The new worry about the next election: your daily news - 2019-08-06

The new worry about the next election: your daily news August 6, 2019, Sarmishta Subramanian, Macleans

---

Recent changes in the Postmedia group suggest a different, more troubling trend is possible.

In June the company announced, though only internally, the appointment of a chain-wide editor to oversee political coverage. Postmedia, of course, owns the National Post, as well as 33 other daily newspapers including the Ottawa Citizen, Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, Vancouver Sun and Montreal Gazette (on top of dozens of non-daily newspapers). The company's new executive editor (politics), Kevin Libin, will oversee or run federal political coverage in the Post as well as federal and provincial coverage in all of the chain's metro daily broadsheets.

Libin is an old hand at the Post, and a natural fit for that paper, which has long had an explicit conservative stance. A former editor of the Western Standard when Ezra Levant was publisher, he's a prominent conservative columnist, and was most recently comment editor and editorials editor of the Post and Financial Post.

But his new appointment means a single voice—and an ideological one—will now oversee or directly run political coverage in a fleet of papers, many of which are not conservative papers at all, beginning in an election year.

Wikipedia cite:

{{cite news | first = Sarmishta | last = Subramanian | title = The new worry about the next election: your daily news | url = https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-new-worry-about-the-next-election-your-daily-news/ | work = Macleans | date = August 6, 2019 | accessdate = August 28, 2019 }}