Bell Media and Astral's Merger Is Going to Make Canadian Media Even Worse

Their empire extends much further than payphones. via.

The often drab landscape of Canadian media changed in a big way on Friday, after Bell Media purchased Astral Media in a deal worth $3.2 billion. Bell already owns HBO Canada, MTV, Much Music, Discovery, and a whole bunch of other stations. Now they have control of TMN, Teletoon, six other specialty channels, 77 more radio stations, two more over-the-air TV stations, and Astral's out-of-home advertising agency. At this point, Bell controls 22.6% of the French-language television market and 35.8% of the English-language market.  While Bell has always been a gigantic monolith of a company, this deal truly sheds light on just how much of the Canadian media is in their hands. Bell and Astral first announced their plans to merge in March 2012, a proposal that was rejected by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, because it meant an absurd amount of Canadian media would be in Bell's hands. That deal would have given Bell a 45% stake of English-language TV viewership and 35% of French-language viewership. Bell's competitors and public interest groups voiced their concerns to the CRTC, because what the fuck, right? And the deal was rightly refused. But Bell quickly came back with revisions, planning to sell off 11 of their TV properties and 10 radio stations, including three of their own if the deal was approved. They also promised to invest $246.9 million into original Canadian radio and TV content. Imposing a few of its own restrictions, like requiring Bell to keep all of its local TV stations plus the two acquired from Astral open till 2017, about a week ago, the CRTC said sure, why not, and gave Bell’s deal a green light. Here’s why you should care: monopolistic business practices in the thrilling world of Canadian media means more money is being taken out of our pockets in exchange for content and subscription services that can maintain a crappy status quo, because there is no adversary or challenger to keep things fresh. Canada is sorely lacking a diverse array of voices in our media, as anyone who has turned on a television in Canada knows. We can barely produce watchable television in the first place, and this deal is another step backwards into mediocrity. I spoke to a former MTV Canada employee who experienced Bell's takeover of CTV in 2010, with MTV included in the deal, to find out what the Bell-Astral merger could mean for the many new stations now under Bell's control and what it’s like to create content in a Bell owned environment. For obvious reasons, he's chosen to remain anonymous, so let's call him Robert. According to him, the creative environment at MTV was a lot more energetic and progressive before the Bell takeover: “The culture was good – it was a really rogue type of culture. Every TV we had in the office had Much Music on, and they were the enemy. That was our goal: to outdo them, to be cooler than them or be more out there.” It was more of an “inmates running the asylum kind of vibe,” he says, recalling his early days. Things started to change at MTV when CTV bought Chum, owner of Much Music. MTV, who had been competing against Much since their inception, were now under the same ownership as their long-time rival. “Content-wise, I think there was a challenge to not have an enemy anymore. We didn't have Much Music to fight. That was the moment when having specific agendas and goals started to get watered down,” Robert says. The day Bell took over, MTV wasn't high on their list of priorities. “There were a lot of speeches, a lot of new bosses that came in. They didn't really come to us because we were that low on the totem pole.” he says. “They didn't say much to us. You kind of got the impression they just wanted to own the content.” But this seemingly hands-off approach didn't mean Bell would let everything slide. The company's culture allowed for less pushing of boundaries with the “weird, the sexual, and the crass,” says Robert. “I think Bell's a little more boring, and your boss's boss's boss doesn't want to hear about customers complaining about that sort of thing, whereas it used to be that your boss's boss was the highest up at the company.” This culture of executive influence is clearly not good for editorial independence, and it is now the norm for most television outlets in the country. Content continued to suffer at MTV as people, including Robert, left. “That's a large part of why morale is so low and why people's view of these channels is low—they're inconsistent, all over the place, and the people making [the content] don't feel good about it. It's a bit of a mass exodus waiting to happen. Nobody is getting raises, no one is getting hired.”
“All the most talented people I know have left. Some of them are still inside, but most of them are about to leave,” says Robert, although he's optimistic about the future of the independent producer as more people leave television in favour of creating online content. “I think all the best stuff you used to see on those channels, you're seeing on places like VICE now.” Even before this deal was approved, Canada already had the most concentrated media ownership in the G8, with over 86% of Canadian cable and satellite distribution controlled by just four large conglomerates—Bell, Shaw, Rogers, and Quebecor.   The more concentrated a media market is, the more power owners have to bump up prices. I spoke with   David Christopher of Open Media, a non-for-profit organization that advocates for open communication systems in Canada. “Costs of TV are likely to go up, and in order to make that affordable, people are increasingly being shuffled towards bundled packages, so they're forced to get their TV, their internet, their phone access from one conglomerate, which is certainly a bad thing because the cost goes up, and there is less choice in the marketplace.” “It's certainly very disappointing – when the news first broke that it had been approved, we started hearing from Canadians across the country who'd been hoping the CRTC would take the opposite perspective,” he says.  
In general, David explains, the situation is worrying because control on so many different levels means, for example, that Bell can exempt its own content from download limits, stifling their competition. “These companies are acting as a dead weight on the economy.” The guidelines by which the CRTC determined this acquisition wouldn't destroy Canadian media—the Diversity of Voices decision of 2008—are outdated and no longer make any sense. According to these guidelines, a company shouldn't have any more than 35% TV market (a number set by the Competition Bureau in 2003 for the banking industry), which is ridiculously high if we're trying to make sure the media is diverse. The 2008 decision also didn't anticipate just how vertically integrated these telecom companies would become, and five years later, the landscape has changed completely. While it would have been great if the CRTC could have revisited their own standards that are supposedly in place protecting the diversity of voices in Canadian media, they didn’t. The centralization of power in this landscape has become even more swollen. But the problem extends beyond Bell and Astral: when there are only a handful of people controlling content, the media can no longer be seen as a democratic tool. That said, as YouTube and online video in general becomes more integrated into our lives—and people start watching online content in their living rooms—monopolistic deals like Bell’s will matter less and less. In the meantime, as Canadians are faced with below average Canadian content producers owned by increasingly few conglomerates with no real motivation to improve upon itself, we can't help but wonder how long viewers will keep tuning in. More Canadian problems:

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