MediaPolicy.ca

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Plan B for AI’s content theft – AI scorecards of news journalism – does Canada Post neutralize news subsidies? – minister Miller’s book briefing

July 18, 2026

News publishers around the world are about to get their asses handed to them by AI companies. And they know it.

What to do? Well there’s Plan A and there’s Plan B.

Plan A is for news publishers to combat the AI chatbots’ illegal scraping of digital news content by filing lawsuits seeking license payments. On that score, sympathetic legislatures could move the needle on compensating news publishers faster, more lucratively, and more broadly to all news publishers by legislating clear copyright ownership of the content that AI chatbots are ingesting without paying for it.

Something like Plan A has been tried before, as you recall.

Over the last decade, the European Union, Australia and Canada have legislated a fair market in news licensing payments from Google and Meta with mixed success.

Landing in Canada as the Online News Act, Bill C-18 was a classic anti-trust remedy to the monopoly power held by Google and Meta over the ad-supported distribution of digital news hyperlinks and snippets on search engines and social media.

The legislated backstop of commercial arbitration meant that the “net exchange value” —-an independent measurement of the offsetting monetary value of publishers’ news content versus Google and Meta’s traffic referrals back to news sites — rebalanced bargaining power over news licensing payments from the monopolists in favour of hundreds of news publishers.

Once Bill C-18 became law, Google opted to pony up $100 million annually to Canadian news publishers. Deciding not to face the music of an independent assessment of net exchange value, Meta banned mainstream news from appearing on Facebook and Instagram.

Despite American trade pressure, Mark Carney hasn’t given away our Online News Act. But his obeisance to Donald Trump on the digital services tax —introduced to counteract Big Tech tax avoidance — and his climb down on the CRTC’s levies on Netflix and the foreign streamers are unnerving to say the least.

By contrast, Australia’s PM Anthony Albanese has been outspoken and defiant while moving slowly on implementing a new law that would put down the same mutiny that Meta staged in 2024 when its first and only licensing deal with Australian publishers expired.

In a recent speech at Sydney University, Albanese outlined a vision on AI that might have been cribbed straight from Carney’s “AI for All” national policy until he went where Carney wouldn’t goal: support for copyright and creators’ IP:

But let me make this crystal clear: not everything produced in Australia is up for grabs. Not at all. Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists must retain ownership and control of their work. Our laws will spell that out, plain as day. An artist’s creative endeavour is their work and their property. No company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI without the artist’s control. That includes the artist’s control of the price and value of their work. Anything less, is theft. No country has got this right yet. Nowhere do artists or rights holders have sufficient control of their work, when it comes to AI training.

That is why the best way to secure the strongest copyright protections for Australian artists is for Australia to be active and involved. To build the best possible solution for ourselves. And to preserve the creativity that is fundamental to who we are to our national identity and the journalism that is essential to our democratic society.

Stirring words, but talk is cheap. Plan A on AI news licensing is still just a plan. Remember how hard it can be to execute.

I would be surprised if news publishers aren’t spending every day contemplating a Plan B, i.e. how to survive AI without government intervention.

The question is what kind of ingenuity and resources can news publishers bring to the table that would change the balance of commercial bargaining power between them and the AI companies? How do news publishers negotiate licensing deals that give them fair compensation, brand visibility, and drive audience traffic back to their proprietary websites?

One of many ideas is news companies charging AI chatbots micropayments instead of selling them all-access licenses. Previously, pay-per-article failed as a news subscription strategy because, as Substacker Ulrike Langer puts it, “micropayments turn every act of consumption into a small purchasing decision, and humans will pay extra [in the form of an all-access monthly subscription] to be spared that unwelcome feeling.”

But could it be different if the news subscribers were emotionless AI scrapers trolling for just the right on-time content to satisfy the latest AI prompt? Langer isn’t sure, but whatever the potential in that kind of innovation might be, it surely isn’t a game changer for news publishers (although perhaps AI micropayments would be better than nothing for the small news publishers likely to be shut out of big licensing deals).

Making a real difference in this unequal contest of commercial leverage may depend upon the brand power of trusted news outlets. If AI companies want their own subscribers to trust their news content over the information offered by competing AI chatbots, they will pay bigger licensing fees to news organizations that are hitting it out of the park on audience trust.

This graphic from a recent academic study, the “The News Canadians Actually See,” illustrates how deeply skeptical Canadians remain about getting their news from an AI chatbot instead of traditional media.

We should probably assume that Plan B is only a plan for the very best and biggest news organizations.

That brings us back to Plan A, which is a legislative intervention to rebalance the bargaining power between Big Tech and Little News.

***

Speaking of hitting it out of the park on brand trust, I’ve been opining about trust in news journalism in my last two posts and perhaps I should stop. But not just yet.

South of the border, Big Tech titan Peter Thiel is bankrolling a couple of AI businesses doing interesting things with journalism.

State Affairs is a news organization that hires journalists to report from US state legislatures. It feeds their reporting into an AI news product. In other words, it’s a hybrid human/AI news outlet (see Plan B, above).

State Affairs’ co-founder Evan Burns told The Washington Post that “AI can’t build sources. It can’t ask follow-up questions. It can’t go knock on the doorframe of the chief of staff of the whatever.”

Less altruistically, the media-hostile Thiel is also the money behind The Primary, an AI-fueled rating agency for news organizations and individual journalists. The Primary publishes a trust scorecard. Here are the ratings of news outlets and here is another scoring of bylined journalists (including those that report on the AI companies that Thiel owns).

The Primary scores don’t seem outrageously skewed although they definitely suggest a right-of-centre standpoint (for example, the New York Times is rubbished).

The idea of a media watchdog keeping tabs on journalist watchdogs is hardly new: media criticism podcasts and columns abound. But the marriage of media criticism and AI tools is new.

AI analysis of bias in media is just getting off the ground in Canada. A few months ago, Substacker David Clinton of The Audit published an AI-assisted review of CBC News coverage. Honest Reporting Canada did something similar on the “emotional sympathy” extended to various news subjects and public actors in CBC’s coverage of the Gaza conflict.

There are also media websites like Briefly News which appears to use AI tools to rate global news companies for bias and trust. You will find two Canadian outlets there, the CBC and the Globe & Mail. The site has no masthead, corporate information or country of origin.

The idea of a machine intelligence stepping forward to referee disputes over news bias has its allure for anyone looking to comment upon trustworthy news journalism.

It would be premature to say that right now that AI tools can reliably improve our ability to measure fairness in news journalism. But I have a feeling we’re going to be talking about it a lot more.

***

In the centrifuge of public policy and competing priorities, sometimes governments do things at cross purposes.

Take the example of the federal government and its historic support for small, mostly rural community newspapers. Since before Confederation, we have subsidized news outlets. At first it was through discounted postal rates and subsequently through direct subsidies in the Canada Periodical Fund, all pre-dating the more controversial journalism labour tax credits for daily and mostly urban newspapers.

I don’t need to re-tell the story of how the advertising market was captured by digital platforms and undermined the business model of community newspapers, subsidized as they were. I reckon the federal government is now paying 50 cents on each dollar of publisher costs.

On a completely separate track from newspapers (and under the aegis of a different government department), Canada Post met its own paradigmatic shift in its legacy business model by going all in on door-to-door distribution of retailer ad flyers, piggybacked on its regular mail delivery.

Since its introduction in the 1990s, the “Admail” Canada Post program has undercut newspaper companies who depend on flyer distribution as a major stream of revenue, offering free editorial content wrapped around local retail advertising inserts. There’s a chapter and verse history of the next thirty years in a News Media Canada op ed published today.

Fast forward, the problem just got worse. Enter the Montreal-headquartered Transcontinental, a national printer and distributor of local retail flyers through Raddar, its printing and home delivery program. Instead of a free newspaper and a bundle of flyer inserts, Raddar prints a single aggregated advertising flyer.

This spring Raddar struck a deal with Canada Post to break into new markets across the country by contracting for national Admail delivery on a discount offered by the Post Office at a rate that local news publishers can’t match.

This week the Winnipeg Free Press announced it is laying off its network of 817 distribution contractors that support its flyer business and shuttering the companion editorial product, the Free Press Community Review. That cedes the 200,000 local household market to the federally-owned Canada Post and Transcontinental. With that, goes 10% of the Free Press’s overall revenue, according to its publisher.

This looks like a case of cross-purposed public policy: the federal government’s revenue strategy for Canada Post submarines a major source of commercial revenue of the news publishers whom it subsidizes with federal money.

***

A few months ago I reviewed Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature. It’s a policy pitch for a better federal policy on supporting Canadian book publishers and authors.

As a follow up on that I think you will enjoy reading Ken Whyte’s last two Substacks on the same topic here and here.

The acid-tongued commentary asks why culture and identity minister Marc Miller asked his civil servants for an update on Canadian book publishing policy and got back advice that ignored whether it was effective. The answer might be that the minister didn’t ask that question, but perhaps he will now.

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – AI news scraping deal in Australia – who will pay for non-partisan journalism? – two paths to liberal democracy

July 12, 2026

Canadians are familiar with the story of the Online News Act. True policy nerds know that it’s part of a bigger story in which Google and Meta grappled with mandatory news licensing in the European Union, Australia, Canada and the United States.

Something similar might be playing out again between digital news publishers and global AI companies. But it is in its early stages, as large news publishers with lots of content to offer, and a modicum of leverage, choose between launching copyright lawsuits against AI companies or settling for licensing agreements. Here’s a list.

The latest news —- relevant to Canada because it occurred in our parallel policy universe, Australia—- is that Microsoft Co-Pilot has a content deal with Nine News (roughly, the equivalent of Canada’s Bell Media) to license its digital news content. Neither party is saying if cheques are being written, but certainly audience traffic will flow.

Co-Pilot has licensed Nine’s paywalled content as feedstock for its AI summaries but will embed Nine’s hyperlinks and enough paywalled content to push Co-Pilot consumers back to Nine’s full stories.

As Ulrike Langer wrote last week, publishers of premium news content such as Time, The Economist, and Dow Jones are making different kinds of AI deals that license content scraping in different ways: full archive access, data-only access, or journalism-only access.

The beginnings of a commercial market in AI-digested news content is an obvious way that AI companies can deflect or minimize any government efforts to come to the rescue of domestic news companies getting illegally scraped by the AI giants. Google and Meta did something similar a decade ago. They made voluntary agreements with a cherry-picked assortment of big media companies until sovereign governments decided to back the claims of news companies that Google and Meta bargained unfairly or not at all because they were monopolists in Search and social media.

The prevalence of ongoing copyright lawsuits against the AI companies suggests that news companies again believe they are getting ripped off but don’t have the leverage to get adequate settlements without the intervention of their domestic judiciaries. Yet litigation is a long and uncertain path and it’s probably a non-starter strategy for local publishers anyway.

At some point, sovereign nations are going to think about legislating mandatory licensing of news content by AI companies with a dispute resolution mechanism that drives a fair market price. You might have heard of the idea.

***

Editorial strategy in news journalism hasn’t changed much over time: most publishers curate their news feed with “biased” or standpoint content stemming from a politically partisan, ideologically driven or simply a “watchdog” philosophy of keeping an eye on powerful political and corporate actors.

It’s hardly a secret that publishers are keenly aware of who their audience is, particularly their paying audience.

As the advertising revenue stream for professional news journalism continues to collapse, two public policy imperatives meet: providing the people with fair and balanced news content and getting them to pay for it. Only 12% of Canadians pay for or share a digital news subscription, a stubborn statistic that hardly moves from year to year.

The policy sweet spot is to foster a commercial market in broad spectrum news reporting on current affairs that gets citizens out of their self-imposed filter bubbles, whether on social media or from conventional news sources.

The newly released 2026 Reuters Oxford Digital News report offers some audience data that’s relevant to what readers want and, perhaps, what they will pay for.

The report includes an inquiry by Denmark’s highly esteemed Rasmus Nielsen where polling respondents were asked to declare the strength of their allegiances to news sources they considered neutral, ideologically comfortable, or offering an editorial standpoint that challenged their own.

As you can see from this graph above a strong plurality of respondents fancied their favoured news source were neutral. But significant minorities openly declared their allegiances to either intellectually comforting or challenging news sources.

Here’s Nielsen’s take away from his research:

But the outsize role played by the minority who seek partisanship is easier to understand when we take into account that those who say they prefer news from sources that share their point of view are, in our survey data, also more likely to:

Share and comment on news online and on social media

Be very or extremely interested in news and in politics

Place themselves on the left or the right of the political spectrum

Access news many times daily and pay for online news

The people who prefer news that aligns with their own views are a minority. But they tend to be more vocal, more highly engaged, more partisan, and more commercially important for many news publishers than the public at large.

I’ll translate that passage as “an audience that is very tuned in to politics with very clear political views of their own will pay for news.”

This is not surprising, is it.

For Canadians, this troubling disconnect between the willingness to pay for news and non-partisan content leads us back to another conclusion: the important role of CBC Radio-Canada as a news content provider for citizens who stubbornly won’t pay for news.

To change tack here, Nielsen also makes some other conclusions from the data with the benefit of polling from around the world.

The first is that there is a correlation between audience preferences for ideologically friendly news sources and the prevalence of social media as a news platform. Not a surprise either.

Another is that perhaps we in the global north and citizens that enjoy the privilege of living in liberal democracies ought not to be too judgmental about that lack of journalistic detachment in autocracies and conflict zones.

“When core democratic institutions or the fundamental rights of whole swaths of the public are under concerted political attack,” says Nielsen, “what does it mean to report the news in a way that doesn’t have a particular point of view?”

Discuss.

***

Open to being pleasantly amused? I recommend a short and compelling weekend read written by a friend of mine, historian David Wilson (among many endeavours, he has just stepped down from a ten-year stint as the editor of the prestigious Dictionary of Canadian Biography).

Published last week on the American July 4th holiday, Wilson asks whether the birth of the republic was a better choice than Canada’s own (but more patient) path to independence and responsible government. A cheeky but serious piece, worth your five minutes.

***

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 – Carney’s Fleecing – Honest Reporting’s tax troubles – what CRTC chairs do – huzzah Canada!

July 5, 2026

Of the gamut of emotions that supporters of the Online Streaming Act ran through when Prime Minister Mark Carney overruled the CRTC’s 15% contribution scheme for Netflix and the foreign streamers, the most gut wrenching was betrayal.

Who could forget only 125 days earlier Carney horsing around with Hudson Williams at the CMPA Prime Time conference, donning the iconic Team Canada fleece jacket from the TV series Heated Rivalry? The smash cultural hit was a demonstration of Canada’s “soft power,” said the PM, as he snuggled deeper into the jacket.

In my high school days, wearing the football team jacket was the prerogative accorded to the girlfriends of the young men on the championship team, showing up to class on a daily basis sporting the team colours.

Well, Carney’s bromance with film producers is over. Or at least they are very seriously taking some time apart. So there’s the problem of the jacket, you see.

Marie Woolf has a delightful story in the Globe & Mail reporting that the executive producer of Heated Rivalry, Brendan Brady, is taking back the fleece (or more precisely, putting on hold his promise to send it to Carney).

Said Brady, “We actually have one of those fleeces on hold for him that we want to send to him. But obviously I think we’re waiting to see how this goes and making sure that everything gets cleared up for the Online Streaming Act to be enacted for real for us, so we might just be holding off on that.

“If we’re on pause with the government, then the fleece is on pause until we know.”

Alternatively, Brady could raffle it off.

***

The Investigative Journalism Foundation published a story last week on the tax troubles of Honest Reporting Canada (HRC).

HRC is a media watchdog that appears to have two main functions: the first to stridently criticize by-lined journalists whose news stories it considers treat Israel unfairly.

The other is to offer journalist-facing content to educate reporters about controversial assumptions often made about the Israeli-Arab conflict without sufficient historical depth or geographic breadth.

The tax trouble is that as of a year ago the Canada Revenue Agency has been seeking to revoke the charitable status (“as a qualified donee”) of a related organization, Honest Reporting Canada Charitable Organization (HRCCO) on the grounds that it does not engage in any of the tax code’s short list of charitable activities.

Examples of the CRA’s approved spending on charitable objects include the relief of poverty or the advancement of education.

Also, the CRA told HRCCO that from the audit it performed HRCCO appears to be diverting charitable donations to pay the expenses of the media website, Honest Reporting Canada, which is not a registered charity.

The tax dispute is headed to the Federal Court of Appeal and in the meantime HRCCO has stopped accepting donations and the CRA has paused deregistration.

Honest Reporting Canada’s publishing generally does not include original news, which explains why it could not obtain “qualified donee” status directly under the federal government’s QCJO program of news subsidies. Probably for a similar reason, HRC is not eligible for Google journalism funds under the Online News Act.

The QCJO program allows non profit journalism organizations to become “qualified donees” of public donations, as an expansion beyond traditional tax parameters limited to education or the relief of poverty.

In general, US charity tax laws are more hospitable to public interest journalism than the Canadian tax code.

Meanwhile charities are free under Canadian law to engage in public policy dialogue and development activities connected to the legal purpose of the charity as long as they are not directly or indirectly partisan. Previously no more than 10% of donations were permitted to support political advocacy.

***

It’s not every day you ask yourself, “what would Konrad von Finckenstein do?”

In February 2011 the one-term CRTC chair (2007-2012) made a ruling he thought was good public policy —-allowing ISP providers to charge more to heavy consumers of data —only to be publicly slapped down by the Harper government that had appointed him.

Von Finckenstein was outspokenly defiant in response to the government’s public rebuke although in the end his Commission came up with a compromise. He was not reappointed when his term expired a year later.

In a recent appearance on Michael Geist’s half-hour podcast, Mark Musselman is unsparingly candid about the current CRTC chair Vicky Eatrides meekly submitting to her now diminished independence on implementing the Online Streaming Act.

Musselman has the gift of the explanatory gab and calls it as he sees it (and his narrative just happens to line up with the MediaPolicy’s posts on this topic). We part company at about the 27th minute when he describes the current federal policy on supporting film and television as outdated and in need of something new.

Still, the podcast is well worth your time.

***

If this was a blog site devoted to American media policy, not Canadian, we could spend a lot of time tracking the never ending mergers and corporate somersaults that feature south of the border.

Here are a few in the recent past:

TikTok spun off its American operations with Oracle founder and billionaire Larry Ellison taking control.
Ellison is the money behind Paramount’s take-over of Warner Brothers Discovery, leaving Netflix as the jilted suitor flush with an unspent dowry.
The Murdoch family’s Fox Entertainment has bought Roku, combining Fox’s content empire with Roku’s extensive home distribution network.

The latest is that Comcast is spinning off its content division, NBC Universal, into a separate company.

This is seen as an acknowledgement of the fading benefits of combining NBC Universal content with Comcast cable distribution, despite Comcast going out of its way to buy NBC in 2011.

Comcast shares bounced up following the announcement that it was cutting NBC Universal loose. More long term, the plan is for Comcast to focus its efforts and its capital on competing with other cable and fixed wireless distribution networks and to free itself of the less predictable media business.

The new NBC Universal would arguably be in a better position to make deals with other distributors not named Comcast. But the sleeper in this new arrangement may be that it becomes a takeover target for Netflix.

Meanwhile, the 900 pound gorilla YouTube has asked that its sleep not be disturbed.

***

I cannot sign off this week without stating my admiration of the Canadian men’s national soccer team.

If you watched their 3-0 exit —not reflective of the balance of play—-from the World Cup against a superior team from Morocco, you would have witnessed a special cultural moment of Canadian self belief, ambition, and a brotherhood of young men utterly unafraid of the odds.

Instead of doing the classic underdog routine of turtling in a defensive shell and playing 120 minutes for a penalty shoot out, the Canadians went for the jugular from the opening whistle. They were the better team for most of the game.

Other than the injured Alphonso Davies, there are no world class stars on this team. Yet they played as if it was the ghost of Admiral Horatio Nelson whispering in their ears, “ne’er mind the maneuvers lads, always go straight at ‘em.”

Huzzah.

***

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

Admit it. CBC News is the best.

July 1, 2026

In my last post, I spent time teasing out the nuances of how the Reuters Oxford 2026 report on digital news analyzes “trust in news.” The gist of the post was: look at the right “trust” numbers before rushing to judgment against Canadian news media in general and CBC/Radio Canada in particular.

The Reuters Oxford report coincided with the release of the Senate of Canada’s report on the CBC (which I will get to, below).

One of the items in the Senate report was that the CBC is perceived to have a bias problem that requires action. That single recommendation instantly grabbed the headline of reporting on the Senate’s work by competing news organizations.

Also released last month was the annual Pollara analysis of trust in Canadian media.

What is immediately striking about the Pollara results is that they quantify public trust in Canadian media at a much higher number than Reuters Oxford (51% versus 37% trust in all Canadian media), rebounding from a low point in 2022 and with even higher trust ratings than in 1992.

Mostly, Pollara asked the question differently than Reuters, a softer and yet binary question: do you “tend to” trust or distrust “the news media”?

By contrast, Reuters asks Canadians if you think you can “trust most news, most of the time.” Then on a scale of 1 (distrust) to 10 (trust), Reuters slots you into trust (6 through 10), distrust (1 through 4) or neither (5). That spits out the 37% figure for Reuters, suggesting there are a lot of grudging sixes in that cohort of trusting respondents.

The grain of salt here is that whether the trust number is 51% or 37%, Canadians are being invited to pass judgment on the entire news ecosystem, including the news outlets you don’t trust and the clickbait you see on social media.

But as I mentioned in the last post, beyond looking at the entire news ecosystem, you need also to take note of the trust numbers for individual news outlets.

For each news source, Pollara has three simple categories: trustworthy, not trustworthy and “not familiar.”

On the other hand, Reuters polls Canadians on each news source using its 1 to 10 scale and then slotting all of the 6/7/8/9/10s as trust, the 1/2/3/4s as don’t trust, and the fives as “neither.”

Under either poll (for English language news), the positive trust figures track almost the same: in order of trust, CBC or CTV on top, then Global News, followed by the Globe & Mail, and then the National Post or the Toronto Star.

Pollara

Reuters Oxford

Notice the pattern?

Like in a cycling road race, the major Canadian television broadcasters are the leader pack (ranging from 62% to 64% in the Reuters poll) while the national newspapers are further back, clustered in the 50% to 56% range (local or regional newspapers are more trusted however). Explain that if you can, but it occurs to me that newspapers regularly publish opinion columnists, opinion editorials, and election endorsements.

Television newscasts limit their overt opinionating to (somewhat) diverse political panelists.

Feel free to disagree.

But don’t feel free to disagree about this fact. CBC News is killing it. It’s as trustworthy as its major competitors and significantly more so than the Brahmin of text journalism, the Globe & Mail (and far more than the conservative National Post and the centre-left Toronto Star).

Yet all we hear is the drumbeat of criticism that CBC News is biased, or alternatively that all that counts is the perception that it is biased (to be fair, its negative trust rating is slightly worse than most of its competitors’ except for the Post and the Star).

If I sound dismissive of the bias accusations, I’m not. The fact that polls reveal the CBC’s negative trust ratings accumulating in the West and among Conservative voters tells you there is something about the editorial curation that isn’t working (here’s my two cents worth). Defunding or not, if the West or Conservative voters “want in” to a national institution like the CBC, open the door.

This bias hot potato got batted about in the Senate Report on the CBC, the outcome of a Senate Committee investigation initiated by Senator Andrew Cardozo in late 2024, an especially precarious political moment when the countdown to a Pierre Poilievre cancellation of English language CBC seemed only to be a matter of time (and arguably, still is).

Cardozo kicked off the inquiry with his own multi-point analysis of the CBC, (reviewed by MediaPolicy here, but see the disclaimer at the bottom of this post).

The mandate handed by Senators to its Transportation & Communications committee was focussed on local media: “to examine and report on the local services provided by the CBC/Radio-Canada .”

After 60 witnesses and 18 months, the Committee came up with a series of recommendations that could be distilled to this:

The CBC should put more resources into local reporting and programming, especially in news-scarce localities and official minority language communities and regions.
Long term Parliamentary funding should be established to pay for that coverage, making the CBC less vulnerable to budget cuts by the government of the day.
To make it national policy, the Broadcasting Act should be amended to explicitly include “local” coverage to its priority coverage (in addition to “regional and national”).
Just in case, the CRTC should reinforce this emphasis on local through its licensing conditions for the CBC.
Keeping in mind the force of gravity that the CBC poses to private local media, the CBC should find more ways to collaborate with local outlets.
The CBC should disclose more data about its resourcing of local news so we can measure how it’s discharging its mandate.

Meanwhile to confront the perception or accusation of journalistic bias, the committee recommended that the CBC should commission an annual third party study of bias in its news reporting.

The auditing recommendation was a gimme. The fact that the Senate committee felt it was necessary to recommend it was taken in some quarters as a guilty verdict for its many journalistic crimes, but candidly it was a bone to throw to CBC critics and haters, the latter category being inconsolable. An audit is a good idea for any public broadcaster, especially with the aid of AI analysis, because the CBC shouldn’t just have industry leading trust ratings for its news product, it should have great ratings.

One of the ways to improve the CBC’s trust ratings, aside from a consciously diverse editorial curation that addresses Western and conservative alienation from the public broadcaster, is to put more money into local coverage across the country with a particular emphasis on the long under-resourced Western provinces.

The CBC seems to be doing that in the last year by announcing more local reporting bureaus and journalists in the Prairie provinces.

But it all comes back to funding. Reporters are expensive and it’s a big country.

On this point, we can argue until we are blue in the face about the adequacy of the $1.3 million annual Parliamentary grant to the public broadcaster.

But I will say the quiet part out loud: whether that grant is more, less or the same, satisfying every Canadian’s idea of what the CBC’s programming priorities ought to be is not possible. As one witness told the Senate committee, the CBC “is drowning in mandates.”

The CBC is formally independent so we’ve been letting CBC management decide on its own what matters most. Lately it seems to have alit on local news as the priority. But if that’s going to be done with gusto, something else in the mandate has to give. The shell-shocked executives at the public broadcaster will be inclined to be risk averse, so the Senate committee might be disappointed in its recommendations.

The ball is in the court of culture and identity minister Marc Miller, which is to say it’s aimlessly bouncing about in the Prime Minister’s Office. The passive neglect of the CBC policy file, and the false election promises of significantly increased funding for the public broadcaster, are both on Mark Carney.

***

(Disclaimer: Senator Cardozo and I co-authored a research paper for the Senate, Making News Media Sustainable. The study focusses on funding for private news media).

***

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 – Your trust in news – Zuckerberg’s your daddy – Seeing Red – CBC is vulnerable – Do AI chatbots lean left? – Explaining Age Bans

(AI illustration)

June 27, 2026

Every year the Reuters Oxford Digital News conducts a global survey of online news journalism. It frequently leads its public release with a headline-grabbing number for “trust in news.” Every year, the number goes down. It sunk by 3% this year to 37%. A further 34% of respondents neither trust nor distrust news.

Every year, that single “trust” metric dominates the conversation. Here’s the problem with making too much of that.

First, what do polled respondents think “trust in news” means? The survey doesn’t offer a definition, so it’s in the eye of the beholder. My beholding eye thinks it describes confidence in, and comfort with, news sources.

Second, the precise wording of the question that generates an answer across 48 participating countries is whether the individual respondents have trust in the “most news, most of the time” in their countries.

“Most news, most of the time” means news from all sources on all digital platforms, from news apps to social media. In other words, respondents are passing judgment on the entire news ecosystem they encounter or are aware of.

A related metric is “trust in news that I use” and runs a little higher at 45% in Canada.

On the other hand Reuters Oxford asks about trust in selected news outlets, favoured or not. When asked that way in Canada, “trust in news” suddenly jumps to the 50s and 60s in percentage of “trusting” new consumers and clocks in at less than 20% for those that “don’t trust.”

My own theory is that the 37% “overall trust” number is being weighed down by the respondents’ disapproval of news sources they think other Canadians should not be consuming.

Third, the global “trust in news” number is a mean average across 48 participating nations. Make of this what you will, Canada was 37% this year and so was the global mean average. Finland, Denmark and Norway are in the 50s and 60s percentage ranges. The United States is at 25%. Is our journalism really so different or is it possible “trust in news” is heavily culturally determined?

Helpfully, the Reuters survey moves on to ask a lot more questions (not just about “trust”) and you can digest it all in two places: the brief Canada chapter (at page 128) in the global report and the in depth Canada-only report. Both are prepared by Sébastien Charlton and Colette Brin of Laval University.

Let’s have a look.

Mark Zuckerberg’s your daddy

This year in Canada we crossed a Rubicon of sorts. For the first time, social media became the most widely used platform for finding news. That surpasses the long time leader, television.

Sure, TV is still the most popular “main source” of Canadian news consumers. But if you take the French language responses out of the equation, social media has become the leading “main source” for English speaking Canadians.

There’s a disturbing trend buried in the data: the remarkable 10 percentage point upward swing in consuming news on social media that you see in the chart above came mostly at the expense of digital news apps, especially among younger Canadians. That doesn’t bode well for Canadian news outlets controlling their own distribution and proprietary audience data.

To fill in the picture of what it means to consume news on “social media,” the survey notes that YouTube is the leading social media app for news (and traditional television news outlets re-publish their digital content extensively).

Following behind YouTube’s 35% share of social media news consumers, Meta’s various social media apps rank second (Facebook, 33%), third (Instagram, 17%), fourth (Messenger, 14%) and seventh (WhatsApp, 10%). Of course Meta bans news content published by conventional news outlets from appearing on Facebook and Instagram.

Seeing Red

Right wing Canadians see a widespread news media bias on almost all key political issues (on that, see the item on AI chatbots at the end of this post).

Left wing Canadians only see news media bias on environmental issues.

Centrists give the news media a modest endorsement. Note that centrists were 60% of the respondents, the other 40% are split evenly between left and right.

The CBC is vulnerable

Canadians who are “very negative” about CBC/Radio Canada —-the CBC-killers to whom the Conservative Party has promised action —- tally only 8% of respondents (and 4% in Quebec).

And the public broadcaster continues to score top of the charts against private media for online news consumption that measure viewing in the prior week. It must be doing something right.

That’s the good news. But “top of the charts” or not, CBC news content is consumed by 29% of Canadians offline and 26% online. That means 70%+ of taxpayers don’t go there for news.

Still, the CBC is not just any news outlet, it is a guardian of cultural sovereignty and many Canadians support it without watching it. Forty per cent of Canadians view CBC as “having a positive effect on Canadian life,” compared to one in five Canadians who don’t. There’s another 34% who can’t make up their minds.

That undecided vote is the CBC’s vulnerability.

No way, we won’t pay

So many of the leading sources of online news are free, ad-supported or buried in our cable TV package, that it’s difficult to get Canadians to dig into their pockets for a digital news subscription fee (after paying for Netflix, Spotify et al).

That’s why Reuters tracks the cohort of digital news paid subscribers as an important metric. Alas, the upward trend in 2024 and 2025 has fallen back from 16% last year to 12% in 2026 (and that number includes those Canadians accessing someone else’s subscription).

***

US conservatives have long claimed that mainstream media is biased against them. Not long ago, Elon Musk had his knife out for the volunteer-curated Wikipedia, threatening to buy it and practice his version of conversion therapy upon it as he did with Twitter (X). More recently, Donald Trump alleged that AI chatbots were biased too. He issued an Executive Order in July 2025 saying so.

This week a story by Kevin Schaul in the Washington Post, building on research from three academics affiliated with the conservative think tank Hoover Institution, suggests the President might have more to say on this.

Schaul pitched 30 prompts adopted from the academic research (at page 21 of this document) querying —to pick the first question as an example— “should the United States abolish the death penalty or retain the death penalty?”

The reporter then evaluated whether the brief 30-word answers were “left wing,” “right-wing” or “both sides.” The original research preferred the labels for these answers as Democrat, Republican, or Independent (the latter described as “ideologically neutral.”).

Schaul’s scorecard of the chatbot responses was heavily weighted towards “left” or “both sides” but very few to the “right.” Even Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot favoured left over right!

***

Parliament is adjourned for the summer and the Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34 will be back in September.

Two weeks ago I posted my “first explainer” of the legislation. For my next explainer, I will just send you to Emily Laidlaw’s analysis of age bans and age verification because it is so helpful and easy to follow.

***

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.

Book Review: Tara Henley’s The Trust Spiral

June 23, 2026

The 2026 Reuters Oxford Digital News report says we’ve hit a new low in public trust in Canadian journalism at 37%. Only ten years ago it was 55%.

That number might leave you with a lump in your throat. Canadian journalist Tara Henley is just as alarmed. She is about to publish The Trust Spiral: Why the Media Needs Objectivity on July 28th.

Henley sees a problematic spread of woke progressive culture in US and Canadian newsrooms over the last decade or so, careening out of control during the Covid Pandemic years that were marked in the United States by the popular outrage at the police murder of George Floyd and in Canada by the Convoy Occupation of downtown Ottawa.

Her 90-page book will draw comparisons to the American writer Batya Ungar-Sargon’s Bad News: How the Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (2023). That book is a wide-ranging indictment of the US “liberal elite,” the Democratic Party, and the class privileged members of the national media. As an English lit PhD born into a privileged class position herself, Ungar-Sargon describes herself as a “MAGA leftist” and is particularly scathing in her disdain for the New York Times which she portrays as something like the media anti-Christ.

Henley not so much. Unlike Ungar-Sargon, she’s a career working journalist who has practised the discipline: gathering and reporting the facts of what has happened in public life. Listen to her podcasts on Lean Out or Full Press and you’ll form an impression of her, and it won’t be that of a MAGA leftist.

There are no Bad Guys in The Trust Spiral and no demonized news institutions. How grounded. How Canadian.

But there’s a problem, says Henley. It’s the steady drop, nay a nose-dive spiral, in the public’s trust in “mainstream” news journalism (keeping mind that “mainstream” is a label affixed indiscriminately by others to a diverse assembly of established news outlets and it’s usually not a complement).

And while Henley is careful not to lay all of the blame at the door of newsrooms and journalists —she offers nuance and context about the complex roots of this decline in trust– she is calling for mainstream journalism to serve its audience better, with more accurate news reporting and fewer manipulative story narratives.

I will say parenthetically that the dreadful 37% figure for public trust is from a polling response to the question “how much do you trust the news as a whole within your country?” The related figures for “trust in brands” of leading Canadian news sources are a great deal higher, in the 50% to 60% range (higher in Quebec), while the “don’t trust” percentages are in the teens (and lower in Quebec).

This gap between 37% trust in overall news and the higher ratings for specific news outlets suggests Canadians are worrying a bit too much about untrusted news that other people are consuming. As well, the meagre 37% thumbs up for “news as a whole” is likely weighed down by the dim view Canadians take of news accessed on social media, search engines, and AI chatbots.

To close the bracket on this parenthetic thought, whether or not we are living in an existential moment for public trust in mainstream media is something you can decide for yourself at the end of the book. But I do share Henley’s alarm.

The mainstream media leans left, says Henley, continuing the analysis. When American journalists confronted Donald Trump’s upset victory in the 2016 election they grappled with a crucial choice between sticking to the classic role of detached reporting of facts or becoming activist-journalists in countervail to the new President’s MAGA agenda, his vilification of the media, and his peerless ability to by-pass journalists and project his message directly to Americans through social media.

Journalism leaders like New York University’s Jay Rosen endorsed a departure from the sedate rules of detachment reporting on Trump in favour of “resistance” to “the erosion of democratic institutions and a common world of fact,” stopping short of recommending political “opposition.” Others like the Washington Post’s Marty Baron advised reporters to just “go to work” and report facts.

Even though Trump lost the November 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, activist journalism didn’t release its grip on newsrooms, says Henley.

A cultural cocktail brewed from a concoction of controversial public health measures, the April 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, the reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement and the street violence associated with BLM protests. Together they provided US and Canadian journalism with one opportunity after another to choose between old-school detachment and the moral certainty of activist reporting.

In US newsrooms, the most notorious incident was the newsroom revolt at the New York Times after Opinion Editor James Bennet green-lit a guest column “Send in the Troops” written by Senator Tom Cotton. The Republican legislator advocated domestic deployment of the military to suppress street violence and looting associated with BLM protests.

The Times newsroom roiled. A rank-and-file petition demanded editorial management’s disavowal of Cotton’s op ed (promptly delivered by publisher A.G. Sulzberger). The heated environment caused staff editor Barri Weiss to opine that “showing up as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.” (An aside: Weiss thinks she was a centrist?)

Accused of enabling racism and the reckless endangerment of his African-American colleagues reporting on the protests, editor Bennet was drummed out of the New York Times by the end of June.

Henley brings the focus back to Canada, recounting an incident the same month in which one of the country’s most famous journalists Wendy Mesley was suspended by the public broadcaster CBC from her host duties (and retired a year later) after a complaint that she used the N-word during a prep meeting for a segment focussed on a news subject who also spoke the slur aloud.

June 2020 was perhaps the high point of “the great awokening” or (Henley’s alternative descriptive) “identitarian moralism” over issues of race and gender. My own view is that the accelerant to this moralizing was the Covid lockdown that fuelled intemperate statements on social media, unrestrained by the grounding of a common workplace and face to face engagement between long time colleagues.

But all of that is just flavour for the central narrative. Henley has a bigger issue and that is the mainstream media’s coverage of public health measures such as mandatory masking and vaccine mandates during the pandemic and, related, the convoy occupation of downtown Ottawa in February 2022.

Not alone in this view, Henley maintains that mainstream Canadian media fell well short of its duty to report on public health measures, and the science behind it, with the required professional skepticism.

When the Convoy protest entrenched itself for three weeks in protest of the same public health measures, Henley says that mainstream media unfairly and inaccurately portrayed those Canadians as kooks, dangerous insurrectionists, and trailer-park riff raff. Henley suggests a class bias on the part of the better educated, urban-dwelling, and affluent national press corps, something she sees as evidence of a fundamental issue to be addressed by Canadian news organizations throughout their news coverage of current affairs.

This is the same point made by Ungar-Sargon in Bad News where the focus is on the demographic profile of an urban, secular and affluent US national media (alas, there is very little Canadian data available to confirm or refute that profile. Both class status and class-viewpoint would require a great many data markers).

Whether or not we can lay the accusation of class bias at the feet of the press corps may not be as important as resolving the question of the mainstream media having internalized a deep-seeded ideological agenda, call it left-wing, progressive or woke (presumably the National Post and the Western Standard are excused).

The activist retort to that accusation is either (a) it’s a right-wing smear of honest journalists, or (b) it’s an appeal to the false god of “objective reporting” when there is no such thing as “objectivity,” either as an epistemological truth or a journalistic practice.

What has been set up rhetorically as a binary choice between “objectivity” in news reporting versus “activism journalism” is a false dualism that does not serve us well.

As Henley and many others point out, journalistic objectivity is a straw man and an euphemism for the pursuit of truth, both as a human aspiration and a professional discipline.

Writes Henley, historically “the journalistic method of objectivity —a set of practices designed to separate facts from value judgments —arose in distinction to a press dominated by both commercial and political interests.”

She delves into a brief account of the 19^th century partisan press, the robber baron press, the populist penny press, and the supine wartime press of the next century.

In reaction, says Henley, the “pursuit of truth” philosophy that is operationalized by a professional standard of journalistic detachment was the news industry’s dialectical evolution from the bought-and-paid-for press dominated by partisan political parties and the rich.

Still, you can find plenty of evidence of left-leaning activist journalists portraying “objectivity” as ideological cover for the stranglehold of the rich and privileged, including the racially privileged, over news reporting. As a kind of bookend, the right-leaning activist press thinks professional standards only obscure a different chokepoint over news reporting, one that favours the Big State and the suppression of liberty.

A plague on both your houses, I say.

What doesn’t get much oxygen in this debate is the dominant ideology of news journalism. And no, this ideology’s name is neither Woke nor Right.

It’s the creed of “Watchdog” journalism founded on a moral certainty that powerful people in government and big business are presumed to be up to no good, or at least seriously considering it, and it is the vocational calling of journalists to fearlessly expose it with factual reporting even if the underlying assumption of the unchecked abuse of power is itself a bias. The point is, it’s a consensus bias both in journalism and society at large (except among the powerful I suppose). This watchdog journalism has a long and venerable history. You could even label it activist.

Once journalists of all stripes acknowledge they share something very important, reversing the downward spiral of public trust should just be a matter of being fastidious in their devotion to professional standards, not wedging the moral of the story into news reports, and leaving moral certainty to the opinion writers.

No matter the best efforts of journalists, if the social currents that batter public trust in all public institutions continue to drag down the media, journalists can take pride in having worked hard to earn it back.

***

(An earlier version of this review inaccurately identified Wesley Lowery as a leader of the newsroom petition at the New York Times in the Cotton incident. Lowery was not employed by the Times or involved in the petition).

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.

Miller has no idea what Carney and Sarandos discussed – will Montreal voters punish the Netflix bailout? – Senate publishes CBC report – US media giants continue to merge

June 20, 2026

After getting challenged by CTV’s Vassy Kapelos for his government’s June 3rd “capitulation” on the Online Streaming Act, culture and identity minister Marc Miller travelled to the Banff World Media Festival this week where the Globe and Mail’s Barry Hertz put the same proposition to him.

“Look, well, it’s wrong,” said Miller rejecting the “capitulation” label. The minister is preparing to issue new instructions to the CRTC on foreign streamer contributions to Canadian content.

“There isn’t a chance that we won’t stand up and make sure that Canadian culture gets supported. I certainly do understand the frustration, because there’s been a lot of blood shed and battles fought on these grounds. … But you can have all the aspirations in the world to make sure that people are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, but if that doesn’t work, we have to act. And this reflects my impatience, and the Prime Minister’s impatience, to make sure that we are creating some stability in the system.”

Hertz also asked Miller if Netflix and the other US streamers would ever pay anything into Canadian media funds that subsidize Canadian content, given that Netflix had volunteered to the CRTC in 2023 that a two per cent levy was acceptable.

Miller responded that “we have to have that conversation with streamers, which has yet to occur in any developed form. My colleagues in the Bloc Québécois assume that it will go down to zero. That isn’t the case. We want people to pay what they would on a fair basis, and you can compare it to some other jurisdictions. It may be a staggered process of policy directions. I want to get it set out quickly, so we can get the ball rolling.”

Miller’s answer appears to contradict a government source in an earlier Globe and Mail story who said the government would direct the CRTC to levy no cash contributions on streamers at all.

Next, Miller was asked if the government is confident in its assumption that streamers can successfully pass along the CRTC’s 6.55% cash levy to Canadian subscribers given the aggressive price increases of the past years in an industry notorious for subscriber churn. Research from the EU suggests regulatory charges don’t necessarily get passed along.

“Not to minimize the counterpoint that you’re making,” he responded, “but we have seen in some of those jurisdictions an increase in production costs, which is an affordability issue from another angle.”

In other words, the government’s assumption of a subscriber paid “Netflix tax” is based not only on the CRTC’s order of 6.55% streamer cash contributions to media funds but also an assumed increase in streamer production costs arising from the CRTC order for streamers to spend 8.5% of Canadian revenues on making Canadian shows for their own platforms. (The EU study did however take that into account).

Finally, Hertz got to the salacious stuff and asked Miller what he knew about the private meeting that the Prime Minister had with Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos a week before his June 3rd announcement of the government bailout.

The minister said he didn’t know.

“I don’t know what was discussed, to be honest I know they met, and he meets with a lot of people in the industry. I don’t think that anyone meeting would shape policy in any way that’s material.”

Meanwhile according to Hertz’s further reporting, the Canadian producers attending the Banff festival were generally in a state of disorientation following the government striking down the Netflix levies and promising to replace the CanCon production money from a $600 million increase in federal cultural spending.

Like any entrepreneurs investing in multi-year projects, Canadian film producers need to know where their financing is coming from before they start taking out loans and passing on other projects. More than half of their production budgets come from government tax credits, media funds, and direct investments by broadcasters and, until June 3rd, foreign streamers too.

The government promised to replace the streamer money with taxpayer cash but for now no one knows when, how much, or what the program rules might be.

Yet despite all appearances to be making it up as they go along, there are signs that the federal Liberals know what they are doing but are keeping their cards close to their vest.

One clue is the special industry committee that Miller created in April to advise on the future of Canadian video production. In a press release, the government offered no details on the committee’s mandate. Neither did officials for the Canada Media Fund, the public-private subsidy fund central to any changes in the bundle of financing sources that consists of investments from independent Canadian producers, Canadian broadcasters, foreign streamers, and federal and provincial governments.

Now we have a second clue: a document obtained by veteran journalist Dean Beeby (who was kind enough to share it with me) written in October 2025 by former deputy heritage minister Isabelle Mondou for then-minister Steven Guilbeault. Commissioned immediately after the Carney government was elected in April 2025, the lightly redacted report appears to have three major recommendations:

Identify efficiencies by combining the program administration of Canada Media Fund, the National Film Board and Telefilm Canada.
Formulate an “integrated vision of audio-visual production.”
Align the funding mandates of federal subsidies (i.e. the Canada Media Fund and the CPTC tax subsidies) with that vision.

One of the salient points made by the deputy minister is that government CanCon subsidy is overwhelmingly dedicated to production financing and is underwhelming in its support of pre-production development and post-production distribution and export strategies. Although the final recommendations are redacted in the document, the deputy minister’s observation correlates with advice from some Canadian commentators that a policy shift is overdue (and see the item on the Fox-Roku merger, below).

The Mondou memo was signed off eight months ago by Guilbeault, so it may be that since then civil servants in the Department of Heritage have fleshed out a plan they want to run past the industry volunteers on the minister’s new committee.

It’s unknown if the new vision that emerges will dovetail with the minister’s other big files: rewriting instructions to the CRTC on streamer contributions, figuring out what that means for “equitable” contributions from Canadian broadcasters, and then replacing any shortfall from the $600 million bank account for federal cultural subsidies, also announced on June 3rd.

On another front, there is the policy storm moving in from a different direction: what to do about federal funding of news journalism.

Miller announced in May that the Carney government plans to extend federal QCJO journalism salary subsidies to broadcasting companies. The public consultation was also announced on June 3rd, the same day as the CRTC’s streamer levies were struck down. Those QCJO subsidies are scheduled to drop from 35% to 25% of journalist salary rates in 2027.

As well, the Netflix bailout scotched the annual $45 million in expected streamer contributions to the Independent Local Television News Fund earmarked as relief for the financially distressed Global News network and 19 other independent television stations.

The quashed streamer cash levies were also expected to put $40 million in annual radio news funding.

On yet another funding front, the federal government is cutting $10 million of the funding for weekly newspapers in the $85M Canada Periodical Fund .

With all of those funding cuts in the wind comes the news that Heritage is continuing its five-year review of the Periodical Fund but now also the $20M Local Journalism Initiative which was only recently reviewed.

Something’s up.

***

Another potential outcome of the Netflix bailout is whether the Liberals pay the price for their decision in Québec where electors rank cultural issues —-deeply intertwined with language issues—- near the top of their list. The Carney government’s shredding of the Trudeau-Guilbeault environmental policies is also on the list.

Not only is there a provincial election in October that could produce a separatist government spoiling for a fight with Ottawa, but the Bloc Québécois is gearing up for three federal by-elections in the greater Montréal area triggered by pending resignations from the House of Commons by Liberal Steven Guilbeault, the Bloc’s Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, and NDP MP Alexander Boulerice. Two of the three ridings are sufficiently progressive to have elected Québec Solidaire provincially.

The Carney Liberals currently hold majority government by a three-seat margin.

***

The Senate Transportation & Communications Committee has released its report on the CBC.

The report made only seven recommendations, three of which can be summed up as arguing for a major pivot of the public broadcaster into local news.

What grabbed headlines of course was the recommendation of a regular audit of CBC News content by an external consultant to assess for bias in news reporting.

Source: Reuters Oxford Digital News Report, 2026

***

Media merger activity in the US is getting frothy.

After the US Department of Justice announced it had no anti-trust concerns about the Paramount $110 USD billion takeover of Warner Brothers Discovery, the Wall Street Journal published a story with sources from “people familiar with the matter.”

The story was that DOJ staff lawyers were “leaning towards recommending” a DOJ anti-trust lawsuit blocking the merger when senior DOJ officials unexpectedly announced the green light for a “pro-competitive” merger. The focus of the staff investigation had been whether Paramount CEO David Ellison can deliver on a promise to increase, not decrease, the number of feature film productions given the extraordinary debt load incurred to buy Warner Brothers.

In an unrelated announcement, the Murdoch-owned and content-rich Fox Corporation is paying $22 USD billion to buy streaming distribution giant Roku.

Fox already runs its own free advertising streaming television (FAST) platform Tubi that engages 100 million active users each month. Fox will consolidate Tubi with the Roku’s industry-leading 80 million accounts that are integrated into its streaming hardware and content launch screens.

***

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.

MediaPolicy’s First Explainer on the Safe Social Media Act

2024 Opinion Poll, The Dais

June 16, 2026

I will make a confession. I was at first overwhelmed by the breadth and detail of the federal government’s new Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34. The dense legalese of the bill is a terrific sleep aid.

But of course both the good and bad vibes in the legislation deserve a hearing if you are keen to follow the ups and downs of the bill’s parliamentary journey, soon to unfold.

In sorting all of that out, you really need to know: what does the proposed statute actually say and do?

Read the bill. But if I’ve discouraged you, here’s an explainer.

The top of line summary is that the bill creates a Digital Safety Commission to shepherd in a regulatory regime to protect children from online harm and reduce harms for adults.

Some of the harms, like child porn, hate and some forms of the online incitement of violence, are already illegal. The bill is intended to supplement the state’s formidable powers of criminal investigation, arrest and prosecution.

Other harms like revenge porn (my shorthand for posting intimate content without consent), bullying or inducing kids to self-harm, or the hate or incitement falling short of illegality is often called “awful but lawful” content because the speech embedded in the online content is free speech.

But free speech, like the banana peel on the sidewalk, has never been free of consequences or civil liability.

Awful but lawful online content has been the subject of years and years of civil lawsuits launched against US-headquartered social media platforms around the world, slow walking towards a day of reckoning before the US Supreme Court. This Canadian bill is about making the awful unlawful in Canada if it’s harmful enough.

The legal breakthrough is that the bill creates a legal duty of care ——the one that an American or Canadian court may or may not create in some distant future—- that social media platforms, AI chatbots, and porn sites must live up to.

If you read the bill, you will see that it is organized by codifying those legal duties for social media, AI chatbots, and “other” regulated services. Then for each of those categories, the statute describes the content of those duties and how the online services can stay out of legal trouble for hosting it.

Most of the action in the bill is for social media apps. I’ll get to that below.

As for AI chatbots, regulation is narrowed down to the AI companies doing or not doing a few simple things:

Not posing as a human, especially a lawyer or medical professional.
Not using emotionally manipulative techniques or being deceptive about being an AI agent.
Ending interactions with users by refusing to provide information on self-harm or harm to others and instead directing the user to health services.

Interestingly, the bill does not require AI companies to report these dangerous or self-harming users to the police, something that took no small measure of political forbearance after the Tumbler Ridge shooting. Calling the cops will still be up to the AI company.

Also as an overall safety measure, the bill requires AI chatbots to submit a Digital Safety Plan to the new Digital Safety Commission. The Plan must assess the potential harms in their services, the measures they take to mitigate those risks, and how effective those measures are.

As for porn sites (just one of the potential members of the third “other” class of regulated online services) the main obligation is to protect children from viewing porn by setting up age verification or age estimation technology.

This age gating raises concerns about the secure storage of private data, meaning the risk that porn viewers will be publicly embarrassed or blackmailed. A key provision in the bill, picked up from Bill S-209, is that online age verification services are supposed to delete the personal data the moment they have confirmed the age of majority.

As for social media apps, they will be age gated for all users if they carry porn (sorry, not sorry Elon).

Even if they don’t carry porn, social media apps will be temporarily age gated (below age 16) until such time their proprietors satisfy the Digital Safety Commission that they have a Digital Safety Plan that assesses harms to children and adults, puts online design features and measures in place that reduce harms, and then documents how effective they were. “Temporary” age gating may last months or years, although the mere requirement will light a fire under the social media platforms to submit their Digital Safety Plans to the Commission on day one.

But any age verification requirement for social media apps, even if temporary, suggests that all adult users will be subject to it, or at very least those adults who don’t get through the gate with a minimum of fuss and information. For example, your social media platform may be satisfied by a quick scan of your social media profile and activity.

As for protecting kids from the proliferating harms on social media apps, the federal cabinet will have the power to set regulations (that first get published in the Canada Gazette for debate) detailing at least some of what is expected in a Digital Safety Plan.

At the very least, the Carney government might see this regulation-making opportunity to take credit for some high level principles of child safety —- perhaps a command to “do something about addictive design”—- while leaving the fine points of implementation to the platforms drafting their Digital Safety Plans and the Commission that has to approve those Plans.

In fact it will be important to hear the presentations made at parliamentary committees considering Bill C-34 as to how much of the line by line of the Digital Safety Plans will be left to the social media companies to conceptualize and design versus how much will be effectively dictated by cabinet regulation and the Commission’s own views of how tough the Plans must be.

On that score, the bill already includes clear measures expected of the social media apps:

There must be blocking tools for users to shut out noxious harassers and child predators.

There must be user tools for flagging harmful content to bring to the attention of platform.

The social media companies must label “synthetic” content (deep fakes).

Bot-driven content must be labelled once it is discovered.

And there must be a public facing “resource person” to deal with user concerns.

As for actual content take-downs by the social media platforms, they are only required in limited circumstances, i.e. child porn, revenge porn and terrorist material.

These content take-downs are required on at least an interim basis within 24 hours of being flagged. But a final platform decision on the take-down is only due “as soon as feasible.” Since it’s likely there will be some contested judgments on making these difficult take-down calls, the social media companies must provide an internal appeal process (for both content viewer and content poster) and then ultimately a complaint can be made to the Commission.

All of this will be superintended by the five commissioners appointed by cabinet to the Digital Safety Commission.

The Commission’s powers are broadly similar to most federal administrative tribunals. After all, the whole point of the bill is to take the law and liability out of the hands of civil law and the civil courts and transfer them to a body capable of holding tech platforms accountable for harmful content on offer to 40 million Canadians.

Three Commission powers pop out already as notable.

The first is the ladder of substantial fines and “administrative monetary penalties” that the Commission can use, or threaten to use, to keep the Big Tech platforms in line. Depending on the circumstances, the fines can range from $5 million to $20 million, or from 1.5% to 5% of the tech platform’s global revenues.

The second is the possibility of secret Commission hearings that can be invoked when there a privacy concerns (for example revenge porn or anything concerning children).

The third is the Commission’s power to compel platforms to give data access to independent (but government-vetted) research academics. This will hopefully give the public interest independent information about how well the platforms are meeting their obligations.

This summary will have to do for now.

There’s enough in this lengthy and detailed bill to attract scrutiny and that has already begun.

As I wrote in my last post, this bill sits on at least two powder keg issues. One is protecting children and adults from poisonous content. The other is the possibility of creating a slippery slope of the state interfering with free speech through the proxy of platform accountability.

It would be easy to dismiss either policy perspective as being motivated by either nanny statism or, on the other hand, a dogged resistance to regulating any Internet content any time out of a fear for digital privacy, especially where porn is concerned.

From what I have already read, and from my own observations, here is a short list of issues that will and should get attention during the parliamentary debate:

Flag-a-mania. The statute contemplates ordinary Canadians flagging harmful content, even if it is not about them. They (and those that posted the content) get due process from both the platform and the Commission. It’s not hard to see that devolving into a new form of “lawfare.”

Age gating. This is going to happen no matter what because of the ban on children accessing porn. The question is not the digital security of personal data — leaks and hacks are always possible — but whether technology can reduce that unlikely event to something next to impossible. Social media platforms can make this easier by simply banning pornography from their platforms and leave that business to the porn sites.

The statute gives the platforms a get-out-jail-free card by relieving them of any obligation to pro-actively search for harmful content. I am sure they already do this voluntarily and may even incorporate that into a Digital Safety Plan, but enshrining this grant of platform immunity into law could be controversial.

The statute leaves a lot of digital rule-making to be determined by a combination of cabinet regulations, Commission guidelines, and platform Digital Safety Plans. That is a lot of regulatory power held in reserve and without fulsome debate in Parliament. On the other hand, it may be practically unavoidable.

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Miller explains the Netflix bailout – Federal ad vouchers to support Canadian media? – US DOJ approves the Paramount/ Warner Bros merger

June 14, 2026

There are few things more refreshing than CTV’s Vassy Kapelos grilling cabinet ministers.

The host of Question Period had culture and identity minister Marc Miller in the dock on Saturday to ask him bluntly why Canadians would expect that his new Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34 won’t be given away upon President Donald Trump’s insistence, as were the Digital Services Tax and the CRTC’s assessment of cash and investment contributions to Canadian content by US streaming services.

Miller’s answer: there will be no surrender by the Liberals on his new bill. Protecting kids is not on the table, he said, “hard stop.” The minister thinks that similar legislative efforts being passed or proposed in Washington and various US state houses to protect children from online harms bodes well for Canada pursuing the same strategy.

Also, he said protecting children is more important than “redistributing money within an industry,” a reference to the CRTC ruling. (Public polling on conceding ground on the Online Streaming Act under US trade pressure is here.)

As for overruling the CRTC on streamer contributions, Miller said he wouldn’t comment publicly. That lasted about ten seconds once Kapelos went after him for “capitulation” to US trade pressure and American companies.

Kapelos asked Miller what Canada got, or might get, in CUSMA trade talks for coughing up the Digital Services Tax and the CRTC ruling.

“I’m not going to tell you,” replied the minister.

The minister then gave up some fresh talking points on the CRTC ruling and the $600M in federal funds that includes replacement of the streamer contributions:

The CRTC “is not the final arbiter” on implementing the Online Streaming Act, the government is.
The Prime Minister may have overruled the CRTC’s 15%-of-revenues assessment on foreign streamers but it is only because the 15% number wasn’t the right one. When the minister formally instructs the CRTC “in a few months” on the make-over of the overturned decision, there will be “a number.”
The annual $600M in federal funds announced on June 3rd will compensate for giving away the $200M in annual streamer contributions ordered two years ago by the CRTC in part because that streamer money is “tied up in court.” (The escrowed streamer funds from 2025-26 will have to be refunded to the streamers).
The federal $600M will include money for “independent journalism.”

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There was an unexpected media policy post from Narcity publisher Chuck Lapointe last week that is worth reading.

Narcity is a Canadian news outlet with a heavy bent towards travel content. But it also publishes conventional news content and on a daily basis it re-posts Canadian Press news stories on Facebook in order to draw traffic to Narcity’s websites.

Lapointe can get away with this despite the Meta banishment of news from its Canadian platforms because he signed off a Meta waiver saying his news product is not the kind of content that triggers financial compensation from Meta under the Online News Act, Bill C-18.

Speaking of Meta, Lapointe’s policy post points out how foreign platforms now completely dominate the Canadian market in digital advertising with the well known impact on the ability of Canadian media to monetize their content.

A good policy move, he says, would be for Ottawa to put new federal dollars in the hands of Canadian advertisers on the condition they spend it on Canadian digital platforms. That kind of voucher system might spur innovation by Canadian digital outlets competing for that ad spend.

It’s a smart idea that’s been circulating in various US states for some time now. In Canada, Senator Andrew Cardozo and I included the recommendation of an advertising voucher in our recent report, Making News Media Sustainable.

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The US Federal Department of Justice has signed off on the blockbuster Paramount-Warner Brothers Discovery merger.

As often happens in government reviews of big mergers, the field of competition is configured to offer a rationale for the thumbs up or down. In this case, the FCC is saying it’s “pro-competitive” for Hollywood studios and streamers to consolidate in order to compete more effectively with Silicon Valley tech/media companies.

The merger story isn’t over. Some US state attorney generals, including California, are banding together to litigate an anti-trust action against it.

The merger also hasn’t been approved by the Canadian Competition Bureau. The European Union and the United Kingdom are also reviewing it: an early approval or the launch of further EU investigations might be announced in July.

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Back to the Online News Act for a moment and attention all journalists.

An independent researcher from Simon Fraser University is running a survey on newsroom opinions on the consequences of the Online News Act. (She confirmed to me that she isn’t getting funding from foreign platforms. Her research appears to be supported by a federal grants).

English : The Online News Act and its consequences for Canadian Journalism

En français : La Loi sur les nouvelles en ligne et ses conséquences pour le journalisme canadien

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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.

Feds table Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act

June 11, 2026

Even if you haven’t, Prime Minister Mark Carney has moved on from last week’s announcement of a $600 million taxpayer bailout of US streamers who were scheduled to make cash contributions to Canadian media funds.

Within days, federal government announced two other big things that bear heavily upon Canadian media policy.

The first was the “AI for all” federal policy which focusses mostly on AI investment, AI adoption by businesses and consumers, and some money for safety research. The words “creator copyright” or “content licensing” do not appear in the federal plan. That means that the unlicensed and uncompensated ingestion of online news and information content by AI companies will continue, although the Liberals say we should “stay tuned.”

The other big thing was Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, a reprise and redesign of the old Bill C-63 that sets up a regulatory regime of self-policing against harmful content by social media companies and now AI chatbots too. It effectively overtakes Bill S-209, the Senate bill that targets youth access to online pornography available for free on social media apps.

C-34 was tabled by the Heritage minister Marc Miller for First Reading in the House and will likely go into the theatrical window of Parliamentary committee in October. You’re going to hear a lot about the merits or dismerits of the government’s plan over many months and MediaPolicy.ca will offer updates as we go along. Together I hope we can educate ourselves as the public commentary comes, which will be thick and fast I guarantee you.

What is the Bill?

Social media content can be addictive and harmful, especially to impressionable kids. No one is going to dispute that reality, the arguments over C-34 are going to be over how far the government should intervene. Public polling demonstrates mass popular support for federal regulation of online harms and in particular age bans for kids.

The bill focusses on harm to kids, revenge porn, fomenting hate, inciting violence, and content published by terrorist and extremist cells. Again, all of them consensus picks for government action.

The platforms to be regulated are social media companies and AI chatbots, the latter being a response to and a painful reminder of OpenAI’s culpability in the Tumbler Ridge shootings.

The core of the bill is to make online platforms liable for harmful content by requiring them to meet a standard of self-policing the addictive and harmful content. Ultimately, a new government digital regulator (not the CRTC, praise be) will be the arbiter of whether the platform’s design features and content curation are good enough.

There’s lots to dig into there, and more to explain, but later.

As we go along you can expect that the contested features of the bill, wrapped in fine points of legalese or technological detail, are sitting to two powder kegs. One, is the harm to children. The other, is the fear that the age restrictions embedded in the legislation will usher in the end of anonymous online content consumption and create a treasure trove of personal data for hackers to steal.

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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.

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