The National Post published a very readable column from its Parliamentary Bureau Chief Stuart Thomson on public perceptions of media bias.
The gist of the column is that journalists lean “left” because their ranks are dominated by urban intellectuals. Plausible but arguable, I suppose. Meanwhile, the author exclusively interviewed conservative commentators. He published his conclusions in a conservative news outlet located in downtown Toronto.
My cynicism aside, there is no doubt that ‘bias in journalism’ as a matter of perception is important, fair or not. But that begs many follow up questions to poll respondents on what content they are perceiving: opinion columns or news coverage? Which news outlets?
Then there is the question of whether perception is affected by partisan loyalties (the Abacus public opinion survey that Thomson relies upon indicates it is) and whether continuous partisan complaining about alleged bias in news coverage is shaping public perception.
Conservative Fundraising Post
And finally there is the question of actual bias, always a challenge to define and measure. Regardless of whether an ideological demography of news reporters suggests a ‘left-wing’ (or urban intellectual) bias in their personal views, the question arises of whether it exerts a gravitational pull on news content? My own view is that the bias and dominant ideology of journalism —- the thing that gets journalists fired up every day— is the desire to be the public’s watchdog, to hold the powerful to account.
***
The ongoing shakeup in the television economy was illustrated by a couple of news items this week.
Netflix announced strong quarterly results, beating expectations on both revenue and subscriber growth. Reuters quoted an analyst saying that “Netflix has won the streaming war.”
All of that reinforces the prevailing wisdom that the streaming market in premium video is divided between Netflix and those who lose money. That would be misleading however because YouTube’s wildly successful creator-economy is thriving and at least two streamers (Amazon and Apple) are ballasted by their non-streaming business. Nonetheless, the other major streamers Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, NBC Universal, Max, etc are not quite so hedged.
For some reference points, check out the US Nielsen ratings represented in the graphic above. A similar pie chart for Canada would have a larger slice for cable TV because cord-cutting is less advanced than in the US.
On that point, the other weekly news item was Canadian telco provider Telus announcing its discount-priced bundle “Stream+” —-Netflix, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime— available to its cable and mobility subscribers.
The Canadian market of nine-million cable households represents a win-win opportunity for Canadian cable companies and American streamers. But in the long run it depends on whether it’s a win-win-win-win, including paying customers and advertisers.
It’s a morbid watching brief to constantly bring this kind of thing to your attention.
On that note I recommend a Sean Speer podcast with perhaps the most engaging federal Senator of all time, former journalist Paula Simons, on “Canada’s News Media and the future of journalism.”
On the bright side, it’s 45 minutes of delightful ‘back in the day’ stories for media nerds. As well, at the host’s relentless prodding, the podcast episode grapples with the conundrum of public policy efforts to save Canadian news journalism.
Off the top, Simons makes it clear she hates the Online News Act. She characterizes it as a government “shakedown” of Big Tech; an illegitimate response to the market power of Google-Meta in digital advertising. In fact, at least in theory the bill was a response to Big Tech market power in news distribution, not advertising. On that point, allow me to re-recommend my post from last weekend; “The Online News Act is law: a buzzer-beater win or epic miscalculation?”
But as for the conundrum about how to pay for news journalism without impairing its independence, Simons is hoping the public appetite for news reaches a tipping point where the public is more willing to pay for news; or perhaps innovative news providers figure out how to cover the news in a way that wins back advertisers.
That said, she doesn’t sound especially confident about the tipping point arriving any time soon. As pointed out on the podcast, the business model that worked for newspapers depended on that medium being the public square for shared local community and information. That was aided by a lucrative pre-Craigslist business in classified advertising that brought even more readers and further enlarged the mass audience. Today, the Senator observes, the “attention” marketplace for news and information, what was once the public square, is fragmented beyond repair.
***
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This weekend MediaPolicy posted a long-form analysis (an 18-minute read) about whether the federal government’s Online News Act has, so far, been a win, draw or loss.
***
There is a press freedom drama unfolding in the village of Sainte-Pétronille (population 1000) on the Île d’Orléans, across the river from Québec City. The Globe’s report in English is here, but it’s worth reading the Radio-Canada account and the scathing La Presse column too.
The Québec Municipal Commission is investigating the village’s town council after it threatened to sue 100 of its own citizens and the community paper Autour d’Île over a citizen petition demanding answers about the controversial hiring of the Council’s new General Manager.
The town paper knuckled under to the libel threat and spiked its news reporting. Adding colour to it all, the Council’s statement through its lawyer included a veiled threat to go after the Autour d’Île’s public funding (25% of its revenue, dispensed by the Regional Municipality but not the village Town Council).
It’s all blowing up on the Town Council now but the endgame may take a while.
***
This week the provincial opposition Parti Québécois laid out its ideas for supporting news journalism in Québec. Its program includes using the tax system to reward and/or punish advertisers for placing their business with online Québec news outlets rather than foreign digital platforms.
This is a familiar policy idea, sometimes referred to as “Close the Loophole,” to extend the long standing federal tax rules on writing off advertising expenses in print and broadcast media so that they apply to placing ads with online media. The proposal was raised in Parliament by the federal NDP as recently as last month.
A throw-away line in the La Presse story on the PQ announcement was that the CAQ Culture Minister Mathieu Lacombe is already in contact with the federal government on something similar. Do tell.
The PQ platform also includes a mandatory 4% spend of government advertising on community media.
***
I’ve buried the lede this week by leaving this item until last.
Black Press Media has entered creditor protection for its chain of 150 community newspapers located in western Canada, the North and the United States. It has a consortium of buyers lined up, including the Canadian hedge fund Canso (freshly paid off as first lien creditor of Postmedia) and the Alabama-based Carpenter Media Group.
Details will eventually leak out about how Black Press got into a liquidity crunch, what terms the retiring owner David Black is leaving on, and how the voting shares in a new company will be structured.
There are going to be important policy issues that emerge from this transaction. Canadian ownership is the most obvious. Another is the requirement in the Online News Act that the “Google money” —for which Black Press will be eligible at approximately $20,000 per journalist— be spent on news journalism (as opposed to making payments on 10% debt bonds) in “an appropriate” amount. The good news is that the staff are represented by Unifor whose task is to protect journalists, newsrooms and therefore the public interest.
This does have the déja vu feel of the ugly Canwest/Postmedia story, so stay tuned.
***
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Last month Canada’s Online News Act Bill C-18 came into effect. Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge announced that despite Meta’s blackout of news for its Canadian audiences on Facebook and Instagram she had struck a deal with Google to avoid the news throttle spreading to its Search platform. Under the agreement, Google will provide Canadian online news publishers with $100 million annually in compensation for their news content appearing on Search. Those expecting a much larger figure —at one time the Parliamentary Budget Office speculated on a combined figure of $329 million to be paid by Meta and Google— no doubt were disappointed. Although further newsworthy events may unfold in the months ahead as Meta sticks to its news throttle and the Google cash is divided among publishers, now is an appropriate point in the policy timeline to pause and take stock of the bill once touted as indispensable to saving a failing news journalism industry. As many have argued back and forth, has Bill C-18 been a success, a disappointment, or an avoidable disaster?
Canada’s ‘news compensation’ legislation had its origins in a crisp policy idea: the unchecked market power of Big Tech’s leading digital news intermediaries, Google and Meta, made them so indispensable to news publishers seeking online audiences in search and social media that the state ought to intervene and ensure the intermediary platforms paid ‘fair compensation’ for news content to the publishers.
Critics of legislating this policy idea were unpersuaded. They lampooned the policy as an opportunistic shakedown of Big Tech, motivated not by a solid theory of intermediary chokeholds on news distribution but envy; green envy over the fact that the platforms offered better advertising distribution than publishers, once lords of mass media advertising. Whatever the remedy to the platforms cornering the advertising market might be, news publishers had no special claim to their lost advertising revenue. If critics had thoughts about the platforms’ market power over publishers’ news distribution, they offered no comment.
The ‘crisp policy idea’ of remedying the platforms’ market power in news distribution made little impact on the debate over the legislation. Instead, public debate over the bill focussed on how to divide up the compensation among news publishers; the independence of a news journalism industry that is increasingly reliant on government action; and the consequences of challenging Big Tech. Could a nation as small as Canada weather the Big Tech counteroffensive, or would the whole thing backfire on Canadians and Canadian news publishing.
“Net Value Exchange”
When my daughter was six years old, she was distressed by her parents’ parsimony in dispensing cash. “You have so much money,” she cried. “And I have none!”
In truth there existed a kernel of legitimate complaint. We may never have signed a binding contract stipulating a weekly allowance, but nonetheless she had claims to good behaviour and limited needs, things of value to her parents. She had no other parents to give her money. Where was the fair compensation?
Sorry to say, but her parents exercised their market power, and our daughter went without remedy. I like to think it was because of ‘net value exchange,’ although in intellectual condescension I didn’t offer that explanation at the time. Even now I remain unmoved in my conviction that our generous parental supply of material and emotional sustenance obviated any requirement for a better (or any) children’s allowance.
Net value exchange was at the core of Bill C-18. The original policy idea was advanced by Rod Sims, Australia’s Competition Commissioner and chief architect of the Morrison government’s New Media Bargaining Code. The “Australian model” of fair compensation for news content was enacted in March 2021 and became the footprint for Canada’s own bill tabled by Justin Trudeau’s governing Liberals in April 2022.
Sims’ policy idea was that the news intermediaries owed compensation to news publishers because the value of their news content to the platforms exceeded the countervailing value of the platforms’ free distribution of that content. That was the “net value exchange” between platforms and publishers.
He contended that the platforms’ market power was so great that the platforms could refuse to pay out because the publishers had nowhere else to go— no alternative distributors in Search (dominated 90% by Google) or Social (controlled 60% by Meta). To fix that, the state had to rebalance bargaining power between platforms and publishers over net value exchange by, one way or another, bringing government power to bear.
While Sims’ notion of net value exchange favouring news publishers was plausible and even likely, it was difficult to prove.
There were two problems. The first was establishing a “fair” market rate in the absence of brisk competition in the distribution of news in Search and Social. Ideally, the distribution market would offer ten Googles and ten Facebooks with whom publishers might negotiate. Without that competition in distribution, setting a fair market rate demands some kind of economic modelling.
The second was the lack of content consumption data that was indispensable to running an economic model of a hypothetically competitive market. Google and Meta owned all of the confidential data, each news publisher had some of its own, and independent researchers had access to almost none of it.
The lack of content consumption data could have been remedied by market studies carried out by national competition regulators in which they commanded the release of platform and publisher data, but this never happened in any jurisdiction. That left only research studies usually tied to one of the contestants that relied very much upon plausible suppositions.
A Swiss study commissioned by publishers claimed that platforms owed publishers millions based on net exchange value. An independent American study made similar findings. Google and Meta both hired consultants estimating a dollar value of the platforms’ free news distribution bestowed upon publishers. Neither of the Big Tech intermediaries suggested a net value exchange (even in their own favour) because their unwavering public position was that publisher content delivered no monetizable benefit to the platforms. None at all.
Australia’s Sims remarked that throughout his investigation Google and Meta had “asserted, without compelling evidence, that they provided more benefit to the news media businesses than they received in return, and in their view that was the end of the matter.”
This left the proponents of net value exchange making thoughtful economic arguments based on limited information, but lacking conclusive proof and allowing the platforms to deny net value exchange favoured publishers. The lengthy analysis put forward by Australia’s Sims was that Google and Meta demonstrably drew audiences to their platforms with news content; more easily documentedfor the information-searching Google audience than the content-sharing public who logged on to Facebook.
Regardless of whether you could prove Google or Meta matched their advertising placements to individual pieces of news content, it was easy to satisfy any reasonable observer that news content was drawing users to the Google and Meta platforms. During their online engagement, consumers were digitally tracked as they were exposed to advertising impressions. That data tracking sold advertising for the platforms and enriched the data profiles at the heart of their business model of matching content tastes to individual consumers.
Confident that net value exchange in a truly competitive market in news distribution would favour the publishers, Sims recommended, and the Australian government agreed to redress the imbalance of bargaining power between publishers and platforms with a mandatory bargaining code with two key measures.
First, the publishers could combine their bargaining power into one or more collective bargaining consortia —although this was mostly aimed at getting small publishers a seat at the table.
More importantly the bargaining for net value exchange would be backstopped by binding arbitration. In the event of a bargaining impasse, the ‘baseball-style’ arbitration empowered an independent adjudicator to choose between one of two final offers by the warring sides. This was anticipated as being effective in soliciting reasonable offers and, as a bonus, relieve the arbitrator of detailing a defensible outcome in the absence of adequate data and an agreement on the best economic model.
Most importantly, arbitration did two other things. It gave the platforms a forum where they could show up to prove their contention that they did not monetize news, and it provided state-enforced consequences, an “or else,” if they couldn’t or wouldn’t do it.
“Grinding resistance”
The “or else” was vital to getting the Australian code to take flight. Both Big Tech companies fought the legislation. Google threatened to shutter its Search platform to Australians and Facebook notoriously blacked out Australian news for a week during fire season.
But the Australian government —and the Canadian government as well—must have taken note of the years-long effort of the European Union states to achieve the same ends as the Australian code.
The Europeans took the first stab at creating an expanded definition of copyright for news publishers so they could negotiate content licensing with Google and Facebook. Initial efforts failed in Germany in 2013 —attributed to a weakly drafted law and an unsympathetic competition tribunal— and Spain in 2014. The Spanish law is often cited incorrectly as neutered by Google’s ruthless delisting of news content from Search, a warning for other nations. In fact, Spanish news continued to be found on Search, it was the Google News aggregation site that banned Spanish content.
It wasn’t until March 2019 that the European Parliament decided to settle the matter by legislating Directive 2019/270, an amendment to existing copyright law that created intellectual property rights for news publishers who made their content available on Google and Facebook platforms. Like most EU Directives, the framework was downloaded to members states for implementation.
France was the first European member state to implement the Directive in October 2019, instructing the platforms to bargain with French news publishers. The French transposition of the Directive included a joint platform-publisher dispute resolution committee, chaired with a deciding vote by a high court judge.
When Google stalled the bargaining, the French Competition Authority ordered good faith negotiations. When Google thought they had triumphed by getting French publishers to sign a deal in which compensation was based solely on news content displayed on Google’s news aggregation site in January 2021, the Authority imposed an eye-watering 500 million euro fine in July 2021 (three months after the Australian code was passed) for trying to limit the scope of compensable news content, among other tactics.Google paid the fine and negotiated a more generous deal with publishers in March 2022, a month before Bill C-18 was tabled in the Canadian House of Commons. Facebook reached its own deal with French publishers in October 2021.
The lessons that Canadian policy makers could draw from the European and Australian initiatives were there to be learned, not the least of which was the grinding resistance of Google and Meta.
“A Bargaining Code or a News Fund?”
When the Canadian federal government introduced Bill C-18, the Online News Act, it was picking up where Australian legislation had left off. But first the governing Liberals had to make an important choice about policy design. Once that was done, the legislation would face the normal Parliamentary hazing from the Opposition, quite a few upstart online news outlets, and a skeptical commentariat of critics.
The mainstream of the Canadian news industry—Newsmedia Canada, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, and the CBC—wanted Ottawa to adopt the Australian bargaining code in Canada. To make that work, Parliament had to create an intellectual property right over online news content that publishers made available on Meta and Google’s intermediary platforms. The Canadian bill would replicate the Australian ‘net exchange value’ as the measuring stick of compensation.
Finally, the legislation would need to rebalance bargaining power. It would enable publishers to obtain compensation from platforms by allowing news companies to combine into bargaining consortia and –if negotiations with Google or Meta failed—seek binding arbitration.
In April 2021, a month after the Australian bargaining code came into effect, the federal government began the public consultation that is typically conducted before tabling novel legislation. It already had the recommendation of the government advisory panel (the same panel that recommended the Online Streaming Act Bill C-11) to rebalance platform-publisher bargaining power. In 2019 the MPs reviewing Canadian copyright legislation had recommended the government study the EU Directive. In Parliament’s senior chamber, Conservative Senator Claude Carignan was preparing Bill S-225 modelled on the French legislation.
With all of that policy momentum propelling him forward, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault asked the public for opinions on adopting the Australian code. He also asked for input on an alternative model of an independent news fund to which platforms would contribute financially and online news publishers would draw.
Guilbeault’s solicitation of opinion on an independent fund seemed like going through the motions: Australia and Europe had blazed the path with a bargaining model which gave it instant policy credibility and was what mainstream Canadian publishers wanted anyway.
On the other hand, independent funds had a track record in Canada. The federal government relied upon an independent committee to vet applications for its 2019 journalism labour tax credits, popularly known as the ‘QCJO’ program from its tax nomenclature “Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization.” As well, the broadcasting regulator the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) had since1994 tithed cable and satellite distribution companies to contribute five per cent of annual revenues to the public-private Canada Media Fund and community cable channels. Beginning in 2016, the contributions sponsored a news fund for 20 independently owned local television stations.
As expected, industry response to Heritage’s public consultation from Newsmedia Canada and the Canadian Association of Broadcasters favoured the bargaining code over an independent fund.
In a separate submission Bell, the country’s largest media company and owner of the biggest news network CTV, offered some revealing arguments about why it preferred a bargaining code. As a large media company, Bell liked the idea of negotiating a bespoke arrangement directly with the Big Tech platforms with the latitude to substitute distribution arrangements for cash contributions. And with its eye on how quickly Australian media companies were signing agreements with the platforms, Bell assumed the same dispatch could be achieved in Canada.
Lastly, as Bell representatives archly observed, “the creation and operation of an independent news compensation fund is likely to be highly politicized with the concomitant risk of undermining the freedom of the press.” This without a doubt was an allusion to political heat the governing Liberals had taken over the QCJO program of direct federal subsidies, two years earlier. In contrast, legislation that focussed on bilateral negotiations between private companies might escape those politics.
While the choosing between these two policy paths —platform/publisher bargaining versus a ‘contribution and draw’ fund — offered various pros and cons, the sleeper issue was about how compensation would be divided.
In the bargaining model, the basic premise of ‘net value exchange’ did not necessarily drive an equitable distribution of compensation based on the number of employed journalists or any other metric. A rebalanced marketplace was still a market: some news content would fetch a higher price than others. Some platform distribution was of greater or lesser value to news organizations, depending upon the circumstances. These uncertain outcomes fed the fears of smaller news outlets that Bell and the other big media companies would manipulate the bargaining model to their own advantage and drink the waterhole dry. Convinced that the fix was in, many small and independently owned news outlets opposed the legislation.
On the other hand, an independent fund was almost certain to adopt a policy of equitable or proportional distribution of compensation, just as the government’s QCJO program had subsidized news outlets on the basis of payment per employed journalist.
One of the few proponents of an independent fund was Unifor, the largest Canadian media trade union (I was Unifor’s Media Director at the time). An independent fund was better, according to Unifor, because “the public interest is squarely at the beginning, middle, and end of this process, as the government sets the levy rate and the distribution formula.” Nevertheless, Unifor ranked the bargaining model as an expedient second choice.
Unifor’s submission to the public consultation also warned that Google or Facebook would look for a way to derail the government’s efforts:
We support the Australian model with the added caveat that the federal government must retain default power to impose a news fund as a remedy to shortcomings of the Australian model. We believe there are any number of ways that digital platforms might sabotage the government’s efforts in this exercise, as Facebook did in its week long capital strike in Australia earlier this year. We would be naïve to think that Facebook would never try that again, from the safety of their American corporate nationality and their billions of dollars in cash reserves. This is, after all, a warm up for the American political battle over the same issues, and the platforms will make every effort to win that battle. Unfortunately, Canada could easily be collateral damage. Accordingly, the power to impose a news fund model should remain within the discretion of the government, allowing them to impose a levy arrangement on a platform.
The recommended fail-safe option of a fund levy did not make it into Bill C-18.
the bill is tabled
Before the Trudeau government could table a bill, the October 2021 election intervened. In their election platform, the Liberals promised to implement a bargaining code modelled on Australian legislation. The Conservatives matched this with a detailed proposal to “adopt a made in Canada approach that incorporates the best practices of jurisdictions like Australia and France,” including binding arbitration and a proviso against government “picking and choosing who has access to the royalty framework.”
Re-elected to minority government, the Liberals tabled Bill C-18 six months later on April 5, 2022. Without explaining, Heritage chose its promised bargaining code over an independent fund.
Like the Australian code, the foundational element of the Canadian bill was the creation of a property right in the news content that publishers linked to Google and Meta’s sites with or without being able to secure a licence agreement. The legislation described this property right as “making content available” while opponents labelled it a “link tax.”
With the foundational property right established for publishers, the legislation replicated the Australian architecture with a bargaining regime between the platforms —dubbed Digital News Intermediaries (DNIs)— and “eligible news businesses” who were permitted to form collective bargaining coalitions. If bargaining did not produce a voluntary agreement, the publishers could seek “final offer” (baseball-style) arbitration. An arbitrator would apply the criterion of net value exchange.
The Canadian bill differed from the Australian code in at least two important ways.
Like the Australian code, section 11(1) of the Canadian bill also offered Google and Meta—the only platforms big enough to qualify as DNIs—a pathway to a CRTC-dispensed exemption from arbitration if it negotiated “fair compensation” with “a significant portion” of Canadian news outlets from a wide diversity of news organizations. The diversity requirement was a Canadian innovation on the Australian approach.
The CRTC had a mandate to review a thorough checklist of policy goals reflected in the voluntary agreements between platforms and publishers. It would ensure that the deals reflected “fair compensation” for all news content made available by publishers and the Big Tech platform and that an “appropriate portion” of the compensation be used by online publishers for news production. The regulator would also ensure that the distribution benefits a diversity of the news industry—covering non-profit newsrooms, official minority language communities, local news, racialized and Indigenous communities, and so on.
There was another important difference between the Canadian “exemption” and the Australian “non-designation” in their respective bargaining codes. Both codes allowed the DNIs to sign only a “sufficient” number of news outlets to voluntary agreements. But the key difference between the Canadian and Australian approach to exempting the DNIs from further regulation was that the gatekeeper of Australian non-designation was the Finance Minister acting by fiat (having taken the advice of the Competition Commissioner). By contrast, in Canada the CRTC ruled on exemption based on legislative criteria and subject to appeals.
The exemption provision in section 11(1) of the Online News Act baked into law the public policy goal of distributing compensation to a wide diversity of news organizations. The importance of that feature of the Canadian bill became more pronounced in 2022 when the Australian Finance Minister granted non-designation to Meta despite it refusing to negotiate with two prominent Australian news outlets.
One thing the Canadian legislation didn’t provide was a bottom line on compensation outcomes. But in light of the fact that Bill C-18 was replicating Australia’s bargaining code, there was a widespread assumption in public commentary and Parliamentary debate that Canadian news publishers would obtain similar results through bargaining or arbitration. The Australian dollar figures were shrouded in confidential agreements and the only information on the public record was Australian Competition Commissioner Rod Sims’ statementthat the aggregate value of the various agreements was approximately $200M AUS ($190M CDN) and an assurance from small Australian news organizations that they had been treated fairly.
Commentators assumed the value of the undisclosed Australian deals to compensate 30 per cent of publishers’ editorial salaries and costs (with Google and Meta dividing the payments, 20% and 10%). Perhaps based on this 30 per cent figure, Canada’s non-partisan Parliamentary Budget Office estimated that the DNIs would end up paying $329M CDN to Canadian publishers.
“A lie, a shakedown”
When the bill hit the Parliamentary order table the Conservative opposition abandoned its election promise and opposed the bill as “censorship.”
Not one of these critics bought into Rod Sims’ formulation of net value exchange between platforms and publishers. Jen Gerson of The Line called it “a lie.” Several others suggested the entire scheme was simply a “shakedown” of Big Tech by politically connected Canadian media companies, driven by an illegitimate conviction that the platforms had stolen “their” advertising revenue.
The argument in favour of net value exchange, while difficult to prove to the satisfaction of critics and skeptics, had one thing going for it: facts on the ground. For example, Google had long split advertising revenues with content providers on its YouTube platform (55% going to creators). Both Google and Facebook had made rich deals with the Australian publishers in 2021 and were in the process of settling accounts with French and Spanish publishers too. And perhaps in hopes of defusing the Liberals’ push for Bill C-18 in Canada, in 2021 and 2022 Google and Facebookreachedvoluntarycompensationagreements with many Canadian print publishers.
All of these precedent setting licensing agreements strengthened policy arguments that net value exchange favoured publishers: otherwise, why would Google and Facebook pay so much?
The bill’s opponents needed a less esoteric issue to rally around. Just as the Liberal MPs were hammering “Big Tech” in their public messaging, the Conservatives beat a familiar tattoo: attack “Big Media.” The criticism that got the most political traction during the public debate was that the bill, like it or hate it, would favour large Canadian publishers at the expense of small publishers.
The “big” publishers included the large television companies owned by major telecommunications conglomerates Bell Media CTV, Rogers City TV and Québecor TVA; the incessantly pilloried public broadcaster CBC Radio-Canada; and (depending on who was doing the skewering) the right-wing Postmedia. Because the television companies and the public broadcaster provided the lion’s share of online news, the Parliamentary Budget Office estimated that on a pro rata basis they would win 75% of the final compensation paid out by the platforms.
As we know, the Liberals’ bill was approved by the House of Commons anyway in December 2022with the support of the NDP and the Bloc Québecois. A number of Parliamentary amendments were made without changing its basic policy design.
But what occurred the same month may have been the most influential event of all in the journey of Bill C-18; and it didn’t happen in Canada. In Washington D.C., a milder version of a news bargaining code almost made its way into law in December 2022 during the waning moments of the 117th congress—and remained to be retabled in the future. Google had finally settled its compensation dispute with French and Spanish publishers but others were queued up to implement the EU Directive, and legislators were planning a similar law for the United Kingdom. In July 2023 Google published a cheerful corporate blog in which it celebrated licensing arrangements with “1500 publications across 15 countries” from which one might infer that its strategy in the face of a transnational battle to discourage legislative action was to voluntarily sign licensing agreements at an agreeable price and threaten news throttles where necessary.
The global platforms faced the same challenge on numerous fronts and, to use a baseball analogy, they needed to strike out the side. Canada was in the batter’s box.
the news throttles
Early Canadian opinion polls suggested strong public support for greater regulation of the Internet, including Bill C-18, when Nanos released a survey in May 2022, shortly after the bill was tabled. Two weeks later, Newsmedia Canada released a Pollara poll finding that 79 per cent of Canadians (including 71 per cent of Conservative voters) agreed with the principle that “web giants should have to share revenue with Canadian media outlets.”
Opinion polls on detailed legislation invariably capture public sentiment at a general level, in principle perhaps, but subsequent events —more information, debate and criticism— can change results. When the bill got into prolonged debate at the Heritage Committee in the fall of 2022 the Conservatives pivoted to oppose the legislation and critics vied to influence the public narrative in media coverage.
But the most impactful events were Google and Meta’s ominous threats to reprise news throttle tactics. Meta was more explicit in its threats (subsequently acted upon as we know now) to evade Bill C-18 by banning news on its Canadian Facebook and Instagram platforms. Google hired Canadian pollster Abacus to publish in mid-October a contentiously framed opinion survey suggesting a sudden drop in public support for the bill. On the other hand, a broadcaster-commissioned Nanos survey published at the end of the month and asking about “fair payment” suggested that public support for C-18 had hardly budged since earlier Nanos poll from May.
The duelling polls settled nothing –-tellingly, the Abacus poll found that only eight per cent of respondents were familiar with details of the legislation—and the broader public only got engaged when Google and Meta acted on their threats of news throttles. Google fired a shot across the government’s bow when it ran a covert six-week news throttle test in February 2023 (while C-18 was before the Canadian Senate) that affected four per cent of its audience.
When the bill received Royal Assent in June, Meta announced and then implemented its indefinite news throttle in August, still in effect in 2024. Once the platforms’ news throttles became a reality variousopinionpolls in July suggested public support for the goals of the bill slumped to 60% and more significantly half of respondents supported the government backing down in response to the news throttles. The results were skewed regionally and by voter preference, suggesting Conservative-leaning respondents were cloving to their Party’s messaging that the bill was “censorship.”
Canadians’ memories are still fresh about what happened next. Google threatened to join Meta in a permanent boycott of news in Canada when the Online News Act came into force in December 2023. The previous September, the new Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge had floated a draft regulation implementing C-18 that offered the platforms a tithe of compensation payments set at four per cent of revenue should they seek the bill’s exemption from bargaining and arbitration. Fixing the levy at figures much lower than the Parliamentary Budget Office estimate from a year earlier (which made the assumption that compensation would be based on 30% of editorial costs), St.-Onge’s four per cent was equivalent to a $172 million annual payment from Google and $62 million from Meta.
Google and Meta both rejected the Minister’s offer and the clock ticked down to the December 17th date when the Online News Act would take effect and Google had promised to begin its news throttle.
But in a buzzer-beater moment on the last day of November, St.-Onge announced she had evaded the looming deadline by negotiating a $100 million annual compensation payment from Google to Canadian news publishers in compliance with Bill C-18.
Hard numbers are difficult to come by when evaluating the bottom-line outcome. But a news-less Meta is paying no compensation under the bill to Canadian publishers and is set to claw back what its spokesperson described as $20 million in its voluntary licensing payments. In addition, Canadian publishers can no longer reach their audiences through Facebook or Instagram distribution, affecting their viewership and advertising reach. As for Google, its $100 million in compensation payments to publishers is far less than its projected $172 million share of the initial Heritage target of $234 million for Google and Meta combined.
“unfinished business“
The Online News Act came into effect in December 2023 and rang in the new year 2024 with some unfinished business.
The Meta news throttle continues. The company’s public messaging is that it would restore Canadian publishers’ access to its platforms if the federal government exempted Facebook and Instagram from the Actwith no obligation to pay compensation. Meta’s previous $20 million worth of voluntary compensation payments—in the form of local journalism bursaries—are gone. A number of commentators have said that the loss of online distribution privileges will impair Canadian news publications, especially start-ups.
Another loose-end is the impact that C-18 may have in other jurisdictions that are showing halting progress towards a bargaining code—the United Kingdom, the United States, California, Brazil, and others. If the European, Australian and Canadian legislation tips political momentum for a similar law in the United States, that might have implications for Meta’s ongoing news throttle in Canada or even the amount of compensation paid.
Yet another long-term question mark is the future impact of artificial intelligence large language models (AI-LLM) on news organizations. All of the Big Tech companies are pursuing this market where they will directly compete with news organizations for information-seeking audiences. In competing with news outlets, the AI-LLM applications will be ingesting their online news content, with or without licences or compensation. The current version of the Online News Act does not address this scenario.
But the business immediately at hand is how Google’s $100 million is to be divided among Canadian news organizations. The September 2023 draft regulation contemplated the value of an individual news outlet’s compensation varying up to 20 per cent above or below the median compensation of all agreements.
“The intent of the criterion,” said the government’s summary, “is to promote equity across news agreements while preserving a degree of flexibility.” The very flexible 20 per cent tolerance for unequal but “equitable” outcomes offered deference to how platforms and publishers might value news content and its distribution differently for some news publishers than others; in other words a rebalanced market for news.
However, the Minister cancelled the 20% rule in the final regulation in December 2023 because the government went in an entirely different direction once it had to work with a smaller pool of money than anticipated. The regulation offered Google the choice of making a series of deals with different publisher groups —in which case the new regulation required “like for like” compensation outcomes— or one agreement with a single consortium of publishers in which case the compensation would be meted out on a headcount of employed journalists.
So far, so equal. Except that the government made a bold move to severely limit the amount of compensation payable out of the $100 million to the public broadcaster CBC ($7 million) and private broadcasting companies ($30 million), leaving $63 million for online print publishers. That means that the final distribution of the $100 million will look approximately like $20,000 per journalist for print publishers, $7,300 for broadcasting companies, and $2,900 for the CBC and Radio-Canada.
Heritage Minister St.-Onge characterized this outcome as “accounting for the dynamics of the news industry.” In briefing the press on the regulation, a Heritage spokesperson elaborated that the dependency of print publishers on the intermediary platforms is “more pronounced.”
Not done yet, in a calibrated policy move the government increased the direct federal subsidies to print publishers under the QCJO program (broadcasting companies are ineligible) by raising the subsidy from 25% to 35% of journalist salaries and raising the cap from $55,000 to $85,000 in annual salary. Combining Google money and QCJO subsidies, print publishers would be reimbursed up to $50,000 per journalist salary. In Québec, an additional provincial subsidy raises it further.
By juicing the QCJO program, the federal government was making weight for the disappointed expectations of the print publishers of up to $81 million from the flush Google-Meta payout previously projected by the Parliamentary Budget Office and the loss of the existing $20 million in Meta licensing payments, plus the lost value of the Facebook traffic referrals to news websites. It is impossible to measure how 570 different print publishers might have gained or lost from the final regulation. As a baseline, the existing voluntary compensation from Google and Facebook is believed to have been unequally distributed among print publishers. The numbers are confidential anyway.
In this kind of information vacuum it becomes difficult to pass judgment on how print publishers fared under Bill C-18, but it is hyperbole for some critics to call it “an epic miscalculation” by the government.
The broadcasting companies, on the other hand, were aggrieved at getting the short end of the stick. The CBC’s claims to compensation for their news content fell easily to the pragmatism of the day, given the financial security of its Parliamentary funding. As for the broadcasting companies, it’s reasonable to assume that the Heritage Minister thought that Bell, Rogers and Québecor could afford to keep producing its many local news casts at a loss (as they had for the previous twelve years running). That was of little solace to the other 35 independently owned local television stations.
For television stations this was the second occasion in which they suffered their free content being monetized without compensation by wealthy news distributors. The advertising-funded broadcasters had fought for years to get cable and satellite companies to pay “retransmission fees” for the broadcasters’ transmissions of programming pulled off their television signal towers. The cable companies meanwhile billed their customers every month for that programming and shared none of it with local broadcasters.
Unlike in the United States, Canadian copyright law denies broadcasters any property rights in their “local signals.” Broadcasters pushed hard for US-style retransmission fees that might have been worth $1 billion in annual payments from Canadian cable companies, but in 2012 a narrowly split Supreme Court denied the CRTC the authority to levy such payments due to copyright rules.
The Canadian Association of Broadcasters was no more thrilled with St.-Onge’s division of the Google spoils, pointing out that “television” news available on broadcasting and online platforms is by far the biggest source of Canadian local news. Yet Google is gatekeeper to 40 per cent of web traffic to CTV News, the country’s most popular news website (next to CBC-Radio Canada).
The television companies nevertheless have one last shot—as the CRTC implements the Liberals’ other Internet bill—Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act—it is considering proposals to create a news subsidy for television and radio stations with contributions levied from Netflix and a host of foreign video and audio streamers now entering the orbit of Canadian regulation.
We can say one thing about the outcome of Bill C-18—with the government’s deliberate intervention in the distribution of the $100 million of Google compensation to news organizations and its boost to the QCJO financial aid to journalism, we have travelled a very long way from Rod Sims’ crisp policy idea of creating a rebalanced marketplace in which to capture the net value exchange between platforms and publishers.
“a post mortem”
A proper post-mortem of legislating the Online News Act would have more information at its disposal. What we can say is that if the results of the bill are benchmarked against the Australian outcomes, there is far less money for news publishers in Google’s $100 million and Meta’s exit.
The aggregate Australian figure of $190 million (CDN) was scaled up to $329 million by Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Office. Whether that was inflated or not, the $329 million for a Canadian population of 40 million is only slightly richer, on a proportional basis, than $190 million for an Australian population of 26 million. The bottom-line outcomes of the Google and Meta deals with French publishers remain undisclosed and unavailable as benchmarks.
It might have been different if not for Google and Meta deciding that the Canadian bill provided too much momentum for legislative efforts in the US and the UK. It might have been different if the platforms did not make the assessment that Canada was a small enough country —having failed to arm itself with an “or else” fail-safe mechanism in its legislation— to defy. It might have been different if the Conservative Opposition had stuck to its previous support for a bargaining code.
The public debate over the bill, and rescue planning for an impoverished news industry, is far from over. What will not change is the profound risk of a collapse in news reporting that is essential to democracy and, on the other hand, an indefinite stream of state-directed sponsorship of an independent press that is unrecognizable from the world in which advertising revenue once comfortably supported journalism. It may seem clinical to reduce such matters of deep principle to the calculus of “risk,” especially risks that are difficult to measure and only darkly predict. But risks they are.
It would not be fair to say the federal government has no plan to manage these risks, no strategy for news. But as is typical in public policy, the current situation is at best a palimpsest of overlapping regulatory initiatives and at worst a triaged scramble to sustain journalism.
In December 2023, Members of Parliament sitting in the House of Commons Heritage Committee agreed to hold hearings in the new year to study the crisis in news media. The carefully drafted language of the resolution reflects MPs’ determination to manage the public policy risk of saving journalism without managing news journalism itself.
“Someone else should pay”
Finally, a postscript to this lengthy evaluation of the public policy goals and their execution in the Online News Act.
It’s the public polling I want to point out. Initially, polls ran strongly in favour of the government forcing Big Tech platforms to share revenue with Canadian news publishers. But that support took a hit when the platforms put their own price to the enterprise in the form of Meta’s blackout of news and Google’s threat to do the same.
I’m extrapolating from that sequence of events in concluding that the public generally favours state action to aid news journalism provided it doesn’t cost us more. This is not unlike previous polling showing public support for sensible policy goals like supporting Canadian content but paired with strong opposition to the notion that consumers foot the bill for that. Even a public policy as conventional as charging sales tax on Netflix subscriptions barely garnered majority support in polling.
News journalism is a public good—both in the sense that Canadians value its importance, but also in the sense that Canadians prefer to consume it without paying. Mass media’s iron grip on the advertising market allowed us to enjoy free or nearly free news content for decades until disrupted by waves of market fragmentation beginning in the 1990s. Today, only 15% of Canadians pay for online news. If local news weren’t included by CRTC fiat in the basic cable TV subscription, we might discover something equally discouraging.
The biggest obstacle, then, to a successful public policy in news journalism might be our stubborn desire that someone else pay for it.
How we devise a national news strategy while conceding that reality is our task. I was pleased to read a valiant attempt at this by Peter Menzies and Konrad von Finckenstein who, in And Now the News, come down decidedly against direct subsidies (except for CBC with a refreshed mandate) and in favour of tax incentives supporting reader subscriptions and enterprise innovation. Responding to their report, Ivor Shapiro and myself didn’t endorse phasing out subsidies, but we did offer support for creating new policy tools and putting them to the work.
If federal MPs really desire a national discussion of a news strategy, let’s give it to them.
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This would not have been a good week to poll Canadians on their opinions of the media or public institutions.
As recounted in CTV News and Globe and Mail reports, Rebel News media personality David Menzies was arrested (and subsequently released without charge) by the RCMP for assaulting a member of Chrystia Freeland’s security detail.
The arrest was ridiculous. As Freeland walked briskly back to her vehicle, Menzies harangued her with accusations, not news questions (but watch the CTV clip and judge for yourself). The cop initiated physical contact with what pickup basketball enthusiasts would recognize as a “hard pick” on Menzies so that he couldn’t keep up with the Minister.
The officer then arrested Menzies, the equivalent of calling your own fouls. Handcuffed him too.
It was pathetic. But it was political theatre, which was Menzies’ mission anyway (it seems he has done this kind of thing before).
Well done, RCMP.
To continue the drama, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre issued a statement attacking the Liberal government and a fundraising pitch distributed within a couple of hours:
Silliness as I say, but pointing yet again to the vexing problem of Rebel News, which MediaPolicy wrote about in a different context, here.
The vex is not just about the media/political-action outlet in question, it’s about the unresolved policy issue of how and where the state recognizes “journalism,” and “journalists.” In the Internet-facilitated world of self publishing and iPhone technology, anyone can be a journalist, a faux journalist, or a “citizen journalist.” Can they all claim the moral and legal privileges of a professional journalist?
Menzies claimed that privilege when he said he was “scrumming” the Deputy Prime Minister. Again, you be the judge. Scrumming usually involves legitimate news gathering questions and, in return, the patient compliance of the news subject.
Editors at the CTV and the Globe weighed in with their choice of descriptors on this. Menzies is variously referred to as a “personality,” “a commentator,” and an “employee of Rebel News which refers to itself as a generally conservative media outlet.” But not a journalist or reporter.
The root issue in this flap is the terms and conditions of journalist access to news subjects, especially politicians being held to account. Two years ago, the issue was accreditation ofRebel News for reporting on an election debate and keeps arising every time that freelance journalists embed with protesters defying injunctions.
This brings to mind the interview that MediaPolicy published in December with Ivor Shapiro, scholar-in-residence at the TMU Centre for Free Expression. His view is that our ad hoc and laissez-faire approach to defining “journalist” and “journalism” won’t do anymore. In an era where it’s all too easy for someone to to claim the mantle of “citizen journalist” and the state-protected privileges of a free press that come along with it (for example, access) we need a purposive policy debate on the matter.
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Spark Insights has published a poll on public attitudes towards the CBC.
The key finding: the vast majority of Canadians, including Conservative voters, do not want to defund the CBC. But there is a very significant appetite for “a lot of change” at the public broadcaster.
As MediaPolicy quipped last week, we often hear “why can’t the CBC be more like PBS?” but you could expand that to include “why can’t the CBC be exactly what I personally think it should be?” That’s okay too: it’s never a bad time for the public shareholders to rethink the company mission:
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Last week MediaPolicy recommended an article in Chatelaine commenting on the federal Liberals’ long promised Online Safety Act. The article was written by former journalist and media scholar Supriya Dwivedi who then published a related piece in the Toronto Star this week.
Dwivedi also announced this week she has been hired by the Prime Minister’s Office as a senior advisor in what seems like a timely hire.
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There is an interesting Press Gazette update for journalism wonks that surveys news organizations about their views on the revenue and distribution opportunities in the year ahead.
Here’s the graph on distribution:
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Just before the new year, Canadian Pressinterviewed Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge about the federal Liberals’ new commitment to re-think the CBC, to “define what the CBC should look like over the next year and decade.”
The outstanding question mark about the results of a CBC review, taking either the short or long path to government action, is whether there is anywhere near enough time left in the government’s mandate before an election intervenes.
“And I really want to achieve that before the next election, to make sure that our public broadcaster is (as) well-positioned as possible for the future,” St.-Onge told CP’s Mickey Djuric.
As for what is to be done at the CBC —to reiterate Djuric’s report verbatim— when it comes to journalism, St.-Onge said she would like the public broadcaster’s new mandate to fill information gaps in local regions, include a strong online presence, invest in international reporting and ensure minority-language communities are supported. As for the cultural sector, she said she would also like to see the public broadcaster continuing to showcase local talent and finance shows “that would not see the daylight if it was just for the private sector.”
Now you can parse that statement without arriving at any conclusion of what that would change about the current CBC programming other than getting rid of its US programming, but some things that are clearly missing are the role of television advertising on one hand, and institutional governance and financial independence from Parliament on the other.
The Globe’s Konrad Yakabuski wrote a column suggesting the looming prospect of a Poilievre government is the CBC’s Waterloo. If I can paraphrase his point of view, shared by many, it’s the rhetorical question “why can’t the CBC be more like PBS?”
Reached for comment by CP, Conservative Heritage critic Rachael Thomas obliged with “Canadians need an independent and free media, not a biased broadcaster that receives a billion taxpayer dollars every year to act as mouthpiece for the Liberal government.”
Chances are, she won’t be repeating that in French.
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Global’s David Akin’s freedom of information request turned up an undisclosed opinion poll from last summer, commissioned by the Privy Council Office, that corroborates what other pollsters were finding at the time: the Google and Meta news throttles soured the previous public support for the recently enacted Online News Act, Bill C-18.
There were other findings too. The first of Heritage’s poll question was whether respondents trusted news organizations to “make decisions in the interests of the public.” That’s an odd phrasing that is popular among pollsters. But the discouraging results mark a continuity with previous polls in Canada and many other countries:
The results of the next question remind us that a majority of Canadians say they are alienated not only from news organizations but pretty much every powerful institution, and often they are equally alienated (except for a collective clear-eyed view of Social Media):
But it’s the counterfactual results of the third question that elicit groans —and are consistent with previous polls too:
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If the Liberals follow through on their promise to introduce Online Safety legislation in the upcoming session of Parliament, MediaPolicy will have plenty of posts following the debate.
There is a good piece in Chatelaine from Supriya Dwivedi of McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology & Democracy. She interviews several female Members of Parliament about the misogyny and racism they endure; a reality check for those of us not female or racialized. By the end of the article, she is recommending what the Liberals’ bill should or might look like:
As the federal government moves forward with regulating online harms, it should look to peer jurisdictions such as the U.K. and the E.U. Both have developed an approach to online harms that requires much more transparency from Big Tech in terms of how their algorithms work, as well as tackling the underlying incentives that lead to the amplification of harmful content. This includes mandated transparency reports and risk assessments, as well as algorithmic auditing powers by the regulator in both jurisdictions. Any online harms framework should also aim to bring Canada in line with the rest of the G7 and introduce intermediary liability, clarifying when platforms are liable for harms arising from content posted on their platforms by users.
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Another reminder: the annual Digital Media at the Crossroads conference takes place January 19-20 in Toronto. A policy nerd’s delight. Here’s where to register.
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It’s the silly, pointless fibs that get you. Meta’s Canadian policy advocate, Rachel Curran, did just that before the House of Commons Ethics Committee of all places. This week, MediaPolicy posted on that.
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Last weekend MediaPolicy recounted the exchange between Québec Culture Minister Mathieu Lacombe and LaPresse Deputy Editor Francis Cardinal over the culpability of news journalism in its own misery.
On Wednesday Brian Myles, publisher of Le Devoiradded his comments. Pointing out that news journalism in Québec is even more heavily subsidized than English-Canadian print journalism —-because of provincial subsidies that stack on top of federal aid and mandatory Google licensing fees— the gist of his carefully written comments seems to be that news outlets don’t deserve the help if they aren’t innovating, by which he appears to mean editorial and reader strategies.
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Scholarship is just journalism without deadlines.
There is a typically good piece of writing from Sean Speer in The Hub ruminating about the politics of teaching and publishing Canadian stories in university history departments. As a history graduate myself (a long time ago), the issue is close to my heart.
Speer talks about the competing narrative missions of the old school of “national accomplishments” and what he less charitably describes as the “identitarian” school of the “one true faith.”
Without quibbling over labels, one must concede that Speer isn’t making this stuff up; that kind of dichotomy does exist for those who insist upon putting historical scholarship to political employment. But I suspect (or hope) it’s more the student body than the scholars themselves who are donning the school-of-thought lapel pins. History scholarship, like journalism, is the place for curiosity and investigation.
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Another story that MediaPolicy has been following lately is the shake-up among Hollywood’s video streaming giants. David Friend of Canadian Presspublished a good (and brief) overview of the mish-mash of price increases, licensing hoarding and purging, and advertising supported services that are proliferating.
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I will read anything that Shannon Proudfoot writes because her prose sounds like a backwoods waterfall, but if she’s going to write about Winnipeg I want everyone else to read her as well.
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The Parliamentary House Ethics Committee has met on and off since last January to study threats of foreign election interference in Canada through social media platforms and, in its last meeting on December 13, the MPs hosted Meta’s Canadian representative (and former Stephen Harper policy chief) Rachel Curran.
You may recall that in 2019 —“some years ago” Curran told MPs— Facebook paid a $5 billion fine in the United States for complicity in providing the right-wing political action group Cambridge Analytica with data gleaned from 87 million Facebook users during the 2016 US election and Brexit vote.
Witnesses don’t really have the option of declining an appearance before Parliamentary committees which often resemble the children’s party game of Piñata. Bloc MP René Villemure took the opportunity to get a little off topic with Curran, as she was glued helplessly to the spot across the room, to ask her about Meta’s ongoing blackout of news for Canadian users.
RV: You say that Canadians share information on social media, including news-related content. Meta has chosen to block local Canadian news on its platform. Do you think this is preventing people from accessing quality information?
RC: Monsieur Villemure, we would love to not be in this position. We would love to have news on our platforms. The problem is that the government, through Bill C-18, the Online News Act,has asked us to pay an uncapped amount, an unknown amount,for content that has no commercial value to us.
[Emphasis added]
Now of course the Meta narrative on C-18 has always been that news “has no commercial value to us.” Not a dime. Perhaps the statement is within the realm of spirited advocacy, even if it can’t possibly be true.
But Curran’s other assertion, that the Online News Act “asks us to pay an uncapped amount, an unknown amount” was a lie. Not spirited advocacy. Not some clever hair splitting. A lie.
Those who have followed the C-18 file will recall that the federal government took seriously Google and Meta’s objections to the lack of certainty over financial outcomes from the mandatory bargaining of compensation with news outlets (even though the platforms could benchmark those outcomes against agreements they reached in Australia and Europe). The federal government remedied this by tabling a draft regulation (now finalized) in September 2023 that fixed liability, set at four per cent of either Google or Meta’s Canadian revenues.
Two weeks before Curran’s appearance before the Ethics Committee meeting, the federal government reached a well publicized agreement with Google to lower that fixed amount to $100 million annually in the case of Google, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2.5% of revenues. Known and capped, as it were.
But consider the glimmer of hope in Curran’s comments that “we would love to have news on our platforms.”
“Mr. Villemure,” she continued, “if you could work with your government colleagues to make amendments to that legislation that would allow us to put news back on our platforms, we would love to do that.
“Meta was very involved in supporting media outlets and supporting journalism in Canada. We had private deals that were worth close to $20 million per year with news outlets across the country, including in Québec. … I think we need to figure out, as industry, as policy-makers, how to support journalism and how to support the local news ecosystem in a way that makes sense for all of us. It doesn’t make sense to try to extract money from two American tech companies to prop up the Canadian news ecosystem, so let’s figure out, together, a better solution.”
A better solution? The Bloc MP followed up:
RV: What can our committee do to bring local media back to Facebook?
RC: I would suggest this, Monsieur Villemure. We have heard this from local publishers as well. We are a very different platform from Google. We do not scrape news content from the Internet or aggregate it in our search results. It has very little commercial value to Facebook or Instagram. If we were carved out of the Online News Act, so that the requirements of that act did not apply to us, or if there was a carve-out for local journalism, we could bring that back onto our platforms.
So there you have the Meta view on its C-18 news throttle and “a better solution.” With $20 million of voluntary licensing agreements cancelled by Meta dangling in the foreground, the Canadian government can either exempt Meta platforms from the Online News Act entirely or exempt all local journalism from the Act. In return, Meta will stop throttling news and allow news outlets that can’t reach their readers on Facebook anymore to resume doing so.
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Last week MediaPolicy posted an interview with the former chair of the Ryerson Journalism School, Ivor Shapiro, that opened up a taboo discussion of journalist accountability and autonomy. It got a lot more hits than I expected.
By coincidence, La Presse interviewed Québec Culture Minister and former journalist Mathieu Lacombe who blue-skyed about public standards of journalist accountability as a response to opinion polls charting a decline in public trust in journalism. His position: the media must accept ownership of this falling level of trust.
Lacombe mooted the possibility of giving the Québec Press Council real powers to regulate professional standards, even linking standards to Québec’s subsidies for news journalism that top up federal tax credits.
La Presse Deputy Editor Francis Cardinal volleyed back in an editorial with a derisive “non” arguing that La Presse readership is growing and the challenge is the business model, not public credibility.
“First, let’s get one thing straight,” Cardinal wrote. “There is NO connection between the “media crisis” and public trust. None. The media crisis is a crisis of revenue, of advertising, of innovation.”
“There is therefore reason to question what has been dragging down this confidence in recent years. But to talk about a “crisis of confidence in the media”? In Québec ? I don’t see how we can come to such a conclusion, other than by spending too much time on X…”
So there.
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The 1000-journalist Washington Post is looking to eliminate 240 jobs. It was only two years ago that the Post was in hire mode.
According to the Axios story, the Post’s finances have taken a turn for the worse despite the fact that the billionaire-owned enterprise ranks third in paid subscribers among the world’s English language news sites. Press Gazette has a list of the “100,000” club of paid subscriptions (top and only Canadian site, the Globe and Mail in 30th place with 246,000).
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After laying low for several months following the sensational Rogers-Shaw merger, Canadian competition law is back in the news.
The Bureau Commissioner Mathew Boswell —our competition police chief — made a name for himself last year in a losing effort to scrap the Rogers merger and now, despite earlier suggesting he didn’t want another term at the Bureau, has in fact been renewed.
In other competition news, several long awaited reforms to our competition law came into force as part of Bill C-56. University of Ottawa’s Jennifer Quaid does a good job of explaining them.
The much maligned Mulroney-era “efficiencies defence” —a uniquely Canadian trump card for approving mega-mergers where economies of scale outweigh the lessening of competition— is out. In addition, the Bureau will now have more power to force companies to co-operate with the Bureau’s “market studies” that explore the possibility of abuse of market power.
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France will introduce a first time culture levy on global music streamers in its 2024 budget. During legislative debate, the figure of 1.5% of revenues was frequently discussed. Spotify has condemned the tax as “unfair.”
In CRTC hearings last month on implementing the Online Streaming Act, the world’s leading music streaming platform argued that music streaming is not profitable, streamers should not pay any cash contribution to Canadian content, and that any regulations promoting Canadian songs must not impact the consumer experience.
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Here’s another news item in an ongoing story for 2024. It’s been clear for some time that the cost of “peak TV” —-the familiar term for Hollywood studios and streamers splurging on premium content in a fight for market share—— is something media companies want out of but can’t figure out how.
Observers have speculated on the possibility of more corporate consolidation through mergers which have a spotty record of working out for the Hollywood giants, never mind the cable companies and viewers who pay the bills.
The latest rumour comes as no surprise: Warner Brothers Discovery might merge with (or buy) Paramount Plus from Viacom. This article investigates the possibility, but also moots the chances of a joint venture or a deal to bundle streaming content.
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Holding the powerful to account: including journalists
That’s a provocative headline but leads to an interview MediaPolicy conducted with Ivor Shapiro, formerly chair of the Ryerson School of Journalism, about journalism autonomy and accountability. I hope it’s a worthwhile read.
Heritage Minister divides up the Google cash
Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge’s regulation under Bill C-18 the Online News Act nails down the $100M deal she made with Google and sets the ground rules for how it’s to be divided.
The animals at the waterhole look at each other a little differently when the water is low and, with Meta’s news throttle combined with Google negotiating itself a lower financial liability, there is far less to go around.
The CBC will get only $7 million of the Google money. Private television and radio broadcasters, who were anticipating about half of the C-18 money would go their way, are capped at $30 million. The remaining $63 million will mostly go to online publishers of text journalism (i.e. newspapers and magazines).
The regulation appears to give Google the choice of whether it bargains the distribution of the $100 million with a single consortium of news organizations —CBC, broadcasters and online news outlets squeezed together— with each news organization being compensated on a headcount of employed journalists. In truth, that doesn’t leave much to “bargain.” The headcount formula allowed Heritage to project an overall per journalist payment of $17,000. But that’s not distributed evenly because of the caps on broadcasters: Newsmedia Canada pegs the publishers’ share at $20,000 while the Canadian Association of Broadcasters is looking at roughly $7,300 per head. CBC’s per cap will be approximately $2,900.
With less compensation to go around than originally touted, it’s not surprising that St.-Onge decided the CBC would end up with a token amount. This might even seem a Solomon-like compromise if it weren’t for the fact that the CBC is laying off 600 staff, including journalists. No one is standing in the CBC’s corner on this, even some of the CBC’s biggest supporters.
The snarling at the waterhole is emanating from the broadcaster association which is questioning why television and radio news, a dead loss on the accounting sheet, is being given short shrift. The answer is undoubtedly political: the proper nouns “Bell,” “TVA,” and “Rogers” are self explanatory.
The broadcasters are already excluded from the federal government’s direct subsidies to text journalism in the QCJO program, recently juiced by the Liberals in their Fall Economic Statement, likely to counterweight Meta’s boycott. Now with broadcast news getting the short end of the stick under the Online News Act, the pressure on the CRTC to create a local news fund out of financial contributions from foreign streamers and online platforms will intensify.
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Expert Review of the CBC
Another explosive file that St.Onge is sitting upon is the CBC. Better late than never, the Liberals have announced their intention to strike an expert committee, mandate unknown, to think about the public broadcaster’s future.
Everyone will have an opinion on the CBC’s direction. Everyone should.
Jamie Watt of Navigator, a political consultant for hire, published a piece in the Toronto Star that demonstrates how much more thinking there is to be done. Comparing the CBC, news journalism and conventional television to the long deceased Blockbuster Video, he observes that politicians like Pierre Poilievre appealing to voters directly through social media represents “direct competition” to the news media and that the Fourth Estate must either adapt or die.
Watt’s conclusion seems to be that the CBC (and all news outlets?) need to reinvent journalism for social media platforms, to out-viral the politicians.
On that note, I can hear news producers and editors across the land exclaiming “oh, gosh, why did we never think of that?!” CBC and all other news outlets are experimenting constantly with delivering news over social media as well as new streaming platforms like the free ad-supported CBC Comedy and CBC NewsExplore.
Shooting from the hip on rethinking the CBC will do no one any good. The relationship between audience demographics, limited resources, and the meaning of “public” in public broadcasting seems like a giant riddle but not one that we can’t figure out.
The expert committee, and the government in setting its terms of reference, might use as its launch pad the observations and recommendations of the last expert committee, the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review that devoted section 3.7 of its 2020 Report to the CBC. It’s a pity that some of the governance and recommendations for the CBC’s accountability that require legislative action have been left so late in this government’s mandate. But at least the conversation is about to begin in earnest.
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The cable guy
For those of you intrigued by the big picture of the entertainment media industry, I have belatedly discovered the blog written by Doug Shapiro. He’s a former Turner and Time Warner television executive, now with the Boston Consulting Group.
His latest post zeroes in on the peace deal between the number two US cable operator, Charter Communications, and entertainment colossus Disney. Until September, the two were engaged in a bitter spat over renewing their content distribution deal. Against the backdrop of galloping cord-cutting in the US (15 percentage points ahead of Canada), Charter wanted to drive down the price of Disney’s linear channels or buy less of them. Charter backed up its bargaining position by threatening to drop Disney’s content.
We don’t know the exact wholesale pricing of Disney channels in the final deal. But we do know that Charter will buy and fold into their TV Everywhere (i.e. multi-device viewer access, like Rogers Ignite) cable service some of Disney’s ad-supported streaming content from various sports and entertainment programming services at no extra cost to the consumer. As paid subscriber options, Charter will also market some of Disney’s streaming apps while dropping some of the Disney linear channels it didn’t want to pay for.
The Charter-Disney deal prompts Shapiro to observe that the harmony of linear and streaming content (both premium and free ad-supported) carried on the same platform by major cable companies could result in a win-win-win for television distributors, Hollywood streamers, and paying customers. That winning combination would click in if the streamers and cable companies can team up to sell the most popular pay-streaming services as bundled discounts: for example getting customers to lock into multiple streaming subscriptions if the price is right.
It’s not fantasy to visualize the same opportunity here in Canada, to fight cord cutting and preserve cable television as a dominant and at-scale platform to distribute Canadian content. Keeping the older audience loyal, and drawing in millenials and other cord-nevers, can only be achieved by giving viewers a competitive bundle, better than a la carte shopping for multiple subscriptions and apps. “Free,” “discount,” and “good bundles” are the building blocks.
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Registration for DM@X January 19-20
Speaking of the future of Canadian broadcasting and the big picture…the annual Digital Media at the Crossroads (DM@X) conference is accepting registrations for the January 19-20, 2024 event.
Over 30 speakers —29 besides your faithful scribe— will address key policy questions, including the obligations of streamers under the Online Streaming Act, social media regulation, artificial intelligence and cultural expression, and many other issues. The Ontario Commissioner of the CRTC Bram Abramson will give the luncheon address on January 20. And broadcasting consultant Nordicity Group will also update its annual report on the digital media universe in Canada.
All the details of the program, Including the bios and photos of the speakers, can be accessed at www.digitalmediaatthecrossroads.com. The website includes Instructions on how to register for the conference.
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Earlier this week The Walrus published Ivor Shapiro’s “How Journalists Can Win People Back,” an excerpt from his new book. By coincidence I had just interviewed him for publication in MediaPolicy.ca.
I first met Ivor in 2015 when he was the chair of the School of Journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University (then known as Ryerson) and he agreed to host the launch of Unifor’s “JournalismIs” campaign. He was the kind of person who had collegiality and collaboration coursing through his veins, so putting on the conference with him was a lot of fun. A former magazine writer and editor, he taught and researched media ethics. He’d recommended the formation of what’s now the National NewsMedia Council, founded the still-thriving J-Source online magazine, and led the Canadian Association of Journalists’ ethics committee. He’s now scholar-in-residence at the Centre for Free Expression. Last summer Ivor and I collaborated on an article, “Canada’s Bumpy Ride Toward a National News Strategy,” published online by Policy Options. He and I spoke at length about the Canadian implications of his new book on journalists’ autonomy in democracies. Then, we then edited the AI-generated interview transcript to make it shorter and, we hope, much more intelligible. Please let us know what you think.
Howard: In Disrupted Freedoms (update: reviewed here), you posit a basic quid pro quo between government and journalism, that for journalists to earn the special protections and privileges necessary for a free press there must be accountability for professional standards. Is that a fair summary?
Ivor: I guess so, although it unsettles me to think of it as a quid pro quo, exactly. I spent many years assuming the exact opposite—that freedom of the press is not earned but given by right to anyone who publishes almost anything. I thought it was just one of several forms of free expression. But thinking about disrupted media has forced me to propose this new idea that freedom of the press is a more ambitious, audacious, and conditional claim. It’s a claim of particular privileges by those who conduct a particular kind of activity. Defining that activity takes a few pages in the book so for now shall we just call it “news work”?
Okay, and in the book you list several of those privileges attached to news reporting in democracies— such as shield laws, which allow journalists in many democracies to protect information about confidential sources, and to gain access to restricted spaces, events, and records.
Yes and, in many countries, exemptions or exceptions under laws ranging from trespass to libel. And, though it’s suddenly become controversial in Canada, many governments including ours, have long provided public money to subsidize both publicly and privately owned news organizations. I think we agree on the root idea that it’s a public service to seek and distribute factual information about current affairs.
Yes. News work is a public good, as people say. But your argument, that these privileges must be earned, is new territory, even provocative. You’re saying that if journalists claim to be providing a core public service, they should be accountable for doing so. Well, in that spirit, let me ask you this: how good a job is Canadian journalism doing these days at demonstrating its value as a public service?
Well, to paraphrase Pope Francis, who am I to judge?
Come on, Your Holiness, give it a shot.
Seriously, there’s no single answer to that. And there’s way too much generalization these days about the allegedly ubiquitous failings of what people call “the media.” Who is “the media”? It’s thousands of people in hundreds of large and small organizations and teams. Most of these people, individually, try to make a living by doing decent work, as do most people who work at anything. So of course, there’s a wide range of quality in their output, with no reliable way to evaluate much of it. And that is a major part of the information crisis that confronts people in many democracies today, including ours. So I think it’s time for journalists to consider more self-critically the idea of being accountable for standards of practice.
Yes, and they serve useful purposes. The broadcast bodies are set up by law to regulate the airwaves, and you’ve written about how well they do it.
Or not, but carry on.
The two news-media councils certainly help news publishers resolve the grievances of audience members and may sometimes spur news organizations to reflect on their practices. So people have places to air complaints against news corporations, which is good. And yet Canadians’ reported trust in news media dropped by 15 percentage points in the seven years since the national council was formed. And in Quebec, a recent poll suggested that about one third of Québécois consider journalists independent of political parties or interests; the rest are equally divided between believing the opposite or not knowing. If these numbers roughly reflect people’s confidence in the news they see, how can we speak confidently of news as delivering a public service? Right now, how confident do people have a right to feel that they know the basic facts of what’s happening in Israel or Palestine right now?
Well, let’s treat October 7th and the Gaza war as a case study of sorts. How good a service is being provided by Canadian newsrooms covering this war?
Again, it depends on who’s answering. I have a sense that many people think our major news providers are hopelessly biased toward Israel, many others think the opposite, and many others believe most of the facts reported through the particular news channels they choose to follow.
But what do you, as a former j-school chair, think?
It’s mostly less bad than many people think.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
Yeah, because it varies. I do think most individual journalists are trying hard to report facts rather than fiction or propaganda. I’ve noticed careful, contextualized newsgathering and editing. I’ve noticed some simplistic and unverified reports. I’ve watched some outstanding interviews conducted under tough circumstances, and some breathless, deferential, uninformed interviews. And the bigger news organizations are often overcautious, trying to achieve an impossible “balance” in stories and newscasts on any particular day, trying without realistic hope to reduce the number of mass-synthesized resource-guzzling protest emails generated by advocacy groups that claim to want fairness or balance. There are limits in what’s feasible for a news desk. And right now, very few Canadian news reporters, producers, or editors specialize in Israel-Palestine issues, no original news reporting from Gaza by employees of Canadian news outfits, and fewer journalists there, period, because that work is lethally dangerous right now. But my central point is that those claiming to provide a public service should hold themselves accountable to service standards whether they’re publicly traded corporations or crowd-funded startups. For journalists, I think that starts with the defining standard of distinguishing facts from allegations, opinions, guesses, or lies.
So a breach of standards would be the initial Associated Press report on the explosion at al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza, which was widely repeated by broadcasters and newspapers?
That’s just one of many stories on which people have disputed essential facts. In war, propaganda defeats facts because no one’s job is to share clear evidence consistently. No one except journalists, that is, and, newsflash, journalists are fallible. So breaking news almost routinely includes assertions that await confirmation, and initial reports often need later correction or contextualization. When the news moves fast, the public value of journalists’ work shouldn’t be judged on the first report or the second but rather on the collective, iterative building of a set of facts on which the public can rely.
Well, then, what’s the standard?
I think of standards in a rather minimalistic way. A standard is not the same as a best practice, or ethical principle, or a marker of excellence. It’s a lower hurdle. Showing indifference to factuality is the clearest possible breach of standards for a journalist, but maybe reasonable people could agree on a bit more. Like, that journalists should follow processes that avoid repeating untruthful information—at least, not without attribution. And that factual errors should be corrected as soon as possible. Recently the leader of the Canadian Opposition laid into the Canadian Press for running a wire story that included three corrections of earlier reporting. But to correct oneself is evidence of effort, not of carelessness.
That’s it—just get stuff right?
If we set the bar just a bit higher, there’s an expectation that daily news should build on previous stories to add layers of new facts. Someone is charged with a brutal crime today and acquitted next year: which story will show up online in 2025? Extra layers of context help people understand the world better. To see a world in which today’s savageries may have been seeded by yesterday’s cruelties and a century of trauma.
So you want journalists to be held accountable for disciplined fact-gathering if they claim press-freedom privileges? What would that look like practically?
That’s for journalists themselves, collectively, to answer, and so far few journalists even agree that they have a problem with accountability. The topic just doesn’t come up! But let’s imagine a representative group of journalists sitting down to seek consensus on their bare-minimum expectations of one another’s work. Maybe they could start with a standard that’s been tested in courts in several common-law jurisdictions, when people’s reputations are damaged.
The responsible-journalism defence for libel, which you include as a “privilege” of a free Press.
Yes. Put simply, some smart English lawyers persuaded their country’s top court around the millennium that if a news report damages someone’s reputation, the journalists can escape punishment if they demonstrably followed a disciplined process of seeking the facts. And within a very few years, that principle was adopted in several other countries. The Supreme Court of Canada renamed it “responsible communication in the public interest,” but essentially it still rests on long-established norms for professional news reporting.
Basically, it says that even if you defame someone objectively, you’re going to be ok if you followed a journalistic process. Should we call it “the pursuit of truth” defence?
Absolutely. What’s privileged is not the outcomes but the work of gathering and sharing facts of current public interest. That’s the opposite of purveying fake news; it’s pursuing what’s called l’information juste in French, which I think implies more than just truthfulness but also relevance and currency. But the simpler English word, “facts,” brings up an important distinction. What press freedom adds to freedom of expression is the availability of news, not comment. Which makes it quite strange when commentary-driven publications boast that they haven’t applied for government support. Well, of course not! You and I are sitting here expressing our opinions for the price of a cup of coffee. Following breaking news, checking facts, investigating corruption, covering a trial: if we don’t pay people to do work like that, it won’t get done.
I’m jumping up and down in agreement with you on that. This issue came up in the discussions about Bill C-18 and, before that, about the tax relief for Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations. I just went on and on about how you’ve got to restrict it to original news reporting. You’ve got to bake that right in. We have enough opinions out there; they’re cheap and plentiful. We don’t need to regulate it and we don’t need to pay for it.
And nor should regulated Google money go there. But it will, won’t it?
Yes, provided the news outlet primarily covers news, opinion gets subsidized too. But okay, news is a public good, and pursuing accuracy is a minimum standard. We agree. But I‘d assume that it will take more to earn public support than basic do’s and don’ts like getting facts right most of the time or quoting people accurately. How about standards of curation, or detachment? I mean, how do journalists really show that what they produce is essential to democracy?
There are a few almost non-negotiable norms. Internationally, most journalists agree that they should keep promises to sources, for instance, and to refuse payment for confidential information, and to keep photos intact. That kind of red-light concrete standard is different from vaguer catchwords like “objectivity” or “balance” or, yes, even “professionalism.” High-sounding highly malleable catchwords are tools for rhetoric. Weapons with which people can bash journalists whose ideas, perspectives, or social media profiles they find bothersome. They’re worst, maybe, in the hands of employers. When managers rely on loosely defined criteria, their judgments will be selective, blinkered, influenced by their own perspectives, such as racial and cultural difference. And when arbitrary judgments affect career advancement, well, that’s supposed to be illegal. So that’s another reason to get very precise about what we call professional standards.
Could there be a case for going beyond the bare minimum standards to justify public support? Like, could public funds foster higher quality journalism by recognizing and rewarding continuous-improvement efforts?
That sounds good to smell but tough to cook. Like, who should decide what counts as “improvement”? I suspect people who work for the Western Standard, the Narwhal, and Global News have divergent approaches to measuring quality because journalism is not brain surgery. It’s more important to understand how audience recognize quality information and what journalists can do to help. One of my key realisations in researching the book was that the countries where more people trust most of the journalism they see are also places where journalists accept public accountability for meeting professional standards.
Suddenly your argument for “professional autonomy” begins to sound like formal self-regulation, as in tribunals where journalists who fail to meet professional standards could be disciplined and disbarred. Is that where you’re going? I didn’t pick that up in the book.
Meaning, for example, protecting one another’s job security. Look, there will always be tension between editors and the owners or publishers who employ them, and editors will always make unwelcome demands of reporters and producers. But if we want journalists to be driven by a public-interest mission, they shouldn’t be fired or held back for doing so! Amongst other things, that means union contracts that cement professional practices as workplace norms.
Union contracts. Now you’re talking my language!
And yet in Canada, as you know from your days as a union staffer, it is the bosses, not the workers, who write the standards. And it’s publishers, not journalists, who are accountable to industry-run or government-required monitors. Whereas publishers freely hire and fire editors over editorial preferences and journalists know that to keep their jobs they must allow editors to arbitrate standards. News companies focus their brand marketing on something oddly called “fact-based journalism” (like, there’s another kind?) or industry-directed certificates of trust-worthiness. Whereas, if I were designing a transit ad for a news business, I’d show a quote-bubble cartoon where the wearer of the “press” badge says, “Yes, boss,” and the suit responds: “You’re fired.”
C’mon.
Seriously. May I quote the book again?
Reb, can I stop you?
No, boss. This is from Chapter 5: “Robust professionalism in news media—the real thing, not the semblance—means owners ceding autonomy to editors, editors recognizing journalists’ quality concerns as labour rights, and all regular editorial contributors being emboldened by job security.” But that’s actually the easier part. The hardest work could be getting journalists to stop filing stories long enough to reflect on their own methods and assumptions.
Okay, here’s the monkey’s paw. Make your first wish for something that would advance accountability in journalism.
Easy. I’d like to see the leaders of the big journalists’ unions get together on Zoom to brainstorm ways to earn back public trust.
Like what?
Like, for instance, they could convene a group of journalists to draft a single, short list of maximum ten consensus standards for news production—crystal-clear, realistic standards, that can each be stated in 50 words or less! They’d distribute the first draft to members for discussion in guilds, locals, and listservs, and give themselves a year to rewrite the list, request public feedback, and put each item up for an up-or-down vote by organized journalists across the country. Any item that wins consensus would be published on Canada’s first national code of professional standards for news, a work in progress that should be augmented or amended every few years through a similar process. And guess what—the very next time a contract’s being negotiated with unionized journalists…
…recognition of the code is on the table.
Yup. Just as unionized professors’ contracts include guarantees of academic freedom, and hospitals can’t require clinicians to break patient confidentiality. And then suddenly, when an employer makes an arbitrary demand or ruling, a journalist might have a winnable grievance, or even a human-rights complaint, because the professional standard is crystal clear. And conversely, when people or companies claim to be in the journalism business, the public has at least a first-stop litmus test. What do you think?
I’d like to eavesdrop when they discuss tweeting. But seriously, I think half would love it and the other half, at least at the outset, would not trust it. If I can generalize about journalists I would say they are not joiners. But joining a peer movement for autonomy and accountability might be different.
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