The great Canadian media war!

Good Day Readers:

In a public battle that's becoming increasingly nasty it's not an exaggeration to suggest Quebecor and the CBC are now at each others' throats. Why has this been allowed to degenerate so quickly into an embarrassing spectacle when we have countless well-paid federal bureaucrats spending millions and millions and millions of public dollars in regulatory agencies such as:

Competition Bureau Canada
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council
Office of the CBC Ombudsman
Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commission
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (Access to Information Act)

And in the end we all know who's going to win don't we? The lawyers who file the lawsuits for both sides that's who!

Sincerely,
Clare L. Pieuk
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Peladeau defends Quebecor's right ot probe CBC

Quebecor Media Inc. CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau reads over his notes on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Thursday, as he waits to appear at committee on Access to Information, Privacy, and Ethics hearing witness on access to information dispute and and the resulting court actions concerning the CBC. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

Heather Scoffield The Canadian Press
October 20, 2011

OTTAWA—Quebecor president Pierre-Karl Peladeau insists his company is not engaged in a vendetta against its CBC competitor, but is instead upholding a public duty to probe the affairs of a government-funded Crown corporation.

The media mogul appeared Thursday at a parliamentary committee hearing into why the CBC is fighting access-to-information laws in the courts.

The corporation says it has been swamped with hundreds of information requests, mainly from Quebecor’s many media outlets, and suspects an orchestrated campaign to damage it.

But Peladeau denies that the quest for information is anything more than independent journalists doing their work.

“Despite what some may think, in other words, that we are waging a war against CBC-Radio Canada, we believe that these requests are not only legal but also legitimate and in the public interest and in keeping with the act,” Peladeau told the access-to-information committee.

Still, he went on to threaten legal action against the CBC for putting out a statement earlier this week about Peladeau’s own lack of accountability in receiving public funding.

He also lashed out at the corporation for pulling all its advertising from Quebecor media and admitted under questioning that he had written the prime minister to complain.

And he chronicled how CBC had withdrawn advertising from his Journal de Montreal during a labour dispute. CBC had wanted to run ads in the sister paper in Quebec City instead, but Quebecor refused.

The two companies compete head-to-head in Quebec for television viewers. Quebecor’s Sun Media division frequently publishes criticism of the CBC and has urged an end to its public funding.

Opposition critics suspect Quebecor has allied itself with the federal Conservatives, who recently surveyed party members on whether the CBC provides good value for the taxpayer.

They are now eyeing budget cuts.

Indeed, Conservative MP Dean Del Maestro praised Sun Media’s journalists for being “courageous” in taking on the powerful CBC through access-to-information requests.

“The CBC is not a small entity in the media business in Canada and I think if you’re going to come out and challenge them, that takes some courage as a media player in Canada,” he explained to reporters after the committee hearing.

“It’s a courage of conviction.”

Peladeau argued that no other media organization in Canada is prepared to scrutinize spending at the CBC because almost every other organization is in some way compromised.

“Unfortunately the reality is that currently Sun Media is the only press organization that is sufficiently at arms’ length and independent to be able to put those questions to the public broadcaster, because so many of our competitors are involved with CBC-Radio Canada,” he said, listing several examples.

“Between their strategic partnership, their advertising budget and their direct payments to journalists in other media organizations, CBC-Radio Canada has somehow managed to quiet dissenting voices in most outlets. Everywhere, that is, to the exception of Sun Media.”

A spokesman for CBC said the corporation had nothing to add on Thursday, beyond the statement published Wednesday night listing federal support received by Quebecor, as well as CBC’s efforts to disclose more information.

The committee hearings are meant to look at a section of the Access to Information Act which exempts CBC from having to divulge material involving its journalistic, creative or programming activities.

Peladeau and others accuse the CBC of using the section to hide all sorts of material and stymie scrutiny into the spending of taxpayers’ money. They argue that CBC should allow the federal information commissioner to decide which information can be exempted, instead of having to battle in court.

CBC officials argue that they have been transparent about many things and have improved their response to access-to-information requests. They say only a judge should be able to look at records that have been held back.

But lawyer and access expert Michel Drapeau, who is doing work for Quebecor, says that kind of response is “condescending.”

He told the committee that the CBC is engaged in a “blatant” exercise to delay and impede the release of information to which the public has a right.
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CBC lashes out at Quebecor’s $500-million in public subsidies
daniel leblanc AND ottawa
Thursday, October 20, 2011 Quebecor's president Pierre karl Peladeau announcing the creation of the Sun News Network at a Toronto news conference on June 15, 2011.

The CBC is fighting back against Quebecor’s attacks on its $1-billion in annual federal funding, accusing the private broadcaster of receiving $500-million in public subsidies over the last three years without being accountable to taxpayers.

Having been accused for months of being a “money drain,” the CBC is going further than ever in a bid to defend itself, accusing Quebecor Media Inc. of using public subsidies to “make record profits.”

The CBC added that Quebecor president Pierre-Karl Péladeau has “sent over a dozen letters to the Prime Minister and others in government to complain that Radio-Canada does not spend enough money advertising in his newspapers.”

CBC officials refused to release their copies of the letters, adding their goal was simply to correct the impression that Quebecor gets nothing from the public while the CBC receives $1-billion a year in federal funding.

Quebecor publishes newspapers across Canada, runs the dominant TVA network in Quebec and has recently launched the all-news Sun TV, which is in competition with the CBC News Network.

The firm’s media outlets have regularly portrayed the CBC as a wasteful corporation, attacking the public broadcaster in both official languages in its pan-Canadian media outlets, in part with documents obtained under Access to Information.

Quebecor rejected the CBC’s $500-million figure as a lie, adding it had referred the matter to its lawyers.

In a statement, the company complained that the CBC released its statement one day ahead of a planned appearance by Mr. Péladeau before a parliamentary committee studying the corporation’s refusal to release some financial information through the Access to Information Act.

Quebecor said that TVA did receive $21-million from a federal television fund in 2010, but that another of its entities, cable provider Videotron, contributed slightly more to the pot.

The firm also blasted the CBC’s advertising “boycott” of its various media operations.

“Quebecor Media made it known that it was unacceptable for a Crown corporation to deliberately ignore the most important media in Canada .... because it doesn’t appreciate the editorial views of its publications,” the company said in a statement.

In recent years, Quebecor researchers have submitted hundreds of access-to-information requests to the CBC, leading to a court battle in which the Crown corporation is fighting to keep records involving its creative, journalistic and programming activities completely exempt from public view.

CBC President Hubert Lacroix has accused Quebecor of using his Sun newspapers to smear the public broadcaster.

“For more than three years, Quebecor has been using its newspapers, and more recently, its Sun News Network TV license to pursue a campaign against CBC/Radio-Canada,” the CBC said in the statement issued on Wednesday.

“Quebecor has received more than half a billion dollars in direct and indirect subsidies and benefits from Canadian taxpayers over the past three years, yet it is not accountable to them,” the CBC said.

The CBC explained its $500-million figure by pointing to $200-million in federal and provincial funding and tax credits related to Quebecor’s television programming, as well as $13-million from the Canada Periodical Fund for its magazine. Finally, CBC argued that Quebecor saved $333-million in wireless spectrum costs by receiving a set-aside portion in an auction at a below-market rate.

The fight between Radio-Canada and Quebecor has been waged on a number of fronts. Mr. Péladeau sued a senior official at Radio-Canada, Sylvain Lafrance, who had called him a “voyou” (loosely translated as a “thug” or a “bum”) in 2007. The matter was dropped earlier this year.