Sunday, September 29, 2013

Is Post Media Even Remotely Canadian?

JustBecauseIt'sLegalDoesn't
MakeItRightVille


In a post discussing how a big sale of Post Media's 'B Shares' demonstrated the huge drop in the company's value last week, Paul Willcocks added something most illuminating in a footnote that I had missed previously:

"...Class B shares represent about 97 per cent of the stick, but are limited to 49.9 per cent of the votes in any matters to be decided by shareholders. It’s not credible to claim the company is really Canadian-controlled when Canadians or Canadian institutions own three per cent of the stock, and foreign lenders hold the debt, but the structure meets legal requirements (including having Canadians pay for their advertising)..."

Imagine that!


_____
Meanwhile, in totally unrelated, and totally tangential local Post Media matter, Tom Hawthorn took the good Mr. Lee to task over his recent exercise in lede burying on the Twittmachine yesterday...Then, today, Tom does a bit of Media Culpa-type digging and comes up with....This!...Mr. Lee, who we are absolutely certain would never, ever consider taking a post-PostMediai job in the flack-hackery of a political machine (and/or a Snowmaggedon Wurlitzer) decided to take the (misspelled) ad hominem road...And, for the record, Terry Glavin noticed.


.

3 comments:

Norm Farrell said...

Jeff Lee rated a mention in this piece of mine from almost four years ago.

Lying with dogs, rising with fleas

paul said...

Though I'm not sure how much I care about the restrictions on foreign ownership - if it matters whether a newspaper company is controlled by Canadian hedge funds or U.S. funds. (It gets trickier if a Canadian media company was to be bought, for example, by a Chinese government-controlled corporation.)
I spent time working at the Red Deer Advocate when it was British-owned. I can't see that forcing a sale to a Canadian buyer would have been a positive.
I think ownership was an issue in the industry's failure to respond to its decline. Corporate owners have great difficulty in looking beyond the next quarterly report.

spartikus said...

On Lee's Armstrong story: There's the "peeing on the workers who made me rich angle" and how this might make Armstrong a polarizing figure to the electorate, but then there's the last comment by Paul Tennant:

“This is in a sense like vultures sensing a death. There are pickings they want to be around for”

As pointed out in the comments, this statement just isn't supported by the latest Justason poll. So why would Paul Tennant, identified only as "a retired University of B.C. political science professor" make such a statement?

Because he has skin in the game.

So why would Jeff Lee write this omission-filled article? Well, that assumes it was by accident and not by design. I don't know what Mr. Lee's politics are and, to be honest, I don't think that matters in this case. I suspect it's more a case of a municipal beat reporter who would love a election horse-race rather than another cakewalk.

Because drama sells newspapers.