Canadian culture threatened by media concentration: Radio-Canada VP

Canadian identity and culture face a serious long-term triple threat fromthedeepening concentration, deregulation and globalization of the media, said the firstpresenter at federal public hearings on media diversity on Monday.

"The more there is concentration, the more a public broadcaster appears as a possible solution," Sylvain Lafrance, head of CBC/Radio-Canada's French-language services, said Monday in French.

Lafrance, an executive vice-president with Canada's public broadcaster, was first on the speakers list at a Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission hearing to help government regulators decide how to ensure the mediaremain diverseas owners merge and technology spawns new media platforms.

When asked if such new platforms erode the diversity of voices in the media, Lafrance respondedthatthey don't.

"Our convergence, rather, allows us to offer more information services to citizens," he said. "It is not intended to reduce the number of journalists."

TheCRTC is scheduled to hear throughout the week from other media outlets, fromorganizations representing journalists and other media workers, and from suchvaried groups as immigrants.

Journalism suffers under convergence: union group

Among the interveners is the Quebec-based Fédération nationale des communications, an umbrella group of unions that represent 7,000 media workers, including journalists.It is scheduled to appear before the commission on Wednesday.

Federation president Chantale Larouche plans to argue that the public loses out when single media outlets own multiple newspapers, TV channels, radio stations and websites.

"That means that we have to feed radio, TV, internet, and that means that we have less time to work on [each] subject.…There's a problem with that," she said.

As a result, the public doesn't get all the information it needs to "really understand what's going on in society," she added.

Larouche plans to call for stricter limits on how many media outlets one company can own.

Karl Moore, a management professor at McGill University in Montreal who studies global business leaders and the development of emotional capability in organizations, said he understands journalists may be feeling the pressure, but he doesn't think stricter ownership rules are the answer.

"But I think what we're looking at is a worldwide trend in this direction," he said. "To a certain degree, you're trying to hold back the tide, and I don't think it's going to work."

He said many reporters like airing and publishing their work in a variety of media, more journalists should embrace the trend, and unions should encourage their members to be more versatile if they want to save jobs.

The CRTC announced the diversity review in April. It says a review is appropriate considering that:

• It developed its ownership guidelines for television stations at a much earliertime when most services were locally owned.
• It has no ownership policies on specialty, pay-per-view and video-on-demand services.
• It has not considereddiversity-of-voices policies for new media platforms.
• Regulated, broadcast media outlets now face competition from new, unregulated digital platforms.
• Canada's changing demographics make it appropriate to look at whether the voices of aboriginal, ethnic and disabled Canadians have appropriate access to Canada's media system.