fall to teach for a year at bc’s newest university, Thompson Rivers, I began to learn more about the Asper family’s media machinations. Preparation for my lectures in the News and Media Business course I taught showed the appalling level to which journalism had fallen in Canada. That sorry state, it seemed from my research, was thanks largely to Win- nipeg’s first family of converged media. So when New Star Books publisher Rolf Maurer asked me in early 2006 if I was interested in writing a book about CanWest, I leapt at the chance. Such an impor- tant book had to be written, I decided, even if it meant taking a year off from my budding second career in teaching. The opportunity to write this book was one I could not pass up, and I thank Rolf for it. Finally, a bit of serendipity resulted in some valuable compara- tive research being conducted concurrently for Blackwell’s forth- coming International Encyclopedia of Communication. When asked if I would be interested in writing its entry on cross-ownership of media, I gladly agreed because I realized how relevant such research would be to this book. Examining how such laws have been chang- ing in countries around the world — and not changing in others, notably the us — has helped add valuable insight. It explained how removing a ban on cross ownership in Canada decades ago left the floodgates open for the tsunami of convergence to transform the country’s media landscape in 2000. When I submitted a draft manuscript in late 2006, Rolf had sev- eral valuable suggestions for improvement. In addition to telling the Asper story, I had decided to explore some issues I felt helped put it in context, such as media bias and convergence. Not only was Rolf all in favor of illuminating those aspects, he decided even more “theory” was needed to explain why such tight media control should concern Canadians. I thus added the Media Power chapter at his suggestion. It includes almost everything I have learned on x ii • asper nation the subject since I began studying it a decade ago. When I tell other scholars my publisher actually asked for more theory, not less, they shake their heads in amazement.