Postmedia headquarters, Bloor Street, Toronto. Photo by Harrison Samphir.

How on earth our press could fall into the clutches of private equity players and US hedge funds while our broadcasters were captured by our country’s largest telecom companies should be the subject of intense study by journalism and communications scholars at universities across Canada. Instead, too many of them have served as unwitting dupes at best and corporate lackeys at worst in the roll-up of our news media over the past few decades into one of the most tightly-controlled in the Western world. More recently, they have stood by and even cheered as the vulture capitalists shamelessly leveraged their acquired propaganda machinery to mount lobbing campaigns first for a government bailout, and then for a government shakedown of Big Tech. The resulting millions in subsidies should keep well-nourished for the foreseeable future our largest media parasite, Postmedia Network, which has taken more than $500 million out of our newspaper industry over the past 15 years. The US hedge funds that somehow own 98 percent of its shares, despite a supposed 25 percent foreign ownership limit, are laughing at us all the way to the bank for not clueing in to the long con they are working. Bell and Rogers on the broadcasting side have perfected the real money-making scam, however, as they use their government-granted market power to charge us through the nose for their services while each walks away with about $10 billion in profit every year, give or take a few hundred million. Now they want to be hooked up to the same lush subsidies that newspapers get. You will hardly hear a peep of dissent from the corridors of academe, aside from the dogged blog posts of one law professor and the occasional rantings of one communications scholar. Most media academics have no idea how business works, much less vulture capitalism, and their eyes glaze over at this admittedly arcane subject.

Unfortunately, the already thin ranks of academic media critics in Canada have just been thinned by one, as I was recently sacked by University Canada West just after I had moved from Vancouver Island to the mainland to teach three sections of Media & Society this term. From now on, I will be a media critic only as a journalist, at least as long as I can continue to find an outlet willing to publish my columns, and their numbers are growing fewer and fewer. Thank heavens for Canadian Dimension, which is literally the last publication in Canada radical enough to carry my........

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