“I told you so”
Newspaper Ownership in Canada and the Kent Commission Twenty Years Later
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20460872 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richard Keshen, Kent MacAskill |
| Year | 2000 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 315-325 |
| Publication date | 2000-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Review of Canadian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0272-2011 • E-ISSN: 1943-9954 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02722010009481056 |
| OpenAlex | W2094695269 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 3 |
I told you so was part of Tom Kent's reply when asked recently about the state of the industry in Canada (Cobb 1996b, A1). Kent, Chairperson of the 1980 Royal Commission on Newspapers, might be forgiven his expression of self-satisfaction. Deprecated and dismissed when the Commission's report first appeared, Kent and his report are now being cited for their prescient analysis. Shelved as either dangerous or impracticable, the Commission's recommendations are now being seriously debated. This paper aims to explain this renewed interest in the Kent Commission. Background The Royal Commission on Newspapers, popularly known as the Kent Commission, was created in 1980 in response to allegations of collusion following the same-day closings of the Thomson-owned Ottawa Journal and the Southam-owned Winnipeg Tribune. These closings left each company--Southam in Ottawa and Thomson in Winnipeg--with monopolies in their respective cities. The closings were followed by expressions of public concern over concentration in Canada and worries that the fourth estate was not fulfilling its democratic function. The Commission's mandate was to explore these concerns and make recommendations for improvement. At the time of the Kent Commission, these two chains, Thomson and Southam, were dominant. Together, they accounted for 77 percent of the 117 dailies in Canada. Significantly, this proportion was up from 58 percent just ten years previously when the first government inquiry on newspapers had been established under Senator Keith Davey. In 1980 Thomson owned the largest number of Canadian newspapers. As well as publishing the Globe and Mail, Canada's only national at the time, Thomson owned forty other dailies. The Southam chain, on the other hand, had the largest total daily circulation, capturing 32.8 percent of the English Canadian newspaper-buying public (Canada, Royal Commission 1981, Chapter 1). The Kent Commission was generally critical of Canada's business, confirming the fears that instigated the Commission. Kent reserved his harshest criticism, however, for the Thomson chain. While praising Thomson for maintaining the quality of the Globe and Mail, the Commission saw the Thomson-controlled smaller dailies as epitomizing the worst aspects of corporate ownership in the print media. The Kent Commission argued that Thomson was squeezing the quality from most of its newspapers in exchange for higher profits. As well, the Thomson conglomerate owned large assets outside the business. Kent argued that Thomson ran its newspapers much the way it operated its other businesses--profit was its dominant goal. By contrast, Southam (then owned by the Southam family) was focussed primarily on newspapers, and quality was not necessarily sacrificed to profit. As Kent put it, Southam still had a newspaper conscience: They spend, on the contents of their newspapers, many millions of dollars a year that are by the simple criterion of the bottom line, entirely wasted (Kent 1982). A paper bought out by Thomson, on the other hand, inevitably becomes a little thinner and the share of advertising increases as a percentage of the newspaper's total space (Kent 1982). Cost-cutting measures are frequently introduced, especially with regard to editorial and news space. These cost-cutting measures occur in an already highly profitable industry, Kent argued. The Thomson conglomerate was (and is) owned by Ken Thomson. But the philosophy behind Thomson newspapers seems to have come from Roy Thomson, Ken's father and founder of the Thomson empire. Roy Thomson famously said that owning television stations and daily newspapers in Canada is like owning money-making machines--only with ownership, unlike television, one doesn't need a license (Siegel 1996, 123). Focusing on ownership, the Kent Commission predicted conglomerate ownership would increase in the 1980s and 1990s
Commission · Fourth Estate · Mandate · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Publishing · Canadian Identity and History · History · Law · Public Administration
| Citations per year | 0.15 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2013 - 2025 (13) |
| Highly cited | No |