Democracy's Oxygen: How Corporations Control the News

Geoff Hayes is Director, International Studies Option, University of
Waterloo.

This book seeks to explain why Canadians get the news we do. According
to its author, a small but powerful corporate elite controls our
newspapers and electronic media. Media tycoons, such as Conrad Black,
Ken Thomson, and Paul Desmarais, enforce “media think,” a narrow set
of conservative messages that focus too much on the evils of deficits
and too little on the social costs of battling them. In Winter’s view,
this kind of corporate control leads to overreporting of sensational
stories (e.g., murder trials) and underreporting of “real” stories
(human-rights abuses, air pollution, and the like). He concludes by
exhorting readers to seek out alternative news sources.

Winter’s right-wing-conspiracy theory of news production is
unconvincing. Canadian newspapers were hardly beacons of critical and
independent inquiry before Thomson and Black came along. What little
evidence Winter uses to support his claims does not bear scrutiny. For
example, he blames the right-wing media for bringing down NDP
governments in Ontario and British Columbia, but does not explain how
they won power in the first place. Winter brings too much left-wing
ideology and too little analysis to this important subject.