Photo: Alos Wonaschuetz
July 16, 2023
The silver lining in the cloud hanging over the future of news journalism in Canada is that we get a lot of public opinion polls. This week Angus Reid published two.
The first was about Bill C-18. The headline finding was that nearly half of Canadians, heavily concentrated among Conservative supporters, want the government to cave in to Meta and Google in the face of news throttling on their platforms. MediaPolicy.ca wrote about that here.
A second and self commissioned poll lead with a finding that a majority of Canadians don’t want government to ‘fund newsrooms.’ The timing of the poll seemed strange: federal aid to newsroom —-the QCJO program, readership tax credits and relaxed rules on charitable donations to journalism—- dates back to 2019 and has not been in the news.
The question was blunt and without nuance about the word ‘funding’ and asked respondents to choose between two policy extremes even if they did not completely agree: government funding of newsrooms or none at all.
The poll moved on to measure continued support or ‘defunding’ the CBC:
As you can see the poll results were, once more, heavily skewed by voter preferences.
The pollster then made this editorial supposition: perhaps the apparent contradiction between support for publicly funded CBC newsrooms and opposition to government aid to private sector newsrooms is because respondents admire the CBC’s non-news programming in sports and entertainment or because of the public broadcaster’s ‘broad mandate.’
Upon reflection, perhaps the pollster is aware of this graphic:
***
The Canadian government’s contest of wills with Meta and Facebook continues.
At the beginning of the week, Heritage Canada issued a statement of the federal cabinet’s intention to pass a regulation under the Online News Act providing Google and Facebook the opportunity to obtain a regulatory exemption under section 11 of the Act by committing a minimum amount of funding in deals with a minimum number of news outlets.
This suggests Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has either made a deal with Google, or is headed towards one by filling in the blanks for ‘minimum’ with actual numbers. The ‘exemption’ in C-18 was designed by Parliamentarians to push the platforms and news outlets to voluntarily negotiated deals and avoid mandatory arbitration. The CRTC makes the judgement call on exemptions based on a long list of criteria set down by MPs in the Bill.
By enacting a cabinet regulation pinning down the most crucial variables in the exemption process in advance, the government is ceding what the platforms have said publicly is their greatest concern, limited liability for payments to news outlets.
We will see now if the platforms ever wanted a deal at all in Canada. Pro tip: Meta doesn’t.
In the meantime, the Big Tech threats continue with two new ones this week. Google let it be known that they are not going to release their search engine AI tool in Canada because of “regulatory uncertainty.”
Next, the Google filing to the CRTC at the outset of the Bill C-11 implementation process threatens an unspecified CUSMA trade complaint if it doesn’t like what it sees at the end of the process for its YouTube platform:
14. These submissions are further made without prejudice to the application of the USMCA to any conditions of service that affect issues of Canadian market access and entry of non-Canadian services established by the Commission for online undertakings.
***
Meanwhile, Hollywood is on fire.
Not literally of course, but the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA has joined the Writers Guild of America on strike. The issues include money, diminishing work, and contract language protecting against job replacement by AI tools. The speculation is that the strike will last for months and heavily impact TV and film production.
On a parallel track, and perhaps intersecting with the strike, is the ongoing market shake-out among the streamers. MediaPolicy linked to a story about that three weeks ago: this week there is an in-depth analysis in the Wall Street Journal about the financial predicament of one of Hollywood’s Titans, Disney.
***
On the artificial intelligence front, Associated Press reached an agreement with Open AI to grant the large language model developer OpenAI access to its news archive. Something to watch.
***
The best read of the week for me was posted by New York Times columnist David French, “Who Truly Threatens the Church?” At one level, it’s about the creeping fascism of the Christian nationalist movement in the US. But it’s more introspective, and more elevating, than that.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or e-mail howard.law@bell.net to be added to the weekly update;
or follow @howardalaw on Twitter.
MediaPolicy.ca 
Nice sweep. I personally particularly loved the “church” article. Thanks.
>
LikeLike