In addressing "media ownership," regulators focus on that which matters least
by George Jonas
CanWest Publications
May 28, 2003
Media ownership has become a hot topic again. It's a subject that rises to the surface periodically, in this country and elsewhere, notably in the United States. In February this year McGill University held a conference entitled "Who Controls Canada's Media?" A six-person Senate Committee, headed by Senator Joan Fraser, a former newspaper editor, will begin another series of public hearings in the fall.
One argument voiced in the debate sometimes is that owners don't matter. People who favour little or no regulation often suggest that the tone and content of newspapers and broadcast programs are determined by writers, producers, and editors. These expert programmers are, in turn, influenced mainly by their own ideas and the spirit of the times. What really governs the media is the socio-political climate, along with the creative ideas and expertise of media craftspeople.
Proprietors do little except pay the bills and rake in the profits, if any. There's little else they can do. Newspapers and TV stations are run a) by the demands of the marketplace and b) by the journalists who work in them. Since owners don't set the tone of their franchises, regulating cross-ownership or foreign ownership is a futile attempt to tug at a lever that's not hooked up to anything.
I think this is a half-truth. No doubt, climate is important, and while owners can choose programmers and editors, they can't do much about the spirit (or taste) of their times. I certainly have a dim view of government interference in the media -- the best bureaucrats scare me more than the worst proprietors -- and also agree that regulations about cross-ownership or foreign ownership are attempts to push buttons that are connected to nothing. But I don't think that this is because "owners don't matter."
Proprietors matter all right, but what matters about them is their character, their intelligence, their erudition, and their business acumen. What matters about them is their judgement and their taste. This goes to the heart of the issue, because what matters about owners, what makes one as different from the other as night and day, isn't subject to any proposed -- or any conceivable -- government regulation.
Governments cannot possibly regulate the character, learning, or business sense of proprietors. They can't regulate their IQ's or their taste. This being so, they can't regulate anything about them that matters. Even in theory, they could only regulate things about owners that matter very little.
If, for instance, a government were to give up on liberal democracy and Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it could theoretically regulate a media proprietor's gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or political allegiance. At present, no one is proposing such regulations in Canada, but the point is that even if someone did, the regulations would be about qualities that matter next to nothing. A proprietor's suitability is almost totally independent from his or her gender, religion, ethnicity, and so on.
Here's the point. If there's one thing that matters even less about proprietors than their gender or religion, it's their nationality -- the very thing governments are proposing the regulate. It's worth repeating this. Politicians and functionaries aren't proposing to touch on anything that genuinely matters, such as character, because they can't. They're not even proposing to touch on things that matter very little, such as sexual orientation. They're proposing to regulate only what is truly meaningless, what matters exactly nothing, and that's an owner's nationality.
In fact, when talking about "foreign ownership," regulators aren't even thinking of nationality in any profound sense. They're only thinking of current citizenship. They don't mean cultural influences, root experiences, or ethnic allegiances that may have shaped some owner in his or her formative years, and may, in theory, amount to an alien influence in Canada. I'd have zilch sympathy with such notions, but at least they'd make some nativist or xenophobic point. As it is, they're just pointless. If an Australian takes out Canadian papers for business reasons he's welcome as a media proprietor; if he doesn't, he's is to be kept out as a foreigner. The same guy, with the same assets, ideas, tastes, intentions, the works. Talk about a button connected to nothing.
One could go on -- the bugbear of "cross-ownership" is a similarly meaningless regulatory preoccupation -- but the point I'm trying to make is simply that owners do matter. They matter a great deal, only in ways entirely different from what some politicians, bureaucrats, or public policy activists believe.