The New Republic's odd new owner
Even though it's Canada's largest and most influential media conglomerate, it's likely that some staffers at The New Republic are still only vaguely aware of CanWest Global Communications, the Great North media giant that announced it had purchased the 93-year-old Beltway opinion journal.
The good news is that CanWest, run by the Asper family, is expected to beef up TNR's resources both in print and online. Yes, the magazine, whose circulation has cratered in recent years, is scaling back to just twice a month. But CanWest promises to redesign the magazine, introduce more illustrations, and try to make TNR look like a real consumer magazine. (TNR is the only stand-alone magazine amidst the multibillion-dollar media behemoth that's brimming with more than 100 Canadian newspapers and dozens of television and radio properties worldwide.)
That's the good news. The bad news for TNR staffers is that CanWest's recent history is littered with lawsuits, gag orders, and byline strikes, buffered by a steady stream of columnists, reporters, and editors who complain CanWest actively censors its employees who stray from the company's conservative, pro-war, pro-Israel blueprint. On paper, that's not a problem for The New Republic, since it was proudly pro-war and pro-Israel under its previous ownership. But TNR editor Franklin Foer told The New York Times that the CanWest deal cements the magazine's "center-left" philosophy. And more importantly TNR remains, in theory, a publication dedicated to open debate and would likely recoil at any kind of top-down editorial litmus test. Yet that's precisely what Canadian journalists have been complaining about for years with CanWest.
"The Asper family of Winnipeg is violating Canada's cherished tradition of a free media," wrote Haroon Siddiqui, a columnist for the Toronto Star, in 2002. "CanWest has spawned a culture of fear and self-censorship among journalists."
Writing for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2005, columnist Joel Connelly, looking across the border, noted that CanWest's "news coverage has been so slanted that Vancouver's daily papers should be read at a 45-degree angle. ... With its blatant biases and recent cuts in staffing, CanWest demonstrates the perils of having a daily paper monopoly in Seattle."
It will be curious to see how TNR, particularly during the upcoming election cycle, fares under the traditionally heavy-handed ownership of CanWest. Here's a look at the laundry list of conflicts that have arisen in recent years as CanWest tried to muzzle its own journalists:
Unfortunately, when it comes to reporting on the Middle East, CanWest outlets seem averse to "open public debate," with the Asper family often demanding editorial purity on the topic. CanWest is "unabashedly" pro-Israel, company executive Murdoch Davis once famously announced.
Indeed.
Following a deadly, anti-Israeli terrorist attack in Jerusalem in 2001, a CanWest chain-wide editorial announced "Howsoever the Israeli government chooses to respond to this barbaric atrocity should have the unequivocal support of the Canadian government" [emphasis added]. CanWest deplored "the usual hand-wringing criticism about 'excessive force' " and declared, "Nothing is excessive." (Papers were instructed not to publish columns or letters to the editor taking issue with that editorial.)
During an October 2002 speech, Izzy Asper eviscerated media coverage of the Middle East, complaining that "lazy," "sloppy," "stupid," and "anti-Semitic" reporters suffer from a pro-Palestinian bias. "'They have adopted Palestinian propaganda as the context of their stories. They have become partisans in, and not providers of, knowledge about this war against Israel," said Asper.
Montreal Gazette TV critic Peggy Curran was forced to appeal to union officials to get her review of a Middle East documentary critical of Israeli forces for targeting media working on the Palestinian side published. CanWest editors objected to her conclusions. Said Curran: "Usually [television] criticism is criticism, and you're allowed to say what you want. I can't think of another occasion when this has happened to me. Whether you know it or not, you start censoring yourself." Curran soon gave up her critic's job.
Meanwhile, Halifax Daily News columnist Peter March was fired, he said, because he had been critical of Israel. When Doug Cuthand, a columnist for the Leader-Post in Regina and the Star-Phoenix in Saskatoon, compared the plight of Palestinians to that of Canadian aboriginals, his column was spiked, a first in his 10 years with the newspapers. And Montreal Gazette's veteran reporter Bill Marsden once complained that CanWest bosses "do not want any criticism of Israel. We do not run in our newspaper op-ed pieces that express criticism of Israel and what it's doing."
In 2004, Reuters, the worldwide news agency, asked CanWest to drop the Reuters byline from some articles the chain published because CanWest editors were rewriting copy originating from the Middle East and inserting the word "terrorist" for phrases such as ''insurgents'' and ''rebels.'' CanWest though, had to publish one correction after it erroneously labeled several Palestinian killed by Israeli troops to be "terrorists" when in fact they were "fugitives." CanWest had to publish another correction after it inserted "terrorist" more than half-a-dozen times in an article describing fighting between Iraqis and United States forces in Fallujah.
In a statement following the announcement of the TNR purchase, CanWest declared, "In today's media environment, we need to place a priority on delivering quality content to readers when, where and how they want it. The New Republic is well positioned to do just that."
The question remains: Will CanWest owners allow The New Republic to do just that?
— E.B.
Posted to the web on Thursday, March 01, 2007 at 06:29 PM ET
