A sure indicator that an anti-capitalism author is about to drive his ideological semi-trailer off the highway and into a fiery explosion comes early in a new book about the media from Canadian writer Marc Edge. In his book — The Postmedia Effect: How Vulture Capitalism is Wrecking Our News — Edge drives his semi off the road on page 74 where, as he’s laying out the intellectual road map for his core theses, he quotes Adolf Hitler and Mein Kampf for support.

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Terence Corcoran: A malicious smear job — What does Mein Kampf have to do with Canadian media? Back to video

At this point, Edge is already careening recklessly down his highway of claims that Postmedia Network Canada Corp. (publisher of the National Post) and Public Policy Forum, an Ottawa-based liberal think tank, in 2017 orchestrated a Hitlerian “propaganda” campaign to create public support for a government bailout of the ailing newspaper industry.

Edge’s accusation is that the Public Policy Forum (PPF), headed by Edward Greenspon, conspired with Postmedia to produce “The Shattered Mirror,” a 2017 report that called for the government to help rescue the newspaper industry from the tech revolution. Edge sets up the PPF report with quotes from various experts on the evil ways of high-end propaganda theorists and practitioners, ending with a quotation from Hitler on the merits of deploying the “Big Lie.” According to Hitler, the Big Lie is a falsehood so “colossal” that no one could doubt its veracity since no one could believe that others — here Edge quotes Hitler — “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Edge helpfully provides the precise reference to Hitler’s work (Mein Kampf, Munich: Franz Eher, 1925, p. 196) and then moves on to trash the PPF and Postmedia for having produced a propaganda masterpiece. “It was a triumph of selective presentation that was rife with distortions, fabrications, exaggerations, and even censorship.”

The Nazi theme is echoed on the book’s cover, a smudgy yellow and black effort that includes partial images of the National Post’s masthead re-set in a typographical font similar to the masthead of Der Sturmer, a Nazi weekly published in Germany from 1924 through to the end of the Second World War. (The full cover can be seen at the bottom of this column.)

This smear is carried right through from the book’s cover to its final sentence that more or less celebrates the end of the company: “What Postmedia produced mostly wasn’t journalism anyway, but instead a perversion of journalism.“

This kind of ideological smear is the engine that drives Edge. He is a meticulous researcher, documenter and footnoter who manipulates and twists his fact-filled work through a warped and ignorant leftist misunderstanding of business, newspapers, journalists, governments and media consumers.

He has two main story themes, both of which he mangles and distorts to suit his world view, which — as far as I can discern — boils down to classic leftist nonsense that cabals of think tanks and corporations control and monopolize Canadian media and politics.

In the first theme he recalls the history of Postmedia, from its days under Conrad Black through to the Asper family to the current ownership structure that includes securities held by U.S. hedge fund investors. Edge claims that over the last quarter century, a string of Postmedia owners and managers drove the media company downward to the point where it might not survive, with foreign hedge funds cashing in. Failure to survive would be a good thing, says Edge.

My purpose here is not to review that storyline, which is filled with detail, conjecture and Edge’s twisted view of the media and how and why business decisions are made. His idea is that Postmedia owner/managers are responsible for allowing the company to fall into financial distress — as if no other news organization in the world has not faced similar crises.

A demonstration of Edge’s inability to grasp economic realities is his 2014 book, Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers, a lengthy wrong-headed work that portrayed newspapers as triumphant over the new technologies sweeping the world. It is a work that is so wrong that one suspects Edge wrote his new book as a defensive move so he could blame newspaper owners for his own failure to understand the changing tech environment.

There is no doubt that the controllers of news media corporations, including Postmedia, blunder and stumble at times, and engage in self-serving lobbying and policy wrangling. I have occasionally noted them in this column, as the companies scrambled to extract funding from Ottawa and Big Tech. Despite the effort from all Canadian media — left, right and centre — for funding, governments have no business in the newsrooms of the nation,.

But I leave it to others to outline Edge’s business ignorance, which holds that anything a company or its executives do to remain successful or even alive amounts to corporate malfeasance. Among his most laughable linkages is the proposition that the market-oriented Fraser Institute and the statist-oriented Public Policy Forum are kindred think tanks manipulated by Postmedia owners to influence public policy to increase government funding of newspapers — or something like that.

Edge rants on about corporate concentration, foreign ownership and executive decisions. Even when he gets things right — as in his criticisms of Ottawa media bailout plans — he wanders off road with lengthy references to other works and writers, many of who are clueless. He even takes a shot at former union leader Jerry Dias over his National Post columns supporting government bailouts.

It is Edge’s assumptions about the proper role of media owners as managers of the activities of journalists that deserve close attention. If the action does not meet with Edge’s ideological approval, then it is evil propaganda of the worst kind.

His views are wrong, often inconsistent, and ultimately a threat to principles of press freedom. In a chapter that likely inspired the reworking of the National Post’s masthead into Nazi typeface, Edge goes on for pages about how and when Postmedia publications were allegedly used to turn the chain into the home of “hard right” political views.

In Edge’s definition, hard right is anything and everything that does not fit into his leftist perspective. If a newspaper’s content or commentary supports the oil and gas industry, opposes defining Canada as systemically racist, backs big and small ‘C’ conservative parties, fires journalists it doesn’t like or hires ones it does, panders to leftists or rightists, shapes the content of editorial pages, creates new schemes to generate revenues and advertising — that is the prerogative of the owners. It is not, as Edge implies, an indication of moral and political degeneracy.

But enough. I can’t go on. Edge’s book is a muddled fact-filled ideological smear job which is as malicious as the book’s cover suggests.

Financial Post