This timely book contributes to ongoing debates in Canada about media ownership. The opening chapters summarize government responses to concentrated media ownership since the 1970s and survey some academic studies on the issue. The study's carefully compiled data on the influence of changes in ownership on content poses a strong challenge to those who see media moguls as using the media to pursue their own ideological and corporate agendas. Journalistic values, organizational realities and the relentless challenge of new technologies severely constrain such action, claim Soderlund, Hildebrandt and two others who contribute to this volume, Ron Wagenberg and Walt Romanow. Perhaps the best chapters in the book are those dealing with the creation by CanWest, one of Canada's largest media organizations, of its ill-fated National Editorial Policy and the dismissal of Ottawa Citizen publisher Russell Mills.
The study focuses almost exclusively on “the impact of … ownership on content and ideological spin” (75). In other words, do media owners today, like the press barons of yore—the Northcliffes, the Hearsts, the McClatchys, the Siftons and so on—turn the media into their own mouthpieces? Based on a huge amount of original, detailed and often rich evidence, the authors conclude that content is weakly affected by changes in ownership. And on balance, whatever changes do occur fall randomly on the positive and negative side of the evaluative ledger. The evidence is, they repeatedly state, “mixed and inconclusive” (43).
Soderlund and Hildebrandt challenge some of the hyperbolic claims of owner influence made by some critics, but they misrepresent the positions of critics and their own work is severely flawed. I feel a bit like Todd Gitlin must have when he reassessed the “minimal effects” media research tradition. In a seminal article, “Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm” (Theory and Society 6 [1978]: 205–53), Gitlin argued that whilst overblown claims of the media's ability to change people's opinions and behaviours had been debunked, a reevaluation of “classic media effects studies” revealed many instances where influence was significant. In addition, he argued that the dominant interpretation of “no change equals no effects” idea was flawed because, after all, perhaps the main power of the media lay primarily in conserving the status quo.
I am reminded of Gitlin because in this study of media ownership there are also many instances cited where ownership changes have had a significant impact; the authors just don't compile them in any coherent way. Moreover, in one passage they say that part of the reason they could not detect any significant changes might be because the ideological orientation of coverage of the newspapers contained in their study sample already had a ‘conservative tilt’ before switching owners. While they assume that this lack of change supports their claims, maybe the fact that a change in media ownership preserved rather than shook up the ideological status quo might be just as worth examining. This kind of methodologically induced myopia pervades the study.
The authors do not ignore all instances where owner influence is evident. The accounts of CanWest's National Editorial Policy and its firing of Ottawa Citizen publisher Russell Mills are two such examples that the authors address. However, their analysis is marred by an underlying sense that we should not be unduly worried because the editorial policy soon died on account of its own stupidity and that the Russel Mills affair was one of those exceptions that prove the rule. Moreover, there is also no need to worry if, the authors claim, owners' actions can be tempered by a dose of social responsibility. No structural regulations. No ownership limits. Just the good will of media moguls. In an age of corporate kleptocracy and business scandals, such recommendations border on the naïve.
My aim is not to heap scorn on media owners and I think the authors' defence of Conrad Black and the Asper family raise points that are worthy of debate. For example, they argue that unlike the unrelentingly dire portraits of Conrad Black painted by some critics, Black was no Neanderthal bent on purging newsrooms to achieve ideological purity throughout the vast Southam chain of papers that he amassed in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, he was a connoisseur of fine journalism, dedicated to the craft. According to the authors, Black raised the quality of journalism in Canada. Editorial interventions did occur, but they were rare, limited to the Big 5 metropolitan papers under his control in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa and Montreal, and penned personally and with class by Lord Black. Such, claim the authors, is a perfectly legitimate right for a media owner.
This may be all true and reasonable (although the jury is still out). The problem, however, comes as the authors decide that, in contrast to their intellectual foes on the left, they will pen some homilies of reverence to the families that run Canada's media firms. The postscripts to chapters 4 and the conclusion will irritate some readers (including this reviewer) as we are admonished to defer judging Lord Black's criminality in the face of corruption charges in the US and as we are treated to a touching eulogy to Izzy Asper, “founding father” of CanWest. An investigation of Lord Black's current predicament would have been more apt; and eulogies to the powerful in the context of critical issues have a cloying quality. Overall, this style of writing, coupled with tepid solutions drawn from a hoary journalistic paradigm (Four Theories of the Press), sadly undermine the credibility of this book as a scholarly document.
Even taken on their own terms, the range of media content the authors analyze is limited. Premised on a narrow conception of politics—defined largely as what happens at each of the three levels (municipal, provincial and federal) of electoral politics—the content analysis is not well suited for the task it is assigned. For example, while there may be minor shifts, or none at all, in the quantity or tone of media coverage of political parties, Parliament and leaders, current research tends to explore how elites from these institutions try to “frame” the news as a more appropriate method for grasping the dynamics of media power. Other broader measures are also ignored. How, for example, do changes in media ownership affect the allocation of resources—capital, technological and people—within media organizations, the kinds and quantity of content they create, the adoption of new media technologies and formats, the proportion of resources used to finance debt versus other more “productive” uses? Do changes in media ownership lead to greater or lesser reliance on, as Oscar Gandy referred to them, information subsidies—the funneling of public relations materials by government and corporate interests to cash-strapped media organizations? The mea culpas by The New York Times and The Washington Post last summer for such behaviour and the skewing impact it had on their coverage of the Iraq War highlight this phenomenon and its nasty implications for journalism and democracy. Yet, such issues are nowhere to be found in this book, obscured as they are by a “hyper-scientistic” style that tries to thread all media ownership issues through the eye of a needle (content measurement) and which is likely to cause most readers' eyes to glaze over.
The big problem at the core of this book is whether the exclusive focus on the “impact of … ownership on content and ideological spin” (75) is acceptable. I do not believe it is. The concept of ideology has been debated for the last quarter of a century and often found wanting. It often serves more as a term of abuse than analysis. Studies that take ideology as a core concept are, in my view, more likely to resemble and reinforce their authors' prejudices than they are to further our grasp of media political economy. While the limited range of critics assailed in the present volume demonize the rapacious media barons, the authors apologize for the owners. Though the critics see owner influence as omnipotent and ominous, Soderlund and Hildebrandt discover “mixed and inconclusive evidence” (43). In short, the first group swings from the left while these authors punch from the right.
Ironically, Soderlund and Hildebrandt also share many theoretical and methodological views with their intellectual foes. Efforts to find direct links between media ownership and impacts on content, or ideological spin, rely on a circumspect instrumentalist view of power. Yet, in complex capitalist economies and large-scale organizations, such an approach garners little support from either structuralist/systems theoretical perspectives or more hermeneutically oriented approaches. A structuralist view, for instance, focuses on how influence can be exercised through the ability to control the allocation of material and symbolic resources and to set corporate policy. It might also look at how ownership affects the allocation of resources between different media along the lines sketched above. It might also ask about “ownership types.” In particular, we might wonder why a relatively archaic type of “owner/family-controlled” firm characterizes the media business in this country versus the tendency in most other countries (except for the media oligarchs of South America) for media to look like other modern capitalist firms, i.e., publicly traded and relatively widely held. Lastly, we might also consider, as do, for instance, Lawrence Lessig, Robin Mansell and others, how ownership influences the design, organization, feel and overall evolution of media technologies and networks. In short, this book gets nowhere close to exploring the range of issues involved. In the words of the “media biz,” content is not king.
