I’ve fallen behind on catching you up on media policy news because I felt compelled to write a series of three posts commenting on the CRTC’s ruling on Canadian content. The last one, the rant I promised, was published this week in Cartt.ca.
While I was ranting, one of the things I let slide was telling you about a new report out of Denmark proposing to refashion its policy design for government aid to news journalism.
The Danes are serious about news subsidies: they spend 540 million krone ($120M CDN) every year on private media in nation of six million people (Canada spends about $200 million in country of 42 million).
According to the Reuters Oxford Digital News Report, Denmark’s “public trust in media” score is 56% and it ranks sixth out of 180 in the Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index at 86.93. By comparison, Canada’s trust score is 39% with a press freedom index of 78.5, 21st in the world.
The Danes also have something we don’t: a 2018 Media Liability law that established an independent national press council and conferred the force of law on editorial independence from ownership.
The Danish subsidy report was commissioned by government and written by a committee led by Rasmus Nielsen, the former chief of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Despite the ocean separating us, there are strong parallels between the Danish system of news subsidy and Canada’s jigsaw of federal programs: we have the QCJO subsidy of journalist salaries, the Local Journalism Initiative that funds 700 full time reporters in under-serviced regions across the country, and the Canadian Periodical Fund which supports editorial expenditures by community weeklies.
The untranslated 144-page Danish report covers a lot of ground, but Nielsen’s own English language summary of it captures the essence: a weighted emphasis on supporting news outlets that are regional, local or “independent” (owners of single-titles) rather than mere incumbency as a news organization.
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The Senate deliberations of Senatrice Julie Miville-Dechêne’s Bill S-209, that would require age verification for online pornography is on hold until February while the Senate justice committee deals with other matters.
During the pause, the Canadian Press reports that Meta has joined the fray by lobbying the federal Liberals to step in with their own bill that would shift the age verification responsibility from pornography websites and social media platforms to app stores.
Meta obviously doesn’t run an App Store, as do Google and Apple, and the latter two Big Tech companies are cheesed about what Meta is up to.
Meanwhile, Canadian children continue to be exposed to online pornography featuring choking and slapping. The CP story is well done and informative.
Meta is having a good month of course. It won the anti-trust trial brought by the US Justice Department that claimed Meta was running a monopoly in personal social networking. In the interim five year period between filing and judgment, TikTok greatly improved its market share.
Matt Stoller has a very good analysis of the lawsuit, the trial, the judge, and why he thinks Big Tech will never be slowed down by anti-trust litigation: he says it takes public policy and legislatures to change things.
A test of his theory may happen soon: the trial judge in the Google Ad Tech case will be handing down her decision on whether to dismantle that illegal monopoly in the new year.
Meanwhile a consortium of US school boards just filed a new lawsuit against Meta and several other Tech companies.
Their allegation against Meta in particular is that company documents reveal CEO Mark Zuckerberg squelched evidence of harm to teenage girls while Meta designed lax safety features, including ineffective measures to expel sex traffickers from the platform. Of course, the allegations must be proven in court, probably over several years.
This does raise the question of whether Americans (and Canadians) should count on US courts to adjudicate Big Tech’s excesses by giving full due process and demanding conclusive evidence of the allegations, or whether governments should just cut to the chase, stop litigating whether the harms to kids persist, and legislate a solution.
The National Film Board’s website is recommending “Ghosts of the Sea,” a riveting documentary about the ill-fated Norwegian father-and-son sailors, Peter and Thomas Tangvald.
The filmmaker is Thomas’ half sister Virginia, who settled in her mother’s hometown of Montreal. The father Peter was married seven times and two of his wives died at sea.
I’ll say this: the film offers a visceral take on “intergenerational trauma.”
I think you will enjoy the one hour and 37 minute film and I absolutely guarantee you’ll have strong opinions afterwards.
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You won’t be sorry you spent five minutes with it. It’s a compelling read. Stursberg is one of the few commentators who puts as much emphasis on CBC’s entertainment programming as he does the news service.
Stursberg sets a simple performance bar for the CBC: is it good television? And then he offers a hypothetical new season(s) of great shows that could meet that standard and bring a real buzz to the CBC’s CanCon offerings, while satisfying our Canadian cultural cravings.
The CBC just got its $150 million booster shot in the federal budget. That money fulfilled an election promise. The 11% increase to the $1.4 billion Parliamentary grant (70% of CBC’s overall $2 billion revenue) won’t necessarily go into a bigger budget for entertainment programming: the Five Year Plan prioritizes local and regional news reporting. But it does give the public broadcaster more options.
The CBC’s new money was the Carney government’s sole increase to cultural funding in this week’s budget. Culture and Identity minister Steven Guilbeault told the Globe and Mail that the public broadcaster had also been spared from the “15% savings” spending review announced by the government several months ago.
On the other hand, the budget document includes projected cuts to Canadian Heritage expenditures which might be either civil servant salaries or “recalibrated” program spending. Guilbeault pointed out to the Globe that the $93 million savings figure was 5%, not 15% of expenditures.
The numbers on recalibrated programs might include the scheduled reduction of the federal labour tax credit from 35% to 25% of journalist salaries on January 1, 2027. As well, Guilbeault told the Globe the government was exploring a merger of the Canada Media Fund, Telefilm and the National Film Board.
The budget document included a brief note that changes are in the works for the Canadian Periodical Fund that subsidizes weeklies and magazines (the government only told me that the details would be communicated at a later date).
The status quo on cultural funding shouldn’t be surprising, given other priorities in 2025.
Still, TV and radio news outlets were miffed that the government didn’t end its arbitrary exclusion of broadcasting companies from accessing federal aid for their online news websites that —-but for the television and radio properties operated by their parent companies—- would be eligible for the $75 million pool of journalist salary subsidy available to all online news outlets.
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There’s a useful explainer posted in Paula Clark’s Substack about the Blacklock’s Reporter litigation with the federal government over Parks Canada’s sharing of a paywall password obtained from an individual subscription, giving unlimited access to every article in the Reporter’s database.
The watchdog news website was in court last month, appealing a controversial trial ruling in favour of the government which appeared to bless the government’s actions and give short shrift to copyright protection.
Among the many legal frailties of the trial judge’s decision is that it appears to expand the public right of “fair use” sharing of quotations or text snippets to authorize redistribution of full articles and, thanks to the password sharing, Blacklock’s entire news archive.
It’s a legally complicated appeal, which is why’s Clark’s piece is helpful.
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As you know, in 2023 Meta responded to Parliament passing the Online News Act by banning most news content from Facebook and Instagram in Canada (a news outlet can pay Meta to post content as an advertisement).
The ban hit the many Canadian news outlets relying heavily upon Meta platforms for content distribution. While the news blackout probably impacted free sites harder, paywalled sites were affected too.
The marketing director at Le Devoir is claiming a measurable success in making up for the lost distribution by working a lot harder at its direct engagement with readers, especially demonstrating the value of content to new subscribers.
Meta hasn’t entirely given up on Canadian news journalism of course. Just last week The Hub published a well argued commentary advocating against the federal government pursuing a digital sovereignty strategy. Meta sponsored the article.
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The Australian government has moved the yardsticks on implementing something like Canada’s Online Streaming Act for Netflix and the other foreign video streamers, a move it has been mulling over since early 2023.
The legislation hasn’t been tabled with details yet, but the announcement suggests the streamers will have to spend 7.5% of their Australian revenues on local entertainment programming. Australian-owned television companies are already required to meet spending quotas for local content and they see the new law as a measure to “level the playing field.”
The news coverage of the announcement is unclear as to the impact of the legislation, as Netflix already invests in video production shot in Australia. It may depend upon the definition of local Australian content.
Significantly for Canadian observers, Australia is not proposing that the foreign streamers make financial contributions to Australian programming through contributions to third party production funds.
A report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation speculates on whether the announcement will provoke a reaction from the Trump administration.
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If you have the twenty minutes, I recommend Natalia Antelava’s incendiary interview of Google’s Richard Gingras in Coda, just for sheer entertainment if not enlightenment. Gingras is Google’s former VP of News and is currently the board chair of Canada’s Village Media.
Antelava goes after Gingras for some of Google’s controversial decisions in foreign autocracies, like agreeing to Vladimir Putin’s demand to spike a voting app set up for the Russian 2021 elections by the dissident, Alexei Navalny, who later died, possibly poisoned, in a Putin prison.
However on the main interview topic of the power asymmetry between Google and the news industry, Gingras sticks to his story that Google’s relationship with publishers is collaborative, not exploitive, which requires him to engage in some grimace-inducing denialism about Google’s abuse of market power over news outlets in Search and digital advertising, both of which have been ruled illegal monopolies by US courts.
Another tidbit: Gingras claims that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was embarrassed by the now famous line-up of tech CEOs attending the Trump inauguration and suggests the photo op was “cleverly staged” by the White House.
“That’s the last photo Sundar ever wanted taken,” says Gingras. “We don’t support this administration.”
Associated Press photo of Tech CEOs Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai and Musk.
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Last fall, when the CBC seemed destined to fall at the hands of an incoming Conservative government, MediaPolicy published a numberofposts on “what is to be done” if the CBC received a stay of execution.
One post (MediaPolicy’s most popular ever) was a guest column from ex-CBC VP Richard Stursberg welcoming the new CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard with some advice for a re-engineered public broadcaster.
One federal election later and we are now getting a clearer picture of what a rethought CBC might look like.
This week Bouchard disclosed an advance copy of her five year plan to Canadian Press which published reports in English and French. The latter story is more in-depth, based on an interview with Bouchard.
Combing through the obligatory recitals for something new, Bouchard’s vision has some promising ideas.
The Plan document makes the familiar aspirational points about connecting Canadians with each other and fostering dialogue.
More concretely, her Plan commits to increasing CBC’s presence in local communities, “aiming to fund additional overage and hire sufficient journalists to cover 15-20 communities with a population greater than 50,000, that currently have no or little local CBC/Radio-Canada presence.”
Keeping that promise no doubt depends on the Carney government following through on its election promise for $150 million in additional funding.
Then there is the CBC’s platform problem. There are too many of them. But the CBC needs to be on them if it’s going to reach the nation’s audience —-multi regional, multi generational, multi lingual and so on. That’s a resource challenge for Bouchard.
Bouchard says CBC has to follow that national audience, youth in particular on digital platforms. The public broadcaster’s analog-to-digital transformation has been underway for years now —over time, television and radio funding has been cannibalized to support digital, especially the CBC News website. Its YouTube audience has grown quickly and TikTok is a must-do opportunity. Bouchard says the logic of the transition necessarily means cutting costs on other platforms, “stopping or transforming certain activities,” though she doesn’t say where or how much.
As for the CBC’s uneasy relationship with private sector media, always frayed because of CBC’s competition for advertising dollars on television and digital, Bouchard wants to focus on where the CBC can collaborate with local media and independent journalists, but also with the content creators and influencers who are popular with youth.
Bouchard also says the CBC should be “a pollinator, a helper to the [journalism] industry.” She told CP that “when we have services to share or offer, we should offer them on terms that are affordable for these media outlets. We have premises, we have space. We can consider facilitating access to [our] assets at zero cost or at a reduced cost that promotes budgetary balance for our colleagues.”
Finally, she grabs hold of the elephant’s leash: the widespread perception that the CBC isn’t ideologically ecumenical in its editorial curation; that it’s insufficiently conservative by content and temperament.
There will be no pleasing the CBC’s harshest critics, but Bouchard says the CBC wants to make a big effort to win over those who don’t tune in or else “undervalue” (what a euphemism!) the public broadcaster’s content. A step in the right direction is devoting more resources to the West and in rural Canada.
But that doesn’t just require money, it requires a migration of corporate culture.
The five-year Plan is officially unveiled on October 28th.
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There is no sign of the federal government retabling its online harms bill in Parliament. It died on the order table at the last election.
Instead, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s has revived her Bill S-209 which zeroes in on harmful pornography being made available to kids. The debate rages in the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs committee and MediaPolicy reported on it this week.
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The much-slagged Online News Act Bill C-18 took another hit this week from The Hub publisher Rudyard Griffithswho told the Parliamentary Heritage Committee that C-18 protects Google from potential copyright lawsuits for ingesting and repurposing Canadian news content in its AI tools, Overview and Mode, embedded in its search engine.
The bill, Griffiths told MPs, “requires all news organizations [accepting money under C-18] must make all of their content available to Google. If you are a recipient of funding through the Online News Act, you are unable to prevent Google from scraping behind your paywall, scraping subscriber-only content to serve up in their [large language model]”
Sections 2and 26 of the Act grant a copyright waiver for news content that Google “makes available” on Search by “ranking and indexing” so long as Google reaches a compensation agreement with news publishers.
The Conservatives’ slagger-in-chief of the Online News Act, MP Rachel Thomas, jumped on Griffiths’ claim and posed it as rhetorical question to subsequent witnesses appearing before the Heritage’s committee that is investigating the impact of AI on Canadian media and cultural industries.
As Canadian news outlets have yet to sue Google for ingesting their news content and repurposing it in Overview and Mode, this remains a hypothetical issue for now. If it got before a judge, the court would have to decide if “ranking and indexing” is what an AI tool does, as opposed to ingesting, summarizing and rewriting from multiple sources. The fact that Mode and Overview are embedded in Search, as opposed to a separate AI app, could be important too.
This idea that that Google might have snagged a windfall immunity from copyright challenges to its content-scraping for AI tools arose previously when Google struck its agreement in June 2024 with the Canadian Journalism Collective for the distribution of Google’s $100 million compensation for Canadian news content, a year after the Overview prototype was launched in the United States.
Taking its cue from section 26 of the Act, Google inserted a clause into its agreement with CJC:
7(h) The Collective will not initiate or participate in, and will include a similar requirement of the Members in the Members Agreement, from initiating or participating in, (i) any bargaining process or (ii) proceeding before the Commission, a mediator, an arbitration panel, or a court of competent jurisdiction, in each case related to (A) any bargaining process in connection with Google, any of its Affiliates, or any Intermediaries pursuant to the Act or the Regulations, or (B) infringement of copyright in relation to making available news content of Members by Intermediaries in the manner permitted by the Act. The Collective will enforce such provision in the Members Agreements to the fullest extent and in a timely manner.
When the Google-CJC agreement was submitted to the CRTC for approval, the Commission appeared to say that the copyright waiver didn’t apply to AI tools so there was no need for action “at this time”:
Some interveners, including the CP group, Village Media, The Logic, and Unifor, raised issues with clause 7(h) in the Agreement, which forbids news businesses from pursuing Google for “infringement of copyright in relation to making available news content of Members by Intermediaries in the manner permitted by the Act.” The interventions raised concerns that this would limit their ability to enforce their copyright against Google for uses beyond making news content available on Google Search. In particular, interveners were concerned about potential use on DNIs other than Google Search, or used to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Google argues that the provision is drafted specifically to reflect the use considered under the Act, namely the making available of news content on the DNI covered by the Agreement.
Section 26 of the Act protects an operator from copyright liability in certain circumstances where its DNI makes news content available. Clause 7(h) of the Agreement extends a similar protection to Google in respect of the making available by Google Search of the news content of news businesses in the collective. (Original Footnote: Clause 7(h) refers to news content made available by “Intermediaries” of Google. Under the Agreement “Intermediaries” is defined as DNIs operated by Google to which the Act applies, which is only Google Search). To the extent that this clause reflects protections from liability set out in the Act, the Commission notes that there is no need for any further action at this time. As a result, the Commission makes no order with respect to clause 7(h) of the Agreement.
So far there’s no copyright lawsuit, so there’s no issue. That might change.
While you’re thinking about news organizations and AI scraping, you might find interesting copyright expert Hugh Stephens’ latest post about the debate that is unfolding at the Heritage committee.
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There is a good analysis piece by Gretel Kahn that reviews the distribution of the $100 million Bill C-18 Google payments to Canadian news outlets and the Meta ban on Canadian news.
The criticisms from various publishers and commentators on where the Google money landed are fairly predictable. Mainstream media, especially the US-controlled Postmedia chain, come in for a bashing and the most vivid quote comes from Christopher Curtis, the online publisher of local news outlet The Rover, who opines that “this whole thing has been a huge gift for foreign-owned legacy media and a spit in the face of small outlets like ours and Indigenous-owned outlets.”
Got it.
The fresh stuff that Kahn digs out is how news outlets are adapting to the Meta ban on Canadian news. One publisher points out that Meta’ s traffic referrals to news sites were falling well before Mark Zuckerberg responded to the Online News Act Bill C-18 by banishing most news organizations from his platform.
Many of these publishers are figuring out work arounds on Meta applications, buying Facebook ads to promote their hyperlinked news or posting unlinked news items on Instagram. Others are leaning more heavily on YouTube and TikTok distribution. As one publisher comments in the story, it’s “better not to build on rented land,” a nod to heavier reliance on their own e-mail and subscription distribution instead of Search and Social platforms.
But all of that may be yesterday’s problem. The new disruptors of journalism are the Internet-scraping AI companies, including the same Big Tech platforms that make news available through hyperlinked news snippets.
Canada’s Online News Act C-18 doesn’t regulate AI ingestion of Canadian news content. So far, the AI companies have got away with being the dog that eats your book, barfs it, and claims the ingestion was okay because it’s no longer a book.
If the Liberal government has any concern about that, or any interest in amending copyright law to get at the problem more quickly, it has yet to show such interest.
In the meantime, the referrals of audience traffic from AI-enhanced search engines to news sites are way down. Yet a news report suggests that the few AI companies deigning to make licensing agreements with a handful of news agencies are sending more traffic to these chosen outlets. In these early days, the AI horizon facing news organizations appears to range from catastrophic to not-so-catastrophic scenarios and the question of which news sites get licensing deals may be determinative. If this sounds like the problem of oligopoly in content distribution that lead to Bill C-18, it should.
Federal AI Minister Evan Solomon just announced the advisory panel for his federal AI Strategy Task Force. The list of strategic priorities does not include news media. The panel is dominated by experts on AI development and economic opportunities. The only member appointed to the 23-person panel who is focussed on the downside harms to the media ecosystem is McGill University’s Taylor Owen.
Whatever is coming from AI, so far the Liberal government does not seem interested in riding to the rescue of the media or creative industries. The Parliamentary Heritage committee is scheduling hearings beginning October 6th and 8th that may put the issue into the public policy spotlight.
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The Bari Weiss deal is done now. The iconoclastic publisher of The Free Press has sold her publication to the newly consolidated Paramount, owned by David Ellison.
Weiss becomes the editor-in-chief of CBS News and, given her MAGA affinities, the editorial curation of the mainstream broadcaster could change.
Paramount joins Fox, Warner Brothers Discovery (CNN, TBS), Disney (ABC, ESPN) and Comcast (NBC) as a media superpower in both news and sports & entertainment. But Ellison has a special edge and the potential to dominate global media to the extent that he works in cooperation with his father Larry Ellison, the second richest man in the world. Ellison pater is expected to become a significant minority owner of the US-operations of TikTok once that deal with Chinese-owned ByteDance is consummated.
The Washington Post has a good story on the Ellisons, their businesses, and their relationships with the White House.
And if you want to listen to an interview full of unexpected personal insights, I recommend the engrossing New York Timespodcast interview of the actor, artist and activist Sean Penn. The interview was recorded in two parts, divided chronologically by the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
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Last week Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault showed up at the House of Commons’ heritage committee for his root canal.
The Conservatives were on him immediately about former CBC host Travis Dhanraj’s charges that the public broadcaster violated the Human Rights Act by treating him as a token “brown guy.” MP Rachel Thomas cited CBC’s “toxic environment” as a fact.
Guilbeault appeared to take Dhanraj’s allegations at face value, expressing “regret” at “what happened to him” but distanced himself from the CBC’s handling of the dispute.
MediaPolicy has covered the story here, here and here but I was waiting for more details on Dhanraj’s claims against unnamed colleagues in CBC’s Ottawa bureau and how CBC management handled the whole situation.
Now Dhanraj has given a more fulsome version of his story on episode one of his new podcast, Can’t Be Censored, produced with former CP24 reporter Karman Wong.
The episode is over an hour long and it’s pretty clear that without naming David Cochrane, the host of CBC’s parliamentary show Power and Politics, that is who Dhanraj is identifying as his nemesis (Cochrane has declined comment). Dhanraj says that “three or four” journalists are running the Ottawa bureau’s news coverage as their own club.
Dhanraj’s narrative is that CBC headhunted him, first as a national reporter and then as the host of Canada Tonight, a current affairs show. Dhanraj tried to make the show edgy and popular by inviting controversial guests. They included former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose appearance CBC management vetoed on the grounds that Carlson is a white nationalist, although Dhanraj says in the podcast he doesn’t agree with that description.
What got him into hotter water was inviting Conservative Party deputy leader Melissa Lantsman onto his show while the Conservatives were boycotting Cochrane’s hot seat on Power & Politics. As it turns out, CBC management already had an internal protocol that forbade the Conservatives end-running Cochrane in favour of a preferred host. Dhanraj tried to convince his boss that it was good journalism and better for the CBC’s reputation as a big tent public broadcaster to get the Conservatives onto any CBC show at all. He even quoted the Broadcasting Act. His boss didn’t buy it.
There’s more in the podcast episode on other friction points between Dhanraj and the Corp. Assuming he has offered his best arguments, it’s hard to see his allegation of racist tokenism as anything other than his editorial gloss. Rather his story comes across as a tale of an ambitious television anchor making a play to upgrade a lesser show into a bigger one, some colleagues resenting that, and CBC not accommodating it.
If David Cayley’s new book critiquing the CBC had gone to press a little later, I am sure he would have devoted a chapter to Dhanraj. Earlier this week, MediaPolicy posted a review of Cayley’s book.
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Bob Iger is writing his own history, day by day.
Iger is the Disney CEO responsible for suspendingLive! host Jimmy Kimmel for his mockery of the US President’s odd reply to a journalist’s question about grieving Charlie Kirk’s death. Then the viewer and political backlash hit Disney. Iger turned Kimmel’s “indefinite” suspension into a one week cancellation.
US media commentator Evan Shapiro has a LinkedIn post breaking down the events leading up to Iger’s actions against Kimmel.
Bottom line: the threat by Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr to strip Disney’s ABC affiliate stations of their broadcasting licenses was an idle one. Up until now media moguls have blinked because they won’t play the long game against the Trump administration’s campaign to tame mainstream media.
Kimmel’s show is back on the ABC network, but initially two major station affiliates refused to air it. One of them is a big Trump supporter. The other needs the FCC to approve a merger.
That lasted three days. Yesterday the two affiliates that include 56 stations across the US reversed course and agreed to resume airing the show.
It ain’t over. Trump replied on Truth Social, “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do.”
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It’s World News Day tomorrow which is a reminder from major newsrooms around the liberal democratic globe that you’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Pairing up with that, my alma mater Unifor —-which represents journalists and media workers across the country—- has launched a middle brow version of the same, a public service campaign branded CheckFactHere.
Video and print ads created by Unifor will appear in Canadian media who are donating the inventory.
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A few sunny weeks ago MediaPolicy posted a dissent from a Canadian Press story concluding that PM Mark Carney was considering repeal of the government’s Online News Act C-18 and its $100 million tithe on Google that compensates Canadian newsrooms for their stories appearing on Search. I didn’t think that Carney’s mangled response to a Kelowna journalist’s question about C-18 actually said that.
It took some time to pin down the government for a clarification, but Politico.com asked Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault for comment and his press secretary replied “the federal government has no intention of repealing either of the acts,” referencing both C-18 and the Online Streaming Act C-11.
Then the National Poststory added that Guilbeault’s office hedged a bit, saying “for us, currently, the intention is not to repeal those acts… But I can’t pretend to know the end result of the negotiations with the United States” which are “very much” the main factor that will determine the future of both acts.
Somebody needs to put this question to Carney.
While we are talking about C-18, when the Canadian Journalism Collective announced the distribution of the $100 million in August, Media Policy posted that the conservative news outlet Western Standard was getting a $68,000 cheque. What I didn’t mention is that I e-mailed publisher Derek Fildebrandt asking him to confirm that he wasn’t also receiving the federal government’s “QCJO” journalist subsidy. His publication was part of a coterie of anti-subsidy news outlets who published a public oath they would never take that kind of money. Fildebrandt didn’t reply to my e-mail.
Now we know why. He’s taking the money. In an email to his subscribers, Fildebrandt said he couldn’t compete without the federal cash and ——I am reading between his lines here— without Pierre Poilievre in power those subsidies will continue to flow to his competitors.
Fildebrandt’s books aren’t public, so it’s also possible he couldn’t remain solvent without federal and Google money. In any event, my condolences, climbing down from high moral ground is never fun. Just ask Mark Carney.
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The former producer of CBC’s radio show Ideas has a new book that asks and answers a question too often ignored: what is a public broadcaster and why isn’t the CBC behaving like one?
David Cayley’s “The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And how to get it back)” is prosaically titled but elegantly written. Cayley loves ideas of course and his argument is grounded in a series of cerebral set pieces that situate his message that CBC News is too much the storyteller and too little the convenor of open-minded dialogue.
If theories of media communications and linguistics are your thing, Cayley explores and applies the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Noam Chomsky, The Frankfurt School and a host of other thinkers you may never heard of. If you have a taste for this (I do) or consider yourself a left libertarian, there’s lots to eat. Otherwise, you may need to be patient with Cayley.
Each of his excursions into theory provide the context for his core message, which goes something like this:
For decades now, the CBC has strayed from its Parliamentary mandate, for which it is provided with big subsidies, to be the non-judgmental convenor of public debate instead of just another corps of journalists holding inflated ideas of their clairvoyant understanding of Canadians. The CBC suffers from cultural orthodoxy —let’s call it an overweening confidence in the destiny of liberal progressivism— and the newsroom’s belief that it has a special talent for divining truth and misinformation.
It’s a heck of an indictment and the prosecutor makes his case, beginning with Exhibit A: CBC’s coverage of the Covid pandemic and the three-week occupation of downtown Ottawa by the so-called Freedom Convoy, whose participants “manifested a large and vibrant new public,” according to Cayley.
In his view, the federal government, echoed in its messaging by mainstream media and the CBC, treated the participants in this “generally moderate Freedom Convoy” as enemies of the state and this demonstrates the dangerous polarization of the Canadian polity and the pressing need for more civic dialogue in this country. Cayley just published therelevant bookexcerpts in the National Post. On the other hand, the CBC Ombud’s judgment is here.
If you choke a bit on that lionization of the Freedom Convoy, you may be recalling that it was riddled with avowed insurrectionists and defiers of public health directives enacted by a democratically elected government in the name of reducing critical infections that threatened to kill untold thousands and overwhelm hospital emergency rooms. The incipient threat of violence associated with clearing the occupation was never far away.
Cayley is a skeptic of anything described as a consensus by the medical and science establishments and he reminds us of this when he lampoons the worldwide public health response to Covid as “comprised of speculative computer models whose probative value lies just north of tea leaves and bird entrails.”
He argues that Convoy participants were vindicated in their opposition to Covid vaccine mandates by later findings that vaccines became less effective over time in preventing the spread of the disease. Meanwhile the CBC and other media organizations disparaged the occupiers’ dissent as “misinformation,” unworthy of serious news reporting.
In this review I am not going to litigate this public health issue, or the openness of media coverage, to a conclusion. But suffice it to say it’s a contentious point on which to rest his argument that the CBC newsroom is swaddled in its own filter bubble.
How the CBC became its own biggest fan, says Cayley, can be traced back to its early departure from a more neutral role in public dialogue and its quest for mojo as an edgy news organization in television shows like the investigative journalism of This Hour Has Seven Days. Despite the fact that Seven Days, which ran only two seasons from 1964 to 1966, was cancelled by CBC management —guaranteeing its legendary status as Canada’s media iteration of the Avro Arrow fighter jet— its strong editorial voice and visually manipulative narrative style exemplifies for Cayley what’s always been wrong about CBC’s news journalism.
Cayley connects the immense popularity of Seven Days with a “populism” that seats media gatekeepers into the role of the audience’s surrogate, as its watchdog over the powerful, its advocate for justice, or (using just one more metaphor) the high priests of a media church sermonizing the congregation, vindicated in their righteousness so long as attendance remains high.
What suffers when the CBC insists on being the audience’s surrogate, he says, is the neglect of its core Parliamentary mandate, articulated by the first two words in its mission “to inform, enlighten and entertain.”
Once upon a time, the old guard in the early CBC were more inclined towards “adult education” and news you can use, rather than theatrical news reporting and laying claim to Canada’s voice. Cayley wants the CBC to get back to that “inform and enlighten.”
Cayley never makes it clear if he wants to blow up CBC’s editorial identity as a news reporting organization entirely or just re-set the newsroom mindset to something better aligned with “inform and enlighten.” He cautions that he is not advocating for a University of CBC.
Mostly, he critiques the CBC’s workplace culture as suffering from a baked-in orthodoxy of thought. He can be quite funny writing about this: his insider account of CBC management’s top-down reset of its corporate culture is relatable to anyone who has ever endured the same. His cheeky disparagement of Jian Ghomeshi’s popular radio show Q may leave a smile on your face or okay boomer on your lips.
But the prosecutor Cayley gets himself into trouble when he puts forward Exhibit B which purports to quantify the pervasive reach of the orthodoxy inside the newsroom.
He begins by citing a Léger poll commissioned by the Macdonald Laurier Institute that self-identified leftists outnumber conservatives in Canadian universities by a ratio of nine to one and that this is killing dissent and fostering self-censorship among the minority. From this poll he links to the CBC’s culture, claiming “the case is the same at the CBC, as I have already shown.”
Well no, he doesn’t show that at all.
To rebut, let me first note that the Léger poll was non-randomized and relied on voluntary participation. It collected lopsided data culled mostly from faculty in the humanities and social sciences —prolix socialists, all— and under participation from STEM departments.
More to the point, where’s the proof that CBC staff are nine-to-one lefties versus righties? Cayley points to three journalists (Exhibit C), one of whom is neither a journalist nor works for CBC but once wrote an analysis of CBC’s news coverage of Saskatchewan’s transgender laws.
He notes the troubling story of a veteran CBC Winnipeg reporter Marianne Klowak who quit in disgust at a management kibosh on her reporting that gave voice to vaccine dissenters.
He cites the departure of CBC Toronto news producer Tara Henley who also quit in disgust, issuing a public indictment of the “cognitive dissonance” created by the CBC newsroom’s groupthink.
Two journalists (make it three including Cayley) out of 3,000 is not enough evidence to support his claim, but to be fair it would be difficult to rely on anything but anecdotal evidence without the kind of newsroom polling that is impossible to provide.
Still, Cayley once lived in the belly of the beast and is likely on to something. Common sense tells you that a newsroom where most reporters live in three big cities may well list to the leftish values of urban progressivism.
On the other hand, my own experience of a lifetime representing reporters and journalists —although never at the CBC — convinces me that the left-right thing is for the opinion pages and eclipsed by the dominant spirit in all newsrooms: a Watchdog ideology that posits white-knight journalists at the service of the public by “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” Nevertheless, Cayley views the CBC’s self-coronation as public champion as the problem that needs replacement by a more passive role as the convenor of civic dialogue, the aforementioned “inform and enlighten.”
His intriguing idea is there for your consideration. But in Exhibit D, the prosecuting Cayley again goes too far when he says that “what is more serious is the way the CBC has lost the country’s attention”.
I beg your pardon, it has not. CBC radio is a market leader across the country. Its online news website earns top ratings, vying each year with CTV for the most consumed or most trusted online source. Even CBC’s much maligned television ratings —which lag behind CTV and Global— are weighted down by flagging audiences for CBC’s entertainment programming which must compete head-on during prime time against American hit shows on private Canadian networks and also a little streamer named Netflix.
Cayley’s overstatements don’t detract from his deepest conviction: that Canada is becoming increasingly polarized, even a “fatally divided polity,” and a public broadcaster needs to engage the participation of all. A more open-minded programming culture of inquiry and intellectual curiosity may be the tonic. More reflection, fewer snap judgments.
Most book-length critiquesof CBC tend to focus on news programming rather than television drama, which is too bad (Richard Stursberg being a notable exception). In fact, Chris Waddell and the late David Taras go so far as to recommend jettisoning entertainment programming altogether and saying uncle to Netflix.
Cayley discusses entertainment programming briefly, mostly in the context of the unstoppable tide of American shows that sets the cultural tone for Canadian content.
He calls upon the CBC to rely less on knock-off genres of television drama, set in classic Canadian landscapes, and more on historical and contemporary stories of Canadian self-discovery. Amen to that, but it’s not clear to me that the CBC isn’t already doing this with the limited production budgets that it has. When it wants to step up its game for bigger audiences, it makes co-venture deals with Netflix.
Finally, Cayley says almost nothing about Radio-Canada, an understandable limitation on the scope of his essay. The application of his critique and his solution, the question and answer about the CBC’s public broadcasting mission, might provoke more insights if anyone in Québec were to take up and explore his views.
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French journalist unions have won a share of the licensing fees negotiated by publishers with AI companies whom are paying for the news content they scrape off the Internet, according to a report in Nieman Lab.
If not for the French: always the first to fight for content creators. Several years ago, journalist unions got their members a share of the “Google money” paid out in Europe under its news licensing framework in the last few years. Le Monde reporters earn an additional 275 euros per year.
Now that there is a new content licensing deal between Le Monde and OpenAI reporters get 25% of the cash. No reports on how much that is.
By his own description, the judge exercised occupational “humility” by going easy on Google. The most significant thing he had to say, much cheered by Google, was that whatever skullduggery allowed Google to solidify its dominant market position over Search, the competition for the AI market is a horse race.
The judge handed out consolation prizes by requiring some limited data sharing with Google’s search competitors, a remedy disparaged by the CEO of Duck Duck Go as “a nothing burger.”
Also, the judge ruled that Google’s multi-billion dollar agreements with Samsung and Apple for making Google the default search app on their phones can continue. Those commercial agreements were significant in the judge’s earlier finding that Google’s monopoly was illegal.
On the other hand, Google is looking a gift horse in the mouth and will appeal both the limited remedy and the original finding of monopoly.
The Big Tech giant may have escaped the worst consequences of the Search monopoly-ruling but it has other concerns. A US Justice Department anti-trust lawsuit against its domination of digital advertising is well underway and yesterday European Union regulators fined Google nearly three billion euros for the same market domination. The regulator’s fine was immediately entangled by US-EU trade tensions and could be delayed.
Meanwhile Google’s share price bumped 8%, so at least someone is happy.
It’s an elaboration on what it means to defend “digital sovereignty,” a new catchphrase describing a public policy gamut stretching from communications infrastructure to software and the regulation of online content. Or as one Comment column in the Globe and Mail put it recently, more Canadian autonomy over “data, code and compute.”
The basic idea is to recognize the new geopolitical environment in which digital technology is increasingly controlled by states, namely the United States, and becomes more than just a regulatory issue but a matter of economic self sufficiency and political security.
An executive summary of the new Open Letter is here:
I made a needed correction to last week’s MediaPolicy’s report that independent Canadian broadcaster Wildbrain had abandoned its CRTC licenses and pulled its suite of family channels from cable TV.
I reported that Wildbrain is selling out to American interests, which its spokesperson says it isn’t, rather it is taking advantage of its new status as a digital-only broadcaster by removing Canadian ownership requirements from its public share structure.
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I am enjoying a left-wing American Substack I just discovered, The Argument.
It published a poll on political attitudes that was interesting but I am not inclined to just map its findings over to the Canadian experience.
But still, I was left agape by the poll finding that 40% of Kamala Harris voters would consider cutting off contact with a family member “for opposing political views.” Only 11% of Trump voters would do that.
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The ka-ching is the responsibility of the Google-appointed gatekeeper, the Canadian Journalism Collective, to decide who gets what.
The conservative website The Hub gets $22,248 and is donating it to the March of Dimes charity. The Western Standard, operated by former Wildrose Party MLA Derek Fildebrandt, is down for $68,377. Rebel News didn’t apply.
None of that is surprising. The Hub and the Western Standard were previously vetted by the Canada Revenue Agency as Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations, becoming eligible for federal news subsidies or reader tax credits (but not necessarilycollecting them). Rebel Newswas not.
An unusual outcome of the Canadian Journalism Collective’s distribution was that the CJC approved the licensing cash for the current affairs website The Conversation (sub nom the Academic Journalism Society) after the CRA rejected it as ineligible for the QCJO subsidy program. The CRA’s rejection (on the recommendation of its independent advisory panel) was upheld by the Federal Court of Appeal in 2024.
The difference in result appears to be how the CJC is interpreting what it means to produce “original news.” That’s a requirement under both the CRA guidelines for QCJO and the Online News Act regulation 2023-276 for Google news payments.
But the difference seems to be that CRA guidelines explicitly require first-hand news gathering “such as independent research, interviews, and fieldwork. For example, a news article orreport about an event would be original if it is written or reported by a journalist and is based on first-hand knowledge that journalist gained by conducting independent research, attending or witnessing the event, or interviewing people who organized, attended, or witnessed the event.”
The CJC guidelines are far less precise. Tersely, “news content should be original, produced on an ongoing basis.”
I did my best to get the Canadian Journalism Collective to explain how it arrived at a different assessment than the Canada Revenue Agency of whether The Conversation is now producing original news with first hand reporting, or if the CJC rules are somehow more forgiving.
All I got was that the CJC’s eligibility criteria was applied and the news content submitted by The Conversation, like all applicant news organizations, will be reviewed each time there is a new cash distribution.
The Conversation’s parent organization, the Academic Journalism Society, has an unusual structure. Its newsroom consists of staff editors who collaborate with university professors who do the writing, based on the academic work of others or their own scholarly writing.
AJS funding comes 80% from participating universities and 20% from readers, philanthropists or government programs. But its financial structure is not an obstacle to qualifying for either QCJO or Google funds. It still comes down to whether the content is original. The QCJO program requires first-hand reporting but it’s unclear if the Google cash distributed by the CJC requires it. In the end I couldn’t get a satisfactory answer.
It’s important to get that answer, in fact it’s vital.
If there is no requirement for first-hand reporting activity, then news organizations are either aggregators of first-hand reporting done by other newsrooms and contribute nothing of their own, or they are opinion websites.
Opinion is cheap to produce and plentiful in supply. Do we need to underwrite opinion writing, or in the case of the Online News Act, devote Parliamentary bandwidth to wresting cash out of the hands of Big Tech?
In a sea of online opinion, commentary and blather, talk is cheap. Meanwhile the far more costly endeavour of news gathering is the value proposition that journalism offers to the public. Looking in the mirror, MediaPolicy.ca isn’t “original news” and deserves no subsidy or special favour.
And there are more good reasons to draw the line between news gathering and opinion.
The Online News Act was opposed by some as an unwarranted state intervention into the ecosystem of online information that Google and social media platforms have provided.
Sure, the monopolistic platforms Google and Meta exploit their market power in content distribution, stiffing news organizations on fair (or any) licensing payments.
But to critics of the Online News Act, this was justified by the overriding public interest in free information, benefiting both liberal democracy and public education.
On the other hand, what the EU, Australia, and Canada did with their legislative intervention on behalf of news organizations was to carve out news journalism from the unregulated Internet as a special case because of the public interest in, well, political and educational information.
As I said, news gathering is the value proposition of journalism.
I could be wrong of course. When Scott White moved on from his role as editor of The Conversation a year ago, he published acri de coeur on LinkedIn. The gist was that the CRA ruling against his news outlet was narrow minded and rooted in legacy thinking.
In an academic article published earlier this year, Nicole Blanchett and her co-writers suggested that “rigid journalism definitions risk excluding hybrid platforms like The Conversation Canada, limiting innovation and diverse voice in public discourse.”
Not to be coy about it, the authors speculated that the troubles encountered by The Conversation should be seen through the lens of legacy media defending its turf:
Answers to these [research] questions were primarily analyzed through boundary work. Boundary work is at play “when the goal is expansion of authority or expertise into domains claimed by other professions or occupations” (Gieryn, 1983, p. 791). Specific to journalism, it includes “expansion” of journalistic practice that can lead to the attempted “expulsion” of outside actors or inside agitators, as a means to protect the professional “autonomy” of journalists (Carlson, 2015, p. 9). As media startups look to attract the same eyeballs as legacy organizations, “efforts to restrict or extend access to technologies, reporting resources, or press credentials are all acts of boundary work that are simultaneously material and discursive in nature. As such, talk about journalism cannot be isolated from practice and context” (Carlson & Lewis, 2019, p. 132).
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The Public Policy Forum has followed up its February report “The Lost Estate” on the state of local news with a study of news poverty at election time.
“Uncovered” advocates scaling up a philanthropy-funded news pilot project launched during April’s federal election in select Canadian cities and rural areas.
The harm identified in the Report is the lack of public engagement with federal MP candidates over election issues that have special resonance in the local area, for example fishery issues on either coast.
The report includes vignettes of five local races where news poverty might have been a big problem in April. The most glaring was the news desert of Bonavista in Newfoundland and Labrador, a rural riding won by the Conservatives in a razor-thin judicial recount.
On the other hand, the report finds that Yellowknife NWT was well served during election time by a robust local news ecosystem in an isolated regional hub.
The report echoes what TMU’s Local News Research Project identified some time ago: the worst effects of deteriorating news ecosystem are felt in rural areas but also in neglected suburbs of media-rich cities (Richmond BC and Vaughan ON are two such vignettes in the Uncovered study).
Uncovered recommends more philanthropic fundraising for local reporting in future federal elections.
The message running throughout the Report is the importance of local news as a gateway to civic engagement —-and voter education—- for Canadians that are exhausted by polarizing national and international news and hungry for information about local issues that more directly affect their daily lives.
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The meme of New France’s fall to the English runs throughout the L’Actualité feature story, “What will remain of our national idols?”
Québec’s Culture Minister Mathieu Lacombe enthusiastically reposted thisfeature story in L’Actualitéwritten by Guillaume Bourgault-Côté on Bill 109. That legislation tabled just prior to the summer recess is the CAQ government’s bid to compel foreign streamers to make French language audio and video content more prominent in Quebec.
I’ve written about this issue more than once, I think it’s a political sleeper.
Lacombe’s bill is probably unconstitutional because the plan to make streamers offer a library of French language content as well as giving it prominence on the prime real estate of streamer and SmartTV home pages intrudes on federal jurisdiction over Internet broadcasting in the Online Streaming Act.
Were the CRTC already taking bolder steps to make French language content more easily discovered, his bill could be dismissed as performative politics. But the Commission hasn’t, at least not yet.
The L’Actualité story covers all of this familiar ground. Bourgault-Côté opines that “digital giants are now burying local cultures under tons of American productions. Quebec, supported by Senegal, France, and Switzerland, among others, is leading the resistance… while Ottawa dithers.”
Louise Beaudoin, the former provincial culture minister who wrote the key government report creating the policy foundation for Bill 109, is quoted saying “we absolutely must be as numerous as possible. Otherwise, the Americans will run us over.”
But the good inside baseball stuff comes at the end of the feature.
Bourgault-Côté chronicles the political tension between Lacombe and federal Culture minister Steven Guilbeault over the Carney government’s tip-toed support for Lacombe’s efforts to entrench stronger international legal standards, specific to Internet streaming, in amendments to the 2005 UNESCO convention on cultural diversity.
The energy in that tension is Lacombe’s opportunity to drive Bill 109 into the public eye during an election year in Québec and a minority Parliament in Ottawa.
Lacombe’s CAQ is trailing the Parti Québécois in the polls and language policy is one way to make up that ground.
In Ottawa, the Bloc Québécois may take up the standard. A federal Liberal minority government that owes its incumbency to its voter base in Québec cannot afford to leave too large a gap between a cautious approach to regulating foreign streamers and cultural nationalism.
And then there’s the uncomfortable situation for the new leader of the provincial Liberals, former federal Heritage minister Pablo Rodriguez (the sponsor of Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act). If it comes to a federal-provincial scrap over Bill 109 or Canada’s approach to strengthening the UNESCO convention, whose side is Mr Rodriguez on?
The next UNESCO event is scheduled in Barcelona at the end of September and no doubt Lacombe will try to put the federal Liberals on the spot.
And when Lacombe’s Bill becomes law and his government implements regulations on French language content, there’s the strong possibility of a legal challenge by the foreign streamers. At that point, the federal government will have to decide whether to endorse the streamer argument that a provincial government has no jurisdiction over online broadcasting.
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Here’s a short but interesting read. Harrison Lowman interviews Andrew Coyne in the The Hub.
I think we could designate Coyne as Canada’s best known English-speaking intellectual, thanks to his considerable talent but also his privileged positions in the Globe and Mail editorial pages and CBC’s At Issue television panel.
I’ve long written off Coyne as an irredeemable libertarian (sorry, libertarians) who is only brilliant when I agree with him (which is usually when he’s being pragmatic about domestic policy or commenting on international affairs).
In the interview, Coyne gives us some insights into his thinking about what it means to be Canadian as opposed to North American.
His comments about the Canadian Charter of Rights suggest his free market liberalism is tempered by a pragmatism and respect for collectivist public policy. It takes a true policy nerd to say I’m a fan of constitutionally reasonable limits on freedom.
But when it comes to media and cultural issues, what Coyne is missing or dismissing is an appreciation of the overwhelming, anti-competitive American market power in the Canadian attention economy.
That was why he could never see how the Online News Act was (at least in its original design) a competition remedy to Google and Meta abusing their gatekeeper power to stiff Canadian news outlets on a fair licensing fee for their content.
Same thing with the foreign media-tech juggernaut in video and audio entertainment. Same thing with his support for defunding the CBC.
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The AI Death Star posts that recently appeared in this space raised the question of where the AI giants are going to get reliable information for their products if they put news outlets out of business.
That prompted a reader to remind me about the agricultural aphorism “don’t eat your seed corn.”
Wouldn’t you know it, the Globe and Mail’s Ian McGugan had the same thought in this insightful analysis.
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The latest development in the AI Death Star powering up to blast news journalism is Google’s AI Mode.
AI Mode is the longer form iteration on Google’s AI Overviews that presents brief information summaries in response to user inquiries on the Search platform. AI Mode has been released in the US and UK, but not Canada yet. It’s reported to be able to handle more complex information requests.
What AI Overviews and AI Mode have in common is they greatly reduce click throughs to news publishers’ websites that normally display as an algorithm-driven search response or links that might even be cited in the summary response. That means less eyeballs and less advertising revenue for news outlets. Way less.
That outcome raises the obvious question: if news outlets become AI road kill, who will feed fresh content to AI?
All of this ought to be on Evan Solomon’s mind. The former career journalist is now the federal AI Minister. In a recent interview in Toronto Life, he said “my job is to develop a sovereign AI strategy while asking, ‘How can we make sure it causes more good than harm?”’
Solomon touted the opportunity for Canada to thrive in a job-rich AI sector. A more vigorous follow-up question might have been how he saw that happening.
He didn’t point, but might have, to the recent announcement by Bell Canada and the Toronto-headquartered AI outfit Cohere of a co-venture targeting business and government clients in need of AI tools and the supporting infrastructure.
A Globe and Mail story makes it clear that Cohere is a favoured Canadian company, part of an evolving federal strategy for digital sovereignty.
That includes a $240M allocation from the federal government’s $2 Billion “sovereign compute” program that is aimed at match-making Canadian suppliers with Canadian consumers of AI tools.
Cohere, it might be noted, is being sued in the United States by various news publishers for ingesting copyrighted content without a license or compensation. As a former journalist, Solomon must have connected the public policy dots.
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The plight of the Canadian “musician middle class” —maybe we could just acknowledge it is more accurately described as an artist working class— is the subject of the best thing I have read yet on the topic, Luc Rinaldi’s long feature “The Death of the Middle-Class Musician” that was just published in The Walrus.
There is a street narrative out there that says the music streaming gorilla Spotify is a soul-sucking, musician-impoverishing monster. Might be true, might not.
Rinaldi’s piece is sympathetic to musicians (hands up those who are unsympathetic) and, given the difficulty in obtaining data on musician earnings, provides strong indirect evidence that there is a real threat to Canada sustaining its supply of homegrown music. And that is despite the fact that Canada has a reasonably generous program of public and CRTC-generated subsidies, by international standards.
But Rinaldi also wisely puts his finger on the important thing, namely the supply and demand for music in a sea of global content:
“The carrot that’s being dangled in front of an artist is their dream,” says Kurt Dahl, a Saskatoon-based entertainment lawyer…. “When people’s dreams are in play, they’re often not as rational or reasonable as they might be in the regular business world.”…
“You’re up against everything, from everywhere, all the time,” says Patrick Rogers, chief executive officer of Music Canada, an organization that represents the country’s major labels. “And if you’re willing to take on that challenge, the industry is in a position to help you.”
The challenge for media policy in music streaming is that the Internet-driven fragmentation of media creation and consumption has over rewarded a tiny elite of hit-makers, well beyond what existed pre-Internet. Everyone else lives on scraps.
Or at least that’s the view of media thinker Doug Shapiro, and he’s a smart guy.
His latest blog puts forward his theory on this but i couldn’t get past the paywall ($18 per month, forget it) to read the whole thing. However his earlier and unpaywalled version is available here.
A crude summary of what he’s saying is that the “informational and reputational cascades” of popular content work fabulously well on the Internet.
Roughly translated, he’s saying that algorithms perfectly capture our human tendency to sift through an ocean of content by paying attention to what other people found to be good content (informational) or what we need to consume because its a pleasing experience to connect with other human beings through a common culture (reputational). Maybe a little too perfectly.
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