The tawdry fall of the Postmedia newspaper empire

[Oscar]

The tawdry fall of the Postmedia newspaper empire

[ http://www.nationalobserver.com/2015/11 ... per-empire ]

By Bruce Livesey in News | November 24th 2015

EXCERPT:

Last year, Greenpeace stumbled across a Powerpoint presentation that someone had leaked on-line. [ http://www.vancouverobserver.com/news/p ... s-de-souza ] Produced by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) for Postmedia’s board of directors in 2013, the presentation proposed a close alliance between the media company and the oil industry’s main lobby group. “We will work with CAPP to amplify our energy mandate and to be a part of the solution to keep Canada competitive in the global marketplace,” it said. “Postmedia will undertake to leverage all means editorially, technically and creatively – through the Financial Post, Postmedia market newspapers and affiliated media partners – to further this critical conversation.” It’s unclear if this alliance ever materialized, although Postmedia said it would never surrender editorial control.

In December of 2013, the Vancouver Sun published a profile of an Enbridge vice-president, who extolled the merits of the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline that would run from the oil sands to the B.C. coast.

Vancouver-based economist Robyn Allan noticed that the article claimed Canada was losing $50-million a day by not having enough pipeline capacity – a sum Allan knew to be fictitious. So she wrote an op-ed piece for the Sun explaining why. “The editor was going to print it,” she recalls, until he discovered the story Allan was responding to was, in actuality, paid advertising by Enbridge – although not marked as such. “It was an advertisement posing to be journalism,” says Allan. “So he could not print my piece because it was advertising.” [ . . . . ]


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Citizen Shame: Politics, Paul Godfrey and Postmedia’s humiliation

[ http://ipolitics.ca/2015/11/12/citizen- ... miliation/

By Michael Harris | Nov 12, 2015 8:59 pm

EXCERPT:

Enough of the Globe and Mail‘s obsequious cheerleading for a tired and corrupt government — including the absurd suggestion that Canadians should vote for the Conservatives but dump the leader. The biggest print players in the country simply disgraced themselves.

But nobody earned that disgrace better than the Postmedia brass. The company’s CEO, Paul Godfrey, violated the core principle on which journalism is built: free speech. His offenses were multiple. The National Post spiked a piece from columnist and then-editorial page editor Andrew Coyne, presumably for writing something that didn’t conform to the Post’s program.

Coyne was smothered for having the wrong opinion. I have news for Mr. Godfrey: There is no such thing as the wrong opinion — not in a free society and not in a good newspaper.

In my opinion, Godfrey had a Pravda moment. While it’s customary for the owner of a newspaper to decide the issue of editorial endorsements at election time (the so-called proprietor’s prerogative), Godfrey imposed support for Stephen Harper on all of the sixteen major papers in the chain [ . . . . ]