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The Federal Communications Commission is poised to unveil new media ownership rules June 2 that some experts believe may change the face of American journalism.

The new rules would allow media companies to own television stations and newspapers in the same cities.

The FCC barred companies from owning newspapers and TV stations in the same market in 1975, but big media owners like the Tribune Co., Knight Ridder, MediaNews Group and the New York Times say it's time to lift that ban.

They argue that cross-ownership makes for better journalism: Staffers working for companies that own newspapers and TV stations in the same market can work together to create richer, multimedia news reports that can then run in the company's paper and on their stations and Web sites.

Advocates say the synergies of convergence lead to cost savings, increased advertising revenues and greater efficiencies.

?The concentration of ownership in a lot of major Canadian cities is of interest for a lot reasons, but mainly because it provides too much news coming through one pipeline.? --Russ Mills, former publisher of the Ottawa Citizen

Cross-ownership already exists in some markets: The FCC granted about 40 exemptions to the cross-ownership rule in cases where a company already had television or radio stations and a newspaper in a single city. The FCC also granted exemptions in larger markets after media mergers produced cross-ownership situations.

The Tribune Co., for example, owns television stations and newspapers in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Miami.

How further media consolidation and convergence would play out if the FCC does lift the ban on cross-ownership has been the subject of hot debate in the weeks leading up to the commission's June 2 vote.

Experts familiar with the rapid consolidation of media in Canada say the U.S. should look northward for some lessons on what loosening cross-ownership restrictions could mean to journalism in the U.S.

In Canada, the deregulation of cross-media ownership occurred gradually over the last 20 years. Within the past eight years, it has led to massive consolidation of media companies.

Most of Canada's news media -- including newspapers and broadcast stations in all of its major cities -- are in the hands of two media giants: CanWest Global Communications Inc., and Bell Globemedia -- a division of the country's largest telephone company, Bell Canada.

The rapid media consolidation in Canada has inspired an often-acrimonious debate over whether Canadian journalists are able to report objectively on social and political issues and whether the country's corporate media has allowed business interests to undermine the role of journalism in a modern democracy.

"Based on the experience in Canada, dropping restrictions on cross-ownership certainly hasn't worked out well," said Russ Mills, former publisher of the Ottawa Citizen in Canada's capital city, who was fired by CanWest in a fight over editorial independence.

"The concentration of ownership in a lot of major Canadian cities is of interest for a lot of reasons, but mainly because it provides too much news coming through one pipeline," he said. "When companies use ownership to control the news, and they do have the ability to do so, it hurts everyone."

Consolidation accelerated in 1990s

Canada's restrictions on cross-media ownership were carved largely from regulatory decisions on broadcasting licenses made since the 1950s by the Canadian Radio-Television Commission -- Canada's version of the FCC.

By the mid-1980s, Canadian media experts say, exceptions to cross-media ownership rules had eroded the cross-ownership ban to the point that it was unenforcable and largely ignored.

By the mid-1990s, consolidation of Canadian media companies had accelerated on the strength of dot.com economics. And in 2000, CanWest, the second largest broadcaster in the country, announced a $3.5-billion deal to purchase a majority of the nation's newspapers -- including papers in the nation's 12 largest cities.

Within weeks, Jean Monty, Bell Canada's CEO at the time, announced that Canada's largest phone company had set its sights on owning both content and the multimedia pipelines into consumers' homes.

The decision prompted Bell Globemedia to purchase the Globe and Mail and the nation's largest TV network, CTV, in 2001.

Despite the rising consolidation of media outlets, the massive purchases of newspapers by CanWest Global and Bell Globemedia took many Canadian journalists and media-watchers by surprise.

CanWest and Bell executives convinced Canada's CRTC that convergence was necessary to attract advertising revenue and reduce costs if newspapers in many Canadian communities were to survive. And they promised that resources from new revenues would be devoted to improving the quality and reach of journalism through the Internet.

When questions about convergence arose during CRTC hearings on both companies' broadcast licenses shortly after their newspaper purchases, they promised regulators that they would separate management of news-gathering operations by their television stations and newspapers.

Officials from the Canada National Newspaper Guild complained that keeping management separate would not prevent companies from forcing journalists to perform work for both newspapers and television, to the detriment of journalistic independence.

Critics -- including journalism professors, journalists, newspaper and broadcast union officials, and some government officials -- have argued that the quality of journalism has gone down, not up, as a result of convergence.

Joyce Smith, an assistant professor at Canada's Ryerson University, teaches online journalism and worked on the online staff at the Globe and Mail before leaving last year.

She said the one opportunity to see convergence succeed might have been missed by Bell Globemedia in its efforts to cut costs to recoup some of what it spent on media acquisitions.

"What I found interesting was that the actual idea of convergence wasn't a hit with people working with just the newspaper or just television," Smith said. "Where it really happened was with the online news team. There were things the TV folks could clearly do much better with the online newspaper. By pooling resources, it all did work much better.

"But in the tradition of journalism," she said, "reporters were asking, 'What does this mean for me? Does it mean that I have to file stories to the Web and then do stand-ups in newsroom, while doing my piece for the deadline at the end of the day?'

"Basically, (owners) wanted reporters to be one-man bands," Smith said. "That has been played and replayed here. It made sense from a business model, but journalists, especially those who have been around for a while, went into newspapers and TV for a reason. Some are great at doing both, but not everyone has the same aptitude. And no one has the time in the day to do it all. Some of the expectations were outrageous."

Canada reexamining changes

While U.S. media critics and media executives have been testifying over the past few weeks in Senate hearings on the proposed changes in the FCC's media ownership rules, Canada is busy reexamining what has come of its own cross-media consolidations.

Two inquiries are underway by Canadian government officials to explore the impact of cross-media ownership and consolidation on journalistic integrity and media responsibility.

The Canadian Senate's Committee on Transport and Communication began taking testimony at the end of April on those issues and is expected to report its findings within the next year.

A House of Commons committee on Canadian heritage is expected to release an 800-page report next month on its own yearlong investigation into the impact  of media concentration and political efforts by corporations to ease restrictions on foreign ownership of Canadian media.

But media-watchers, who have a ringside seat on Canada's great media debate, say they are doubtful that government investigations will produce any new regulation on media conglomerates.

"The horse is out of the barn," said Arnold Amber, director of the National Newspaper Guild of Canada. "But the good news is that this has at least inspired a vigorous national debate on press freedom and responsibility."

Amber and other critics of media convergence said promises of more stories and better information from combining print and broadcast news staffs have largely failed in Canada.

"Bell Globemedia is talking about restructuring and selling off its media wing," Amber said. "The failure of convergence to bring in revenues was primarily responsible for the resignation of Bell Canada's CEO, Jean Monty," who stepped down in April 2002.

Geoffrey Elliot, vice-president of corporate affairs for CanWest, said that convergence has not led to revenues, or the reduced costs, the company had hoped for.

But Elliot, and other supporters of cross-media ownership, argues that all sides have benefited from consolidation.

"We are a family-owned business that saw an opportunity in which the whole was greater than the sum of the parts," Elliot said. "We saw substantial potential synergies on the sales side by putting television and newspaper assets together, since they both serve primarily advertising clients as sources of revenue, and serve a combination of local and national markets."

Amber said the companies likely saw their primary financial advantages from a convergence of back-office technologies -- combining circulation, sales, printing and management operations.

But it was something else that brought issues to a head in Canada over media consolidation and sharing newsroom resources: The loss of diversity of voices within the Canadian media took on new importance, observers say, after a series of events that led to accusations of censorship and political bias by CanWest's owners.

In December 2001, CanWest -- which owns 11 major dailies and 22 smaller papers in Canada -- issued a directive to its newspaper editors that they would be expected to run three editorials per week that reflected the position of CanWest?s owners on political or social issues.

The decision was met with a spate of criticism -- especially when editors were told that other local editorials were not to contradict those from corporate headquarters.

A byline strike ensued at the Montreal Gazette, and inquiries by the newspaper guild there led to findings that work by columnists and cartoonists was spiked when it conflicted with opinions from corporate headquarters.

Several journalists quit; some staffers published a protest Web site.

The furor finally boiled over into the public arena last June when Russ Mills, the publisher of the Ottawa Citizen, was fired by CanWest for running a series of stories and an editorial that outlined alleged political and financial irregularities in the administration of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

Elliot, the CanWest vice president, said the controversy arose because Mills failed to let CanWest's owners know in advance of the series or the editorial -- which called on Chretien, a friend of CanWest patriarch Israel Asper, to resign.

Mills said he had not sought permission for either the investigative series, or the editorial, because he believed in preserving "editorial independence."

The problem, Mills said, was that the new owners were trying to dictate local editorial policy from corporate headquarters.

Elliot described the concern over attempts at a national editorial policy -- which has since been largely abandoned ?- as a tempest without substance.

He said CanWest?s owners were "well within their rights to propose national editorials," and that their actions were no different that those of other newspaper ownership groups prior to media consolidation.

"There has never been any effort to control what was published in news stories," he said.

Since his firing, Mills has become an outspoken critic of media consolidation in Canada, and he testified in April before the Canadian Senate committee conducting media hearings. He was also awarded a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard University and is the incoming dean of the journalism program at Algonquin College in Ottawa.

Meanwhile, Mills' firing prompted a public opinion poll by Canada's largest media union that found that the incident had caused the public to lose confidence in the media's editorial independence.

The results, union officials said, showed that Canadians were concerned about press freedom and wanted the government to look into problems associated with media concentration.

Peter Murdock, then vice-president of the communications union, told Canada Newswire that the poll "demonstrates that Canadians want their journalists protected from the whims and prejudice of media barons. It is a grim warning to media corporations and government that Canadians believe that the very integrity of the news that feeds our democracy is being undermined by the effects of concentrated media ownership."

It is clear that online journalism at Canada?s newspapers has changed dramatically under CanWest?s corporate control.

The company replaced independent newspaper Web sites with a common site, Canada.com, which allows consumers to access local news by clicking on the community they are interested in.

Elliot said community news on the Web site comes from local newspapers and television stations, and said that consolidating that information on a single Web site provides consumers better access to local news across the country -- as well as reduces costs.

Bruce MacCormack, former head of interactive media at CanWest, said supplementing newspaper and television content with a common Web site has made access to news more efficient and allowed the corporation to serve consumers better.

"The consumers of online media ? were also television viewers and newspaper readers, and at different points in the day, different media were the best way to reach those people," MacCormack said.

"Someone watching television in the evening could be told about stories being developed for the next day's newspaper, which is read on the commuter train as people go to work," he said. "Then, during working hours, the Internet was the most effective way to get them up to date on news, and tease them for television use at night."

"These were handoff mechanisms that worked to reach people, so consumers and the public were able to access services in the most appropriate media, for whatever method they could best be served."

CanWest recently filed testimony with the FCC to support the relaxation of cross-media regulations in the U.S. That testimony challenges media critics on their central objections to cross-media ownership.

"Today's media market is the richest and most diverse in the history of modern media," the document says. "Cross-ownership has strengthened media companies and encouraged greater diversity and more sources of information.

"Experience," it adds, "simply does not support the contention of some opponents of cross-media ownership, that consumers would have access to fewer point of view, or would see only repackaged versions of the same content across multimedia platforms."

Smith, the Ryerson professor -- despite her criticisms of the handling of online media opportunities in Canada -- said she sees differences between media ownership consolidation in Canada and in the United States.

"In the U.S., because of the size of the market, the chance of one or two owners gobbling up everything, I think, would be less than in Canada," she said. "But there is some caution in that.

"If you are thinking about journalists, there are wonderful things about operating in a converged environment. It was really exciting thinking we could potentially have video, and it may be good for news consumers in the sense that (online video) will be a faster way of converging types of media.

"But you get a lot of the same stuff. There is no alternative. You are going to lose some (editorial) voices in the process."