August 6, 2023
Last week MediaPolicy posted two columns.
The first was co-written with Toronto Metropolitan University’s Ivor Shapiro and appeared on the IRPP website. It is a continuation of the policy discussion on a national news strategy that was kicked off in June by Peter Menzies and Konrad von Finckenstein.
The contribution from Ivor and myself is to build on the Menzies/KVF idea that the CBC is the foundation of any strategy countering the market failure of news journalism. And the four of us agree that we have to get back to a place where there is a truly “private” private-sector news industry that co-exists with the publicly funded CBC. The question is how to get there and the disagreement I would suggest is what we are willing to risk —given the existential requirement of news journalism in our democracy— to get there.
In practical terms, Ivor and I have added two essential elements to this work-in-progress: prioritizing news gathering in state support for journalism and reinforcing its political legitimacy with far more transparency in its administrative governance. My own pet idea is a constituent assembly that elects a board of directors to oversee the administration of public subsidies and incentives.
The other MediaPolicy post turns back to Bill C-11 with a summary of ‘What Hollywood Wants.’ It’s a review of the Motion Picture Association’s written submissions to the CRTC regarding how the US studios and streamers should contribute to Canadian content under the new legislation.
Related to that post, Johanna Schneller has an analysis piece in the Globe suggesting that lately Hollywood has been making a bad bet on high-budget thrillers. I’m not convinced of that without the full monetization numbers for those movies, especially the foreign box office receipts which are typically two-thirds of the take.
In any event, Schneller isn’t entirely hyperbolic when she says that the Hollywood streaming platforms “are bankrupting their studios to keep up” with each other. Only Netflix makes money and one feels that either cost retrenchment or a culling of the streamer herd is only a matter of time.
***
If you are looking for some good reading, here are some suggestions.
Sean Speer has co-written a brief column with Pierre Poilievre’s communications director Ben Woodfinden describing the political ideology of Canada’s first Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald’s as a hybrid of nineteenth-century conservativism and classical liberalism.
That’s not a contentious point but what is interesting is they latch on to the idea of “state capacity” conservativism which they describe, in its circa 1867 context, as nation building under the shadow of the American juggernaut to the south.
Their line of argument could easily apply to cultural regulation in this modern era —it certainly did in Brian Mulroney’s Conservative Party— though no doubt Speer and Woodfinden would say times are different now. Speer has suggested Bill C-11 is the “hidden agenda” of Quebec cultural nationalists and Woodfinden’s boss wants to repeal it.
More bingeing on Speer, he has an excellent podcast (24 minutes) with David Frum exploring the phenomenon of young conservative men “falling down a far-Right path” or as Frum puts it “young conservatives and the fascist temptation.” (My contemporary, Frum made me chuckle by describing left-wingers of the 1970s and 1980s as “emotional.”)
This follows a Speer column I linked to last week which positions Pierre Poilievre as a libertarian conservative competing for the soul of Canada’s conservative movement with ‘nationalist’ conservatives.
***
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 