How much profit does Bell really need?

The people who work for Bell Media are having a rough time these days. The company has sharpened its knives and is going through its CTV and radio newsrooms across the country, cutting employees loose.

About 300 people are losing their jobs. That’s 300 individual stories of heartache and sadness with the knock-on effects on spouses and children.

But it’s also sad for Canadian journalism. The company can argue, as it has, that the television industry is “evolving quickly,” so changes must be made. But it can’t argue that its newsrooms are stronger because there are fewer people working in them.

Which means the news the rest of us need to know to be engaged and informed citizens is diluted.

It’s true that television isn’t what it was 20 years ago, or even five years ago. The multi-channel universe and competition from Internet sources has splintered the audience and made it more difficult to attract large numbers of viewers and listeners.

So you might be tempted to accept what is happening as a necessary consequence of this shifting broadcasting landscape, shrug your shoulders and move on. But we shouldn’t accept it. Bell Media is not some mom-and-pop small business set up over a laundromat, trying its best to make an honest dollar. It’s a very big corporation.

Earlier this month, its parent company BCE reported its profits for the third quarter of this fiscal year: $791million. That’s profit. In just three months. So let’s do some math. If each employee losing a job at Bell made $100,000 (and I’m pretty sure that’s much higher than the real figure) then the company is saving $30 million a year, or less than $8 million every three months.

So its last quarterly profit would have been only $783 million. Isn’t that enough? Running a news service is not the same as running a widget factory. You have the right to make money, but you don’t have the right to squeeze every nickel from the operation. It’s not just me who says that. In 1969, a committee of the Senate looking at media ownership concluded that, “This country should no longer tolerate a situation where the public interest in so vital a field as information is dependent on the greed or the goodwill of an extremely privileged group of businessmen.”

Eleven years after that, a royal commission said that, “Conglomerates should be kept out of newsrooms.”

It recommended that no company or individual be allowed to own a newspaper (and by implication a TV or radio newsroom) if they already owned something that was worth more.

Unfortunately, no government listened to either the senate committee or the royal commission.

And so we are left with a journalistic enterprise that is part of an empire, unwilling to make just $783 million every three months.

Bell Media is not some mom-and-pop small business set up over a laundromat, trying its best to make an honest dollar. It’s a very big corporation