Carleton communication studies professor Dwayne Winseck has launched a five-year study looking at concentration of ownership of Canadian media and its implications for the public.
“It just seems to me that there is this idea of media concentration [that] keeps coming up over and over and over again,” he said.
If only a few major companies own all the media outlets, there is less of a chance that outlets will represent a diversity of viewpoints, or many different options for viewers or consumers, Carleton PhD student and project manager Adeel Khamisa said.
Media concentration, according to Winseck, is a question of “whether there are a lot of players in the [media] market or a few players . . . with a very large market share.”
Winseck said his study examines a number of media sectors in Canada, including cellphone service, radio, television and social media, between 1984 and the present day, to see whether ownership of these sectors has become more concentrated over time or less.
“When most people debate [media concentration] they [do so] on ideological grounds,” Winseck said. “So the idea here was to put together a real systematic body of evidence that would help people do this [free from ideology].”
Khamisa said the issue of data is tied to public participation.
“It’s about liberalizing that data, it’s about democratizing the data that we use to measure these industries,” he said, which is often released by “corporate players” rather than independent of these interests.
“When that happens, we have to question what that data really represents. Is that data being spun? Is it being presented accurately? Is it valid data? That’s one of the motivations behind this project, making sure journalists, researchers, the general public have access to un-spun data.”
This commitment to free information led the team to open their project to the public and make the data available on the project website.
Visitors to the site can use an interactive graphing tool that allows them to compare media ownership among companies in Canada, and perform basic analyses on the data.
Public understanding of media concentration is important as it impacts the options for Canadian consumers of media, Khamisa said.
“People like to draw attention [to] the notion that concentrated ownership results in a reduced variety of voices being heard . . . so there’s an impact on cultural diversity,” he said.
“But what people often miss is what’s right under their noses, and this is about consumer choice . . . There’s no incentive for [large media companies] to really compete, so they don’t offer that variety of choices of simple [services].”
Winseck’s research is particularly relevant these days, as Bell Media seeks to obtain permission from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to acquire the Astral Media Company. According to Winseck’s data, Bell is the second largest telecommunications company in the country.
A merger with Astral would make the combined company the biggest media player in Canada.
Winseck has adjusted the data to account for a potential merger, to provide the public with “a good understanding of what the effect on market concentration levels will be.”
Both researchers noted the potential impact of the merger on Canadian media concentration.
Khamisa raised questions about preferential access for Bell customers to certain content, such as mobile HBO services, which are owned by Astral.
“We already have very high levels of media concentration in Canada,” Winseck said. “This deal will increase those levels of concentration, and that we don’t need to move in this direction. Basically, we should be moving in the opposite direction.”
Bell Media declined to comment.
