WIRES CROSSED

A hybrid memoir, history, and political work centers on corporate-dominated media.

Despite its abundance of natural resources and the “generosity and good humour of its people,” New Brunswick is Canada’s poorest province. To lifelong citizen Walker, this is in large part due to the disproportionate influence of the Irving family oligarchy for more than seven decades. KC Irving and his children not only dominated the region’s oil, lumber, and shipping industries, but also controlled most of the area’s media outlets. New Brunswick, to the author, is thus a cautionary tale of what happens when the media’s and industry’s “wires cross” under a central corporate identity and operate with “one voice.” Walker’s own personal history—as a journalist and career civil servant inside multiple New Brunswick ministries—is deeply tied to the Irving family, which controlled both the newspapers he wrote for and many of the politicians he worked for. Now a professor of journalism at New Brunswick’s St. Thomas University, the author blends his life story with a well-researched history of the province’s most powerful family backed by impressive endnotes. Though the autobiographical passages are too often a distraction rather than a complement to the book’s case against media amalgamation, its more straightforward history of the Irving family is its strong suit. In viewing a three-year strike at Irving Oil, for example, Walker convincingly demonstrates how Irving media protected the corporation with “tame” editorials that favored management. The result was a “humiliating and restrictive” final contract for workers, who were forced to take “mandatory re-education programs,” and the termination of dozens of striking employees and union executives. The book’s concise, accessible narrative is accompanied by an ample assortment of historical photographs, newspaper clippings, and charts that make for an engaging read. The volume’s final section offers a powerful commentary on the future of the free press in an era where many of the world’s news outlets are following a path already trod by New Brunswick, with corporate monopolies dominating both the industrial and media landscapes.

An effective case against media consolidation that occasionally loses its focus in autobiographical tangents.