The Tyee Outs Canada's Corporate Media Cartel

Perhaps the biggest single threat to democracy in Canada is the advent of our corporate media cartel where concentration of ownership and media-cross ownership in the hands of a few major corporations leaves Canadians at the mercy of a narrow corporate agenda packaged as factual news.  Pardon me, I singled out the corporate media cartel when I should have added the federal parties that choose to ignore it and thereby enable it including the Conservative Party of Canada, the Liberal Party of Canada and the New Democratic Party.  There's a reason I omitted the Green Party.  They have a specific policy calling for breaking up the media cartel and restoring a free press in Canada.

A helpful poll run by The Tyee illustrates how skewed the corporate media cartel has become from ordinary Canadians.

According to the Canadian Media Concentration Project at Carleton University, of all newspapers who endorsed a candidate for PM,95 per cent of them endorsed Stephen Harper.

In that same election, 24 per cent of the eligible electorate cast votes for Stephen Harper's Conservative party. This is different than the oft-quoted 39.62 per cent because it includes people who voted by not voting. In other words, of the 24,257,592 people who were eligible to vote, 5,832,401 cast votes for the Conservatives, which equals approximately 24 per cent. Factoring out those who didn't vote, the Conservatives garnered 39.62 per cent of the popular vote.

The issue here isn't Stephen Harper. The issue is media concentration. When 95 per cent of Canada's newspapers endorse a man that only 25 per cent of Canadians ended up voting for it means that Canada's major newspapers are not doing the job of representing the broad and diverse views of Canadians.