News too tough to print: Trudeau fuddle duddles about Facebook while an industry burns
Plus! Britons arrested for speech crimes and debate rages over whether CBC is Islamophobic or too soft on Anti-Semites!
The truth has arrived and boy is it ugly.
For months, it has been assumed that the government’s bungling of its Online News Act has financially crippled Canada’s news industry. Now, at last, there is a study that not only confirms that supposition, it shows things may be much worse than even the most pessimistic among us had guessed.
Canadian Press reports that a study by the Media Ecosystem Observatory, which it describes as “a collaboration between McGill University and the University of Toronto” reveals a trail of devastation from what may turn out to be one of the grandest public policy failures in the nation’s history. (If you can think of a worse one, please share in Comments.)
The Act, also known as Bill C-18, was based on the make believe assumption that Big Tech companies were profiting unfairly as carriers of links to news pages. This allegation, made without supporting data, was widely promoted by News Media Canada, the lobbying arm of large legacy news companies such as the Toronto Star and Postmedia, and by broadcasters such as Bellmedia/CTV and CBC. The Star and Postmedia staked their claims vigorously, transforming their front pages into posters promoting the legislation and rejecting commentary arguing against the Act. The Friends of Canadian Broadcasting - now known as just The Friends - launched a campaign that, barefaced, accused Meta of larceny.
The bill also had the backing of, notably, people like Taylor Owen, co-leader of the Media Ecosystem Observatory that conducted this recent study and Supriya Dwivedi, now a policy advisor in the Prime Minister’s Office and no holds barred Tweeter.
To make a long story short, the bill resulted in Meta banning all news links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada. Desperate last-minute negotiations avoided a similar reaction from Google, which paid a $100 million ransom but also killed the commercial deals it already had with publishers. Meta maintained it had provided about $220 million in value - for free - to news organizations.
The Media Ecosystem Observatory reported that its preliminary research shows national news outlets lost close to 64 percent of the traffic once generated through Facebook. The remainder apparently found its way to alternative social media or directly to preferred news sites. Drew Wilson of Freezenet.ca breaks it down here.
The outcome for local news outlets was even more devastating. They lost almost 85 percent of their Facebook engagement.
As Aengus Bridgman of the Media Ecosystem Observatory told CP, several news platforms “have gone dark entirely because they’re no longer getting the ad revenue being driven from Facebook to their sites.”
Kelowna Now, in a desperate plea to readers, recently explained its circumstances bluntly:
“It might well be true that Meta doesn’t need news – but news needs Meta,” it wrote on March 24. “Since the Facebook and Instagram bans, dozens of news outlets have closed down across the country. According to Toronto Metropolitan University, 36 platforms shuttered in Canada in the first 11 months of 2023. Of those, 29 were community newspapers.”
The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, could fix this - or at least direct his Heritage Minister, Pascale St-Onge, to do so - with a simple amendment. Instead, while an industry burns, he fiddles, fusses and tries to lay all the blame at Facebook’s door, referring to the situation as a battle of wills between the future of democracy and Big Tech. It is, he said, a “test.” But of what? His virility?
You may not like Meta. You may actively dislike it. But as anyone with even the most remote understanding of how business actually works could have predicted, it simply did what it had to do to protect its shareholders’ interest. Faced with irrational, extortionate legislation, it responded rationally and refused to be mugged. Its usage has not suffered. Its users are happier without news and its share price is up by a little more than 50 percent. You may not like how the world works, but that, Sunshine, is how it frickin’ works.
The realities of the grownup world clearly remain beyond this government’s grasp. As a result, to put it in working man’s terms, it has had its ass handed to it. And so, having chosen to gaslight rather than listen to people who actually know what they are talking about, the Trudeau government’s Online News Act is now actively killing Canadian news media.
At the time of writing, several of the bill’s major backers - the ones who perpetuated the falsehoods upon which the legislation was based - declined to pick up and publish the Canadian Press report or do their own.
Some media, it appears, can’t handle the truth that they rolled the dice and not only lost the farm but consequently did immense damage to the public’s trust in what’s left of them. The Rewrite’s advice to readers is to find a media outlet that tells you the truth - even when it doesn’t serve its interests to do so - and subscribe to it.
Oh, and you can find Justin Trudeau’s Facebook page here. It works just fine.
Still waiting for the first deep dive look by a mainstream media source into what the world will look like once the Online Harms Act is passed in Canada.
In the meantime, here’s a peak at what online life is like in Britain where according to UK podcaster Konstantin Kisin, thousands people have been arrested for their social media posts. Watch by clicking here.
There was a wild flap last week when a little known online platform posted an anonymous essay authored by a former CBC employee who quit because of what she believed was the Mother Corp’s insensitivity towards the Palestinian cause in Gaza. Imagine.
The post was on a platform called The Breach, about which you may wish to read for yourselves. My first impression is that The Breach has a lot in common with the People’s Voice and the Daily Worker, once the media flagship of Canadian communism.
Here at The Rewrite, we believe good journalism means stories based on anonymous sources should be used rarely and unnamed commentary ought to be posted only in the most extreme circumstances - like in order to save the world from thermonuclear destruction. These days, though, news organizations use unnamed sources all the time and sometimes for the flimsiest of reasons. A “dismayed” CBC Editor-in-Chief, Brodie Fenlon, responded the next day with a plea for readers to judge on the body of his institution’s work.
At the same time as The Breach was accusing CBC of being a snake pit of right wing Israeli apologists, Canadaland publisher Jesse Brown was taking the Mother Corp to the rhetorical woodshed for what he described as its overly sensitive portrayal of those within the McGill University protest camp who have (clears throat) harsh views when it comes to Jews.
“So, is the CBC biased when reporting on pro-Palestine protests?” Brown wondered in an X/Twitter post. “Let's look at a recent example. Here's reporter @mattlapi investigating the question: is Stuart Myiow an antisemite? He asks Myiow, who says he isn't. Now here's what Stuart Myiow said on his FB.”
And then Mr. Brown posted a frame grab from Mr. Myiow on Facebook that begins with “Hitler should have finished the job.”
It you are so inclined, you can read the thread here. Oh, and (parental warning) here’s how it’s working out so far for Mr. Brown in the new diversity-makes-us-stronger Canada. #becauseits2024.
If you are reading this on Monday, May 27, I am scheduled to be a guest at 11:30 a.m. ET on the Evan Bray Show (Rawlco Radio) which broadcasts across Saskatchewan. And thanks to True North and Kris Sims, who was guest hosting on The Andrew Lawton Show, for having me on last week (shortly after the 15:30 mark) to talk about government-funded journalism.
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I was a young girl living in Ontario when Pierre Trudeau shoved the NEP down our throats. To say that it really only affected Western Canada is naive and patently false in my view. The NEP did more to divide this nation than any other policy before it. It brought on a hatred of the ‘east’ (by that I mean Quebec and Ontario) and a resentment that this nation has yet to heal from. Bill C-18 allows the current PM to further ‘stick it’ to Albertans and grassroots Canadians in general by muting their voices. As a former broadcast journalist with CBC National TV News, I am heartsick and ashamed of the tactics of our federal government and big news media. The government couldn’t pull this off without the ‘Big Media’ journos in its back pocket.
Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy ....
Sir, in your third paragraph you conclude with, "... what may turn out to be one of the grandest public policy failures in the nation’s history. (If you can think of a worse one, please share in Comments.)" This is, of course, your description of Bill C-18.
According to my computer I received your column nine hours ago and this appears to be the first comment on your column. I conclude that one of a) no one reads your material (which I reject), b) no one has anything on their mind that would add / detract from your commentary and which they wish to share with the world; or c) everyone agrees with your characterization of C-18.
Personally, I suspect that there are greater policy errors but, having said that, I actually cannot enumerate any. That means, I suppose, that I am left with your assessment as being definitive.
I recall that prior to the passage of C-18 I many times commented in various fora that, rather than Facebook et al profiting at the expense of the Canadian news industry, to me it was clear that the news industry was profiting at the expense of Facebook et al and if any compensation was (at least ethically) owed, it was owed by the news industry to FB et al. Of course, our famous government idiots got it backwards and here we are, with more dead and dying media.