We’ve been getting a lot of stories from our media lately (here, here, and here), assuring us that an equivalent to the Rupert Murdoch scandal couldn’t possibly happen in Canada.

Really? No cozy incestuous relationships? No dirty tricks?

On March 30, 2009, Stephen Harper, PMO staffer Kory Teneycke, Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, and Roger Ailes, president of Murdoch-owned Fox News and former communications adviser to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Sr., all sat down to lunch.

We know this because it showed up in the mandatory disclosures made by media consultant and former White House flack Ari Fleischer to the U.S. Justice Department. Ari, you will recall, had a personal contract with Steve to grease US media wheels for him. Teneycke had a dream of a Canadian Fox news channel.

Four months later, Teneycke had left the PMO — barely a year into his job as Harper’s chief spokesman — only to pick up a contract with Quebecor to explore a project that Ottawa insiders almost immediately described as a fledgling “Fox News North.”

Three more PMO staffers followed Teneycke to SunMedia: an issues management adviser, an advertising manager, and an issues management researcher, described as “a guy who could dig up any dirt on the opposition in a jiffy.”

Teneycke himself had to take a brief three-and-a-half month leave from heading his new project, when conflict-of-interest embarrassments ramped up following his Sun op-ed and public admission to prior knowledge of the hacking of an Avaaz petition, hostile to his setting up Fox News North.

Teneycke was back in the Sun saddle during Steve’s re-election campaign in April this year when a fifth PMO ex, Harper’s former deputy chief of staff Patrick Muttart, sent him a photo of an Ignatieff look-alike posing in full combat gear in Kuwait in 2002.

“Ignatieff linked to Iraq war planning” ran the SunMedia headline and story, sans photo, before Teneycke apparently tumbled to the ruse.

Patrick Muttart was working for the Con election war room at the time, while simultaneously heading the “Canada/US practice” at the US PR firm Mercury Public Affairs, where he works under Terry Nelson. Nelson, former political director of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, and McCain-Palin campaign manager, now a Senior Advisor to teabagger and 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, is famous for the race-baiting campaign ads and phonejamming dirty tricks done under his GOP watch, and for employing the media advisor on the original Swiftboat Veterans For Truth ads, which used lies and doctored photos to smear John Kerry’s war record during his run for US president.

Amusingly, the CTV piece, Harper immune from Murdoch-style scandal, makes extensive use of analysis from Muttart to assure us a similar scandal could not happen here. We just don’t have the same “intense, quasi-incestuous” clique of political and media elites, Muttart says, without irony.

Besides, as another former Harper Chief of Staff, Ian Brodie, explains about Canadian papers: ”So few people actually read most of them.”

Yet somehow the rightwing National Post muddles on for 13 years losing $9-million a year, no one seems to know who owns CanWest/PostMedia now (besides it being some US hedge fund  — and so much for the rule limiting foreign ownership to a third), and 99% of the papers who endorsed a candidate in the last election all endorsed Steve.

We could have a Murdoch-style scandal here and it would be out of the news cycle again the same week, no damage done.

Update: More from David Climenhaga at Rabble.

Sure we should wonder what Stephen Harper was doing having lunch with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in New York last year. And of course the CRTC was right to refuse Quebecor a Category 1 specialty TV licence for its proposed SUN TV News Channel, which would force cable and satellite companies to carry it. Kory Teneycke’s dream of a right-wing news outlet should have to muddle along like any other niche channel, which is what it will be anywhere outside Calgary.

However, the Margaret Atwood-endorsed campaign against SUN TV sponsored by Avaaz.org is so over the top that it ought to offend even the most inveterate cause-whores. It’s not the petition itself that’s the problem so much as the bumpf accompanying it. “Prime Minister Harper is pressuring the Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to approve plans for a ‘Fox News North’,” it reads. “If successful, this would bring American-style hate media to Canadian airwaves, and be funded by our license fees!”

You may have noticed that Avaaz spells “license” the American way. That’s because it’s actually a New York-based outfit that grew out of the success of MoveOn.org in the States. And it does a lot of good work, such as its current fundraising for flood victims in Pakistan. But it’s tone deaf on the SUN TV issue. First of all, the Sun newspapers are more blue-collar than neo-con — if the TV channel follows suit, its most popular program is liable to be the weather as forecast by a SUNshine girl. But ideologically the Sun papers have always been conservative soft-soap. In fact, some of the best reporting on the abuses of the police at the G20 summit came from the Toronto Sun.

And personally, I find Avaaz’s export of this sort of strident, demonize-your-enemy tactic to Canada as offensive as anything Fox News could come up with. It’s a style that Canadians typically reject — both the Conservatives and the Liberals have been forced to pull attack ads after a public backlash — and if SUN TV tries the same thing, it will fail, as I expect its proponents know. Meantime, they have every right to reject Avaaz’s silly bleating. “Fox News fuels hate,” its petition states. “While constantly claiming to be ‘fair’ and ‘balanced,’ it allows hysterical anchors like Glenn Beck to compare Obama to ‘Lucifer’ and ‘Hitler’.” All of which is true. But is comparing a network that hasn’t launched yet to Roger Ailes’ demonic creation any better?

The Times shut down its old website on Tuesday and started directing all traffic to two new ones: thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk. These are the ones that they propose, at sometime in the indeterminate future, to start charging for.

I was interested to see how Rupert Murdoch, wily media titan that he is, intended to get people to pay for something they’re used to getting for free, and will still be able to get for free from most of his competitors. I imagined lots of rich media, streaming video, real-time interaction with visitors, maybe the kind of collaborative citizen/professional journalism, using Google Wave, that recently won the Seattle Times a Pulitzer. Imagine my surprise, then, when I signed up for the sneak preview a few weeks ago and found this:

A newspaper. Okay, so I wasn’t that surprised. As I’ve already written, the whole notion of charging for newspapers online represents a massive failure of imagination. This just confirmed that the NewsCorp cartel had run out of ideas.

And possibly reporters, too. I happened to be logged-in the night that the Israeli navy was chasing the Rachel Corrie on its voyage towards Gaza. The whole world was watching, to see if there’d be a repeat of the bloody incident of a few days before. Down in the corner, The Times was reporting this:

But as it turned out, it would actually be a good half hour before soldiers boarded the boat. Significantly, Twitter was busy at the same time with the same “news,” but already new reports were beginning to emerge there: the Israelis hadn’t “seized” the boat, but were merely tailing it. So I waited, and sure enough, about 10 minutes later:

The implication seemed unavoidable: The Times was getting its news from Twitter, right along with the rest of us. And for this it wants to charge us?

Sorry, Rupert. I already have Twitter. But good luck with that paywall idea anyway.

We are beginning to see the outlines of the newspaper industry’s survival strategy, and it’s going to be this: since what we’ve been doing doesn’t work anymore, let’s go backwards and try something else that didn’t work. Namely, charging for online content.

The signs are everywhere. When John Stackhouse succeeded Edward Greenspon as Editor of The Globe and Mail last week, he advised readers that change is coming: “We think our journalism has a strong value for our users and we think that audience wants to pay for it directly or indirectly . . .” The idea of customers wanting to pay for anything strikes me as a bit rosy, but good luck to them. Rupert Murdoch, a more hard-bitten businessman, told his own Fox Business Network much the same thing, but allowed as how the online product will have to raise its game. “A [newspaper] website will be vastly improved, much more in them.”

The Globe, to its credit, has already begun to muscle-up its site. I don’t refer to the general redesign unveiled recently, which is par for the course, but to its new Toronto hub, with its tight integration of text, video, and cams (for traffic coverage), along with supplementary material from hyper-local online mag Torontoist. Presumably this is a template for what will happen with The Globe‘s other regional sections, which so far remain conspicuously old school.

Still, it will take a lot more than just some Web 2.0 bells-and-whistles to get people to pay — including, probably, live streaming and social media options that will make online newspapers better than TV, better than facebook, and a lot better than they are now.

Some say the move to charge for online content is an attempt to get people to start buying hardcopy newspapers again — you know, the ones you used to get from a box or have delivered to your home. (Remember them?) If so, this is precisely backwards. Nothing could be more reactionary, or downright dumb, than trying to drive readers back to a model that requires publishers to pay rocketing newsprint and distribution costs, relies on a collapsing and possibly discredited advertising model, and is lousy for the environment to boot. (The environment: remember that?) If anything, the big newspapers should adopt the model of many community papers and start giving a much slimmed-down version away for free (delivered to homes, please, to cut down on the litter problem), strictly as a loss-leader intended to drive readers to their (hopefully) much better websites.

Once again, Murdoch, damn him, sees where things are headed more clearly than most. “Instead of an analog paper printed on paper you may get it on a panel which would be mobile, which will receive the whole newspaper over the air, [and] be updated every hour or two,” he told FBN. He might also have mentioned reading it on your TV and in your car. And you thought people talking on their cellphone while driving is bad.

Murdoch also understands how long the shift will take. “I think it’s two or three years away before [these devices] get introduced in a big way and then it will probably take 10 years or 15 years for the public to swing over.” Meanwhile, there’s no point in retreating to the past. Newspapers need to move a lot more quickly than they’re used to moving, put off this charging for online content idea until their online content is a lot better, and dig in for the long haul.

Rupert Murdoch has spoken, and now O.J.’s book and TV interview are gone. The Juice has been squeezed out. And everywhere, of course, newly-minted moralists proclaim that The Right Thing Has Been Done.

Not since Mel Gibson’s drunk driving arrest has so much fatuity been heard in one 24 hour period. Of course the book and interview (on not one but two nights) would have been an outrage. And no doubt still will be: is there any question that both will eventually emerge anyway? But now that we know they’re out there, waiting to be shuffled onto the media forestage, can we not just get the whole thing over with?

I had no intention of watching the TV special, though not because I eat a high moral fibre breakfast; I simply knew that I could get the essentials from the internet later. As for reading the book: I’ll wait to flip through it in the remainder bin. But do I want to know what Simpson has to say? You bet. If the sonuvabitch wants to confess, let’s let him. Take the money from the book and the show, give it to the Goldmans to help settle that $33.5 million still owed them from the civil suit, and give us and them some closure.

Closure may be a very ’80s idea, but that doesn’t mean that, unlike Milli Vanilli, it isn’t real. Is there anyone who isn’t still carrying around a large burden of irritation that this guy actually got off scot free? Well, yes there is, actually: a significant segment of the African-American population, who think he was set up. They might have to come to terms with that sentimental proposition, were O.J. to admit, even obliquely, that he did it. That wouldn’t be a bad thing. As for the rest of us, we’d finally have the satisfaction of saying “Christ, it’s about time,” and walking away, as from a bad smell. The Goldmans and Browns, those poor, tortured families, aren’t the only ones who need to move on.

A young man was recently murdered in a bar fight in the city near where I live. He came from our small community, and our anger was even greater than our grief. Or at least mine was; I’d never really carried around so much unprocessable rage before. But then arrests were made, and the bar shut down, and the management of the bar announced that they wouldn’t even try to re-open it. And suddenly the anger I heard and saw around me began to lift. The grief remained, but we knew which emotion was which now, and could let go of the one that was making us more sick than heartsick.

There won’t be any arrest in the Simpson case. But there might be some cold comfort. And I’ll take that over a murderer breezing around claiming he’s innocent anyday.