Source : National Post

'What matters is the fact that control of the media is passing into fewer and fewer hands … This country should no longer tolerate a situation where the public interest in so vital a field as information is dependent on the greed or goodwill of an extremely privileged group of businessmen."

The above comment was not taken from Tuesday's decision by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission regarding new media-concentration regulations. But it could have been. The sentiments are the same.

Rather, the warning was taken from the original source document of the modern media-concentration hysteria movement, the 1970 Davey report by the Canadian Senate. It called for the establishment of a Press Ownership Review Board that would have the power to approve or reject media takeovers and mergers. The Liberal majority recommended, too, that the board operate from the presumption that "all transactions that increase concentration of ownership in the mass media are undesirable and contrary to the public interest."

To demonstrate how outdated such thinking is, consider that when Trudeau campaign guru, Senator Keith Davey, chaired his investigation, the Ford Maverick cost $1,995. Bill Hewitt was calling Leafs games on Hockey Night in Canada and the team was just three years from its last Stanley Cup win. (After this season, it'll be 41.)

James Cross and Pierre La-porte were kidnapped by the FLQ, the Vietnam War was five years from its end, Watergate hadn't happened yet and Woodstock had taken place just two years earlier.

Anyone who danced at his high school grad that year -- the #1 hit being Bridge Over Troubled Water-- would now be just two years away from early retirement.

Much has changed in the nearly 40 years since, but not in the mindset of the CRTC nor those economic nationalists who lobbied hard for Tuesday's decision.

The ruling was spurred, in part, by Canwest's takeover of Alliance Atlantis. (Canwest owns the National Post.) In announcing the decision to limit media companies to owning at most two radio stations, a television station and a newspaper in the same city, CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein said the commission's goal was "to make sure there is a plurality of voices and a diversity of programming.''

Do commissioners truly believe a government regulator can do a better job of providing diversity than the 500-channel universe?

Alliance Atlantis's Showcase channel, for instance, is the only Canadian network, including the CBC, to air a prime-time schedule made up entirely of Canadian-made dramas. It's History Television airs more Canadian history programming than the CBC ever did. Sure it has channels that seem to offer nothing but episodes from the CSI franchises, but it also operates the Independent Film Channel, which shows alternative Canadian films, Discovery Health, Food Network, Home and Garden TV, Slice and National Geographic.

Is there more original Canadian jazz and blues programming on CBC than on CanWest's Cool TV? Did indoor lacrosse become popular thanks to a CRTC edict that Canadian networks devote a set percentage of their schedules to the sport? No. As new, private sports channels scrambled for content, Rogers Sportsnet and The Score hit on lacrosse, exposing it to a national audience for the first time.

Were Canada's hundreds of thousands of hardcore "football" fans well served before Sportsnet, Fox Sports World Canada, GolTV and Setanta? Of course not. And while regulated networks had arts programming, culture talk and documentaries, they had nothing next to the likes of Bravo!,Biography, Booktelevision and the Documentary Channel.

The CRTC, though, believes that a single, myopic, Ottawa bureaucracy intent on pleasing special interest groups is better capable of preserving "diversity" than even a handful of private media owners who have millions of consumers to please. Ludicrous.

© National Post

Related Documents:

October 16, 2007 - Podcast - FRIENDS presentation to the CRTC on the Diversity of Voices proceeding

September 21, 2007 - Policy Brief - Presentation to the CRTC Diversity of Voices Proceeding [PN CRTC 2007-5+41]
FRIENDS tells the CRTC BDUs have a huge impact on diversity of voices and should be a focus of the CRTC's review.