Internal influences are most often not overt, making the question of influence a complicated assessment. While most Canadian news organisations’ journalistic mandate and ethics herald their independence, several interviewees talked about the subtle influence bosses or owners can have on the content and direction of editorial matters. Several journalists interviewed for this study stressed that owners and bosses make hiring and promotion decisions. It follows then that bosses and owners do not need to explicitly say what they want; the people they hire will conform because they want to please their bosses.
At CBC News, there are clear distinctions between the roles of journalists and newsroom bosses. All assignment decisions at the public broadcaster are made by journalists who are members of the corporation’s unions. News executives, outside the union, have control of journalistic standards and ethical questions, allowing them to kill stories that do not meet the public broadcaster’s standards – but these bosses cannot assign stories.
In an interview with a reporter for a major Canadian news organisation, the reporter stated “as far as I know, [the owner] has never called up and said, you know, we want this story covered and in this way”. This was supported by other journalists who insisted they had a large degree of autonomy. Canadian journalists by and large told us they bristle when bosses insert themselves in editorial matters; however, there are some examples of this very thing happening in Canadian media.
In 2015, for instance, the president of Bell Media, the owner of Canada’s most-watched newscast CTV, was forced to apologise after he interfered in news coverage concerning Canada’s broadcast regulator. Kevin Crull had told his news service not to use interview footage of CRTC chair Jean-Pierre Blais after the regulator had announced a decision to unbundle cable channels, which hurt Bell’s bottom line. While daytime news on CTV acquiesced to Crull’s demand, CTV’s Chief anchor Lisa Laflamme and senior correspondent Robert Fife defied the order and ran part of the interview with Blais on the late national broadcast (Bradshaw, 2015). The next day, the CRTC released a public statement reprimanding Bell for interfering in the journalism process.
The allegation […] that the largest communication company in Canada is manipulating news coverage is disturbing. Holding a radio or television license is a privilege that comes with important obligations that are in the public interest, especially in regards to high-quality news coverage and reporting.
An informed citizenry cannot be sacrificed for a company’s commercial interests. Canadians can only wonder how many times corporate interests may have been placed ahead of the fair and balanced news reporting they expect from their broadcasting system. (Canada, 2015b)
Crull publicly conceded it was wrong of him to intrude in the editorial process, and a month later, released a statement announcing his departure and stressing that the independence of the telecommunication giant’s news service was of “paramount importance” (Faguy, 2015).
Another notable exception to the general sense of journalistic freedom in the Canadian press is found in the powerful Postmedia newspaper chain. Despite financial struggles resulting in successive debt restructuring (Krashinsky Robertson, 2019), the company remains Canada’s largest newspaper chain, with holdings including The National Post and 33 other daily newspapers, such as the Ottawa Citizen, Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, Vancouver Sun, and Montreal Gazette (as well as dozens of non-daily newspapers). A series of investigations from varied news sources including online start-ups such as Canadaland (Craig, 2019) and more established news magazines such as Maclean’s (Subramanian, 2019) have uncovered the strict limitations placed upon editorial (opinion and commentary) direction across all Postmedia properties. The corporate ownership insists on a consistent conservative voice on editorial matters across all papers, including the endorsement of political candidates (see Figure 5). In a clear act of journalistic dissent, both members of the Ottawa Citizen editorial board resigned in 2015. The national impact of the editorial centralisation at Postmedia was illustrated in the twitter feed of journalist Jonathan Goldsbie during the 2019 federal election (see Figure 5).
Figure 5. Postmedia Editorials
Despite occasional instances, which have been appropriately met with national outrage, most Canadian journalists claim freedom to pursue their work. Editorial decisions at Postmedia have unfortunately clearly been centralised, despite a promise to the Competition Bureau in 2015 that their newspapers would maintain “distinct editorial departments” (Canada, 2015a).
