Bourbon & Bullets

The above headline might seem odd coming from a right-leaning libertarian website, but I assure you it isn't. Rebel Media is on a fundraising kick this holiday season, hoping to be the Breitbart News of the north. But they can never be Breitbart News for one fundamental reason, they are not a truly independent media outlet like Breitbart. Media in Canada (and yes I'm speaking from firsthand experience) is about as corrupt as it gets. In print media four major companies control just about everything, and to make matters worse, they don't compete against each other, they illegally collude to secure monopoly markets for themselves. And on top of that, they are inter-owned. Of the four print media companies, Glacier Media, Black Press, Torstar and Post Media, Post Media owns (approximately) 15 percent of Glacier, and Torstar owns 15 percent of Black Press. Now you might think the two inter-owned entities would at least compete against each other, but you'd be wro...

It all started a few weeks back with Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin bemoaning the state of print media in Canada. Then Martin who never saw a government spending solution in search of a problem he didn't like followed with a suggestion that newspapers should be subsidized by the government. This was followed by the CBC's announcement they were getting into the news publishing business (online) and its condemnation from the gang over at the Rebel Media (born out of the ashes of Sun TV) crying foul over CBC's move into the (digital) newspaper game. Brian Lilley recorded a monologue about Canada's heavily subsidized broadcaster muscling in on the private enterprise, and supposedly at-arms-length from government, newspaper business.  Except its not true, not even remotely. Canada's newspaper media has the most monopolistic ownership of any industrialized democracy... okay, we're about on par with Venezuela, wonderful, how proud we should all be in...