MONTREAL - A bitter feud between the Quebecor media empire and the CBC's French-language network, marked by insults and threats of legal action, appears to have been resolved with a new advertising deal.

Under the accord, Radio-Canada will buy advertising on different platforms owned by Quebecor, which publishes Le Journal de Montreal and has media properties in the rest of Canada under the Sun Media banner.

Quebecor, meanwhile, will renew distribution deals for various Radio-Canada specialty channels on its Videotron cable subsidiary. Those specialty channels include CBC News Network and its French-language counterpart RDI, as well as the Bold arts channel. That channel has a French-language version known as ARTV.

The deal, which was reached Friday, was announced by Quebecor (TSX:QBR:B) in a news release on Monday.

Quebecor president Pierre Karl Peladeau said he's pleased Radio-Canada sees the value of his company's publications.

"As leaders in our respective markets, we have always been convinced that our newspapers allow Radio-Canada to reach the biggest market that its mandate has directed it to achieve," Peladeau said in a statement.

"We are pleased that, with this deal, Radio-Canada has recognized the value of our newspapers in obtaining the public broadcaster's objectives."

A Quebecor spokesman declined to comment when asked if this would herald an era of better relations between the company and the CBC, referred to with derision as the "state broadcaster" by Quebecor's English-language properties. He said Quebecor had nothing further to say beyond the news release.

Quebecor, which is privately owned, has been highly critical of the publicly funded CBC.

At one point Peladeau sued a Radio-Canada vice-president for alleged defamatory remarks, in a case that was eventually settled out of court. He also threatened legal action against the Crown broadcaster because it didn't advertise in Quebecor's French-language newspapers.

Peladeau wrote in a letter to CBC president Hubert Lacroix that if the broadcaster persisted in "boycotting" Quebecor's publications he would take the matter to court.

Peladeau concluded that Radio-Canada stopped buying ads in Quebecor publications when it locked out employees at two newspapers. He also said Radio-Canada was reacting to criticism of the Crown broadcaster by Quebecor journalists.

The Sept. 7, 2011, letter was obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act. It was among a flurry of correspondence between the two men that went on for two years.

CBC president Hubert Lacroix has previously said that Quebecor's readers weren't part of Radio-Canada's target market.

On Monday, Marc Pichette, a spokesman for Radio-Canada, said the deal is mutually beneficial and suits the Crown broadcaster's distribution plans for its existing specialty channels and a new science and nature channel, Explora.

"This being said, we will continue to react forcefully when journalists or columnists, working for whatever media organization, question the relevance of the public broadcaster," he added in an email.

Louis Lalande, vice-president of Radio-Canada, said Monday that the agreement strengthens the distribution of the broadcaster's specialty channels. The added sources of income "will contribute to the production of original Canadian content on all our platforms," he said.

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