Just like that, it’s no longer about whether news media will sell out to politicians: now, we’re just negotiating the price

Latest political platform launch ensures that what only a few years ago was profane is now sacred for all but a few Canadian publishers

There’s an old story about a parlour game exchange between a gentleman of some renown and a lady of the day (well, an actress actually) that I always imagine took place in a Downton Abbey sort of setting.

It came to mind when I was reading the Conservative Party’s platform and noticed it no longer plans to eliminate media subsidies and will instead add $25 million to the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI) plus another $25 million for Indigenous media.

There’s more to their media policy than just that - they have fleshed out their plans regarding the fate of English CBC and no foreign platforms will get Canadian government advertising - but we’ll get to those ideas if they win on Monday.

The LJI, cooked up by the dying newspaper industry, was initially $10 million annually for five years but became $128.8 million over eight. It now has an annex called the Changing Narratives Fund which more explicitly pays journalists to influence public opinion to the government’s liking. Publishers apply to the LJI and an industry (primarily News Media Canada) panel selects which of them gets $50,000 or so to hire reporters to, ostensibly, enhance “local coverage in underserved communities.”

Some of you may recall how, last summer, Niagara Now penned what Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff Katie Telford called the longest editorial in history when Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre suggested he was opposed to media being dependent upon the good graces of politicians. Regardless, Niagara Now had signaled media would oppose Conservatives so long as they threatened to cut off their access to taxpayers’ money. We can now report that the shakedown succeeded despite polls indicating Canadians are suspicious of this arrangement because - not surprisingly - it diminishes their trust in journalism.

And, when one looks at the current list of recipients of LJI funds, those reservations are not without foundation. Because if you click on that link you will see that Vancouver-based Canada’s National Observer, a decidedly pro-Liberal platform which self-describes as a “critical pillar” of democracy, is the single largest beneficiary with three LJI-funded jobs. The first - and I am not making this up - appears to be, essentially, a federal Liberal communications position with the staffer assigned, full time, to report on “Government of Canada impacting Vancouver and BC.” The second government-funded journo is the “Cortes and Quadra Islands” reporter which I imagine displeases the folks running the Gulf Islands Driftwood. The third is an “Ottawa Indigenous reporter” and I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Ottawa is a “news desert.”

Those assignations might be controversial. But Postmedia, the Toronto Star and almost everyone else in the industry suppresses reporting about or criticism of the LJI, Online News Act, Canada Periodicals Fund and the Journalism Labour Tax Credit. So you won’t find any funded journalists questioning whether National Observer’s “beats” are consistent with the LJI mandate.

Suffice to say, were it not for a few people sympathetic to my belief, which was widespread only a decade ago, that government funding of media is both unethical and morally repugnant (The Line, Western Standard, The Hub and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute come to mind), I would have had no platform on which to offer an opinion opposed to this abominably close, greasy and mutually muted relationship between the press and politicians. In fact, were it not for those stalwarts, you might not know about it at all.

I had hoped, as I naively wrote in The Hub on Monday, that this election might decide if news media should be disconnected from direct government funding and, therefore, remain reputable and trusted. The decision by the Conservatives to join the Liberals in the quest to be Sugar Daddy ended that fantasy.

The era of a free, independent and trusted press - with the exception of the righteous few - is now officially over. It won’t get any headlines because the people involved don’t want to write about it because they know it doesn’t make them look good. But it’s a significant moment. It ended as foretold by TS Eliot: not with a bang, but a whimper.

And that’s why the story, first told in 1936 by New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons, about the gentleman, the actress and their game of hypothetical questions came so swiftly to mind.

Gentleman: “Would you live (polite 1930s phrasing) with a stranger if he paid you £1,000,000?”

Lady: “Yes”

Gentleman: “And if he paid you £5?”

Lady: “£5? What do you think I am?”

Gentleman: “We’ve already established that. Now we’re trying to determine the degree (price).”

The lady, quite properly, remains anonymous. The gentleman, poignantly, was Max Aitken, a Canadian newspaper publisher who became Lord Beaverbrook.

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Paradoxically, two of this week’s most significant scoops were executed by the from-my-cold-dead-hands independent, Blacklock’s Reporter.

The first was when it revealed that the CBC posted a correction regarding news presenter Rosemary Barton’s embarrassing attempt to label a Rebel News questioner as a purveyor of misinformation only to reveal herself as the one spreading misinformation. While many in the funded legacy media ranks were fighting over the presence of Rebel and others at leaders’ debates, Blacklock’s checked the CBC site where the correction was posted. None of the thousands of subsidized reporters were similarly curious and so, for three days, Blacklock’s was able to sit on its scoop.

The second was the Blacklock’s Reporter revelation of an horrific, dystopian future for Canadians as soon as 2040 in a Privy Council Office report. It was so compellingly dark that Poilievre used it for a dramatic campaign moment Tuesday in which he wondered why the information revealed wasn’t leading the news across the country. (Hint: see subsidies shakedown.)

Going forward, Blacklock’s and other entrepreneurial, innovative platforms such as Western Standard and The Hub will have to either abandon their ethics or compete in a game now permanently rigged against them. And, as the subsidies grow - and they will - it will be much more difficult to launch new, independent, competition.

The Rewrite, meanwhile, will continue to keep you informed as best it can. But it’s going to be harder now.

(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.)