First there was Izzy. The former tax-lawyer turned banker, politician,
then communications tycoon, passed away late 2003. In his wake Israel “Izzy” Asper
has left behind Canada’s biggest media empire, ever.
CanWest’s rise to dominance started in 1975, after
Izzy purchased a small North Dakota TV station and moved
it to an old supermarket in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He then
bought a struggling Global TV network in Ontario. Through
the years several more TV stations were bought, with
more than 10 stations across Canada acquired in 1998
alone. By that year, Global had become Canada’s
third largest TV network.
In 1999, Izzy handed over CanWest’s reigns to
his son, Leonard, remaining on as chairman of the board.
A year later, he and Leonard smiled for the cameras when
they bought most of Canada’s major daily newspapers,
weeklies and other sources of print news. They were Canada’s
newest media barons with holdings in every major media.
Cheese!
Izzy was a shrewd businessman and a dedicated philanthropist.
If you worked for him, though, he often came off as “a
dangerous bull inside the fragile journalistic china
shop.” If you read about him in his papers, he
was usually portrayed as a hero, while elsewhere he appeared
as a political meddler of the highest order – a
person who, as journalist Stephen Kimber writes, saw
his role as “that of the righteous/self-righteous,
single-minded avenging angel, whose ever-expanding media
empire gave him the supernatural powers to right wrongs
and smite anyone who unwisely suggested his wrongs might
be someone else’s rights.”
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