How Black Is The Future of Our Press?

Our topic this morning is timely because the employees of the Calgary Herald are on strike. This effort is opposed by one Conrad Black, who owns Hollinger which owns Southam which owns the Calgary Herald and, among many other papers, the Edmonton Journal.

The Herald’s reporters and editorial writers have recently formed a local of the Communications, Energy and Paper workers' Union, and it is seeking its first contract. A unionizing effort was made at the Journal also, which failed. To support their brothers and sisters in Calgary, a number of Journal editorial staff has stopped writing under their by-lines so that their columns cannot be used to help fill the space between advertisements in the Herald. One of those who thus refuse to be a strikebreaker or scab is sometime Edmonton Unitarian Linda Goyette. You haven’t seen her column in months and I bet you won’t until the strike ends successfully, if it ever does.

This strike, strange to tell, is not about wages and working conditions. It is about journalism as a profession. Conrad Black has been buying newspapers in Canada and elsewhere for a long time, and what he usually does, always saying that he won’t, is immediately to fire between a quarter and a half of the journalists who work there.

This has two profound impacts. It vastly increases the paper’s profitability, and at one and the same time, vastly diminishes the standard of journalism. But, with the Southam acquisition, Black is proceeding with strategic care.

He has chosen Calgary as the place to start implementing his agenda, as it is the most reactionary large city in the province with the most anti-union labour laws in Canada. Once the precedent of breaking the union is established there, the news staff on papers in other cities, unionized or not, Conrad Black hopes, will fall meekly into line.

What the striking writers are asking for is that lay-offs be made according to seniority, a common feature in union contracts. The paper is refusing to bargain on that at all. Conrad Black likes to have the privilege of firing whomever he wants, and often the senior people are the first to go, since they are the best paid, and the least malleable.

Since the Black takeover, the Herald has launched a formal program for their journalists to follow in their writing called “Fairness, Accuracy and Balance.” What FAB actually means, according to the workers, is for the paper to promote the interests of business over that of the public, adhering to a party line of management-imposed groupthink, which reflects the ideas of Conrad Black.

There are over a hundred journalists on the picket line. Inside, their work is being done by other Southam employees brought in from all over the country, plus a bunch of young rookies so eager for a jobs on a big city paper they are willing to take someone else's.

The real issue in this contest is ideological. Conrad Black says the strike is not aimed at winning workers’ rights, but is an attempt at a “left -wing coup d’etat.” His publisher says the company has “shown nothing but respect for the basic rights of workers,” and Black clarifies: “including the right not to be used as industrial cannon fodder by corrupt union leaders” whom he also calls “mindless socialists.”*

I believe the profession of journalism is a high calling indeed. It serves two very important functions. An informed electorate is essential in the operation of a democracy. And, as our opening words this morning suggest, you can only have a community if the individuals who constitute any group are somehow brought together in communication.

Not long after I retired as minister of the Unitarian Church of Edmonton, I found myself delivering the mail in a remote and somewhat scattered community of Fulham, northeast of Edson. As I was always meeting people from one end of the community to the other, I knew as well as anyone what was happening. When the Edson Leader appealed in its pages for someone to chronicle local events, I applied for and got the job (if job it could be called at ten cents a column inch.)

I figured I could promote the sense of community in Fulham, but I had another goal. I knew only a minority read the Leader because I delivered it in the mail. I also knew almost no one saw any other paper or magazine. And, it was a community which had long been isolated from the progress made in ideas in the twentieth century, cut off by poor to impassable roads and, until recently, electricity to power radios and TVs. In my first column, I promised not only to report any personal and community events that come to my attention, but also hold forth on any ideas which I might find traipsing through my “alleged mind.”

Privately, I hoped to drag twentieth-century ideas into the public domain, and to add a little spice to pages of the Edson Leader. Its publisher, former PC MP Doug Caston, scrupulously followed this policy: Never print anything which could possibly offend any subscriber or advertiser. Controversy was avoided like the plague. As a consequence, reading the Leader was like eating dehydrated mashed potatoes without butter, salt or pepper, slightly warmed over.

I found it absurdly easy to write what was universally acclaimed the most interesting feature in the paper though this was no great feat.

My third column was about public power. I’d overheard a Calgary Power lineman talking with Mary Conover in her general store in Shining Bank. He’d been to the farms of three local families and had threatened to climb their transformer poles and disconnect their electrical service if they didn’t pay up. They paid. In a public place, he named these “dead-beats.”

I reported this, without repeating the names. Our community was poor. Many still didn’t have any power. I was one of them. I also said that the rivers that flow through the province and the coal that lay underground - the rights to which were reserved to the crown, belonged to all of us, and I couldn’t see why we should pay the “Calgary Powerful” a profit above costs to receive our energy back in the form of electricity. If, like all the other provinces in Canada at that time, we had public power, more of us would receive it and be able to pay for it.

When I received my Leader the next week, my column wasn’t in it. I enquired of the Editor, Carol Alf, for the reason. Well, half-page ads sponsored by Calgary Power often appeared in the Leader, and you’d have to wonder why. Certainly not because we might choose to get our electricity from Edmonton Power, eh? - the CP had a monopoly. Why advertise then? Ah, for one reason, to purchase silence, or as Carol put it entirely without shame: “You can’t expect us to bite the hand that feeds us now, can you?” It was obvious that Carol was not acquainted with the highest ideals of journalism. If she had heard of the expression, the Freedom of the Press, she believed it belonged entirely to the guy who owned the Linotype machine and printing press. In the matter of debate over public power, it certainly seemed that she was right.

I’m going to tell you later how against all odds I resolved this apparent impasse, but I will say now that I wrote for the Leader for something like fifteen years after that, until I moved back to Edmonton, and I never had a column go unpublished again, even though I habitually referred to the Edson Leader as “the Follower” all of that time, a practice soon embraced by everyone else in town but Edson Leader management.

In the face of this outrageous insubordination, why did the publisher print my stuff? I think, for the same reason Time/Life’s founder Henry Luce, an archconservative, often printed articles by archliberal Canadian-born economist John Kenneth Galbraith. According to Galbraith, Luce found it more profitable to print the work of Liberals who could write than conservatives who could not. Caston noticed that, since the advent of my column, the number of subscriptions had gone up sharply. He even bought local radio spot announcements that said, “Buy the Edson Leader and read the Fulham Philosopher.” When folk called to complain about something I said, which was often, he told them mildly, “if you don’t like his column, just don’t read it.”

Our topic this morning is only incidentally the Calgary Herald strike. It is really about Conrad Black. To understand whom he is and what he is in a position to do is to understand a serious threat not only to Canadian journalism but also to the very existence of our country.

The battle in Calgary is a battle because Mr. Black loves battles. His mind is hard-wired to the military mentality. He frequently uses combat terminology to describe matters of business. His heroes are military men, many of them WWI generals who had the power to send thousands of men at a time to their certain and bloody deaths in order that they might momentarily occupy minute strips of pulverized ground, or then again, they might not.

I swear I am not making this up, but “When the Queen inspected the Governor General’s Foot Guards during her trip to Canada in the summer of 1997, she was followed by Conrad Black in Full Military Uniform,” although he is not in point of fact, a member of our military in any way, shape or form. “For an undisclosed sum of money, Black was allowed to dress up as an honorary colonel.”

Conrad Black loves power. It is no accident that his favourite General was Napoleon Bonaparte, who was, not incidentally, an Emperor also, with powers absolute. Napoleon’s portrait adorns Black’s principal office. It is next to that of Admiral Nelson. Nelson is there because Black, though Canadian born and bred, believes the English are superior to all other races. Black’s principle office is in London, the London.

According to the Big Black Book, by Maude Barlow and James Winter, what Black believes, Barbara Amiel, his wife, believes also, and vice versa. What else do this happy couple believe?

Strange to tell, I think the easiest way to describe this is to describe first what we as Unitarians believe.

“First and foremost, we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

We believe in justice, equity and compassion in human relations, in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process in society at large.

We believe in a world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.”

Well, both Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel have written their autobiographies, so we know in excruciating detail what they believe.

You know what we believe? Well, they don’t believe any of it.

They certainly don’t believe in equity in human relations. Inequity is the cornerstone of their belief. They love the London because there, aristocracy is understood and appreciated. In Black’s ruthless pursuit of profit and power, compassion is a soft, gooey leftist sentiment unworthy of great men like him.

“World community with peace, liberty and justice for all” sounds like communist drivel to both of them, I am certain.”

Newspapers at their best often reflect the conscience of the people. When Conrad Black buys your paper, conscience goes out the window. Why? Because, Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel do not believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. It isn’t just that they simply do not believe this. That does not do it justice. They believe, with all their hearts and minds that very few people indeed, a tiny privileged elite, are of worth and is deserving of dignity.

Amiel once visited Kenya on safari. She writes, “Our party was made up of three Americans and myself, with 11 Kenyans cooking and cleaning up for us as we “roughed it.” One night, a leopard killed one of them, a young boy, the cat ignoring she says, “the small print about game parks being places where predators and cows exist in an oyster of jolly multi-culturalism...Alas, now one protected leopard and a bright-eyed boy ... is gone. There isn’t much to say about it except to muse on the irony.”

If there is one theme that both of them return to time and time again it is feminism, to which they are indignantly opposed. Barbara Amiel in particular is outraged by this idea. She believes women should serve their traditional roles. She writes, (and I swear I am not making this up,) that women have from times immemorial sought as best they could with feminine wiles, to snare and wed men who are rich and powerful, and this is as it should be. She is actually proud of her success as a “gold-digger” (her term, not mine).

To this pair, homosexuality is a sickness, referred to variously as “neuro-pathology” and a “deviance, like necrophilia.” To them, same-sex marriages bear a similarity to bestiality. AIDS? “Today,” Amiel writes with regret, “the operative phrase seems to be we must not treat AIDS’ victims like lepers.”

It is hard to imagine that any woman could condone violence against women in this day and age, but Barbara Amiel does. “If we are going to accept the lifestyle choice of being gay, we should accept the lifestyle “choice” of a violent relationship. She is opposed to police intervention in “domestic strife between consenting adults.”

Child abuse OK? You bet! Discussing the 1984 Badgeley Report of Sexual Offences Against Children, she writes, if “an uncle occasionally fondles his niece when he tucks her into bed, for instance, does the committee honestly believe the child will suffer less psychological trauma when mother’s brother is reported ... and the family is disrupted? This is creating a greater problem, the destruction of family values and the family itself.”

Other unfortunates get no sympathy. Amiel writes that you should call a cripple a cripple, and Black says 400% of the population see themselves falling into one victim category or the other.

Their greatest scorn is reserved for their employees. Of journalists in general, Conrad Black was on record as early as thirty years ago, as seeing the pros of the print media as being “ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest.” He called them “aged hacks, decrepit and alcoholic.” His favourite appellation for journalists who belong to unions is “scum.”

Conrad Black and his wife believe it is ideology, right and left, which separates them from us. But I think ideologies are the embodiment of ideals. I do not think the acquisition of money and power, unrestrained by society in any way, is properly called an ideal, although it certainly seems the ideal situation for Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel. I think when you get far enough to the ideological right; you enter the realm of an altogether different parameter. There, right becomes wrong.

Hitler’s ideas were not just Fascist. They are wrong.

We could draw upon the model of class warfare but the continuum that has resonance for me is that of sickness/health. I think that what makes Black and Amiel so special, is illness.

Three mental illnesses, it seems to me jump off the pages of The Big Black Book at you. The first is “folie a deux.” This is where one person’s craziness is entirely and accurately reflected in the insanity of a partner. This is doubly dangerous, because where one person alone might have a dim perception that their warped view of reality is unique, and therefore suspect; when this view is constantly mirrored and mutually reinforced, it confirms to both mentally ill persons that their take on life is the correct one.

Second, I believe they are psychopaths. By their own words, it is clear they are indifferent to the pain of others, and even take pleasure in it. Conrad Black is never happier than when firing journalists, preferably en mass.

And third, and most obvious, Conrad Black is obsessed by power. He is a certifiable megalomaniac. Buying one newspaper is Israel, he said, ‘“I was buying a good deal of influence relatively cheaply.” His favourite film was likewise the favourite of Richard Nixon, "Patton." Incredibly enough, both Black and Nixon are blissfully oblivious to the fact that the whole point of the film “Patton” is that the General had gone bonkers; a mad fool, demented in precisely the same way that Nixon was and Black is. To them his rants seem perfectly normal, even grand.

This was the General Patton who went to a psychiatric ward of a military hospital crowded with men who had seen horrors of war that generals seldom see and who had been reduced to quaking husks shaken by fear. And wholly insensible to their pain, the General added insult to their agony, bellowing at them that they were cowards.

For his utter ruthlessness, Patton was famous or infamous, take your pick. To Richard Nixon, and to Conrad Black, he was an unblemished hero, not in spite of that ruthlessness but because of it. Strange, yet stranger still it is that any women would be drawn to them, but Pat Nixon and Barbara Amiel were, perhaps because they too were as cruel and hard as the men they admired.

If this is true, then the Amiel-Blacks are living, a megalomaniac’s dream come true, as they are well on their way to complete control of the press in this country.

Barbara Amiel’s column appears in MacLean’s every month, reaching half a million families there alone and her columns appear in 72 of our 105 dailies. She is a media executive as well, and her job description is enough to make a Unitarian’s blood run cold. She is Vice-President, Editorial Control of Southam.

Conrad Black owns, - the Vancouver Sun and the Vancouver Province, the Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald, The Regina Leader Post and Saskatoon Star Phoenix, the Windsor Star, the Ottawa Citizen, the English-language Montreal Gazette, and the French-language Le Soleil in Quebec City. In addition he owns all the daily newspapers in Newfoundland and PEI.

That is just the beginning of his power over the press. Using his control of Southam, Black engineered capture of what was once a genuine newsgathering cooperative, Canadian Press. It relays news from and to 86 of 105 dailies, and it decides what is newsworthy enough to relay, killing stories that would be embarrassments to Black or his business friends, and to a considerable extent putting what spin is initially given to any story. This often sticks, because many small papers print CP material uncritically, un-edited, and you’d swear, unread. It's the cheapest way of fill newsprint with news.

And there is the CP’s “Broadcast News” which feeds as it sees fit recorded material to 425 radio stations, 76 TV stations, and 142 cable outlets.

Southam also owns substantial interests in Cole's Bookstores and Chapters with 430 bookstores. Its 9 buyers largely determine whether a book published here or elsewhere will reach a national audience.

Finally, The National Post gives Black himself more direct control over national and international news than his ownership of the papers themselves, each of whom has a local publisher theoretically in charge. It also gives Black a paper of sorts in Toronto where he is otherwise shut out - except that Amiel's columns are run in the Toronto Sun.

Internationally, Black and his partners own or control hundreds of dailies and weeklies, including the London Daily Telegraph, the Jerusalem Post and the Chicago Sun Times. They are the third largest newspaper publisher in the world, and through the Chicago Sun-Times Company, have over 500 American papers, making him the largest publisher in the US.

If he purchases as expected the Winnipeg Free Press, which was early this week put up for sale along with all the other Thompson papers in Canada except the Globe and Mail, Black will have a paper in every major Canadian city.

What I am saying here can be summed up one simple sentence: Never have views so narrow, reached so wide an audience.

What is exactly wrong with this concentration in the power of the press?

In 1969, the owner of the Sherbrooke Record told the Davy Senate Committee on Mass Media that

“Further consolidation of monopolistic situations is reprehensible. Diversity of opinion and aggressive newsgathering tend to disappear with the disappearance of competition. Public opinion could become more of a hostage to private interests than a master to public policy.

If even Conrad Black says this, you can be sure it is true. Those were his words. Mind you, the Sherbrooke Record was the only paper he owned then.

If the Herald strike fails, In Alberta, we could see a day when a dream I happen to share with local right wing columnist Lorne Gunther may come to pass. We both imagine that Gunther could some day become publisher of the Edmonton Journal. Of course, for him this is a fondest dream, for me and I expect most of you, a nightmare.

Nationally, just one of the many worst-case scenarios might be that Black and his papers could throw their weight behind the winner in the contest to become the leader of the Canadian Alliance Party nee “Reform,” particularly if that leader had any credibility in Ontario. Should CAP receive overwhelmingly favourable press coverage all across the country, in the very next election we might well see, say. Stockwell Day elected as Prime Minister.

The impact in Quebec of Preston Manning’s Francophobe followers with their hands on the levers of power is not at all hard to predict. It is all but certain that then Lucienne Bouchard's fondest dream would quickly be realized in a referendum, likely with a huge majority. In the hands of the new Federal leaders, the divorce would be especially confrontational, with the newspapers likely clamouring for a solution imposed by force of arms. It is a situation, in Conrad Black’s imagination at least, I fear he would feel required to put on his fake soldier suit again and get himself aboard a white horse, saber in one hand, the other placed inside his jacket.

As our country teeters on the brink of civil war, the next event could well be a “stabilization” of the situation by the United States, utilizing the helicopter-borne Mountain Division stationed at Fort Drum, New York, located for that very purpose something like sixty miles south of Ottawa. If so, they will be welcomed with open arms by banner headlines in the Ottawa Citizen, for Conrad Black loves all things American nearly as much as all things English and has since he applauded their war on the people of Vietnam.

And that is just a political scenario. The future of the very character and culture of Canada is just as threatened. God knows what Conrad Black’s dreams are for the world, but you can bet he has some.

What can we do? I think we should support the Herald strikers if we can with our presence on the picket line and by our contributions. We can cancel our subscriptions to the National Post, and/or Edmonton Journal as I have done, telling the person who answers why we are doing so. Many readers have already done this, according to the nice lady I talked to there. We can urge our MLAs to pass stronger labour laws with arbitrator-imposed first contracts in cases where the employer refuses to bargain in good faith. Such laws are on the books in Saskatchewan, and the labour dispute at the Regina Leader-Post is much more apt to end successfully because of this. Alas, it is probably only though a change in government that Alberta will receive this blessing but we could work towards that.

Most promisingly, we can urge MPs and the PM in Ottawa to pass anti-monopoly mass media legislation. In the House of Commons on Tuesday, in response to a question by Saskatchewan NDP MP Bill Blaikie, the Prime Minister suggested that his government might very well bring in such legislation. He deserves our support for sure.

But I wonder if any of you will do any of those things? You may think we are hopelessly out-gunned and that all is lost already.

I don’t agree. The more powerful Conrad Black gets, you have to think the more alarmed the public must become.

And there are three events in particular that give me hope. One: they lost The Battle of Seattle at the WTO meetings, which you would have thought had to be won by the world’s major corporations, in a remarkable upset to ordinary folk using the Internet to cooperate, Maude Barlow among them. The “irresistible” sweep to corporate power hit a real speed bump there.

Two: The Government of Canada recently announced it was subsidizing professional hockey. Why not? With its majority, it could do as it pleases or so it was thought. But the very next day, it was pronouncing this initiative dead as a doornail. It didn’t take rioting in the streets to change the government’s mind either, just ordinary folk picking up their telephones and saying “no - no to millions of tax dollars for people who are already millionaires.”

Three: Much less recently, you will remember the Edson Leader’s Carol Alf saying she’d never bite the hand that fed her, Calgary Power?

In my next column, as an aside, I explained that the missing column was one I had actually written but it was on a topic judged by the paper to be too hot for the good people of Edson to consider. However, if you really wanted to read it, I had posted it on the east wall of Mary Conover’s Store in Shining Bank, and you could drive out there (over 40 miles of gravel each way) and read it for yourself if you want to.

So sure was the powers-that-be in the Edson Leader that the power of the press belonged to them, that they printed this without a worry. It turned out this was a big mistake. By seeking to avoid controversy, they had created one. I don’t think anyone drove those eighty miles of gravel, but a lot of people picked up their telephones. It was ringing off the hook down at the Follower.

It rapidly emerged that there was only one way Doug Caston and Carol Alf could make all those phone calls short ones with happy endings, and that was this: They suddenly found themselves promising they would print my too-hot-to-handle column in the very next issue in full without changing a single word, and they did.

It happened then, and it can obviously happen again: The axiom spawned by the report of the Davy Royal Commission on Newspapers thirty years ago is as true today as it was then:

“Freedom of the Press is not a property right of owners. It is a right of the people.”

And I am here to tell you that if you can make this high concept fly in the oil-enriched redneck town of Edson, it will fly anywhere. But you have to do something to get it off the ground.

-30-

* SOURCES

Many quotations in this work are from the Globe and Mail and some from the Edmonton Journal, but the great bulk of them are from The Big Black Book, The Essential Views of Conrad and Barbara Amiel Black, by Maude Marlow and James Winter, Stoddard, 1997.

CONTACTS

The Strike Headquarters of the Calgary Herald workers currently on the picket line is:

CEOPU 115A,
106 Meridian Road NE,
PO Box 37009,
#817 116 19 St. NE,
Calgary, AB, T2E 8V1

The telephone number is (403) 207-1554
Web site: www.heraldunion.com

THE CHURCH
Westwood Unitarian Congregation is located at:
11135 65 Avenue
Edmonton, AB
T6H 1W3
Phone: 780-434-5819
e-mail: info@westwoodunitarian.ca
Web site: www.westwoodunitarian.ca

Mr. Wrigley retired from the ministry many years ago. At the time of this presentation, he was an active member of the Westwood Unitarian Congregation.
He now attends the Edmonton Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers.)

Added to Westwood's archives October 20, 2008