The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias bemoans the fate of a critic in a very converged Canadian media universe.

An excerpt from her Dec. 6 treeware column:

Ever since Friday morning, when the news of Bell Globemedia's restructuring hit the wires and then the markets, many people have asked me what this means for journalism.

The truth is, I don't know.

Does anybody?

I can tell you this: when the Star's business editor Mike Babad roused me to apprise me of the fact that Torstar, which owns the Star, had paid $283 million to acquire 20 per cent of Bell Globemedia (BGM), which is comprised of CTV and the Globe and Mail, my first reaction was to ask to change beats.

My second was to contemplate suicide.

(Let's get the numbers out of the way: BGM, owned 68.5 per cent by BCE Inc. and 31.5 per cent by the Thomson family's Woodbridge Company Ltd., will, pending regulatory approval, end up being owned 40 per cent by Woodbridge, 20 per cent by BCE, 20 per cent by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and 20 per cent by Torstar.)

Regular readers know that since 1995, when Disney bought Capital Cities Corp., which owned ABC, for $19 billion (U.S.) and Westinghouse bought CBS for $5.4 billion, I have railed against media concentration and its negative impact on democracy and discourse.

More recently, I have been ranting about concentration in Canada, especially when it comes to CanWest Global, which owns the National Post, many big-city dailies such as the Vancouver Sun, Ottawa Citizen and Montreal Gazette as well as Global TV.

Now, with Torstar buying into BGM, media concentration has landed plop plop plop like a steaming pile of bad news on my very own front stoop. Which makes me worry that things might get very slippery for a media critic, if you get my drift.