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Election deals blow to Canada's dominant press group

Debater
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Joined: Apr 17 2009

Postmedia’s support for Conservatives leaves it out of step with the public

Sunday 1 November 2015

Quote:

The most common prediction ahead of last month’s Canadian election was that the country’s many polling firms would again fail to predict the results. In the event, most of them accurately foresaw Justin Trudeau’s Liberals sweeping into power. Instead, it was the country’s daily newspapers that got it wrong, promoting the incumbent Conservatives while readers and voters turned en masse against the party. Social media pounced on the striking disconnect with increasing ferocity as editors in virtually every Canadian city and town published tortured endorsements of Stephen Harper’s government.

[snip]

Yet the defeat was a particularly brutal blow for Canada’s dominant chain, Postmedia, which publishes more than half of the traditional daily newspapers in English-speaking Canada and all but a handful of those that matter. Postmedia achieved its market dominance in step with the rise of Harper’s Conservatives. Its support for Harper was widely seen as an expression of the company’s will rather than editorial judgment. One columnist at the Postmedia title the Edmonton Journal wrote on Twitter that owners rather than editors had decided which party to back.

The company’s chain-wide blitz supporting Harper culminated a few days before the election when virtually all Postmedia publications replaced their front pages with a pro-Conservative advertisement masquerading as an official notice from Elections Canada, the independent agency managing the vote.

“What was revealed here is that these papers have seriously lost touch with the readers they are supposedly representing, and it was noticed,” says media critic Jesse Brown, founder of the website Canadaland. “People were outraged. This was a shameful moment.”

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Full article:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/nov/01/election-blow-canada-postme...


Comments

montrealer58
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Joined: Jun 30 2014

Conservative slime and their own, doing their slimy Conservative things for their slimy rich friends. Here's the finger to all of you.


Debater
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Joined: Apr 17 2009

It was so disgraceful the way the right-wing media in Canada still went out of their way in the final week to try and influence Canadians into voting the Conservatives back in.

First there was The Globe & Mail -- aka "Canada's National Newspaper" which twisted itself into a pretzel to endorse the Conservatives while recommending that Harper be replaced as leader.

Then there was Post Media demanding that all their newspapers, even in cities where the Conservatives had no support, endorse them anyway.

It was particularly offensive to people in Ottawa & Montreal that The Ottawa Citizen & Montreal Gazette endorsed the Cons.  The Cons were wiped out of the Ottawa area (except for Pierre P. outside the city, who barely held on) and the Cons finished in FOURTH in Montreal.  The Cons have never elected a single Harper MP in Montreal during the entire Harper era.  It was ludicrous for The Gazette to endorse them.

It was very insulting and demeaning to the public in these cities, who wanted nothing to do with the Cons.

So it's good to see The Guardian tear the Con-owned media a new one.


mmphosis
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Joined: Apr 28 2009

One of the reasons is that we still have this failed state of a newspaper chain that is able to suck up all the oxygen.

Jesse Brown http://canadalandshow.com/


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