Brunswick News

Brunswick News Inc. is a Canadian newspaper publishing company based in Saint John. It is privately owned by James K. Irving.

Brunswick News employs more than 600 people and operates nearly all of the major print publications in New Brunswick, including three daily newspapers and several French and English language weeklies throughout the province.

Brunswick News operates the following newspapers:

Brunswick News owns 14 English-language weeklies (6 paid subscription, 5 free) and 7 French-language weeklies (4 paid subscription, 3 free).

Brunswick News Inc. is the largest owner of media in New Brunswick. It is privately owned by J.K. Irving, who is also co-owner of the "Irving Group of Companies," one of the largest industrial conglomerates in eastern Canada. It owns all of the English-language daily newspapers in New Brunswick and 29 other publications. In light of this affiliation, many citizens accuse newspapers owned by Brunswick News of bias, and of failing to cover stories that depict subsidiaries in the Irving Group of Companies in a negative light.

The Irving media concentration of New Brunswick was investigated in the Davey report (1970) and the Davey Committee on combines and the Kent commission (1981) during an era before extensive media concentration took place across Canada in the 1990s; at that time, the Irving concentration in New Brunswick was considered unique in the country's media landscape. The Kent Commission recommended (in section 2.a) the creation of new legislation that would "require the break-up of regional monopolies, such as that of the Irving family in New Brunswick, by prohibiting the ownership of two or more newspapers having 75% or more of the circulation, in one language, in a defined geographical area".

A report from the Canadian Senate in 2006 on media control in Canada also singled out New Brunswick because of the Irving companies' ownership of all English-language daily newspapers in the province. Senator Joan Fraser, author of the Senate report, stated, "We didn't find anywhere else in the developed world a situation like the situation in New Brunswick." The report went further, stating, "the Irvings' corporate interests form an industrial-media complex that dominates the province" to a degree "unique in developed countries." At the Senate hearing, journalists and academics cited Irving newspapers' lack of critical reporting on the family's influential businesses.

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