I am retired staff of Unifor, the union representing 300,000 Canadians in twenty different sectors of the economy, including 10,000 journalists and media workers. As the former Director of the Media Sector and as an unapologetic cultural nationalist, I have an abiding passion for public policy in Canadian media.
There is a good analysis piece by Gretel Kahn that reviews the distribution of the $100 million Bill C-18 Google payments to Canadian news outlets and the Meta ban on Canadian news.
The criticisms from various publishers and commentators on where the Google money landed are fairly predictable. Mainstream media, especially the US-controlled Postmedia chain, come in for a bashing and the most vivid quote comes from Christopher Curtis, the online publisher of local news outlet The Rover, who opines that “this whole thing has been a huge gift for foreign-owned legacy media and a spit in the face of small outlets like ours and Indigenous-owned outlets.”
Got it.
The fresh stuff that Kahn digs out is how news outlets are adapting to the Meta ban on Canadian news. One publisher points out that Meta’ s traffic referrals to news sites were falling well before Mark Zuckerberg responded to the Online News Act Bill C-18 by banishing most news organizations from his platform.
Many of these publishers are figuring out work arounds on Meta applications, buying Facebook ads to promote their hyperlinked news or posting unlinked news items on Instagram. Others are leaning more heavily on YouTube and TikTok distribution. As one publisher comments in the story, it’s “better not to build on rented land,” a nod to heavier reliance on their own e-mail and subscription distribution instead of Search and Social platforms.
But all of that may be yesterday’s problem. The new disruptors of journalism are the Internet-scraping AI companies, including the same Big Tech platforms that make news available through hyperlinked news snippets.
Canada’s Online News Act C-18 doesn’t regulate AI ingestion of Canadian news content. So far, the AI companies have got away with being the dog that eats your book, barfs it, and claims the ingestion was okay because it’s no longer a book.
If the Liberal government has any concern about that, or any interest in amending copyright law to get at the problem more quickly, it has yet to show such interest.
In the meantime, the referrals of audience traffic from AI-enhanced search engines to news sites are way down. Yet a news report suggests that the few AI companies deigning to make licensing agreements with a handful of news agencies are sending more traffic to these chosen outlets. In these early days, the AI horizon facing news organizations appears to range from catastrophic to not-so-catastrophic scenarios and the question of which news sites get licensing deals may be determinative. If this sounds like the problem of oligopoly in content distribution that lead to Bill C-18, it should.
Federal AI Minister Evan Solomon just announced the advisory panel for his federal AI Strategy Task Force. The list of strategic priorities does not include news media. The panel is dominated by experts on AI development and economic opportunities. The only member appointed to the 23-person panel who is focussed on the downside harms to the media ecosystem is McGill University’s Taylor Owen.
Whatever is coming from AI, so far the Liberal government does not seem interested in riding to the rescue of the media or creative industries. The Parliamentary Heritage committee is scheduling hearings beginning October 6th and 8th that may put the issue into the public policy spotlight.
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The Bari Weiss deal is done now. The iconoclastic publisher of The Free Press has sold her publication to the newly consolidated Paramount, owned by David Ellison.
Weiss becomes the editor-in-chief of CBS News and, given her MAGA affinities, the editorial curation of the mainstream broadcaster could change.
Paramount joins Fox, Warner Brothers Discovery (CNN, TBS), Disney (ABC, ESPN) and Comcast (NBC) as a media superpower in both news and sports & entertainment. But Ellison has a special edge and the potential to dominate global media to the extent that he works in cooperation with his father Larry Ellison, the second richest man in the world. Ellison pater is expected to become a significant minority owner of the US-operations of TikTok once that deal with Chinese-owned ByteDance is consummated.
The Washington Post has a good story on the Ellisons, their businesses, and their relationships with the White House.
And if you want to listen to an interview full of unexpected personal insights, I recommend the engrossing New York Timespodcast interview of the actor, artist and activist Sean Penn. The interview was recorded in two parts, divided chronologically by the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
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Last week Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault showed up at the House of Commons’ heritage committee for his root canal.
The Conservatives were on him immediately about former CBC host Travis Dhanraj’s charges that the public broadcaster violated the Human Rights Act by treating him as a token “brown guy.” MP Rachel Thomas cited CBC’s “toxic environment” as a fact.
Guilbeault appeared to take Dhanraj’s allegations at face value, expressing “regret” at “what happened to him” but distanced himself from the CBC’s handling of the dispute.
MediaPolicy has covered the story here, here and here but I was waiting for more details on Dhanraj’s claims against unnamed colleagues in CBC’s Ottawa bureau and how CBC management handled the whole situation.
Now Dhanraj has given a more fulsome version of his story on episode one of his new podcast, Can’t Be Censored, produced with former CP24 reporter Karman Wong.
The episode is over an hour long and it’s pretty clear that without naming David Cochrane, the host of CBC’s parliamentary show Power and Politics, that is who Dhanraj is identifying as his nemesis (Cochrane has declined comment). Dhanraj says that “three or four” journalists are running the Ottawa bureau’s news coverage as their own club.
Dhanraj’s narrative is that CBC headhunted him, first as a national reporter and then as the host of Canada Tonight, a current affairs show. Dhanraj tried to make the show edgy and popular by inviting controversial guests. They included former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose appearance CBC management vetoed on the grounds that Carlson is a white nationalist, although Dhanraj says in the podcast he doesn’t agree with that description.
What got him into hotter water was inviting Conservative Party deputy leader Melissa Lantsman onto his show while the Conservatives were boycotting Cochrane’s hot seat on Power & Politics. As it turns out, CBC management already had an internal protocol that forbade the Conservatives end-running Cochrane in favour of a preferred host. Dhanraj tried to convince his boss that it was good journalism and better for the CBC’s reputation as a big tent public broadcaster to get the Conservatives onto any CBC show at all. He even quoted the Broadcasting Act. His boss didn’t buy it.
There’s more in the podcast episode on other friction points between Dhanraj and the Corp. Assuming he has offered his best arguments, it’s hard to see his allegation of racist tokenism as anything other than his editorial gloss. Rather his story comes across as a tale of an ambitious television anchor making a play to upgrade a lesser show into a bigger one, some colleagues resenting that, and CBC not accommodating it.
If David Cayley’s new book critiquing the CBC had gone to press a little later, I am sure he would have devoted a chapter to Dhanraj. Earlier this week, MediaPolicy posted a review of Cayley’s book.
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Bob Iger is writing his own history, day by day.
Iger is the Disney CEO responsible for suspendingLive! host Jimmy Kimmel for his mockery of the US President’s odd reply to a journalist’s question about grieving Charlie Kirk’s death. Then the viewer and political backlash hit Disney. Iger turned Kimmel’s “indefinite” suspension into a one week cancellation.
US media commentator Evan Shapiro has a LinkedIn post breaking down the events leading up to Iger’s actions against Kimmel.
Bottom line: the threat by Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr to strip Disney’s ABC affiliate stations of their broadcasting licenses was an idle one. Up until now media moguls have blinked because they won’t play the long game against the Trump administration’s campaign to tame mainstream media.
Kimmel’s show is back on the ABC network, but initially two major station affiliates refused to air it. One of them is a big Trump supporter. The other needs the FCC to approve a merger.
That lasted three days. Yesterday the two affiliates that include 56 stations across the US reversed course and agreed to resume airing the show.
It ain’t over. Trump replied on Truth Social, “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do.”
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It’s World News Day tomorrow which is a reminder from major newsrooms around the liberal democratic globe that you’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Pairing up with that, my alma mater Unifor —-which represents journalists and media workers across the country—- has launched a middle brow version of the same, a public service campaign branded CheckFactHere.
Video and print ads created by Unifor will appear in Canadian media who are donating the inventory.
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A few sunny weeks ago MediaPolicy posted a dissent from a Canadian Press story concluding that PM Mark Carney was considering repeal of the government’s Online News Act C-18 and its $100 million tithe on Google that compensates Canadian newsrooms for their stories appearing on Search. I didn’t think that Carney’s mangled response to a Kelowna journalist’s question about C-18 actually said that.
It took some time to pin down the government for a clarification, but Politico.com asked Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault for comment and his press secretary replied “the federal government has no intention of repealing either of the acts,” referencing both C-18 and the Online Streaming Act C-11.
Then the National Poststory added that Guilbeault’s office hedged a bit, saying “for us, currently, the intention is not to repeal those acts… But I can’t pretend to know the end result of the negotiations with the United States” which are “very much” the main factor that will determine the future of both acts.
Somebody needs to put this question to Carney.
While we are talking about C-18, when the Canadian Journalism Collective announced the distribution of the $100 million in August, Media Policy posted that the conservative news outlet Western Standard was getting a $68,000 cheque. What I didn’t mention is that I e-mailed publisher Derek Fildebrandt asking him to confirm that he wasn’t also receiving the federal government’s “QCJO” journalist subsidy. His publication was part of a coterie of anti-subsidy news outlets who published a public oath they would never take that kind of money. Fildebrandt didn’t reply to my e-mail.
Now we know why. He’s taking the money. In an email to his subscribers, Fildebrandt said he couldn’t compete without the federal cash and ——I am reading between his lines here— without Pierre Poilievre in power those subsidies will continue to flow to his competitors.
Fildebrandt’s books aren’t public, so it’s also possible he couldn’t remain solvent without federal and Google money. In any event, my condolences, climbing down from high moral ground is never fun. Just ask Mark Carney.
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The former producer of CBC’s radio show Ideas has a new book that asks and answers a question too often ignored: what is a public broadcaster and why isn’t the CBC behaving like one?
David Cayley’s “The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And how to get it back)” is prosaically titled but elegantly written. Cayley loves ideas of course and his argument is grounded in a series of cerebral set pieces that situate his message that CBC News is too much the storyteller and too little the convenor of open-minded dialogue.
If theories of media communications and linguistics are your thing, Cayley explores and applies the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Noam Chomsky, The Frankfurt School and a host of other thinkers you may never heard of. If you have a taste for this (I do) or consider yourself a left libertarian, there’s lots to eat. Otherwise, you may need to be patient with Cayley.
Each of his excursions into theory provide the context for his core message, which goes something like this:
For decades now, the CBC has strayed from its Parliamentary mandate, for which it is provided with big subsidies, to be the non-judgmental convenor of public debate instead of just another corps of journalists holding inflated ideas of their clairvoyant understanding of Canadians. The CBC suffers from cultural orthodoxy —let’s call it an overweening confidence in the destiny of liberal progressivism— and the newsroom’s belief that it has a special talent for divining truth and misinformation.
It’s a heck of an indictment and the prosecutor makes his case, beginning with Exhibit A: CBC’s coverage of the Covid pandemic and the three-week occupation of downtown Ottawa by the so-called Freedom Convoy, whose participants “manifested a large and vibrant new public,” according to Cayley.
In his view, the federal government, echoed in its messaging by mainstream media and the CBC, treated the participants in this “generally moderate Freedom Convoy” as enemies of the state and this demonstrates the dangerous polarization of the Canadian polity and the pressing need for more civic dialogue in this country. Cayley just published therelevant bookexcerpts in the National Post. On the other hand, the CBC Ombud’s judgment is here.
If you choke a bit on that lionization of the Freedom Convoy, you may be recalling that it was riddled with avowed insurrectionists and defiers of public health directives enacted by a democratically elected government in the name of reducing critical infections that threatened to kill untold thousands and overwhelm hospital emergency rooms. The incipient threat of violence associated with clearing the occupation was never far away.
Cayley is a skeptic of anything described as a consensus by the medical and science establishments and he reminds us of this when he lampoons the worldwide public health response to Covid as “comprised of speculative computer models whose probative value lies just north of tea leaves and bird entrails.”
He argues that Convoy participants were vindicated in their opposition to Covid vaccine mandates by later findings that vaccines became less effective over time in preventing the spread of the disease. Meanwhile the CBC and other media organizations disparaged the occupiers’ dissent as “misinformation,” unworthy of serious news reporting.
In this review I am not going to litigate this public health issue, or the openness of media coverage, to a conclusion. But suffice it to say it’s a contentious point on which to rest his argument that the CBC newsroom is swaddled in its own filter bubble.
How the CBC became its own biggest fan, says Cayley, can be traced back to its early departure from a more neutral role in public dialogue and its quest for mojo as an edgy news organization in television shows like the investigative journalism of This Hour Has Seven Days. Despite the fact that Seven Days, which ran only two seasons from 1964 to 1966, was cancelled by CBC management —guaranteeing its legendary status as Canada’s media iteration of the Avro Arrow fighter jet— its strong editorial voice and visually manipulative narrative style exemplifies for Cayley what’s always been wrong about CBC’s news journalism.
Cayley connects the immense popularity of Seven Days with a “populism” that seats media gatekeepers into the role of the audience’s surrogate, as its watchdog over the powerful, its advocate for justice, or (using just one more metaphor) the high priests of a media church sermonizing the congregation, vindicated in their righteousness so long as attendance remains high.
What suffers when the CBC insists on being the audience’s surrogate, he says, is the neglect of its core Parliamentary mandate, articulated by the first two words in its mission “to inform, enlighten and entertain.”
Once upon a time, the old guard in the early CBC were more inclined towards “adult education” and news you can use, rather than theatrical news reporting and laying claim to Canada’s voice. Cayley wants the CBC to get back to that “inform and enlighten.”
Cayley never makes it clear if he wants to blow up CBC’s editorial identity as a news reporting organization entirely or just re-set the newsroom mindset to something better aligned with “inform and enlighten.” He cautions that he is not advocating for a University of CBC.
Mostly, he critiques the CBC’s workplace culture as suffering from a baked-in orthodoxy of thought. He can be quite funny writing about this: his insider account of CBC management’s top-down reset of its corporate culture is relatable to anyone who has ever endured the same. His cheeky disparagement of Jian Ghomeshi’s popular radio show Q may leave a smile on your face or okay boomer on your lips.
But the prosecutor Cayley gets himself into trouble when he puts forward Exhibit B which purports to quantify the pervasive reach of the orthodoxy inside the newsroom.
He begins by citing a Léger poll commissioned by the Macdonald Laurier Institute that self-identified leftists outnumber conservatives in Canadian universities by a ratio of nine to one and that this is killing dissent and fostering self-censorship among the minority. From this poll he links to the CBC’s culture, claiming “the case is the same at the CBC, as I have already shown.”
Well no, he doesn’t show that at all.
To rebut, let me first note that the Léger poll was non-randomized and relied on voluntary participation. It collected lopsided data culled mostly from faculty in the humanities and social sciences —prolix socialists, all— and under participation from STEM departments.
More to the point, where’s the proof that CBC staff are nine-to-one lefties versus righties? Cayley points to three journalists (Exhibit C), one of whom is neither a journalist nor works for CBC but once wrote an analysis of CBC’s news coverage of Saskatchewan’s transgender laws.
He notes the troubling story of a veteran CBC Winnipeg reporter Marianne Klowak who quit in disgust at a management kibosh on her reporting that gave voice to vaccine dissenters.
He cites the departure of CBC Toronto news producer Tara Henley who also quit in disgust, issuing a public indictment of the “cognitive dissonance” created by the CBC newsroom’s groupthink.
Two journalists (make it three including Cayley) out of 3,000 is not enough evidence to support his claim, but to be fair it would be difficult to rely on anything but anecdotal evidence without the kind of newsroom polling that is impossible to provide.
Still, Cayley once lived in the belly of the beast and is likely on to something. Common sense tells you that a newsroom where most reporters live in three big cities may well list to the leftish values of urban progressivism.
On the other hand, my own experience of a lifetime representing reporters and journalists —although never at the CBC — convinces me that the left-right thing is for the opinion pages and eclipsed by the dominant spirit in all newsrooms: a Watchdog ideology that posits white-knight journalists at the service of the public by “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” Nevertheless, Cayley views the CBC’s self-coronation as public champion as the problem that needs replacement by a more passive role as the convenor of civic dialogue, the aforementioned “inform and enlighten.”
His intriguing idea is there for your consideration. But in Exhibit D, the prosecuting Cayley again goes too far when he says that “what is more serious is the way the CBC has lost the country’s attention”.
I beg your pardon, it has not. CBC radio is a market leader across the country. Its online news website earns top ratings, vying each year with CTV for the most consumed or most trusted online source. Even CBC’s much maligned television ratings —which lag behind CTV and Global— are weighted down by flagging audiences for CBC’s entertainment programming which must compete head-on during prime time against American hit shows on private Canadian networks and also a little streamer named Netflix.
Cayley’s overstatements don’t detract from his deepest conviction: that Canada is becoming increasingly polarized, even a “fatally divided polity,” and a public broadcaster needs to engage the participation of all. A more open-minded programming culture of inquiry and intellectual curiosity may be the tonic. More reflection, fewer snap judgments.
Most book-length critiquesof CBC tend to focus on news programming rather than television drama, which is too bad (Richard Stursberg being a notable exception). In fact, Chris Waddell and the late David Taras go so far as to recommend jettisoning entertainment programming altogether and saying uncle to Netflix.
Cayley discusses entertainment programming briefly, mostly in the context of the unstoppable tide of American shows that sets the cultural tone for Canadian content.
He calls upon the CBC to rely less on knock-off genres of television drama, set in classic Canadian landscapes, and more on historical and contemporary stories of Canadian self-discovery. Amen to that, but it’s not clear to me that the CBC isn’t already doing this with the limited production budgets that it has. When it wants to step up its game for bigger audiences, it makes co-venture deals with Netflix.
Finally, Cayley says almost nothing about Radio-Canada, an understandable limitation on the scope of his essay. The application of his critique and his solution, the question and answer about the CBC’s public broadcasting mission, might provoke more insights if anyone in Québec were to take up and explore his views.
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The CRTC is shaping the regulatory path for streaming services in Canada in three big files: audio content, video content and media distribution. The public hearings for video and distribution were done before the summer break and this week the Commission kicked off hearings on music streaming and radio.
The Commission has to figure out what more the global streaming services must do for Canadian content, a year after the CRTC levied on the streamers a “5 per cent” cash contribution to Canadian media funds that match those paid by Canadian cable TV providers.
In music streaming, that could mean new requirements for streamer spending on Canadian songs and musicians through a combination of copyright payments and investments in musician development. It could also mean “prominence” requirements giving an extra push of Canadian songs to the attention of listeners, something that the streamers normally do only if music labels pay them.
The pro-CanCon advocacy group Friends of Canadian Media (I’m a volunteer) says the regulatory algebra should be straightforward.
The streamers’ spending requirements ought to be benchmarked at the same level of radio broadcasters’ budgeted spending on Canadian music and local programming, about 30% of revenues according to the Ontario Association of Broadcasters.
With the benchmark set, next would come the detailed arguments about what streamer expenditures on Canadian music count towards the 30%. The streamers will point to their current budget for copyright payments to Canadian musicians whose songs are uploaded to their platforms, but those don’t come anywhere near filling up a 30% bucket.
Then the “discoverability” requirements would get assessed and Friends has proposed that the Commission require the streamers to promote Canadian music with home-screen prominence, e-mailed song recommendations, more song picking of Canadian music in staff-curated playlists and an algorithmic responsiveness to listeners’ Search inquiries for different types of music. The cash value of these prominence measures to Canadian music producers would be calculated and set off against the streamers’ spending obligations.
The streamers are looking for two things and they want both.
They want the repeal of the five per cent cash levy that supports touring and special development projects for Canadian musicians under the stewardship of independent Canadian media funds. The streamers don’t want to pay and have appealed the levy to the courts.
Also they have filled the ears of the Trump administration and US Congress on how unfairly Canada is treating them (Canadian radio broadcasters pay only a one-half per cent cash levy because they already carry the heavy airtime quotas.)
The other thing the streamers want is no Canadian regulation. Or to put that in regulatory vocabulary, they want whatever efforts they care to make to support Canadian music deemed sufficient. It’s worth recalling that Canada is the first country to regulate streaming audio, even the Europeans haven’t done it yet.
This audio hearing is also the opportunity for Canadian radio broadcasters to bang away at air-time quotas for Canadian songs. As well, they want to water down the “MAPL” definition of what counts as Canadian music for the purpose of meeting those quotas.
The dispute about MAPL —which provides a point system for counting song contributions from performers and songwriters—- will drive some headlines if only because Canadian rock star Bryan Adams publicly trashs it. At some point, MediaPolicy will chime in (again) on that topic.
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It is hard to keep up with dizzying pace of the Trump administration’s rolling offensive against mainstream media outlets (excepting Fox News of course).
The FCC Chair’s threats of regulatory action against Disney/ABC and the television stations that carried the Jimmy Kimmel comedy show were successful in getting Disney to kill the show after Kimmel lampooned the President’s response to a question about the assassination of his friend and ally, Charlie Kirk.
A day later, the President said that he expected NBC to fire two more late night comedians, Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon. He also promised more FCC regulatory action against television networks if they don’t put more conservative guests on air.
As well, this week Trump filed a $15 billion libel lawsuit against the New York Times. A district judge punted the statement of claim as too long and rhetorical, giving Trump’s lawyers a month to refile.
Stepping back from the daily drama, I recommend Matt Stoller’s most recent Substackthat sees recent developments as the consequence of successive Republican and Democrat administrations allowing rampant corporate consolidation of telecommunications and media over the last four decades.
Stoller argues that repression of free expression was made possible by a consolidated media landscape, compounded by monopolies in Big Tech.
He has a lengthy list of recommendations, combining anti-trust break-ups of major tech and media companies with new regulatory action that favours more diverse ownership of media.
The ambition of his wish list is considerable, perhaps unrealistic, but it looks to be a campaign proposal to the Democratic Party based on the idea the people are ready to break up Big Media into smaller and more lovable independent media outlets.
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Lest this blog space seem to be picking on the Americans, I draw your attention to MediaPolicy’slast post spotlighting an on-air anti-Semitic rant from Radio-Canada‘s Washington correspondent.
Élisa Serret described Jewish influence in American politics as “a big machine” fuelled by Jewish money and claimed that “the Jews run Hollywood” and (a new one) that Jews are the mayors of America’s “big cities.”
There’s also a good opinion piecefrom the Globe and Mail‘s Tony Keller that you might like.
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On Monday, Radio-Canada’s Washington correspondent Élisa Serret, appearing on the network’s afternoon news show “Sur Le Terrain,” was asked by the host how it was that the US government seemed unable to distance itself from Israel following the IDF attack on Hamas leaders who were meeting in Qatar, a US ally.
The veteran host Christian Latreille asked why the US administration “has such difficulty distancing themselves from Israel, even in the most difficult moments?”
Serret’s answer was that it was because of the “big machine” of Jewish influence in American politics.
Specifically, what she said (as translated in theNational Post story) was that “my understanding, and that of multiple analysts here in the United States, is that it is the Israelis, the Jews, that finance American politics a lot.
“There is a big machine behind them, making it very difficult for Americans to detach themselves from Israel’s positions. It’s really money here in the United States. The big cities are run by Jews, Hollywood is run by Jews.”
You can watch the video here. Her broadcast comments were covered by the French language press here and here.
It was a gobsmacking statement. There are pro-Israel lobby groups in the US, as there are many groups that lobby US politicians on everything under the sun. There are Jewish Americans who make campaign donations, as there are plenty of non-Jewish Americans who do the same.
Then’s there’s the canard about “Hollywood” being “run by” Jews and putting the whammy on all thinking Americans. As for Jews dominating the ranks of big city mayors, I think that’s a new conspiracy theory, although demographically fictitious (three out of fifty US big city mayors are Jewish).
The host, an award-winning veteran of broadcast journalism, including the last eleven years as anchor and Washington correspondent, did not interrupt, contradict, or ask Serret to clarify.
After Serret was called out on X, Radio Canadaapologized for Serret’s “stereotypical, anti-Semitic, erroneous, and prejudicial allegations against Jewish communities.”
Serret has been suspended by her employer pending investigation, although she is still listed on the Radio Canada website as the show’s Washington correspondent. Audience complaints will no doubt be filed to the network’s Ombud and we’ll get a published report after he interviews Radio-Canada management.
This is one of the moments where the casual, ingrained anti-semitism in Canada smacks you in the face. As a friend reminded me, Serret “just said the quiet part out loud.”
What he means by that, or what I mean by that, is the matter-of-fact manner in which anti-Semitic conspiracy narratives about Jewish control and manipulation of non-Jews and government are culturally reproduced, century after century, day after day, everywhere.
What happened here is that a well educated veteran journalist carried around these conspiracy theories in her head for years and finally had a chance to offer them on-air as conventional wisdom. The awkward question is whether her views were already known and condoned. As for the host Latreille, he either regarded her comments as legitimate journalism or he froze, which doesn’t say much about his level of professional abilities.
Serret’s assumption that she could state these conspiracies as analysis, in a broadcast to a national audience, suggests she believes her views are widely shared with the audience.
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The Travis Dhanraj story that MediaPolicy followedthis summer took another step forward with the former news host filing a formal complaint against the CBC at the federal human rights commission.
In a previous media interview, Dhanraj’s lawyer Kathryn Marshall described the public broadcaster as “Stalinist” and her client’s complaint as “the CBC’s nightmare.” She promises to disclose “names, receipts and e-mails.”
The Globe and Mail viewed a copy of the complaint and, as reported earlier, the grit of the allegation is an ugly newsroom battle between Dhanraj, host of the Canada Tonight evening show, and “two liberal white hosts” of CBC’s Parliamentary bureau over booking, or not booking, high profile news guests. Dhanraj characterizes the dispute, and how CBC responded to it, as race discrimination.
According to the Globe, the complaint says “the CBC constantly gave leading speakers and guests to shows on CBC News Network that had liberal, white hosts namely [Power & Politics host] David Cochrane and [chief political correspondent] Rosemary Barton…These hosts received resources and opportunities that Mr. Dhanraj, the only brown prime time host on CBC News Network with a solo show representing multiple minority identities, was denied.”
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US mainstream media is typically disparaged on the right as hopelessly woke, liberal and Democrat, but things are looking up for conservatives.
The right-wing Fox News cable television network has been rejuvenated by the resolution of the succession dispute among 94-year-old patriarch Rupert Murdoch’s children. The three older siblings have been handsomely bought out for $4 billion and Lachlan Murdoch, who is currently running Fox, will continue to lead the business. Prior to the settlement, there was speculation that the less conservative heirs might one day reorient the political compass of the news organization.
Meanwhile the venerable CBS news network may be in for a big change. As reported previously, CBS is changing owners and the new proprietor Paramount has given assurances to the White House that it will keep a watchful eye on the newsroom that President Trump disparaged and sued. Now there is a report that Paramount may purchase Bari Weiss’ online news site, The Free Press, and as part of the deal appoint Weiss as head of CBS News.
For those who aren’t familiar with the iconoclastic Weiss, read up. She’s difficult to pigeon-hole but she would readily claim that mainstream media is hopelessly woke, liberal and Democrat.
Still more news, Reuters reports that Paramount is now considering a bid for Warner Brothers Discovery. A merger or acquisition would surely be driven by the opportunity for increasing market share in streaming video. But Warner Brothers also owns CNN News, a charter member of mainstream media and oft impeached on the right as “the Clinton news network.”
Paramount is owned by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison (the world’s second richest billionaire) who is reputedly a supporter of the President’s, although their relationship bears a strong resemblance to the President’s mercurial alliance with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
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There is something special about the ability of documentaries to ignite controversy and the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival is often the well lit stage.
Previously, MediaPolicy commented on TIFF disinviting Russians At War (2024) and this year’s The Road Between Us. The latter was reinvited after public outcry. Barry Hertz has an interview with TIFF festival director Cameron Bailey here.
Now there’s another TIFF controversy. A new film on the making of the iconic Degrassi television series reportedly features former child actors accusing producer Linda Schuyler of exploiting them. Schuyler deemed that categorically false and defamatory, adding that she was never confronted with the allegations or given an opportunity to refute them when she was interviewed for the film.
Her application for a court injunction against TIFF screening the film was resolved after the film’s producers agreed that post-TIFF screenings of the documentary will “add some additional context around the compensation paid to the performers.”
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Hudson was a legendary professor and provocative thinker in telecom and broadcast law who touched the lives and careers of many, many of us who have worked in this space.
With me, it started in his Communications Law class at Dal where gave some personal attention and a boost, arranging to publish something I had written for his class on the development of the CRTC FM Policy. Then, when I articled at the CRTC, he was on sabbatical in Ottawa, and we saw quite bit of each other. Much later I was a guest lecturer for many years in his Communications Law class when he was at U of T.
He used to take summer fishing trips to Killarney Mountain Lodge in northern Ontario and would stop off for a family lunch at our cottage on the way. We loved the stories about his boyhood in South Africa and Saint Helena and, given that island’s connection with Napoleon, my history nut father always made sure to attend.
I was honoured to speak at his U of T retirement dinner at the Rideau Club. It was quite an evening, an all hands gathering of the telecom and broadcast regulatory “clan” there to celebrate and honour his contribution to our little world.
We kind of lost touch when he moved west, but he came back to Killarney for almost six months when he and his wife Alice separated. He said he was writing, but beneath it was clear he was grieving. While he was there, Hatty and I joined him for a few days. Because he strode through the town every day like he was its mayor, the local folks began to call him that! Every once in a while, he would hitch a ride into Sudbury in the lodge’s food truck to get a haircut!
He was a larger-than-life teacher, a powerful mentor, and a wonderful friend. He was an important part of my life, and I will miss him.
Doug Barrett, Adjunct Professor, Schulich School of Business
French journalist unions have won a share of the licensing fees negotiated by publishers with AI companies whom are paying for the news content they scrape off the Internet, according to a report in Nieman Lab.
If not for the French: always the first to fight for content creators. Several years ago, journalist unions got their members a share of the “Google money” paid out in Europe under its news licensing framework in the last few years. Le Monde reporters earn an additional 275 euros per year.
Now that there is a new content licensing deal between Le Monde and OpenAI reporters get 25% of the cash. No reports on how much that is.
By his own description, the judge exercised occupational “humility” by going easy on Google. The most significant thing he had to say, much cheered by Google, was that whatever skullduggery allowed Google to solidify its dominant market position over Search, the competition for the AI market is a horse race.
The judge handed out consolation prizes by requiring some limited data sharing with Google’s search competitors, a remedy disparaged by the CEO of Duck Duck Go as “a nothing burger.”
Also, the judge ruled that Google’s multi-billion dollar agreements with Samsung and Apple for making Google the default search app on their phones can continue. Those commercial agreements were significant in the judge’s earlier finding that Google’s monopoly was illegal.
On the other hand, Google is looking a gift horse in the mouth and will appeal both the limited remedy and the original finding of monopoly.
The Big Tech giant may have escaped the worst consequences of the Search monopoly-ruling but it has other concerns. A US Justice Department anti-trust lawsuit against its domination of digital advertising is well underway and yesterday European Union regulators fined Google nearly three billion euros for the same market domination. The regulator’s fine was immediately entangled by US-EU trade tensions and could be delayed.
Meanwhile Google’s share price bumped 8%, so at least someone is happy.
It’s an elaboration on what it means to defend “digital sovereignty,” a new catchphrase describing a public policy gamut stretching from communications infrastructure to software and the regulation of online content. Or as one Comment column in the Globe and Mail put it recently, more Canadian autonomy over “data, code and compute.”
The basic idea is to recognize the new geopolitical environment in which digital technology is increasingly controlled by states, namely the United States, and becomes more than just a regulatory issue but a matter of economic self sufficiency and political security.
An executive summary of the new Open Letter is here:
I made a needed correction to last week’s MediaPolicy’s report that independent Canadian broadcaster Wildbrain had abandoned its CRTC licenses and pulled its suite of family channels from cable TV.
I reported that Wildbrain is selling out to American interests, which its spokesperson says it isn’t, rather it is taking advantage of its new status as a digital-only broadcaster by removing Canadian ownership requirements from its public share structure.
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I am enjoying a left-wing American Substack I just discovered, The Argument.
It published a poll on political attitudes that was interesting but I am not inclined to just map its findings over to the Canadian experience.
But still, I was left agape by the poll finding that 40% of Kamala Harris voters would consider cutting off contact with a family member “for opposing political views.” Only 11% of Trump voters would do that.
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If you track news reports about President Donald Trump’s tariffs, you may recall that he struck a one-sided framework agreement with the European Union on July 28th. The headline was 15% American tariffs on imported goods arriving from the EU. On the flip side, the US gained tariff-free access to the EU market.
Initially the deal seemed more of an armistice than a fully fledged agreement, since nothing was signed off until a one-page Framework was published three weeks later. Notably there was no repeal of the EU’s digital services taxes on American companies (like the one that Canada scrapped on June 29th).
At the time, the White House made a point of describing EU DSTs as unfinished business while the EU news release stated that the agreement “fully respects the EU’s regulatory sovereignty.”
Now for round two.
Deal or no deal, this week Trump threatened to retaliate against 15 EU nations that maintain DSTs and also denounced as discriminatory the full gamut of EU tech regulation under its Digital Services Act (online harm and safety) and Digital Markets Act (anti-competitive practices). The threats include new tariffs, presumably in excess of the 15% “deal.” Trump also threatened export bans or taxes on American AI micro processing chips.
The European response was defiant: “it is the sovereign right of the EU and its member states to regulate economic activities on our territory, which are consistent with our democratic values.”
As for Trump’s new trade cudgel of export taxes, last month he reversed a Biden-era export-ban on Nvidia’s AI chips destined for China after meeting with CEO Jensen Huang. The New York Times published an illuminating feature story on why.
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I have some updates on recent MediaPolicy posts.
Earlier this month I wrote about the US State Department claiming that press freedoms are threatened in Canada. As I said at the time, the State Department’s Report was performative, written for the benefit of a majority-Republican Congress. If you found that post interesting, you’ll find Hugh Stephens’ bluntly worded post to your taste.
I’ll just add one more citation to my own post about North American press freedoms: this past week President Trump again invited his appointee as FCC chair to de-license ABC and NBC local news stations on the grounds that “they give me 97% bad news stories” and act as “an arm of the Democratic Party.”
MediaPolicy also posted an interview with Senatrice Julie Miville-Dechêne, the sponsor of Bill S-209 that will impede kids from accessing online porn by implementing age verification technology, an increasingly common public policy in the US and the UK.
In the interview, Miville-Dechêne expressed doubts about the wisdom of extending age verification technology to social media apps. The state of Mississippi is not so doubtful and implemented a parental consent requirement for minors under age 18 with age verification of adult users as enforcement.
Last week the news sharing app Bluesky, a progressive alternative to the X app, responded by exiting that deepest of red states, Mississippi. A Bluesky statement described age verification regulation as too big a hassle for too small a company.
Perhaps the size of the “Mississippi progressive” market was a factor too.
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As the fortunes of broadcasting businesses rise and fall, certain bellwether events stand out among the steady drumbeat of quarterly and annual reports.
Here’s two you may not have noticed.
Québecor took the occasion of announcing its fall television programming line-up for its TVA network to make another plea for regulatory relief from the CRTC.
What popped out in CEO P-K Pélédeau’s press release was that the combined revenue of TVA’s specialty and conventional television businesses has crossed the profitability line into negative territory. “In absolute terms, TVA and its specialty channels have lost $34.9 million in television advertising revenue over the past three years.”
The MTM numbers from 2023 indicate that Québecor’s revenue situation is typical: as a group, Canadian broadcasters boasted a mere 1.6% net profit on total broadcaster revenues. The new CRTC chart (2023-24) below suggests it has become a net loss.
That calls into question the “regulatory bargain” cited by the Commission in 2016 that committed the major networks to paying for money-losing news programming out of the robust profits earned in specialty television, thanks to the majors holding Canadian distribution rights to high-margin American programming.
The other ominous development for conventional broadcasting was the announcement by Wildbrain that it is exiting broadcast television and is removing the restriction on its non-Canadian shareholder voting that is required by broadcasting regulations. Wildbrain is (was) the only independent Canadian children’s programmer that operated Canadian children’s channels (Family Channel and WildbrainTV) until the CRTC blessed the decisions by Rogers and Bell cable to drop them. Steve Faguy’s blog has more.
[Update and correction: the original publication of this post inaccurately stated that Wildbrain was “selling its growing online business to American interests.”)
The prevailing financial and audience trends in Canadian broadcasting were updated in the CRTC’s new annual report (with now year-old data).
I was very much saddened to read an obituary for Hudson Janisch who is well known to those in the telco community. He taught me Public Law in first year law school and made quite an impression. A great teacher and a mensch.
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The ka-ching is the responsibility of the Google-appointed gatekeeper, the Canadian Journalism Collective, to decide who gets what.
The conservative website The Hub gets $22,248 and is donating it to the March of Dimes charity. The Western Standard, operated by former Wildrose Party MLA Derek Fildebrandt, is down for $68,377. Rebel News didn’t apply.
None of that is surprising. The Hub and the Western Standard were previously vetted by the Canada Revenue Agency as Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations, becoming eligible for federal news subsidies or reader tax credits (but not necessarilycollecting them). Rebel Newswas not.
An unusual outcome of the Canadian Journalism Collective’s distribution was that the CJC approved the licensing cash for the current affairs website The Conversation (sub nom the Academic Journalism Society) after the CRA rejected it as ineligible for the QCJO subsidy program. The CRA’s rejection (on the recommendation of its independent advisory panel) was upheld by the Federal Court of Appeal in 2024.
The difference in result appears to be how the CJC is interpreting what it means to produce “original news.” That’s a requirement under both the CRA guidelines for QCJO and the Online News Act regulation 2023-276 for Google news payments.
But the difference seems to be that CRA guidelines explicitly require first-hand news gathering “such as independent research, interviews, and fieldwork. For example, a news article orreport about an event would be original if it is written or reported by a journalist and is based on first-hand knowledge that journalist gained by conducting independent research, attending or witnessing the event, or interviewing people who organized, attended, or witnessed the event.”
The CJC guidelines are far less precise. Tersely, “news content should be original, produced on an ongoing basis.”
I did my best to get the Canadian Journalism Collective to explain how it arrived at a different assessment than the Canada Revenue Agency of whether The Conversation is now producing original news with first hand reporting, or if the CJC rules are somehow more forgiving.
All I got was that the CJC’s eligibility criteria was applied and the news content submitted by The Conversation, like all applicant news organizations, will be reviewed each time there is a new cash distribution.
The Conversation’s parent organization, the Academic Journalism Society, has an unusual structure. Its newsroom consists of staff editors who collaborate with university professors who do the writing, based on the academic work of others or their own scholarly writing.
AJS funding comes 80% from participating universities and 20% from readers, philanthropists or government programs. But its financial structure is not an obstacle to qualifying for either QCJO or Google funds. It still comes down to whether the content is original. The QCJO program requires first-hand reporting but it’s unclear if the Google cash distributed by the CJC requires it. In the end I couldn’t get a satisfactory answer.
It’s important to get that answer, in fact it’s vital.
If there is no requirement for first-hand reporting activity, then news organizations are either aggregators of first-hand reporting done by other newsrooms and contribute nothing of their own, or they are opinion websites.
Opinion is cheap to produce and plentiful in supply. Do we need to underwrite opinion writing, or in the case of the Online News Act, devote Parliamentary bandwidth to wresting cash out of the hands of Big Tech?
In a sea of online opinion, commentary and blather, talk is cheap. Meanwhile the far more costly endeavour of news gathering is the value proposition that journalism offers to the public. Looking in the mirror, MediaPolicy.ca isn’t “original news” and deserves no subsidy or special favour.
And there are more good reasons to draw the line between news gathering and opinion.
The Online News Act was opposed by some as an unwarranted state intervention into the ecosystem of online information that Google and social media platforms have provided.
Sure, the monopolistic platforms Google and Meta exploit their market power in content distribution, stiffing news organizations on fair (or any) licensing payments.
But to critics of the Online News Act, this was justified by the overriding public interest in free information, benefiting both liberal democracy and public education.
On the other hand, what the EU, Australia, and Canada did with their legislative intervention on behalf of news organizations was to carve out news journalism from the unregulated Internet as a special case because of the public interest in, well, political and educational information.
As I said, news gathering is the value proposition of journalism.
I could be wrong of course. When Scott White moved on from his role as editor of The Conversation a year ago, he published acri de coeur on LinkedIn. The gist was that the CRA ruling against his news outlet was narrow minded and rooted in legacy thinking.
In an academic article published earlier this year, Nicole Blanchett and her co-writers suggested that “rigid journalism definitions risk excluding hybrid platforms like The Conversation Canada, limiting innovation and diverse voice in public discourse.”
Not to be coy about it, the authors speculated that the troubles encountered by The Conversation should be seen through the lens of legacy media defending its turf:
Answers to these [research] questions were primarily analyzed through boundary work. Boundary work is at play “when the goal is expansion of authority or expertise into domains claimed by other professions or occupations” (Gieryn, 1983, p. 791). Specific to journalism, it includes “expansion” of journalistic practice that can lead to the attempted “expulsion” of outside actors or inside agitators, as a means to protect the professional “autonomy” of journalists (Carlson, 2015, p. 9). As media startups look to attract the same eyeballs as legacy organizations, “efforts to restrict or extend access to technologies, reporting resources, or press credentials are all acts of boundary work that are simultaneously material and discursive in nature. As such, talk about journalism cannot be isolated from practice and context” (Carlson & Lewis, 2019, p. 132).
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