Elle Canada ignites a Hamas/trans controversy, pours gas on the blaze and runs away
Plus! The CRTC is coming up with yet another bailout, traditional TV is in a nosedive and was CBCNN miffed it got scooped on the NDP news?
Elle magazine, as you might suspect, caters mostly to women or at least people who used to be commonly referred to as women.
Wait. Let me try this again. Elle Canada magazine’s content is designed primarily for persons interested in the following subjects: Fashion, Beauty, Culture, Life and Love, Decor & Horoscope. That’s better. All of its editors appear to identify as female and among its top current reads are “Taylor Swift ‘hasn’t fully made decisions’ about life post-tour as friends hope for Travis Kelce engagement,” “Bella Hadid is the new face of Chopard” and “Dyson’s latest beauty launches are here - and they’re incredible.”
I, in other words, am not their target audience, but boy oh boy did they ever catch my attention with their latest edition and an article it originally touted as featuring “eight incredible Canadian women” who “have broken the glass ceiling, paving the way for those behind them.”
It was immediately noticed that the first three people mentioned in the article - written by Sadaf Ahsan - were trans artist Vivek Shraya, Ontario MPP Sarah Jama and trans activist Fae Johnstone.
Controversy, as you can imagine, ensued, initially centred around Jama, notorious for her calls for global intifada but also because, as Quillette Editor Jonathan Kay put it, “of the eight listed ‘Canadian women’ honoured by @ElleCanada, two are men. And one of the other six is a Hamas supporter.”
What followed was a breathtaking, panicked series of revisions by Elle Canada’s senior editors who certainly didn’t stand behind their work. The online version of the article was first edited to replace the reference to eight incredible women to simply “incredible Canadians.” Not only did that appear to acknowledge that the publisher was uncomfortable including two trans activists in its count of women, one of the women, er, people - Jama - was removed from the article entirely, allegedly “for the safety of everyone involved” because threats had been recieved and that “the writer had nothing to do with this decision and we’ve removed her byline from this piece.”
Both Sama and the author, Ahsan, took issue with this version of events as the following frame grab illustrates:
Which leaves one to wonder: did anyone actually read this piece before hitting “publish?” It was certainly going to be controversial but one can only imagine what sort of internal, external and perhaps commercial pressures, debates and fights were going on. Kay, perhaps, summarized it best:
“Okay I can’t keep up with the tires @ElleCanada keeps throwing on its dumpster fire.”
My advice to Elle? Stick to interviews with Sophie Gregoire.
It’s looking increasingly likely that the bond between the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and the newsrooms of the nation is going to get cozier.
Not only has the CRTC announced it intends to hold a consultation next spring, followed by a hearing in the summer of 2025, into the state of TV, radio and online news (in other words, everything), it has also once again revised its plans by quietly adding another “consultation” for this fall. This one “will consider the creation of a temporary fund that would support local news production by commercial radio stations outside of the major designated markets of Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa-Gatineau.”
There is currently no indication whether this will be funded with money from a new money tree or via redistribution of an existing fund. The one thing we know for sure is that the CRTC will be putting its finger on the scale in non-metro markets so that radio station news websites will have an advantage over the local newspaper websites. There’s some chance this could evolve so that the CRTC aids and abets the death of more small regional newspapers.
But at least it will be saving radio stations, right?
Well not CHRC-FM in Clarence-Rockland, CKHK-FM Hawkesbury and CJWL Ottawa. Evanov announced the closure of all three effective Sept. 20 and had some harsh words for the CRTC in doing so.
“I regret that the media industry, still regulated and a trusted source of news and information in a quagmire of fake news, misinformation and open social media borders, has not received the necessary support and relief sought during the crises (Covid) or as a pre-emptive and insurance measure that would have us and our fellow broadcasters at a different place,” said president Paul Evanov.
The CRTC is at a fork in the road. It can either take the shackles off its regulated radio licensees or, now that it has authority over the internet through the Online Streaming Act, throw leg irons on streamers and YouTubers. You decide:
Speaking of the CRTC and media funding, it has now been 17 months since the Online News Act passed and a little more than 13 months since Meta chose to cease the carriage of news links on Facebook and Instagram.
Since then, Meta’s share price has gone from $325 to $500, Canada’s news industry has lost as much as $200 million in no longer redirected traffic and not a penny has been distributed from the $100 million Google agreed to cough up in exchange for being exempted.
That’s because the CRTC still hasn’t decided to exempt it. In the meantime, Corus has laid off 25 percent of its staff. You can buy its shares for 12 cents apiece.
The year-end results for 2023 are in and they aren’t so hot for 20th Century businesses.
Some highlights from the CRTC’s annual report show:
Commercial Radio (-0.55%), Commercial Conventional TV (-7.16%), Discretionary TV (-6.31%), and cable/satellite (-5.37%) reported revenue decreases.
Digital media (14.08%) reported an increase in revenues. In 2023, 26% of Anglophones and 15% of Francophones aged 18+ watched audiovisual content exclusively online.
Profitability is down for all 20th Century sectors - radio, conventional TV, discretionary TV and cable/satellite. Cable, radio and discretionary TV all remain profitable, while conventional TV’s PBIT margin was -30.5 percent.
Looks like this internet fad might have some legs.
The Toronto Sun’s Brian Lilley seemed perplexed by what he interpreted as CBCNN’s David Cochrane surprise that a right winger was the first to break the story that NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was ending his party’s supply and confidence agreement with the governing Liberals.
“Brian Lilley of SunMedia tweeted out the internal NDP letter announcing it,” said a chagrinned Cochrane. “So the NDP-Liberal supply and confidence agreement revealed to the world by a conservative-leaning columnist.”
“Contacts everywhere,” explained a chuffed Lilley.
Finally, a tip of the hat to Althia Raj of the Toronto Star for breaking the story that Liberal campaign director Jeremy Broadhurst was stepping down, apparently because he no longer believes the party can win the next election under Justin Trudeau. Weird, eh?
Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a former publisher of the Calgary Herald and a previous vice-chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
Fae Johnstone never misses an opportunity for self-promotion and attention seeking. Yikes.
I'm waiting for Corus to announce it will shutdown Global unless it gets a government bailout. Global is a financial mess. It has lost over $120M each of the last 2 years and its revenue is more than $80M below what it pays to acquire and produce content. Corus's specialty channels have been subsidizing Global, but with the loss of WarnerDiscovery content to Rogers that can't continue. So it's either a bailout or say goodbye to Global.
Also, what is this obsession with local news? Most local news is about the weather, traffic and what local events are happening. Very little is about holding local governments accountable. This is especially true for news on radio. Radio doesn't break important stories, it just repeats what comes across the newswire.