The motion for a permanent injunction that Quebecor Media filed against the Quebec Press Council in 2018 will soon be resolved at the Montreal courthouse. The publishing giant is thus seeking to prevent our only oversight body in terms of journalistic ethics from continuing to deal with complaints from the public against its two major daily newspapers and TVA. They officially dissociated from the CPQ in 2010.
The initial request accompanied by a claim of $200,000 having been ignored by the organization, the suit is now claiming compensation of $428,000. She intends to demonstrate that the CPQ delivered an erroneous decision concerning a reprimand whose The Journal of Montreal was the subject of and which would be the result of a botched investigation. If it wins its case, Quebecor Media could well sound the death knell for this court of honor that has already been weakened for several years, due to a lack of adequate financial support from media companies and the provincial government.
The CPQ is necessarily incompatible with the objectives of profitability and autonomy of the private sector. Even the media that continue to recognize its role as a public watchdog, such as The Press, The sun and the five other daily newspapers of the National Independent Information Cooperative, as well as The duty, are reluctant to accept his decisions when they are unfavorable to them. Which is however rarely the case.
What’s more, the CPQ only accepts a minority of requests sent to it by the public and, for lack of personnel, processing complaints can now take up to 18 months. The rare decisions unfavorable to the media do not entail any penalty, apart from the moral obligation to mention them in their pages. Finally, it should be noted that only a small proportion of the reading public who has a reason to complain takes action with the CPQ, for lack of time or lack of motivation as to the chances of winning their case.
Moreover, when aggrieved individuals go directly to the editorial staff of a newspaper to obtain a correction, they rarely obtain satisfaction and hardly ever receive a public apology. All publishers are reluctant to admit their wrongdoing. Such are the observations highlighted by Michel Lemay in Vortex and Propagandahis two reference works published respectively in 2014 and 2022 by Québec Amérique.
This media specialist reviews hundreds of often flagrant professional errors, from elsewhere and from here. They are most often committed by journalists who lack accuracy or objectivity, columnists who abuse their freedom of expression with insulting remarks or lapses in language. Unwarranted intrusions into people’s privacy.
Editors are not to be outdone with misleading headlines, sensationalist titles that betray the meaning of articles, the abusive use of anonymous, unverified or even non-existent sources of information. It is obvious that the two major dailies with a populist and polemic flavor of Quebecor Media have reaped a significant number of bad decisions from the CPQ.
But why does the senior management of these daily newspapers not simply continue to ignore the decisions of the private non-profit organization, these alleged attacks on its reputation which it is no longer even required to communicate to its readership for ten years? Why this relentlessness against a moral authority that she despises?
This may be because, contrary to the claims of the prosecution in this case, the CPQ has a reputation for doing rigorous work, even under the increasingly difficult conditions imposed on it. Plaintiffs who succeed in obtaining a favorable decision from him benefit from a considerable advantage in the event that they undertake… a lawsuit for damages. Their proof is largely done.
At a time when our courts are more clogged than ever, the CPQ facilitates access to restorative justice for victims of media abuse. More than ever, it remains an essential democratic tool.