I have sleep issues. Here's why.

January in Canada consists of two main rituals: cold, dark mornings back at the office after an all-too-short winter vacation, and fighting a mighty turkey-and-booze hangover that you’ve been staving off for the better part of a month (usually by consuming more turkey and booze).  Long story short, the ringing in of the New Year is typically concomitant with suffering the fallout of unheeded excess and a flippant attitude toward consequence.

This past January, one of Canada’s biggest media conglomerates, CanWest Global, woke up to its own staggering New Years hangover. Unlike the rest of us though, CanWest couldn’t just chase away a headache and a weak stomach with a fistful of ibuprofen and a hearty breakfast. They had bigger problems. Namely, teetering on the edge of collapse.

CanWest is one pillar in the Canadian media “triopoly,” a group of immense media conglomerates that provide our nation with the vast majority of its news and entertainment. CanWest, as of 2008, maintained control over a host of specialty cable TV channels such as the Food Network, HGTV, Fox Sports World, History Television, IFC Canada, National Geographic, the Showcase Network, and all Global television outlets. Add to this their newspaper empire made up of 13 major regional and national dailies such as the Calgary Herald, the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post, and a stake in major online outlets like Canada.com, and you’ve got one seriously hearty diet.

For a while, the conglomeration strategy held up. CanWest, in stable economic times, happily chugged along, acquiring exclusive rights to broadcast popular American television programs, folding smaller outlets into their corporate structure, and cheerfully adhering to a very obvious pro-business bias, championed by the company’s owners, the Asper dynasty. But as any holiday reveller can attest, there’s only so much you can consume before your body decides to give out. And sure enough, after years of reckless acquisitions and mergers, and increasingly poor management practices (extravagant salaries for upper management while local newsrooms suffered), even through flagging economic conditions, CanWest found itself struggling to support its appetite. Call it the spins.

In the final quarter of 2008, the company posted a $3.7 billion debt and a $33 million loss. In the following year, CanWest cut over 1000 jobs, and scaled back local operations significantly, funnelling news through a predominantly national and standardized lens, and seriously undercutting the availability of local news. In the first three months of 2009 alone, CanWest and the other major Canadian media conglomerates, CTV Globemedia, Torstar, and Quebecor, collectively cut approximately 1300 jobs, again drastically slashing the number of skilled journalists on the ground, working to tell the stories of our communities. Thanks to the appetite of conglomerates like CanWest, Canada is now struggling through waning local representation, and more standardized wire-style information. CanWest’s glut has become all of our burden to bear.

Clearly, this is more than an economic or corporate issue. This is a matter of CanWest, and the other Canadian majors, through conglomeration, making a move to become national agenda-setters on key policy issues. This is about cannibalizing as many media outlets as possible to expand the corporate bottom line (backfire!), with the ultimate consequence of radically hindering diversity and democratic debate in the Canadian media. This is about people, ideas, and power as much as it is about money. For example, in December 2001, the Aspers announced that all CanWest newspapers would contain “national editorials:” standardized critical commentary coming from a single source, with a stated pro-business, pro-Israel stance. Workers at the Montreal Gazette issued an open letter to the company decrying the decision and published it online. CanWest papers ignored the story. The journalists were ordered to shut down the website on threat of termination of employment, and were put under a gag order, which was then extended to all CanWest print and broadcast newsrooms in Canada.

CanWest used to be our country’s largest media company- one of our most powerful means of knowing and understanding this world- and they have outwardly muzzled their journalists, hindered free speech, and gagged an entire system of national communication to advance their own economic and ideological agendas.

Luckily, it seems karma does have some bearing on giants. On January 8^th, 2010, CanWest, in an attempt to save its newspapers, put the entire division into Chapter 11. For many, this seemed like a boon. Maybe if CanWest was forced to give up its hold on some of its subsidiaries, we could have more diverse television offerings and maybe even competitive local dailies in major Canadian cities! A novel concept if ever there was one!

Unfortunately, the reality that has emerged doesn’t quite sync up with this potential. Who has come to the aid of CanWest but Shaw Cable. In addition to being one of the Canada’s four major Internet service providers, Shaw carries 10 specialty TV stations, 3 CBC affiliate stations, 2 pay TV stations, 53 radio stations, controls Star Choice satellite TV, and like the company it’s now helping to revive, has been little help in creating a competitive, diverse communication industry in Canada. In many regions, Shaw carries local television programming, for which they receive tax-payer funding. Shaw, however, has a nasty habit of turning community TV stations into corporate outlets for their own programming and promotional content, all while keeping the money Canadians are paying to them for the production and carriage of local content.

To get their papers out of hock, CanWest has decided to sell off every single one of its TV stations and specialty channels to Shaw, in a deal worth an estimated $2 billion. This is a supremely lousy idea. Such a deal effectively gives Shaw vertical control over a large chunk of the television industry in Canada. They now have their fingers in the production, distribution, and carriage pies.  In 1948, deals like this were outlawed in the United States under a ruling known as the Paramount Decree, which forbid motion picture companies from vertically integrating. That is, no longer could a production studio also own a distribution company and an exhibition branch. It was baldly obvious, even mid-century, that such a structure chokes out competition, gives a single company undue authority to overcharge their patrons for basic services, and drastically reduces the quality of content being produced.

And yet here we are, more than 60 years later: a company struggling to stay afloat thanks to a binge model of growth is saved by another company that will now own the means of content production, and the very cables that carry that content into our homes; as I said before, a supremely lousy idea.

These kinds of mergers are precisely the impetus for the media democratization movement, which emerged in the United States in the 1990s to stem the tide of corporate conglomeration in the media industry. Today, independent, non-commercial, and citizen-sourced media is showing us how corporate coverage often frays at the edges, and provides only a cursory examination of what’s happening in the world. Diversity can be structurally integrated into a given media system. It is not the fever dream of a bunch of goofy leftists who like to get together and brandy about terms like “corporatism” and “control.” The oligopolistic organization of our media system is the consequence of a policy choice to allow such an arrangement to proliferate. By the same token, then, we can choose to place value on diversity, richness, depth, and discursive variety over corporate bottom lines.

It’s high time we set a richer media table in Canada; one that celebrates community voices, innovation, and creativity, and refuses to allow a single lens to become the dominant cultural viewpoint. Let’s wade our way out of the major media hangover, and do our very best not to fall back into it. From here on in, sensible bites from a diverse menu of unique offerings.

There is a particularly vibrant media democratization community taking shape in Vancouver that coalesces once a year around an event called Media Democracy Day. Held annually since 2001, MDD unites citizens, artists, policy makers, academics, students, and educators in a dynamic and vibrant dialogue on the state of the Canadian media system. Built on a spirit of inquiry and policy analysis, MDD has also become a way to celebrate those creating their own messages and images, providing us all a richer vision of the lives and cultures we’re living. By providing an exhibition space for local, alternative, non-commercial, and public service media producers, panel rooms for critical discussion, and workshops that empower citizens with a knowledge of how to create their own cogent responses to their culture, Media Democracy Day seeks to give life to its three-fold mandate: Question. Create. Transform.

Media Democracy Day Vancouver 2010 will be held November 6 at the Vancouver Public Library’s Central Library (350 West Georgia Street), and will run from 12 PM-5PM. Admission is free, and the entire event is open to the public. For more information and updates, you can follow what we’re up to online:

Twitter: @MediaDemocDay

Website: www.mediademocracyday.org

WordPress: mddvancouver.wordpress.com