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Pacific Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver's Newspaper Monopoly by Marc Edge.

Article Excerpt
Vancouver: New Star Books Ltd., 2001. 385 pages.

Born in 1957 as a merger--technically illegal yet authorized by the federal government--Pacific Press became, through the processes of capitalist concentration, a one-hundred-per-cent monopoly owning both of Vancouver's daily newspapers. Stranger still, at least by the logic of capitalism, is that this prima donna among monopolies lost money like a sieve. Edge's book takes us only to 1991, when the Vancouver Sun went to morning publication. (History attests to the rest: in 1996 Southam was consumed by Conrad Black's Hollinger Inc.; in 2000, Hollinger sold to Israel Asper's CanWest Global.)

Concentrated ownership in the newspaper business is of course a fait accompli. It seems unlikely that a new book on the issue could contain anything new. In fact, Edge's book makes a major contribution to the field; it fills in a missing link in that sad story of long ago: the demise of the independent daily newspaper.

The 1957 deal that created Pacific Press merged the market-leading Vancouver Sun, then owned by the local Cromie family, with the money-losing Vancouver Province, owned by the Southam chain, in a "partnership" of equally shared profits and losses. In the previous decade, the two dailies had fought an all-out war for readers, a battle it appeared only one paper would survive. (Of course, if the companies had been concerned about preserving competition, they might have kept hands off a third paper, the Herald, owned by Thomson. Instead, the newly formed Pacific Press bought and closed the Herald, and the Sun and Province began joint publication on June 17, 1957.)

Why did the federal government allow the clearly anti-competitive merger? The 1960 report of the Restrictive Trade Practices Commission acknowledged that the Pacific Press monopoly would likely operate "to the detriment of the public" (56). It said that through illegal profit pooling, the "earnings of the Vancouver Sun are, in effect, subsidizing the operation of the Province and ... advertising rates and selling prices of the Vancouver Sun have been raised to accomplish this result" (56). But an even greater danger existed, the report maintained, of an even "more complete monopoly." It concluded: "The continued publication of separate newspapers ... does not immediately represent as serious a danger to the public interest ... as a newspaper monopoly in the hands of a single owner" (62-63).

In the less stolid observations recapped by Edge of the Globe and Mail's Scott Young: "Each paper has assured its readers that it...