The biggest scoop of all!

A Senate committee recently held hearings into the Canadian news media, including the key questions of convergence and cross-media ownership, and it issued a report with some mild recommendations for reform this past summer. The senators might have shed some light on the question of media profitability had they done what a previous Senate inquiry into the mass media did in 1969 -- force the media companies to open their books -- but they didn't. Back then, the hearings chaired by Senator Keith Davey found media profits "astonishing" at 12 to 17 per cent in newspapers, 21 to 26 per cent in radio, and 36 to 64 per cent in television, compared to 9 to 10 percent in other businesses.

"An industry that is supposed to abhor secrets is sitting on one of the best-kept, least-discussed secrets, one of the hottest scoops, in the entire field of Canadian business -- their own balance sheets," declared the 1970 Senate report.

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