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For Immediate Release: May 5, 1999
National Post target of media satire in three Canadian cities and on the Internet
VANCOUVER - More than 40,000 people in Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria received copies of a parody edition of the National Post this morning. The four-page satire was produced by Vancouver's Guerrilla Media (GM) and tackles Canada's high degree of media ownership concentration.
"Whether it's print, radio or TV, the extreme levels of ownership concentration in Canada is a serious problem," says GM spokesperson Beau Gus Monniker. "Guerrilla Media has created this parody of the Post to point up the downside of letting a special interest group of a few wealthy men – like Hollinger/Southam's Conrad Black or Power Corp.'s Paul Desmarais – control the news we read."
Lovingly prepared to look like the real thing, more than 150 guerrillas and GM supporters in the three cities handed out 40,000 copies of the bogus daily directly to commuters. In addition, they wrapped thousands more around the National Post's Wednesday edition in the Post's own newspaper boxes. Guerrilla Media also posted the edition at a National Post parody web site -
"Obviously, Conrad Black epitomizes everything wrong with the state of Canada's media ownership," says Monniker. "He doesn't hide the fact he won't tolerate editors who oppose his views, and his downsizing tactics have severely hampered local coverage in many small- and medium-sized Hollinger/Southam papers. However, Black is just one of a few media barons bent on buying up print and broadcast outlets. If he left, another corporate raider would just fill his Gucci shoes. To reverse this anti-democratic media trend, we need major reforms to ownership in this country."
The first in a news series of media criticism parodies to be launched by Guerrilla Media, the bogus National Post featured satire pages with articles by prominent Post columnists like Linda Frum, Barbara Amiel, Kenneth Whyte and David Frum. The back page advertises a new horror movie called The ConBlob, a "Megalomedia/TeleTubby/Cuts of Thousands co-production of a Conrad B. DeMillions film." Another page is devoted to a straight-up discussion of media concentration in Canada, examining its effects on editorial coverage and alternatives that exist in other countries.
"In Italy, France and Germany, Black and Desmarais would not be allowed to control the number of dailies they currently reign over in Canada – they would be breaking the law," said Monniker. "Canada needs to rethink it's media policies. We need to take ownership away from greedy, ideologically-driven media barons. We need to make the media a public trust."
Guerrilla
Media is a Vancouver-based group of media critics who look
forward to future newspaper parodies – there's
just so much material out there. As AC/DC puts it, we're
back in Black.
l
