The second generation of Aspers that now runs Canada's largest news media company is much like the first. Israel "Izzy" Asper's three children often appear in today's headlines. David is bidding to buy the Winnipeg Blue Bombers football team. Gail heads fundraising efforts for the new Canadian Museum of Human Rights. Leonard sits in his father's place as head of CanWest Global Communications. Like its founder, they also use their media empire to influence public opinion. Asper Nation explains why Canadians should be concerned about where the country's first family of news media is coming from, politically.

Izzy Asper was an oddity as a Liberal politician in the 1970s. Fiscally, he was to the right of most Conservatives. As a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, he called for a flat tax and "workfare." As a best–selling author, he helped thwart a plan to shift Canada's tax burden from the middle class onto corporations. But when Asper took his policies to Manitobans as Liberal leader in 1973, he was soundly defeated. Asper got into the television business instead and built Canada's third network.

Asper made CanWest the country's most profitable broadcaster by feasting on regulations that encouraged the importation of cheap American programming. He took his formula to the world in the 1990s, buying television networks in New Zealand, Australia, and Ireland. Then in 2000, Asper pioneered media "convergence," buying Canada's largest newspaper chain from Conrad Black. Southam dailies were soon ordered to run "national" editorials written at CanWest Global headquarters in Winnipeg.

This corporate news control brought protest from journalists and two government inquiries. Neither resulted in long–sought limits on media ownership, however. Marc Edge offers a compelling account of the political perils involved in allowing the Asper family to dominate Canadian media.

A native of Greater Vancouver, Marc Edge began his newspaper career as a writer at the Province in 1974. He later worked in the business section of the Calgary Herald, and in 1982 completed a Master of Labor and Industrial Relations degree at Michigan State University. He was BC Supreme Court reporter for the Province for ten years before accepting a Southam buyout offer in 1993. From 1995 to 1997, he sailed his forty-foot ketch Markenurh around the Pacific. He completed a PhD in Mass Communication from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in 2001, and is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He can be contacted by e-mail at pacificpress@hotmail.com.

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