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Richard Stursberg drills down on policy proposals for Canadian books he says can be winners (if only Ottawa would listen)

March 27, 2026

In January, Sutherland Books published Richard Stursberg’s tonic for the anemic domestic market in Canadian authored books, Lament for a Literature.

Now semi-retired, Stursberg served as a senior advisor on cultural policy to the Mulroney government and went on to a string of important jobs in cultural production that culminated with a tour of duty as the VP English services at the CBC. He wrote a memoir of his CBC days, The Tower of Babble, which is a fun read (though not for his skewered adversaries).

Lament for a Literature chronicles the decline of the Canadian book publishing industry and Canadian authored books in a domestic market dominated by foreign book houses. The Canadian book publishing landscape is dominated by a handful of multinational publishers owning 95% of book sales, with small independent Canadian publishers chasing what’s left. And that’s before we consider the chokehold on book distribution that Amazon and Indigo have and the implications of that for publisher profits and author royalties.

MediaPolicy reviewed the 100-page book that is bursting at the seams with major public policy proposals to reverse the decline.

To get a better handle on his proposals, I interviewed him.

***

MediaPolicy: How’s Lament for a Literature doing?

Richard Stursberg: I would say I’ve been very pleased so far. A lot of reactions. There was an excerpt published in the National Post. And they had over 400 reader comments before they cut them off.

MP: You saw my review of your book?

RS: Yes, and John Ibbitson did one in the Globe, and there’s an interview in Canadian Affairs.

MP: About that interview, they asked you a lot about the cultural controversy you stride right into in the book, this contested terrain of decolonizing literature versus telling iconic Canadian stories. The bottom line in your book is that we need to legislate help for Canadian book publishing. But you can’t legislate the cultural zeitgeist, can you?

RS: No you clearly can’t. The difficulty for a curator of cultural funding, like the Canada Council for the Arts, is you end up pursuing an ideological agenda by carving up a fixed budget for book publishing based a policy agenda. And I don’t think that’s what you want to do. I think what you want to do is something different, which is to create a set of arrangements that allow publishers and writers to decide what they are going to write, not bureaucrats.

And the way you do that is simple. You make the book subsidies automatic, like we do in film and television tax credits. And so you get rid of this sort of notion that we’re going to have people sitting around and deeming what’s worthy and what’s not worthy, and what’s politically correct or not. You leave the decisions about what gets published in the hands of authors and publishers.

MP: Right. You talk in Lament about this tax credit, this subsidy program that we already have in film and TV. You are proposing that something like that would replace the federal budget lines for the Canada Book Fund and the book funding program inside the Canada Council?

RS: Yeah. And the way the TV credits work is that typically they’re labour-based. The producer files a cost report and then as a certain proportion of those total costs the government sends you a cheque. Now, there’s two good things that happen with this which don’t happen with any of the book programs.

Right now, the book programs are all zero-sum. So, one publisher gets more, the other has to get less. That doesn’t happen with television tax credits. It would allow you to grow the book industry.

But secondly, what happens is the tax credits are bankable. The publisher can take the tax credit down to the bank and get a loan, more investment [for author advances or marketing].

And they will. You can’t do that with the current book program because you never know how much money is going to come out the other end.

MP: You also write in Lament that we need to re-establish Canadian ownership of publishing houses if we’re going to revive Canadian books. Isn’t the horse out of the barn on Canadian ownership?

RS: The horse is out of the barn and into the meadow. He’s been grazing for a long time. Ninety-five per cent of book sales in Canada go to foreign owned publishers.

MP: So reversing that foreign ownership is not your top priority?

RS: Well I would say this. We should have a federal ownership review process that is transparent. The whole secrecy is bizarre. The entire process over the years has been a complete disaster. The last one was Allan Lau’s Wattpad, it was sold to a Korean company in 2021.

MP: I think the most challenging policy proposal in the book is to create a Canadian rights market where foreign publishers have to make deals with Canadian book publishers to have their foreign-authored books retailed and distributed in

RS: I don’t know if it’s back to the future. No doubt, it would be a little complicated to set it up. But it’s a way of compensating for having allowed the industry to have become completely dominated by multinational publishers. The first right of refusal has to go to Canadian publishers and distributors.

We know that in the early days, whether it was Macmillan or McClelland & Stewart, that’s how they made a lot of their money and financed these extraordinary lists of Canadian artists. With a rights policy, you’re trying to recreate that publisher capacity.

MP: Another proposal you make that also looks complicated to me is your idea to stop Amazon and Indigo from undercutting independent Canadian bookstores on discount pricing. Straight-up price regulation, in other words.

RS: It’s worked in Germany and France for decades. Quebec too. And the reason why it’s a good law is threefold.

One is that, outside of Quebec, our independent bookstores can’t compete. It’s because they’re small and their margins are small, with giants like Amazon or Chapters. But independent bookstores are very important, because one of the fundamental ways to promote books is so-called hand selling at your local bookstore.

You go there. They know you. They know your taste. They say you might be interested in this new title.

So you, you know, instead of saying to yourself, “oh, I think I’ll go to Chapters, because I’ll get 20% off,” it’s the same price everywhere. In France, not only does Amazon have to sell it at the same retail price as everybody else, but they have to charge 10 euros for shipping.

And it’s been very successful. You walk around Paris and there’s a small independent bookstore on every block. And they’re very good.

And you look at the statistics as to the extent to which the French read French authors. Something like, about 55 to 60 percent of all the bestsellers in France are written by French authors.

MP: I think I’m only part way through your list of proposals. It’s a lot and some of it might not even be in federal jurisdiction which means you have to shop the ideas to provincial premiers.

RS: Yes, it’s an ambitious proposal. Any one of them is an ambitious proposal, but altogether it’s an ambitious proposal.

MP: I’m thinking, okay, it makes it a lot easier if the federal government can act alone rather than doing anything that the provinces can object to.

RS: So, in Quebec it’s no big deal. They’ve had their book law, their Loi de Livres, since 1981. Quebec publishers of French language domestic books have 51% of sales in their own market.

It’s because their book law requires schools, libraries and universities to source their books from independent Quebec-based bookstores. They can’t source them from Amazon or from anybody else outside the country. That seems to me to be like almost a silver bullet.

To sell books to those key institutional buyers, you have to be an accredited bookstore.

MP: What does it mean to be an accredited bookstore?

RS: It means that you have to not only be in Quebec, but Canadian owned and operated. It means you have to carry somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Quebec titles in your store. So when people walk into the store, there’s lots of books to them, select them, some that are local.

And you can see, this is a big shift because if you went back 30, 40 years, the Quebec book market was in many ways much weaker than the English-Canadian book market.

MP: Do you think you can get the attention of Canadian Heritage with Lament?

RS: The thing that’s so amazing to me is that a lot of these policy models are well-known because they’ve been trialed out elsewhere, whether they’re tax credits or top-ups for distribution or whatever they happen to be. Or, you know, they’ve been tried out for years and years in the TV and film business. And for some reason or another, despite the fact they’re all in the same Department, none of it seems to have penetrated Canadian Heritage’s book people.

MP: Very odd. Well, is it odd?

RS: I think it’s odd.

MP: Well, in the real world of politics and influence, is it any surprise that the television industry has had more success in getting Heritage to implement helpful things than the wee little book industry?

RS: Well, yeah, you’re doubtless right.

***

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Defending our cultural sovereignty, down to the last budget cut

March 21, 2026

There was a brief political buzz this week when US Congressman Lloyd Smucker (R-PA) introduced a bill in the House Ways and Means Committee to ask the Trump administration to pronounce Canada’s Online Streaming Act Bill C-11 an unfair trade practice.

The technical term for the congressional request is a “section 301” investigation under the US federal Trade Act that can lead to retaliatory tariffs against other nations, Canada in this case, or it can fizzle out.

On the eve of CUSMA trade negotiations, Smucker’s congressional action is the expected statement of American intent. He and other Congressional representatives have sporadically demanded White House intervention since Parliament passed Bill C-11 in April 2023. In Canada, Smucker’s move was met with a smattering of told-you-sos from the foes of the Online Streaming Act, as was the case when Joe Biden’s White House expressed the same opposition to C-11.

The allegation of “unfair trade practice,” taken seriously, requires the Trump administration to recant its endorsement of CUSMA in 2018, a treaty that Smucker enthusiastically supported.

That’s because the Online Streaming Act, and the CRTC’s implementation of it that includes a 5% cash levy on US streamers to replenish Canadian media funds, almost certainly does not violate CUSMA, which may be why neither the Biden administration nor the Trump White House ever filed a complaint against C-11 that would have gone to a trade arbitrator for final resolution.

It’s not a violation of the CUSMA trade deal to impose financial or regulatory obligations on foreign companies that hurt their bottom line so long as Canadian companies are subject to broadly equivalent regulatory requirements that hurt their’s. That’s clearly the case in the Online Streaming Act and the CRTC levy.

None of that matters a whit, of course.

After plenty of lobbying, the US streamers believe they have the tariff-mad Donald Trump in their corner and they may well be right. With Paramount Plus having swallowed Warner Brothers Discovery under the new ownership of friend-of-Trump Larry Ellison, the streamers are even tighter with the White House than before. So who cares that Canadians obeyed the trade deal that Trump signed?

Netflix is all in for trade action too. This is mostly a case of smash and grab: they will take what they can get from the White House. In Europe, Netflix plays ball with regulators because they have no better option. In Israel, Netflix succeeded in getting streaming regulations scrapped at Trump’s request. As for Canada, Netflix told the CRTC two years ago it could live with a 2% cash levy (Disney seemed to be okay with something closer to 3%) —so quaintly pre-Trump, yes?—but if the new White House administration is willing to go to the mats for Hollywood, why not go for broke?

Meanwhile, the Carney government is sending some mixed messages to the US on how highly we value our culture.

Of course there was last summer’s Carney-cave on the digital services tax, but strictly speaking that was a corporate tax dispute rather than cultural legislation.

Most recently, our federal government’s projection of its own budgetary spending in the next three years suggests that Canadians love culture so much that the Prime Minister is prepared to make the deepest cuts to the CBC, the Canadian Media Fund (CanCon), the Canadian Periodical Fund (news journalism), the Canada Book Fund (Canadian books), and the Canada Music Fund (CanCon) since Stephen Harper took a cleaver to them.

The Main Estimates tabled in the House of Commons by Carney’s treasury board look something like this for 2026-2027:

CBC: eliminate $192M from the $1.5B parliamentary grant (13% cut);
Canada Media Fund: eliminate $68M from the $203M budget (33%);
Canadian Periodical Fund: eliminate $13M from the $86M budget (15%) with a further $14M cut in 2028/29;
Canada Book Fund: eliminate $3.4M from the $40M budget (8%);
Canada Music Fund: eliminate $16M from the $40M budget (40%);
TV5: eliminate $2M from the $13M budget (15%).

Funding for the Canada Council for the Arts, the Indigenous Screen Office, and the Local Journalism Initiative is frozen.

All of this violates the Liberal government’s election platform that left no wiggle room in promising to increase CBC funding by “an initial $150M” —implemented in 2025-26 budget —before moving on to future increases. At least the government hasn’t resorted to blaming Donald Trump’s tariff squeeze, well known to all when these election promises were made.

These cuts require a budget to make them final. But they aren’t a trial balloon. The Main Estimates were approved by cabinet’s treasury board and tabled in the House of Commons on February 26th, citing them as the government’s promised “comprehensive expenditure review.” Two weeks earlier, Heritage minister Marc Miller appeared before the Commons Heritage committee to praise the government’s increased cultural spending in the 2025-26 budget.

If there’s been any public outcry about Carney’s deep cuts to cultural spending, it’s been lost in the din. Somewhere, Stephen Harper is turning purple with indignation at the double standard.

As trade talks loom, it appears that Canada will defend its culture down to the last budget cut.

***

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – The Dhanraj Show – Go away Paul Wells, you’re not a journalist – The OpenAI problem – Grand Theft Anna

March 14, 2026

Last September MPs on the Parliamentary Heritage committee (CHPC) voted unanimously to hold hearings on “the state of Canadian journalism.”

This happened after, or perhaps because, the Conservatives called for a Parliamentary inquiry into the dramatic departure of Canada Tonight host Travis Dhanraj from CBC Radio-Canada. At the time, MediaPolicy wrote about that dispute here, here and here.

On Tuesday, the curtain was drawn back for the first of five days of CHPC hearings and as the opening guest Dhanraj told his story. For a detached review of the blow by blow, here is Karyn Pugliese’s Substack post.

Dhanraj’s narrative is (a) the CBC is a toxic workplace that management tolerates, (b) he was tokenized as a brown skinned journalist and rebuffed in efforts to make his evening show more edgy and interesting, and (c) he was on the short end of a power struggle with the Rosemary Barton of the National and David Cochrane of Power & Politics, preventing him from booking Conservative MPs on his show.

The side of the story he doesn’t tell is CBC’s management view that so long as the CPC was boycotting those two flagship news shows, they weren’t getting on Canada Tonight. Bruce Arthur’s column in the Toronto Star delves into this. So far, the CBC isn’t saying much and is keeping its litigation powder dry (Dhanraj has filed a human rights complaint).

A thread pulled on during the hearing is a list of 45 “do not book” guests that Dhanraj says he got from CBC management. Depending on what the list is for, and who is on it, there could be fireworks.

It’s fair to say that CPC Heritage critic Rachael Thomas is getting as much mileage out of the Dhanraj affair as possible and going after the CBC with gusto. Dhanraj, whose lawyer Kathryn Marshall is well connected in Conservative circles (she’s married to CPC insider Hamish Marshall), says he’s not bearding for the Conservatives.

MP Thomas is building on a theme over the five days of hearings by calling witnesses such as Honest Reporting (critical of CBC reporting on Gaza and an on-air anti-Semitic rant by Radio-Canada’s Washington corro) and inviting the Canadian Ethnic Media Association to amplify its dissatisfaction with the CBC’s reporting on mass protests in Canada against the Iranian government.

Still to come, compulsory Committee appearances by both the Heritage Minister Marc Miller and CBC CEO Marie-Philippe Bouchard.

***

That pesky issue of defining a journalist never goes away.

Last week Blacklock’s Reporter broke a story, picked up on by The Hub, of communication staff in two federal government departments appearing to require reporters seeking information or comment to be employed by news businesses certified by the Canada Revenue Agency as a Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization. The purpose of QCJO certification is to vet news outlets for labour tax credits, i.e. subsidizing 35% of journalist salaries.

I say “appear” to require QCJO certification, because the federal websites for Immigration and Global Affairs said comms staff would only speak to journalists employed by news organizations that are QCJO certified or abide by “similar” standards of journalism.

“Similar” is an important caveat. The key standards of QCJO certification are first hand reporting (“original news’) and adherence to an editorial code of accountability: picking up on those rules, the private journalism consortium that disburses $100M in Google news money every year under the Online News Act also requires news outlets to meet standards of news gathering and editorial accountability. Hence, the departmental caveat “similar to.”

Still, the federal department websites repeatedly refer to “QCJO” and quote word for word from the QCJO tax guidance on original news reporting and other program red lines. And when this happens in two different federal departments, you have to wonder about the group think behind it.

Of course two federal bureaucrats can get the same thing wrong at the same time out of ignorance: for example, maybe the light didn’t go on that the QCJO program is not available to thousands of broadcast journalists, freelancers, or reporters employed by magazines and community weeklies. It seems doubtful the government departments won’t talk to CTV, Global, TVA or CBC Radio-Canada reporters.

It gets worse. The QCJO rules quoted by the two departments reiterate the “two employed journalist” threshold that sets a minimum size of a newsroom that is eligible for QCJO subsidies. Following such a rule, it appears the departments won’t speak to any freelance journalists, no matter who they are. Paul Wells and Linda McQuaig need not apply.

Who defines a journalist anyway? Canadian journalists are not government regulated, nor self governing except to the extent that their news organizations voluntarily participate in Press Councils or the Press Galleries in Ottawa and provincial capitals.

Even then, the peskiness of hair-splitting definitions arises. Recently in Washington state, a federal judge upheld the legislature’s exclusion of three right-wing media personalities from enjoying the full run of the state building granted to professional journalists on the grounds that their primary identity was in the role of political actors.

In Canada, the Supreme Court already acknowledges the unregulated status of journalists by expanding the libel defense of “responsible communication” to include anyone, not just professional journalists.

On the other hand, in 2017 Parliament needed a legal definition of a journalist in order to create a whistleblower law that shields confidential sources. Under that statute, a journalist is defined as “a person whose main occupation is to contribute directly, either regularly or occasionally, for consideration, to the collection, writing or production of information for dissemination by the media.”

It took a few days, but Immigration reacted to the bad publicity and the intervention of the Canadian Association of Journalists. It says it’s reviewing its definition of journalist.

***

The tragic role that OpenAI played in the Tumbler Ridge mass school shooting, by flagging but not reporting the killer’s homicidal ideation, has policy experts thinking hard about what kind of regulation we need to see in an online harms bill.

Taylor Owen has an important LinkedIn post, worth the two minutes of reading time. Here’s an excerpt:

Here’s the thing that doesn’t get said enough: your conversations with ChatGPT or Claude or Grok are not private. Employees, and AI, can read what you type. OpenAI is about to start selling ads against those interactions. While, the product is designed to feel intimate, simulating patience, attentiveness, understanding, it is ultimately a content serving product. But it is a product that many open up to in ways they would to a person. It is a psychological bait and switch that capitalizes on a disconnect in norms. But because we have an illusion of privacy with these products, mandatory reporting to law enforcement, if not designed carefully, risks layering a surveillance obligation on top of what is already, fundamentally, a surveillance product.

What could actually help? I have been arguing for a Digital Safety Commission with real enforcement powers, mandatory risk assessments, transparency over safety protocols and age-appropriate design standards. Upstream regulation that changes how these products are built, not downstream surveillance that monitors how people use them.

If I understand Professor Owen correctly, he thinks that if AI and tech companies are compelled to adopt robust and transparent safety design of what their bots will give advice on, the less we will have to worry about the surveillance and reporting of private activity on the web.

***

Because I have decided your weekend reading list is still incomplete, if you care about books you must read yesterday’s Substack post from Sutherland Books publisher Ken Whyte. It’s about book publishers’ court challenge to the industrial-scale theft of copyrighted content by Anna’s Archive, an unauthorized aggregator of digital content.

***

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I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Local TV independents demand Meta bargain despite news ban – Radio Canada’s Amazon deal roils in Quebec – the clock ticks on Bell Media’s future

CHCH News Director Greg O’Brien

March 8, 2026

Just before the new year, the CRTC hit the pause button on its staff investigation into Meta’s leaky ban on news content posted to Facebook and Instagram, declaring a wait-and-see.

CRTC VP Broadcasting Scott Shortliffe issued the brief notice on December 3, 2025, noting Meta’s efforts to remove user posts of Canadian news and stating that the Commission would continue monitor the news ban.

On February 4th, the LITS coalition of 15 independently owned television stations filed an application to the CRTC asking the regulator to confirm that Meta, despite its news ban announced in August 2023, continues to “make news available” in Canada through either the replication of news content or linking to it on Facebook and Instagram. The broadcasting companies, which include Hamilton’s CHCH and Victoria’s CHEK, want the CRTC to order Meta to bargain with news outlets.

MediaPolicy wrote about this issue previously here and here, pointing out the regular news posting activities of Canadian digital outlets Telelatino, The Peak (on Instagram but not Facebook) and Narcity on both platforms.

Narcity publisher Chuck Lapointe claimed in a LinkedIn post to have an agreement with Meta to exempt his publication from the news ban.

Aside from these exempted news publishers, the LITS application to the CRTC cites a long list of news posts from Meta user accounts, often linking back to content posted on YouTube. The application offers the CRTC a number of examples of user-posted content from news sites that directly compete for audience with digital content published by the television stations on their websites. According to LITS, some of the posts were removed after several months, others remain.

CHCH News Director Greg O’Brien also points to Facebook permitting regular posting of video clips from the Rogers City-TV Breakfast Television morning show in Toronto, in direct competition with CHCH’s own morning show.

It’s a legality worth noting that the Online News Act does not narrowly define the “news content” that Meta must bargain for as hard news or political reporting. The Act describes news content as original reporting on “matters of general interest and reports of [Canadian] current events, including coverage of democratic institutions and processes.”

Asked why he thinks Meta is platforming CityTV’s Breakfast Television but blocking CHCH, News Director O’Brien said “we can’t understand this and can get no answers from Meta. Breakfast Television and [CHCH] Morning Live are competing morning news shows. We are banned from Instagram and Facebook and BT is not. It makes no sense and is unfair. Global Television’s morning show also has an Instagram page. It makes me think Meta has some side deals with them.”

LITS counsel Peter Miller expressed a similar concern when asked why it was the small independent television stations raising this issue with the CRTC on their own, so far.

“It’s also possible that Meta has done deals with large players. Certainly the recent stance [Meta has] taken with government —-drop the [Online News] Act and we’ll do deals that include [licensing of] AI—- suggests they’d rather only have to concern themselves with bigger news players. And the survival of smaller independent players and news media diversity generally is the most at risk here,” Miller told MediaPolicy.

Further details of LITS allegations can be downloaded below.

LITS Application Re Meta – Revised 23-02-2026 Download

***

Another day, another controversy for CBC/Radio-Canada.

The Corp’s decision to broadcast its 24-hours national news television channels on Amazon Prime for a monthly subscription fee has been heavily criticized in the press, Québec’s Culture Minister and by federal and provincial political parties in Québec.

The criticism is that CBC is partnering with a foreign tech platform that is overwhelming Québec audiences with English-language content.

Making it worse, say critics, the same live news content is not available on Radio-Canada’s ici tou.ca (the CBC says that is coming to tou.ca, it’s already available on CBC Gem).

La Presse cultural columnist Mario Girard was so incensed that he speculated he might be unable to defend Radio-Canada funding in the future.

“In short, if we follow the logic of this agreement with Prime Video, Radio-Canada will be selling content (largely paid for by Canadian taxpayers) to an American giant that will, in turn, siphon off profits to further crush Canadian private media,” wrote Girard in his regular column.

CBC content is available on a number of non-Canadian platforms, on its YouTube channels in particular, as the public broadcaster follows the audience leaving, or never considering, conventional television. As well, media content is increasingly discovered on apps that are gated by foreign-owned operating systems installed in smart televisions and other connected devices.

This week the Hamilton-based and Canadian owned online distributor Parrot TV announced it is adding the ad-supported CBC National News Channel, CBC Vancouver and CBC Toronto to its other live news channels CHCH-TV and Newfoundland TV.

Besides the CBC news channels, Amazon Prime also carries live Canadian news channels on paid subscription from CTV, Global, and Rogers City-TV, but not Québecor’s TVA.

Update 14/3/26 – Radio-Canada has paused its deal with Amazon Prime until such time that it can offer its news channels on tou.ca.

***

Bell Media has responded to speculation about its long term licensing of Warner Brothers Discovery’s HBO content on Crave, now that Paramount has won its takeover bid for WBD. In a declaration kept short and sweet, Bell claimed its HBO deal was good for “the foreseeable future.”

Paramount has announced its intention to merge HBO into its own subscription service Paramount Plus and also fold in its advertising supported app, PlutoTV.

The expiry date of Bell’s licensing deal for HBO’s content remains a commercial secret. If I was a shareholder, I would want that secret told.

In the meantime, Bell must be planning to pivot hard to rebuilding its Crave platform into an engine fuelled by its own Canadian IP. There’s an excellent interview of Bell’s content VP, Justin Stockman, by Irene Berkowitz, exploring how Bell hopes to build on the success of hit shows like Heated Rivalry, Sullivan’s Crossing and Empathie.

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Meta’s “Faustian bargain” – Paramount, so much winning – Millennial beer buddies have at it on ‘Elbows Up’

February 28, 2026

Meta’s ban on Canadian news and the rumour mill about the federal government being interested in fixing it has dragged on for several months.

It seems that Meta and Ottawa are talking about something that touches upon licensing of news content for Meta’s AI tools, age verification for social media accounts, the Online News Act, and Meta’s news ban on Facebook and Instagram.

Earlier this month, Meta spokesperson Rachel Curran was invited to a ten-minute spot on David Cochrane’s CBC news hour to discuss Meta’s pitch to have the federal government impose age verification responsibilities on app stores (Google and Apple) rather than apps (Meta).

At the eight minute mark they pivot to the news ban and Meta’s recent chats with the Liberal government.

“We would love to have news back,” said Curran, which doesn’t exactly square with her adamant position that as an advertising-driven business they get no commercial value from news content.

Her read-out of Meta’s talks with the Liberals was that the government agreed with Meta’s view.

That’s an astonishing claim —not denied by the government as yet— given that the Online News Act was built on precisely the opposite foundation, the government’s policy conclusion that Facebook monetizes news content and exploits its commanding market position in social media to shortchange news publishers in what would otherwise be a fair market in licensing payments for news snippets and hyperlinks.

A more nuanced answer from Curran might have been that Meta is willing to pay for news content from some news publishers, but not from most others, and therefore a mandatory licensing regime doesn’t make sense.

The idea that some news content generates ad revenue for Meta, but some content does not, is a value proposition that could be true but it has never been proven one way or another and Meta has no intention of putting it to the test.

The Online News Act gave Meta a chance to prove such a claim by negotiating different price points for different news outlets. But prevented by the Online News Act from cherry picking news outlets, Meta instead chose the nuclear option of a news ban.

Now we’re back to “Go” on the Monopoly board and Meta wants to cherry pick deals with chosen news outlets for the ingestion of news content into the training of its AI tools.

Curran tried to obscure the cherry picking by making the shamelessly false statement that the Online News Act is preventing Meta and news outlets from engaging in negotiations over AI content (the Online News Act only regulates “making news available” to the public and would require amendments to apply to content licensing for the training of AI tools).

Alternatively, Meta wants news content in order to offer AI products that mimic search engines and embed news links in its chat replies. Yes, that might well be covered by the Online News Act and so Curran would be right, the Online News Act is an obstacle to implementing Meta’s evolving global model of monetizing third party content without licensing it.

But the important take-away here is that Meta is pitching a deal to Ottawa: repeal the Online News Act, let Meta cherry pick a few Canadian news outlets for licensing deals, and in return Meta will allow news publishers and their content back onto Facebook and Instagram.

The President of the Canadian Association of Journalists Brent Jolly dubbed this “a Faustian bargain,” but a more descriptive characterization would be “total capitulation by Ottawa.”

Removing the news ban would certainly help some news publishers, especially start-ups, who are still willing to put their business faith in Meta-controlled distribution. But the political value of the Liberals of taking such a lop sided deal seems minimal.

***

The battle to buy Warner Brothers Discovery is over.

This week the WBD board accepted Paramount’s improved $31 per share offer as “superior” to its tentative deal with Netflix, which declined to bid higher. It’s an $111 billion USD deal in the end.

You could spend the rest of your weekend reading analyses of the dramatic bidding war. For something short and punchy, here is Aakash Gupta’s X post.

The deal is supposed to catapult Paramount into a far better competitive position with the streaming thoroughbreds Netflix, Disney, YouTube and Amazon, improving upon its current also-ran position. With a mountain of debt financing sitting on Paramount’s post-merger balance sheet, major layoffs and studio production cost controls are a good bet.

Prior to the improved share bid, Paramount tried to satisfy the WBD board and its major shareholders with a key promise to buy its laggard cable assets (including CNN) and other guarantees around break-up fees and the reliability of its debt financing. In the end, it had to pay more.

Netflix didn’t want to pay more and may have been listening to the chorus of critics who thought they were overpaying, even with a lower per share price and Netflix stock swaps for WBD shareholders.

One interesting view was that Netflix might get more bang for its buck buying Spotify instead of a bigger share of the video streaming market through WBD’s prestige HBO content, WBD’s other IP brands and its massive movie archive.

Paramount is ultimately owned by Larry Ellison, third richest man on the planet and tight-with-Trump. The New York Times has a useful overview of Ellison’s budding media empire in technology, movies, cable news, and TikTok USA.

There will be at least two story lines for MediaPolicy readers to follow once the deal is closed.

The first is what happens to CNN News. In less than a year, Ellison has acquired control of CBS News and now CNN.

CBS News is already being repositioned towards a more conservative audience.

CNN —disparaged for years by Republicans as the “Clinton News Network”— seems a good candidate for being starved for cash, stripped for parts or transformed into Fox News 3 unless Ellison is shrewd enough to hang on to a centre-left audience for advertisers. Certainly his friend in the White House expects a conservative CNN.

On the latter point, Ellison may have jotted down notes on Jeff Bezos’ business misjudgment in humbling the Washington Post to appease Trump.

The other story is Canadian: will Ellison renew or let the HBO licensing deal with Bell Media expire and offer HBO as a stand-alone streaming service in Canada (in a bundle with Paramount Plus, or separately). (Update 2/3/26 – Paramount has announced that HBO and Paramount Plus will be merged into one streaming service.)

If Bell loses the profitable HBO content stream, its entire broadcast enterprise becomes very weak, possibly an intolerable drag on its bottom line.

This merger drama started by WBD CEO David Zaslav isn’t quite over of course. There are anti-trust hurdles for Paramount, even with a friendly government in Washington DC.

The Attorney-General of California Rob Bonta is talking out loud about challenging the deal. But anti-trust is notoriously a long shot both in timeline and chances of success.

Regardless, the deal may not close for a year, an election year, and the Congressional Democrats are not going to let this merger go gently into the night.

***

In December I wrote about the book Elbows Up, an anthology of centre-left English Canadian and Indigenous voices responding to Donald Trump’s annexation threats.

I wasn’t deeply impressed by the book and said so. But I recommend an entertaining follow up: The Hub’s Harrison Lowman video interview of the book’s editor, CBC Radio host Elamin Abdelmahmoud.

Lowman had the same problem with the book that I did: no conservative voices and more than a generous dose of settler-state vocabulary that seems at odds with forging the ecumenical political bonds and links required for resisting US hegemony.

His guest had no good answer for the parochial exclusion of conservative perspectives on a common Canadian challenge, the threat of annexation: he weakly implied a lack of interest from conservatives to meet his time sensitive call-out for contributions.

But Abdelmahmoud is quick-witted to say the least, and he did a good job of explaining the importance of Canada and Canadians integrating the Indigenous perspective of dispossession, domination and death into our national consciousness of who we are, what we want to be, and, as pointed out in the book, why Trump’s threats provide a perfect opportunity to advance our reconciliation project.

Lowman and Abdelmahmoud, conservative and progressive bookends, are good friends in their private lives and listening to the interview is like sitting back and appreciating a robust argument over beers. That makes it an almost perfect metaphor for the national conversation we might have.

***

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Federal action on online harms is now a political no brainer

February 26, 2026

The most casual observer of public opinion on Ottawa taking action against harmful online content will have long concluded, this ain’t no battle.

Canadians categorically support government action against online harms.

The leading policy proposals focus on harms to kids with the prescribed remedies of bans on youth accounts and regulatory take-down laws to shield tweens and teens from porn, self-harm content and predators.

The only roadblocks to federal action in Canada —and they should not be underestimated— are the potential for Trump-induced trade chaos and on the other hand the possibility that the Official Opposition will keep a Liberal online harms bill, once tabled, bottled up in Parliamentary committee.

The Safer Online Spaces Coalition, a Canadian campaign group headed by the mother of the late Amanda Todd, just released a Léger poll making it clear how popular federal action on online harms will be. The thirst for government action is even higher than similar poll results from two years ago .

The poll shows extremely high levels of concern about addictive and otherwise harmful content, and similarly high support for regulation (90%) delivered by an independent regulator (79%). Significantly the support for regulating AI tools, in addition to social apps, is also strong (75%).

Broken down by the genre of harmful content, the Léger poll suggests Canadians are “very concerned” about fake news (76%), harms to kids (74%), incitement to violence (67%), and hate speech (66%). The responses by parents versus non-parents were not very different.

There is a high degree of support for core of online harms policy contemplated in the Liberals’ earlier draft of online harms Bill C-63, which is the legal expectation that platforms will design safer algorithms and content controls and effectively take legal responsibility for content.

Perhaps counterintuitively, polled support for mandatory safety controls prescribed by government ran at a much lower level of approval, a narrow majority. As well, 65% agreed with the statement that “parents, not government, should make decisions about their children’s social media or online activity.”

The Liberal vs Conservative disagreement over how to deliver enforcement of online safety —through a civil regulation scheme versus judges sitting in criminal courts— may be resolved in the Liberals’ favour: 76% of Canadians are good with federal regulation and even 61% of Conservative voters support it.

The poll didn’t solicit opinions on the wisdom of relying more heavily upon criminal charges, but demonstrated a high support (87%) for government launching criminal investigations and prosecutions of corporate executives in “severe cases” of online harm.

The poll was conducted before the tragic shootings in Tumbler Ridge and the revelation that OpenAI flagged concerning Internet activity by the shooter but elected not to notify the police.

And in a final point of opinion punctuation, the Léger poll also demonstrated high public support for the general notion that some level of collateral damage to freedom of expression was acceptable.

While 85% agreed to the statement that “my right to freedom of expression be maintained,” the principle of “freedom of expression online should not come at the expense of other people’s safety” won the same 85% level of high support.

As for joining the budding global movement to ban youth accounts, the support for different age cut-offs ranged from 12 to 17: but only 3% supported no minimum age at all.

As for the scenario of the US President coming to the rescue of Big Tech platforms in some kind of trade-related intimidation of Canadian government, 53% supported the federal government going ahead anyway with another 27% saying “it depends on the situation.” Those figures were heavily skewed by political allegiances, with Conservative voters more likely to be doing the hedging.

10015020_Safer Online Spaces Coalition_Online Safety Survey Report_11.03.26.pdf Download

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Canada’s Paul McGrath on the YouTube juggernaut and the creator supply chain

February 24, 2026

I am going to introduce this interview with Paul McGrath, the former flagbearer for CBC’s YouTube strategy, by thanking LinkedIn.

That’s where I first noticed McGrath and his Tigger-bouncing enthusiasm for YouTube’s creative universe.

Post after post, he diarized his journey at CBC bringing its content to YouTube. (Last week MediaPolicy published news of the historic partnership —-no other words for it— between the BBC and YouTube).

As for McGrath, here was a guy on a mission to make our CBC more relevant to millennials and Zeds. I was glued to his feed.

Then he quit. Or rather moved on to something new. I’ve done that myself a couple of times, so I could relate, even forgive.

Given the noise of apocalyptic foreboding we hear about legacy media, or about how AI is going to obliterate everything, Paul’s brimming optimism is just the thing.

MediaPolicy: I see you have a new job?

Paul McGrath: Yes, I do! I’ve joined Underknown as the Senior Vice President of Content & Operations. It’s a Canadian company and a modern creator studio headquartered in Toronto. We’re a creator-led digital media company behind popular brands like What If, How to Survive, and Animalogic. We manage more than 100 owned-and-operated programmatic channels. We’re a growing studio, employing about 100 to 150 people.

In my new role, I’m working to drive innovation and identify operational efficiencies across the organization. The core of the business is creating original content for digital platforms. We distribute across dozens of platforms, including 25 YouTube channels, social accounts like Facebook, Snapchat, and MSN, and through distribution to FAST and also recently some linear television. My focus is really on making the most out of our YouTube operations, and growing YouTube channels, which I did for years at CBC, so now I’m bringing that knowledge here.

I’m also setting up our services division, where we consult with traditional media companies and creators, leveraging my background in broadcast and digital transformation to help them thrive and make more money on digital platforms.

MP: What’s the difference between distributing on YouTube as a creator studio versus doing it as mainstream broadcasting, like Crave or Gem?

PM: That’s the question everyone asks, and after twenty years in traditional media and now just completing my first month at a creator studio, I’ve noticed two major differences that drive everything we do.

The first, and biggest, difference is how we view the platform itself: Is YouTube a Cost Centre or a Profit Centre?

For traditional media—where I came from—YouTube is generally viewed as a cost center. Its content is usually repurposed, derivative, or repackaged from the main line of business, like TV shows or films. It exists to support the core revenue through promotion, reach, or awareness, and it operates under a lot of pressure to justify its impacts as an expense.

For creator studios, YouTube is the main business. It pays the bills, and creators and creator studios live and die off of moneymaking on original content. There is no safety net—if we don’t grow, we don’t succeed. This forces us to be lean, mean, scrappy, agile, and profitable. This competition is fierce. We’re the junkyard dogs of the media world.

The second difference lies in how we use technology, specifically AI, to drive the workflow.

While traditional media is certainly adopting AI, creator media is using it to tool the entire workflow: leading, enabling, supporting, and automating. At a company like Underknown, we build AI agents to growth hack our own channels—data-nerding to analyze, diagnose, benchmark, and pinpoint growth opportunities. We use these agents as tools for everything from scripting to thumbnail ideation, and we connect them to platforms like YouTube Studio AI, VidIQ AI, and BigQuery.

This extensive and continuous use of AI is always overseen by people—the masters of the craft with a deep history on YouTube. That’s crucial. This combination of “Art plus Science,” creative plus data, and being totally audience-obsessed is what positions creator studios to excel in a highly fragmented audience environment.

MP: You were the face of the creator economy at the CBC. Did you leave CBC feeling that you had moved the yardsticks?

PM: Yes, for sure. The results speak for themselves, I helped manage teams to their highest ever views, highest ever watch time and highest revenue, year over year, for multiple years. This was really hockey stick-style growth. I think I left with 1.8 billion views in 2025, which was another all-time record high.

A case in point, at CBC, when I left our YouTube operations were reaching 1.5 billion impressions a month. That’s 1.5 billion screens we landed on every month. It’s a massive amount of audience reach that CBC wasn’t exploiting previously. To me that’s the remit of public service broadcasting, service audience where they consume.

I’ve always been interested in helping organizations work more effectively on digital platforms, and work together to scale success. [Former EVP] Barb Williams and [GM Entertainment] Sally Catto and others were always very supportive and encouraging to drive more collaboration and digital transformation.

So yes, I think we definitely moved the yardsticks.

MP: The BBC has got attention for its formal partnership with YouTube, announcing a digital first strategy. There is some hand wringing over it though. What did you think of it?

PM: I loved the move, and I think it was incredibly smart. The hand-wringing is understandable, but I see it as a sign of humility from the BBC. They acknowledged that to succeed in operating and creating original content on YouTube, which they hadn’t done before, they needed to partner with studios that already know how to do it, instead of trying to build that expertise completely on their own.

The CBC has not been far behind. They’ve been doing original content on YouTube for years, like with Street Cents. I helped set up a program where CBC worked with creators and licensed their content to distribute on CBC YouTube channels.

However, you have to imagine the blowback, not to mention the political reaction, if the CBC made a similar formal partnership and announcement to the BBC’s.

This is difficult to balance for a public broadcaster. You have to balance serving audiences on the platforms they consume, while also not getting too cosy with big Tech and maintaining ownership of your own platforms.

There’s no single, right answer. Ultimately, the digital strategy doesn’t have to be binary—it shouldn’t be YouTube First or proprietary platforms. Given the fragmented audience, you need multiple bets, it’s more of a “Yes, and…” scenario.

MP: Some media commentators talk about YouTube, and the creator supply chain that feeds it, as the juggernaut that will rule the media world. What do you think?

PM: I don’t think that’s the case at all—the need to relax with a comedy movie or get lost in a world of drama doesn’t disappear just because YouTube is growing. YouTube fulfills specific audience needs like how-to videos, parasocial updates, music, and podcasting extremely well. Its growth is a direct result of being highly effective at listening to its audience and fulfilling those specific needs.

That said, from a business perspective, the platform and the creator supply chain are certainly dominating the growth story. YouTube’s market share continues to increase, and almost all growth from the last few years is coming from the creator economy. Meanwhile, traditional media is not growing, and the audience age for a lot of linear channels is 60-plus. I expect this trend to continue, partly because traditional media is nowhere close to being as highly attuned to their audiences as creators or tech platforms are.

MP: What’s driving the growth?

PM: The reason the creator space is growing so much is because creators excel at making content more cheaply, that is more personal and relevant to smaller audience fragments than traditional media can. Creators are simply more attuned and more efficient in a highly fragmented audience environment.

Looking ahead, the AI is going to accelerate and amplify this dynamic. AI already enables a more efficient workflow in terms of production, so creators will get even more efficient. But, I feel like its true potential lies in versioning net new content that is micro-targeted to smaller and smaller fragments, allowing it to get more and more personally relevant. Think about your favourite YouTube generating a workout just for you, or your favourite band singing you Happy Birthday and having it get DM’d to you.

You’re already seeing this play out with dubbing and localization, next we’ll see this with versioning of the content themes and topics themselves, where AI generated content will be versioned and formatted to be personally more and more relevant to you, and your personal interests.

MP: That sounds less like art as a community experience, and more like a very different audience experience. What does that kind of art look like?

PM: Well, first off, I don’t know if it’s necessarily art. I don’t consider most things AI generates art. But either way, it’s most definitely a more fragmented experience, which comes with its own concerns of further fragmentation, isolation and diminishing shared experiences. This is the kind of stuff that Yuval Harari —Google it— warns about as the largest risk of media fragmentation.

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – “we the people:” influencers, activists and journalists – is this microdrama’s punk rock moment ?

February 22, 2026

Prior to last year’s federal election campaign, a cadre of protesters gathered on my block in a highly successful effort to disrupt Chrystia Freeland’s nomination meeting. The image that stuck in my mind was the young man in the thick of it who was wearing a “Press” ball cap.

I was reminded of that last week when reading Stephanie Taylor’s analysis and profile in the National Post of three high-profile conservative “influencers”: ‘The Pleb Reporter’ (Nick Belanger), Mario Zelaya, and Jasmin Laine. The Post article charts their informal relationships with Pierre Poilievre’s campaign team and their own ambitions.

At the most recent Conservative convention in Calgary, the Party granted influencers “content creator” status, waiving the $1000 observer fee and putting them on par (or with better access) than mainstream media journalists covering the same event.

The right wing influencers —-don’t worry, they have plenty of counterparts across the partisan aisle—- offer no apologies for their boostership of Poilievre or the CPC. They’ll point to their likes and ‘Ks of followers.

If you got it, flaunt it.

What sometimes galls the old schoolers is when influencers and activist reporters mooch off of the credibility and trust of capital-J journalism, hard earned by thousands of serious journalists over decades.

Or perhaps it’s the nihilism that’s most disturbing: “everyone lies, mine are true if they get lots of clicks.”

It’s discouraging of course, but journalism is a profession (or a craft, or a vocation, whatever) that holds no entrance examinations.

On this point, I commend a second piece of reading to you —Peter Klein’s op-ed in the weekend Globe & Mail—-that probes these questions. He begins with the well known case of award-winning photographer Amber Bracken being arrested by the RCMP for her presence (or extra-professional participation, according to the cops) in an injunction-defying land protest.

Then Klein observes that “today as a journalism professor, I’ve watched a generational shift: More students arrive without a clear sense of where reporting ends and advocacy begins, and some have no interest in drawing that line.”

If you meet or listen to journalists from war torn countries or despotic regimes, you will often hear a clear message: ‘we are for the people, we are of the people.’ You would be pitiless to deny them.

Here in a liberal democracy, there are also those who reject journalistic detachment and take sides, convinced of their moral certainty.

There is a line, says Klein, but the question is where and who gets to decide. The contempt charges against photojournalist Bracken (for allegedly violating the court’s injunction) were dropped, but she is suing the RCMP for damages. Legal arguments are scheduled for April.

***

If there’s a buzz in the world of entertainment programming, it’s the rise of short-form video and micro-dramas, often shot in portrait mode for better “vertical” viewing on phones.

Platformed by YouTube and newly powered by AI tools, short form is changing video production before our eyes.

It’s disruptive. But is it premium entertainment?

Premium, schmemium. As media guru Doug Shapiro likes to say about this phenomenon, quality is what the audience consumes.

How viral will short-form go? Is it just a punk rock wave of a new entertainment niche or is it something bigger?

The other guru Shapiro, Evan, just posted this:

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BBC and YouTube get married – Social Media on trial in L.A. – MediaPolicy’s glitches

AI illustration

February 14, 2025

Today’s post is a mash-up (remember those?).

MediaPolicy follows a number of themes and story lines in Canadian media. One of them is our public broadcaster, CBC Radio-Canada. Another is the surging audience growth of YouTube.

The travails of the CBC always beg comparisons to the British Broadcasting Corporation. Earlier this month, the BBC announced a formal partnership with YouTube that, if the BBC follows through over the long term, will make it a YouTube-first broadcaster.

So happy Valentine’s Day.

The BBC’s idea is to fish where the fish are, at least when it comes to the younger demographic whose media consumption leans very much into short-form video content on YouTube and social media apps.

The BBC says it’s going all in on micro-drama series and verticals (so called because video clips are shot in portrait mode, the better to consume on phones).

That means the Beeb will invest more heavily in developing its supply chain into the digital “creator community” of video artists and studios. It also plans to launch far more BBC YouTube channels built around popular genres and local communities and feed them with digital-first content.

The BBC isn’t completely reinventing itself. It’s going to keep using the YouTube platform as a marketing strategy to push audiences back to its main streaming services BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds. It would be reckless to do otherwise lest it put the BBC’s audience growth entirely within the grasp of a big US tech company that controls the discoverability of content through its algorithms (I mean, what could go wrong?).

A recent report in Britain marked the occasion of YouTube overtaking the once-dominant BBC as the UK’s market leader in video consumption. The early commentary on the YouTube-BBC partnership has been a mix of optimism and dread, here’s one insightful view.

***

A big trial just started in Los Angeles where a 20-year old woman is suing YouTube and Meta’s Instagram for degrading her mental health by feeding her harmful content through addictive content algorithms.

The plaintiff KGM’s lawsuit is hardly frivolous: TikTok and Snap already settled to escape trial.

Her lawyer found his Johnny Cochran stride when he told the jury that his case was “easy as ABC…addicting the brains of children.”

The US maintains a Congressional exemption of Internet companies, especially social media apps, from liability for content uploaded by third parties (incidentally that litigation shield pops up in the digital chapter of the CUSMA trade agreement but Canadian courts have interpreted it narrowly). Given the exemption, KGM has to prove that YouTube and Meta are liable for creating addictive algorithms that push unhealthy content rather than paying a price for accepting the content in the first place.

The US is a more litigious society than we are and lawsuits don’t create legislation: KGM may claim damages but it’s highly unlikely she will force Big Tech to do anything differently.

***

I’m concluding this weekend’s post with something boring: weird publishing things happening with this blog.

Last weekend’s post included a three paragraph quote of the European Union’s regulatory indictment of TikTok for addictive algorithms pushing harmful content with inadequate safety features. Due to a WordPress software glitch, the e-mailed version to subscribers dropped out two of the paragraphs, which made for a strange narrative flow. If you found it jarring, you can go back and read the more fulsome EU statement.

The other oddity was an unprecedented two-day surge in MediaPolicy viewing in the US which puzzled me given the Canadian focus of MediaPolicy posts. It coincided with a MediaPolicy reader receiving a scam e-mail with an embedded link to MediaPolicy.ca (offering a marketing opportunity). The e-mail was associated with the digital marketing website Blogger Tuesday and I have nothing to do with it.

Please let me know if you received one.

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Europe indicts TikTok – Age verification bill S-209 clears Senate committee – Bezos and the WAPO layoffs – CPC frenzy over “the Canadian media summit”

February 8, 2026

The European Commission has fired a shot across the bow of TikTok, and by implication other social media, by finding the social media giant culpable of addictive algorithm design and inadequate safety measures.

The Commission explained its preliminary ruling, which TikTok can either appeal or fix, as follows:

TikTok seems to fail to implement reasonable, proportionate and effective measures to mitigate risks stemming from its addictive design.

For example, the current measures on TikTok, particularly the screentime management tools and parental control tools, do not seem to effectively reduce the risks stemming from TikTok’s addictive design. The time management tools do not seem to be effective in enabling users to reduce and control their use of TikTok because they are easy to dismiss and introduce limited friction. Similarly, parental controls may not be effective because they require additional time and skills from parents to introduce the controls.

At this stage, the Commission considers that TikTok needs to change the basic design of its service. For instance, by disabling key addictive features such as ‘infinite scroll’ over time, implementing effective ‘screen time breaks’, including during the night, and adapting its recommender system.

The EU finding is made against the Chinese-owned app in the European market, not the American-owned TikTok across the Atlantic. But it will heat up the tension between the US and the EU over the regulation of online harms impacting US-owned apps operating in Europe.

The momentum of regulatory intervention around the globe picked up more steam when Spain indicated its intention to follow Australia and France in banning underage social media accounts.

As for Canada, Heritage Minister Marc Miller isn’t saying yet if a ban on underage access is part of the online harms bill he is preparing.

Last Monday, the influential Taylor Owen and his McGill colleague Helen Hayes called for a moratorium on underage access to social media while online harms legislation gets tabled, works its way through Parliament, and gets implemented.

Judging from Canada’s last two pieces of media legislation, the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act, the length of the entire process might be measured in years.

What might advance the timetable at the front end is Senate Bill S-209 that would require age verification for porn sites and possibly any social media site that permits porn. The bill passed committee last week and will likely get approved by the full Senate in the next few weeks, putting the governing Liberals on the spot.

Last week Senatrice Julie Miville-Dechêne, the bill’s sponsor, obtained committee approval for a series of technical amendments as well as a change that defined porn more narrowly to get at “X-rated” content and scope out the nudity and implied sexual activity common in mainstream drama. The new definition requires the exhibition of explicit sexual activity and exposed genitalia for the purpose of sexual excitement.

As drafted, S-209 still leaves the decision on whether to scope in porn-permissive social media apps to the federal government, either in a House vote on the bill or afterwards.

***

Last weekend MediaPolicy noted the diverging fortunes of the New York Times and the Washington Post with the Times getting the Trump-bump in digital views and the Post sagging in the other direction.

Then on Tuesday the Washington Post announced a breathtaking round of newsroom layoffs, 300 of 800 staff. By Saturday, publisher Will Lewis had resigned.

The public reaction was what you might expect: a mix of shock and anger. Former Post Editor-in-Chief Marty Baron posted his condemnation of the layoffs and put at least part of the blame on multi-billionaire proprietor Jeff Bezos’ decision to ingratiate himself to Donald Trump. That included Bezos killing a planned editorial board endorsement of Kamala Harris’ presidential candidacy, which reputedly cost the Post 200,000 subscriptions, as well as vocal support for Trump’s demolition of the White House east wing and making a donation to the ballroom project to be built on its foundations. Recently, Bezos’ Amazon Prime reputedly overpaid the Trump family for the streaming rights to the documentary Melania.

Then American anti-monopoly advocate Matt Stoller published a long Substack post where he suggested that Bezos bought the Post in 2013 as political insurance against the Obama administration taking anti-trust action against his Amazon e-commerce business. The insurance policy, Stoller suggested, has become unnecessary or overpriced as Bezos literally put his money on Trump.

One piece of context is that while the Post’s declining audience numbers may be attributable to anti-Trump readers voting with their feet, the conservative and pro-Trump Wall Street Journal is experiencing the same decline, although not as steep as the Post.

There were also layoffs in Canadian journalism, suitably smaller in number. Bell Media CTV laid off 60, including 11 television journalists.

***

The gong show otherwise known as the right-wing frenzy over mainstream media went viral last week when a video clip surfaced of Reynolds Mastin publicly thanking Prime Minister Mark Carney for “having our backs” and gushing that “we have your back too.”

There it was, proof of the blood pact between the federal Liberal Party and the mainstream news media.

But who the heck is Reynolds Mastin?

Mastin is the President of the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA), the industry group representing independent Canadian production companies that make entertainment programming. He was chairing the CMPA’s annual Prime Time conference in Ottawa when he made the remarks.

Readers may know, Mastin is not a journalist and he (and the CMPA) has nothing to do with news journalism. He was encouraging Carney to resist American trade pressure on the Online Streaming Act which requires US streamers to contribute to the Canada Media Fund.

Independent movie and television producers draw CanCon subsidies from the Canada Media Fund to make dramas and comedies. The CMF doesn’t spend a dime on news, although some make the mistake of thinking it does.

Nevertheless, the timing was was perfect for frenzy: the Conservative Party was in the midst of its annual convention in Calgary.

Here is Conservative Heritage critic Rachael Thomas MP describing “the Canadian media summit” as a news journalism event:

Thomas’ falsehoods then found their way into Conservative fund raising e-mails.

At that point, some conservative pundits urged Conservatives to do a fact check. The managing editor of The Hub, Harrison Lowman, was as brave as he was blunt:

Now speaking of Mr. Lowman and The Hub, I can recommend an excellent podcast he did in January with ex-New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet.

In June 2020, Bennet (whose brother is a Democratic Senator) cleared for publication an opinion column from Republican Senator Tom Cotton arguing that Donald Trump ought to deploy the military if necessary to deal with rioting and looting that flared in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd.

Bennet’s employment did not survive the newsroom uprising that followed.

A similar newsroom conflagration occurred the same month at Canada’s National Post when columnist Rex Murphy opined that Canada “is not a racist country.”

In any event, I found myself gripped by the full 35 minutes of Lowman’s interview of Bennet and you may find it worth the time as well.

***

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