Matthew Fraser (journalist)
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Matthew William Fraser (born July 3, 1958), British-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 School of Radio and Television Arts 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 2002-03, 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 television show twice in its debut season for different reasons. In January 2003, he quit the show following the sudden death of his wife Rebecca Gotlieb. Fraser made an attempt to return to the show two months later, but quit suddenly again when, in May 2003, he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the National Post, replacing founding editor Ken Whyte.
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. Fraser is not considered a strident neo-conservative in Canadian journalism circles, though his intellectual background is situated firmly in that camp. His 2003 book, Weapons of Mass Distraction: Soft Power and American Empire, made a neo-conservative argument about the global influence of American pop culture and was critical of traditional Marxist analysis on the same subject.
Fraser left the National Post in 2005 following a clash with the newspaper's new publisher, Les Pyette, about the tone, look, and future direction of the money-losing paper as it struggled in a fierce competition with Fraser's journalistic alma mater, the Globe and Mail.
[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 throughout the 1980s, when Allan was Canadian ambassador to the United States and Sondra wrote a much-read column in the Washington Post.
Rebecca had a young 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 wife's death and his departure from the National Post, Fraser (a British citizen) stayed in Canada until he moved to France in late 2006. He currently lives in Paris, France where is working on numerous books. He is Senior Research Fellow at the international business school, INSEAD, and also teaches at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris.
[edit] Selected works
Quebec Inc. (1987)
Free-for-All: The Struggle for Dominance on the Digital Frontier (1999)
Weapons of Mass Distraction: Soft Power and American Empire (2003)
