Canada's largest media empire (right-wing CanWest) is declared insolvent

[Newsjock]

Source: The Globe and Mail

Canada's largest media empire has taken its first step toward a historic breakup, as debt-laden CanWest Global Communications Corp. sought court protection from creditors to shelter some of its most crucial assets.

It was a move the company's chief executive officer, Leonard Asper, tried desperately to avoid over the past year, agonizing in private that the business founded by his late father, Izzy Asper, 35 years ago would be forever tainted by the stigma of a filing aimed at staving off bankruptcy.

The restructuring, which includes the National Post newspaper and the Global Television network, will now lead to what would be the biggest sale of media assets the country has ever seen, including the potential selloff of a national newspaper chain and the auction of a major television network.

... After months of negotiations with the hedge funds and other lenders in a bid to find a different solution, two senior executives with CanWest appeared in a Toronto courtroom yesterday and declared the company insolvent. Its debt, which reached $4-billion earlier this year, was unmanageable amid the economic downturn, CanWest lawyer Richard Leipsic told an Ontario judge.

Read more: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-asper-dream-ends-the-sell-off-begins/article1314690/

[provis99]

1. Asper's kids were lazy, dimwitted degenerates.

Not surprised that a few years after Izzy Asper died, his stupid kids ran the company into the ground.

[Cha]

2. Darn what's a rw media conglomerate down on

its luck to do?

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

3. The Asper family family was synomous with the liberal party for decades

None the less, it is the same media story as everywhere else - idiots used borrowed money to buy every media outlet in sight on the false premise that massive profits could be made exclusively on the basis of economies of scale, local content and quality be damned.

The National Post (founded by convicted felon Conrad Black) has been on life support since day one, but limps along as it is cheaper to keep it running than to replace the content in affiliated papers with a wire service source.

From a business perspective the problem with the National Post is simple. The editorial content and the feature content appeal to mutually exclusive audiences. The editorial content is tailored to angry white assholes while the feature content is tailored to a yuppie audience. The same people who want to read David Frums garbage probably aren't too interested in multi-page color features on foreign travel, fashion or literature. All the while it has a terrible sports section that might be appealing to either audience did it not suck.

We get it delivered to our office, we don't subscribe to it, we don't pay for it, it just appears.

[Newsjock]

4. One of the 'great moments' of the National Post

From our own DU archives, May 2006:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1238695

Stories of Iranian law requiring Jews to wear badges are FALSE!!

The National Post of Canada is "reporting" that "...Human rights groups are raising alarms over a new law passed by the Iranian parliament that would require the country's Jews and Christians to wear coloured badges to identify them and other religious minorities as non-Muslims..."

[Sebastian Doyle]

5. Hope Canada still has laws that would keep it out of Murdoch's hands.

He's been trying to get FAUX noize over the border for years, unsuccessfully. Global was right wing compared to CBC, but probably closer to post-AOL merger CNN than FAUX.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

6. There has been Fox News in Canada as long as I have been here

There was an enormous protest after a Fox News personality mocked the death of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan.

[stuball111]

7. Good bye, and good riddance

The media is RW in Canada, and Global is the biggest of all of them, be nice to see some left wing media type like Ted Turner get in there and change some of that. They have been lobbying to get rid of CBC for years, and have successfully weakened it to the point that any "left" view is almost gone up there, thus, the continued re-eletion of those fucking conservatives up there!