We have entered an era in which Canadians must choose between media with or without strings attached
Plus! Broadbent Institute scores Google cash for its media arm; list of loot recipients suspiciously delayed and now you can fundraise for Gilmore
There are now three types of news media in Canada - those who are happy to take the government’s money, those who would take it but are unapproved by government appointees and those who, on principle, will not.
Me? I struggled with which metaphor to use - Faustian for the bargain or Kafkaesque for the scenario - before deciding both were too cliched for my or, more importantly, your liking. So I’ll just say it all carries the mephitic bouquet of an emerging one-party state. Happy to be proven wrong.
Befuddled media managers have failed to adapt to the internet and the 21st Century. Innovation has occurred in other countries and there are public policy tools available to promote media consumption. Canada has chosen instead to subsidize broken business models, opting to preserve the past at the expense of the future while undermining public trust in all involved. Decisions regarding who qualifies are made by a government-appointed panel that reports annually to the Minister of Heritage (or whatever it’s called now). I once counted some panel members as colleagues. They are good, honest people for whom I have a great deal of respect. All have backgrounds at publications known to be suspicious of conservatives.
Proponents of these arrangements call them “saving democracy” and, while others such as I see it as the polar opposite, most of the nation’s journos appear to have passively accepted it as something called “paying the mortgage.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to expand the power, influence and competitiveness of the CBC will lead to demands from the increasingly nationalized private news media sector for an even more entrenched codependency. As Bob Dylan famously wrote, whether, it’s the devil or the Lord (you decide which applies), we all have to serve somebody.
As that situation evolves, we are going to see more tension along the lines of an exchange that recently took place between Terence Corcoran of Postmedia - a leading beneficiary of subsidies - and Sean Speer of The Hub, which vehemently opposes the same.
Corcoran, who’s once eloquent words opposing government newspaper subsidies have fallen mute in recent years, objected to Speer’s forthright Twitter/X comments by asking:
“So I am supposed to quit my job because the company I work for gets government money? And what is that allegation #1)? Who’s (sic) views have I misrepresented?”
To which Speer responded:
“No, no, Terry. You don't have to quit. You should just disclose your own government subsidies in the columns that you write against government subsidies for other industries.”
The Hub’s demands for transparency during the election regarding who got how much from the $100 million (I call it ransom) paid by Google in exchange for exemption from the Online News Act, were met so quickly after the election it raised suspicions the information had been withheld until then.
You can read the initial list of 108 recipients right here. Items of note, for starters, are that Postmedia is the largest recipient with $4,268,319.33 followed by the Globe and Mail’s $2,062,409.41. The Hub got $22,248.58 (which it donated to charity), the Broadbent Institute got $41,049.35 to assist Press Progress’s campaign against Conservatives (my wording), the weekly Hill Times pocketed a sparkling $188,218.56 and the Bengali Times got $21,248.97. The criteria used involves the number of employee hours dedicated to the creation of original online news.
Speaking of transparency, I write regularly for The Hub and have made $2,400 so far this year. Rakin’ it in, baby, rakin’ it in.
It didn’t take long following the election for the first outbreak of sniffles to occur concerning Carney’s failure to kowtow to the media funded by his government. Just as his first interview when campaigning for the leadership was on a foreign program - Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show - his first one following the election was with his other nationality’s public broadcaster, the BBC.
This had the knickers of the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt, historically the Liberal’s go-to source for sympathetic interviews, in a twist:
“I'm old enough to remember a time when a newly elected PM would give a news conference to Canadian journalists before doing interviews with foreign journalists,” she groused in a Twitter/X post. So there.
Had he stayed on his previous career path, Andrew Lawton (I was a guest on his podcast a couple of times) might have been one of the journalists covering the debates and causing David Cochrane, Robert Fife and others to be distressed that he was allowed among them.
The former True North managing editor will instead be sworn in shortly as the Conservative Member of Parliament for Elgin-St Thomas-London-South.
No doubt there are other journalists who have chosen the more reputable career path of politics. Feel free to draw them to my attention.
It will be amusing to watch Lawton’s appearances on CBC in the years ahead.
The tribal battle lines within the news biz were glamourously illustrated by a titillating exchange on the eve of the vote between the Toronto Sun’s Brian Lilley and the Globe and Mail’s Gary Mason.
In case you don’t know, Lilley is conservative, an affiliation the once more nuanced Mason views these days with unrelenting alarm and contempt.
Lilley, using sarcasm seasoned with bitterness, posted a photo of Carney with a straight arm raised:
Mason rushed to Carney’s defence with:
And then a whole bunch of people responded to Mason like this:
The internet is a wonderful thing.
A note on CBC’s election night coverage. I thought nothing quite illustrated the malaise of the Mother Corp as leaving the analysis up to the At Issue panel of three Laurentian thinkalikes - Andrew Coyne, Althia Raj and Chantal Hebert - hosted by the similarly-inclined Rosemary Barton. The addition of former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney - whose perspective Barton embarrassingly attempted to “fact-check” the day before - smacked of tokenism. One had the feeling he was there “just in case.”
Don’t forget to check out my May 6 column in The Hub and the Full Press podcast on Thursday. Oh, and National Observer, the nation’s leading recipient of Local Journalism Initiative funding, is launching a new feature called “Reality Check” focusing on debunking climate “disinformation” and building on election fact-checking done by TikTok influencer Rachel Gilmore and freelancer Emily Baron Cadloff. They need $150,000 by May 31 so if you want more Gilmore, buck up. Come on: you know you do. 😊
(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, a former vice chair of the CRTC and a National Newspaper Award winner.)
This has to be one of your finest columns yet Peter.
And speaking of CBC's blatant bias that it does not seem to care hide at all any more, what is your opinion of this obscene, is what I call it exchange between Bob Fife and David Cochrane when discussing Pierre Poilievre. https://x.com/AnnRolle_/status/1918262183705653400
I cannot describe it as anything other than disgusting and childish and then Cochrane as he finally gets himself under control from the guffaws of laughter mumbles something about having to fill out some Ombudsman paperwork. Does that mean he's going to be reprimanded, because it thus far, appears not as he is still doing Power and Politics and I have heard of no public apology being issued for such unbecoming and unprofessional I have launched my own campaign for people to register a complaint with the CBC Ombudsman, for whatever good in might do.