Postmedia has largely replaced local news coverage with paid content, including a long-running campaign for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, and under new CEO Andrew Macleod ordered its editors to hew even harder to the right politically. We are thus in effect paying foreign-owned media to feed us propaganda, an irony perhaps not lost on Justice Hogue.

The National Post is notably owned 98 percent by US hedge funds, as are most of the rest of Canada’s newspapers, despite a 25 percent limit on foreign ownership in this politically influential industry. The Postmedia chain that publishes it has steadily increased its stranglehold on Canada’s press, taking over the Sun Media chain in 2015, the Brunswick News chain in 2022 and Atlantic Canada’s dominant SaltWire Network last year. Postmedia’s majority shareholder by far, with 65 percent ownership, is New Jersey hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, whose manager Anthony Melchiorre is a Trump ally whose supermarket tabloid National Enquirer suppressed allegations of sexual impropriety against Trump during his first presidential bid in 2016.

  • sbvEnglish
    16·
    1 day ago

    Ottawa should enforce the law limiting foreign ownership of newspapers

    …

    Our limit on foreign ownership was imposed in the 1960s after US chains threatened to take over newspapers here. A 1999 study of coverage in Canadian-owned US newspapers of the Québec independence referendum noted that most countries prohibited or limited foreign media ownership “at least partly out of fear that foreign owners would use those outlets to manipulate public opinion in times of national crisis.” It indeed found evidence that foreign ownership “influences newspaper coverage and editorial commentary about key political issues in the parent company’s home country.”

    • LostWon@lemmy.ca
      9·
      1 day ago

      Have there been any petitions about this to get MPs’ attention? There would need to be a good awareness campaign first so the petition doesn’t fail, but it could be a good candidate for government review.