By: Marc Edge (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2001)
| IN A 1998 ARTICLE in Acadiensis, William J. Buxton and Catherine McKercher lament the lack of critical journalism scholarship in Canada that links the growth of newspapers to broader technological, economic, and social changes. Unlike the United States, they argue that Canada has been slow to publish credible surveys of the development of newspapers, magazines, and journalism. Pacific Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver’s Newspaper Monopoly succeeds in addressing their concerns and in doing so makes a definitive addition to the history of the media in Canada. This book is particularly helpful for the painstaking detail that it uses to examine the creation of Pacific Press in 1957 and its entrenchment as a monopoly that had detrimental effects on two major media companies. Author Marc Edge convincingly outlines the interplay of economic, institutional, and labour forces, as well as personalities in the newsrooms of Vancouver’s two major daily newspapers and their impact on content, circulation, and the larger media culture. | 1 |
| The literature on the Canadian media is full of memoirs from journalists, editors, and publishers that tell fascinating stories. But this book, which is written by Edge, a former reporter for the Vancouver Province from the 1970s who took a buyout in 1993, and completed this study for his dissertation, succeeds where many former journalists have failed in melding the interesting stories of Pacific Press with its economic and historic context. | 2 |
| The study is a critical one written from a viewpoint that challenges the changes that have taken place at the Vancouver Sun and Province since what Edge defines as the genesis of the problem — the mechanical amalgamation between the Vancouver Sun and Province into Pacific Press Ltd. in 1957. Edge argues that the joint operating agreement between the two competing dailies similar to partnerships that had proliferated in the United States since the 1930s signaled the beginning of a government-sanctioned monopoly and the end of competition and quality journalism in the Lower Mainland. He calls his work a “case study of the adverse effects of removing competition from the marketplace for ideas.” (xxiv) | 3 |
| What makes his book particularly fascinating and worth reading for any media or labour historian is its examination of the bitter labour relations at Pacific Press and how a number of strikes and shutdowns since 1957 and successive mismanagement by absentee corporate owners had a negative impact on circulation and readership, leaving the papers basically rudderless. For instance, Edge outlines in detail five shutdowns that occurred at Pacific Press in an eleven-year period, ending with what would prove to be the “catastrophic strike” in 1978 that then Sun publisher Stuart Keate had long feared. At the same time, he places the shutdowns in the context of North American labour and the impact of technological change on the press rooms of daily newspapers. | 4 |
| In his attention to labour history, Edge addresses Hanno Hardt and Bonnie Brennan’s lament in Newsworkers: A History of the Rank and File, that the history of journalists as workers has been largely untold. Buxton and McKercher also point out that monographs on journalistic institutions follow general surveys in focusing on élite figures important in their history. In this case, while Edge details the lives of the major players in Vancouver media history such as Stu Keate and Allan Fotheringham, he also includes anecdotes from rank-and-file journalists. For instance, he outlines in detail how the union launched the strike paper, The Express, in 1970 under the editorial direction of Mike Tytherleigh, the night city editor at the Vancouver Sun. The paper was a resounding success for the three months that it was in operation, in the ended making money for the unions and situating Tytherleigh for the position of general manager at the end of the shutdown. Edge also spends an entire chapter on the “Cheesecake revolution,” a 1989 rebellion of a group of Vancouver Sun journalists over cost-cutting and quality concerns at the paper. | 5 |
| His use of sources — both interview and document material is meticulous as is his eye for detail and story — is an obvious remnant of his journalistic experience. As a result Pacific Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver’s Newspaper Monopoly is not the dull, unimaginative history that some claim is all too often found in the field of journalism and media studies. While the book would be less interesting without the stories behind the scenes, it could also have done with a bit of editing. For instance, Edge tends at times to be easily seduced by anecdotes and sensational details without links to his larger argument. This is particularly evident in the chapter on Province columnist Ormand Turner, who in 1965 began making charges of union vote-fixing in aid of candidates in the 1963 federal election under the banner of the New Democratic Party. His claims resulted in a royal commission in 1965 and ended with Turner retiring from the Province shortly after his allegations of election price-fixing were nixed. One gets the sense that the section was included for the last line. Turner later “became editor of the monthly magazine “Phenomena,” published by the Vancouver Flying Saucer Club, of which he was elected president in 1968.” (105) | 6 |
| In the end however Edge’s history of Pacific Press from 1957 to 1991 is a must read and his argument that the numerous strikes and shutdowns coupled with the lack of competition in the market have left Vancouver readers unattached and under served is convincing. | 7 |
| Mary Lynn Young University of British Columbia |
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