Received truth

Staff at The Northern Miner were downcast in November 2000, when we found out the trade press division of Southam, of which we were a part, had been cut out of the sale of Hollinger assets to televison network CanWest Global Communications. How unwanted we felt.

Now it appears editorial scribblers at the Miner may have dodged a bullet. CanWest Global has mandated one editorial a week, to be produced by Southam News Service with the effective imprimatur of CanWest’s head office in Winnipeg. Newspapers in the Southam fold must run the editorial, and (according to leaks from Southam newsrooms) the editorial becomes the paper’s official position, whatever the editorial board of the paper itself may think. (The policy has been dispensed with for the National Post, which did not run the group editorial last Dec. 6.)

We don’t seriously suppose that, had we remained part of the sale to CanWest, these editorials would have descended on the doormat of a lowly trade weekly such as ours. But the sudden command-and-control policy from the top of CanWest sets the teeth of anyone who cares about the quality of Canadian newspaper writing on edge.

The content of the editorial itself, which dealt with the forthcoming national budget and the tax treatment of charitable donations, has been criticized elsewhere; we would simply make the objection on principle that a newspaper group’s corporate head offices have no business setting editorial policy on any subject, ever. (In this, we differ from The Globe and Mail, which conceded that CanWest “own[s] the papers and set[s] the rules.”)

There is an irony here: during the period the Hollinger Group owned the Southam chain, critics warned darkly that Hollinger’s chairman, Conrad Black, would make the Southam dailies his personal forum for a right-wing vision of society. Editors who refused to toe the line would be dismissed, and replaced with others of a more complaisant bent. Editorial independence would be shattered. But now Hollinger and Black are gone from the Southam group, and none of the feared interference ever happened. It is happening instead at CanWest’s hands.

Black had his faults as a content provider, readily apparent to any good editor, but interference with editors and the careless operation of ideological steamrollers were not among them. CanWest may make its new editorials as decorous and unobtrusive as it likes, but the practice is damaging and insulting to its own papers and an arrogant affront to their readers.