For many people, how food gets from a farm to a supermarket is a process by which no small details go unnoticed. For many Canadians, the small details of the media acquisition are essential, but for others, not so much.
The magnitude of this purchase, and the consequences it will have on the Canadian media scape, is more than a mouthful.
This is what’s at stake. If Bell acquires Astral, this would increase Bell’s English-speaking television market share from 28 to 33.5 per cent, still within its legal allotment. It will also give Bell over 90 TV channels, more online multimedia content, an additional 100 radio stations on top of its current ownership of CHUM Radio, one of Canada’s largest outdoor advertising companies, and the only headway to SiriusXM Canada.
The discourse surrounding this issue is highly charged with rhetoric that panders to Canadian nationalism. Bell’s CEO George Cope, in a closing appeal to the CRTC, spoke of how this merger, in which Bell will absorb all of Astral’s media properties, will benefit Canada by giving us a stronger foothold in the global economy facing off against giants like Netflix, Apple TV, Facebook, YouTube, and Google, to make sure we Canadians are being taken care of.
Irrespective of the infantilizing tropes, they are feeding Canadian consumers a David-versus-Goliath fairytale.
This rhetoric aims to divide and
conquer Canadians. Some think the merger is problematic because it
gives an already vertically integrated media conglomerate even more power. Others think the merger can help Canada strengthen its media scape
by creating more jobs, generating more revenues, and competing within the global economies of media.
I don’t think we can blame Bell for this attempted purchase of Astral. After all, they’re in the business of business. We have plenty of other media options available to us, and if people want to curb the growth of vertically integrated media conglomerates, like Bell, we need to start paying more attention to independent, local, and publicly funded media.
We have the power to make choices. As conscious Canadians, we need to know where our media are coming from, so that we know what we’re consuming to make informed choices. We need to question the production of our cultural content—like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, whose mandate is the duty to provide culturally constructive media for Canadians—to feel good about consuming it, because this merger is a byproduct of our
passive consumption.
There needs to be recourse to local media, and, conversely, publicly funded media. In the world of consumerism, knowledge is synonymous with power. Together, you and I can make informed choices about the media we consume.
I want to know where my media comes from, how it gets to me, and only then,
I can feel safe sinking my teeth into it.
Dave Synyard
Deputy Copy Editor
