Matthew Fraser (journalist)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Matthew William Fraser (born July 3, 1958), Canadian journalist, academic, and author.

Born in Toronto to British parents, Fraser was educated at the University of Toronto (Victoria College), Ryerson University, Carleton University, London School of Economics, Nuffield College, Oxford, University of Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne, and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, where he earned a doctorate in political science.

He began his journalism career at the Globe and Mail in the early 1980s, and subsequently wrote a weekly column for the Montreal Gazette from Paris and London. In the 1990s, he became a policy adviser and consultant in Ottawa, where he worked mainly on broadcasting and media policy issues for the Liberal government. In 1997, he joined the faculty of Ryerson University's communications school as a research professor.

In 1998 when media baron Conrad Black launched the conservative daily, National Post, Fraser joined the paper as its media columnist while retaining his academic position at Ryerson. In 2002, he co-hosted a weekly CBC Newsworld television show, "Inside Media". His co-host, with whom Fraser had a combattive on-air relationship, was left-wing Toronto Star columnist Antonia Zerbisias. Fraser left the show towards the end of the first season when he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the National Post, replacing founding editor Ken Whyte.

Hired by the paper's new owner, Izzy Asper, Fraser's tenure at the helm of the right-wing daily was marked by drastic budget cuts, staff layoffs, and pervasive uncertainty about the money-losing paper's future in a fierce commercial war with Fraser's journalistic alma mater, the Globe and Mail. He left in 2005 shortly after the arrival of a new publisher, Les Pyette, a former publisher of the tabloid Toronto Sun, who aggressively took the Post downmarket with a splashy tone and look.

While Fraser was editor at the Post, the paper gained notoriety in Canadian media circles for its regular feature called "CBC Watch" -- inspired in part by the Daily Telegraph's "Beeb Watch" in Britain -- which pointed out errors of fact, signs of entrenched left-wing bias, and in particular bias against Israel at the public broadcaster. "CBC Watch" infuriated the CBC's supporters in the Canadian media elite, and critics claimed the Post was attacking the CBC to defend the commercial interests of the private television network, Global, owned by the Post's proprietors, the Asper family. Izzy Asper, the late family patriarch, had railed against the government-owned CBC as a "state within a state" and argued that it should be "expunged". Some believed "CBC Watch"'s appearance in the pages of the Post was not indifferent to Fraser's close relationship with the Aspers. Ironically, he had once co-hosted a television show on the CBC.

While Fraser is not considered a strident neo-conservative in Canadian journalism circles, his intellectual background is situated firmly in that camp. As an undergraduate one of his influental professors was conservative political thinker, Allan Bloom, a leading disciple of Leo Strauss and author of the controversial bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. At graduate school in Paris, Fraser reconnected with the Straussian School at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, where his professors included Jean-Claude Casanova, an influential disciple of Raymond Aron and editor of the conservative revue, Commentaire Fraser's book, Weapons of Mass Distraction: Soft Power and American Empire, makes a neo-conservative argument about the global influence of American pop culture and is critical of traditional Marxist analysis on the same subject.

[edit] Family

Fraser was married to lawyer Rebecca Gotlieb, daughter of Canadian diplomat Allan Gotlieb and writer Sondra Gotlieb. The Gotliebs were well-known fixtures in Washington power circles during the Reagan years throughout the 1980s, when Allan was Canadian ambassador to the United States and Sondra wrote a much-read column in the Washington Post. Sondra Gotlieb's book Washington Rollercoaster recounted their years as glamorous hosts in Washington during the Reagan presidency. Sondra attracted a blaze of international publicity in 1986, when she slapped her social secretary at an official dinner she and her husband were hosting in honour of the Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney and U.S. Vice-President George H. Bush.

Rebecca had a small son, David, from a previous marriage when she and Fraser married. She died suddenly of cancer in January 2003, after which David moved to England to live with his father, lawyer Keith Ham.

Following his departure from the National Post, Fraser (a British citizen) moved to France to write books, dividing his time between Paris and Fontainebleau.