October 5, 2024
Let’s start this weekend with something inspirational.
I’m half-way through the four-episode documentary No Dress Rehearsal on the glorious music career of Kingston Ontario’s own The Tragically Hip.
It’s gold (say I, as a diehard Blue Rodeo fan).
The documentary was made by Mike Downie, older brother to late Hip frontman Gord Downie. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. You can watch it now on Amazon Prime.
The Hip was the X/millennial generations’ iconic Canadian band in both its songwriting and success. Perhaps because of their international appeal, the documentary’s streaming rights were snapped up by Amazon Prime, instead of Bell Media’s Crave.
Filmmaker Downie is interviewed by The National’s Ian Hanomansing here.
If you want to dwell a little deeper on your connection to “Canada’s band” and the signposts in their music to Canadian experiences, have a listen to Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s CBC radio show here.
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You may have noticed two weeks ago that CTV National News stepped into a big puddle of mess with its reporting on the Conservative Party’s efforts to bring down the Trudeau government through a Parliamentary motion of non-confidence.
CTV took up a story angle linking Pierre Poilievre’s motion —–which he branded as Canadians deserving an opportunity to vote in a carbon tax election— to the possibility that the Liberal-NDP dental program would be the collateral damage of a fallen government. CTV’s spliced video of Poilievre’s stand-up edited out his reference to the carbon tax which, of course, wasn’t the story angle.
The Conservatives were having none of CTV’s grovelling on-air apology for an “error” when the Tories saw premeditated journalistic malfeasance. CTV then fired the video editor and reporter involved in the story production.
I was waiting for the dust to clear for a clearer picture of what happened. The fired staff aren’t speaking publicly (the unionized editor has filed a grievance and the non-union reporter hasn’t done a Lisa Laflamme-style video giving her side of the story).
But Rewrite commentator Peter Menzies did some digging and has an informed take on it, here.
The controversy shed light, retrospectively, on yet another CTV National face plant, a story covering the capital gains tax increase in the Liberals’ spring budget.
Three weeks ago the industry self regulator, the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Committee (CBSC), found against CTV in a complaint filed by two Canadians who pointed out egregious factual errors in a newscast that misstated Canadian tax law and as a consequence wrongly identified tax liabilities for children inheriting the family cottage.
The CBSC ruled that CTV breached the expected standards of “accuracy” in news presentation.
When pressed by the complainants to make a further finding of CTV’s “bias” against the Liberal government, the CBSC ruled that “to make a finding of bias, the report would need to use incorrect facts for the purpose of pushing a specific agenda. This was not the case with the CTV report.” (Emphasis added).
As far as we know, no one got fired.
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We are only weeks away, one hopes, from something very big on the CBC.
A story on the CBC website, quoting an anonymous Heritage Canada source in Minister Pascale St.-Onge’s department, says that within the month we can expect the Minister’s announcement of her government’s new vision of the CBC along with the appointment of a new CEO to carry it out.
With a federal election looming, St.-Onge appointed an expert panel in May to advise her on a CBC re-boot.
She’s been posting social media videos about a new CBC for the last two weeks, stating that questions about the CBC’s mission need answering. Soon we will get a peak at what her answers are.
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Another big Canadian broadcaster —it’s Facebook I have in mind— still makes available original news journalism produced by a Canadian television broadcaster and uploaded by its news subject, Pierre Poilievre, on August 23rd in brazen defiance of its year-old ban on posting Canadian news.
MediaPolicy commented previously on the selectivity of Meta’s news blackout on its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
Meta’s Canadian news ban is easily evaded, and apparently not policed by the company, through uploads of news story screen shots and modified hyperlinks.
In the high profile case involving Narcity, the news outlet was reinstated to active posting of news articles because its content was rejected for journalism salary subsidies by Revenue Canada due to an insufficient volume of original news-gathering.
Now there’s yet another on ramp to Facebook and Instagram for those wishing to evade the ban: news outlets can pay Meta for a boosted post of their news journalism.
Lauren Watson has the story in the Columbia Journalism Review.
UPDATE: On October 4, 2024, the CRTC asked Meta to explain reports of a selective news blackout, Meta’s response to be filed by October 11th.
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The new centre-right New Zealand government is on track to pass a bill similar to Canada’s Online News Act, Bill C-18. In response, Google is threatening to remove news links from Search.
The bill was tabled two years ago by the ruling Labour Party and opposed by the National Party. But the new government has had a change of heart.
Previous coverage of the issue appears to assume that Meta will also block news.
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