Sank like a cinder block. Gone the way of the dodo. Fell off the radar. These are the phrases that spring to mind when one thinks of the Lincoln report. It has been seven months since parliament’s standing committee on Heritage, headed by MP Clifford Lincoln, issued its five-pound, 900-page thinkpiece about the state of this country’s broadcasting system – more than half a year since it made nearly 100 recommendations to Ottawa about what the industry needs and needs to do if it is to serve Canadians through this century.

Greater and more stable funding was recommended for CBC, plus the creation of a unified Communications Act to replace the current rat’s nest of telecom and broadcasting legislation. There was talk of an improved Canadian Television Fund, a parliamentary industry monitor and, perhaps most significantly, a recommendation that Ottawa maintain restrictions on foreign ownership levels and that it withhold new broadcast licences from companies that own newspapers.

Serious stuff. And yet the report made no splash, eliciting only a lukewarm formal response from Ottawa and little mainstream media attention, leading some to suggest that maybe – just maybe – the whole thing had been wilfully ignored by this country’s biggest congloms, CanWest Global and BCE, which would prefer to see ownership laws relaxed and the CBC cut down. The under-reported report has stirred up media critics.

‘These are not proposals that some media barons wanted to see,’ wrote Toronto Star columnist Antonia Zerbisias in June. ‘To them CBC is competition, unfairly aided and abetted by a billion bucks or so of government funding every year… And none wants to see limits placed on their growth.’

Ottawa lobbyist Arthur Lewis agrees, and believes arguments in defence of CBC from his group, Our Public Airwaves, have been shouted down by big media. ‘We can’t get our message out,’ he says.

The handling of the Heritage report by the media highlights one of the central issues being studied by another federal body. The Senate committee on transport and communications is partway through its own long, hard look at the Canadian news media, and over the summer and fall put in face time with village elders from across the print and TV world. The committee is expected to conclude its two-year study in 2005.

Lewis cited the strange behavior of CanWest-owned canada.com as an example of corporate bias, noting during his time with the committee that a search on ‘cbc’ through that site invariably returns a list of articles slanted against the public broadcaster. A piece called ‘CBC: a bastion for propagandists and twits’ is always in the top 10, despite being a year old. ‘CBC’s soft stance on terrorists’ from September 2002 comes in at four or five, and number one on the list is always, for some reason, a 20-month-old piece called ‘Should the CBC be privatized?’

Lewis believes a less drastic slant also shows up on the National Post site, and complains that the Corp. cannot get a ‘fair shake’ from CanWest. He also thinks that the Lincoln report was unfairly buried.

A senior executive on CWG’s interactive side, who asked not to be named, admits the results are odd and that something might have gone wrong, but insists there is no editorial bias in the search engine.

Gordon Fisher, president of news at CanWest, also insists there is ‘no interference whatsoever’ by corporate interests in his division. ‘Our editors are independent and autonomous… they don’t get any direction or interference from corporate people,’ he says, and dismisses criticisms by Zerbisias and others as ‘mischief making’ by competitors. The BCE gang also says it keeps its business and news sides separate.

‘This is a competitive business and it is in the interest of our competitors to make this kind of noise,’ says Fisher.

At least one competitor agrees with him. Gordon Pitts, a business writer at The Globe and Mail, which is owned by BCE, admits he was ‘surprised’ the Lincoln report didn’t get more coverage, but he doesn’t believe there was ever a Chomsky-esque conspiracy to suppress it. There were a lot of reports issued earlier this year – from Trina McQueen, Barry Kiefl, Francois Macerola and others – and he thinks Lincoln’s simply got ‘lost in the shuffle.’

The Globe and the CWG-owned National Post did run one or two pieces about the report, not much more or less than the Star, which is independent. The Post gave a grudging nod to its recommendations in June and the Globe ran an op-ed by Lincoln in September.

Nor does Pitts think there is much editorial interference at CWG. ‘It’s a concern, but I don’t think there’s a lot of integration in cross-media ownerships,’ he says.

CanWest’s problem is that it has become a lightning rod for this sort of criticism in part because it is still trying to buy its way into a successful convergence model – getting into print, radio and TV – and because its owners are so politically outspoken. BCE, meanwhile, is comparatively apolitical and is said to be preparing to shed its media holdings.

‘Izzy [Asper] loved this give and take. To a certain extent he revelled in it, and to some extent [his sons] Leonard and David do, too. The Asper family does not shy away from these things,’ says Pitts. But the politicking has been mishandled and created a major public relations problem, and now ‘everybody’s jumping on them, whether there’s anything there or not.’

Cross ownership has become an even more fiery issue in the U.S., where the FCC earlier this year relaxed rules governing big media congloms, much to the horror of media watchers and a good portion of Congress, who have vowed to reverse the changes. Efforts to tighten ownership laws in the U.S. have stalled, however, and many feel the U.S. situation will get worse before it gets better.

Bill Moyers, president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, and host of a PBS public affairs show, warned of the increasing ‘censorship-by-omission’ by media empires in a speech at the National Conference on Media Reform in Madison, WI.

Up here, it is unclear if the new government in Ottawa will give the matter much attention, but Ian Morrison, spokesperson for the lobby group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, is optimistic that Paul Martin will take action, perhaps by the second half of 2004.

‘This one seems to be different,’ he says, citing remarks made by the new PM in which he expressed some concern over cross-media ownership.

Morrison takes the long view, and says documents like the Lincoln report and the forthcoming Senate study are contributing to greater awareness about media issues among Canadians.

But ‘ownership questions are vastly complicated,’ says Senator Joan Fraser, a Liberal and former newspaper editor from Quebec who chairs the Senate committee. ‘There are no easy answers.’

She has first-hand experience with this sort of thing, having crossed swords with owner Conrad Black during her stint as editor in chief of the Montreal Gazette.

‘He used to complain about people who were left wing, feminist, Liberal – all those good things I qualify under,’ she says. ‘But that’s okay. It’s well and truly okay. I felt then and I feel now that… Black had every right to have an editor in whom he felt comfortable. That’s the nature of the beast and part of freedom of the press.’

But it is possible that her committee’s two-year study, like that of Lincoln, will be lost in the fog of government. The committee has been on hiatus since Parliament broke in November, and its study will need to be re-approved when the Martin government convenes in January. Committees are usually allowed to continue, but it will then face the choppy political waters of a general election, expected by late spring or early summer.

The senator is optimistic that, despite the hurdle, the Fraser report will make a difference. ‘If you’ve done a good job, these reports have influence. The really good ones have lasting influence,’ she says.