journalism – MediaPolicy.ca

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Being Galen Weston – California budget cuts – Liberal culture cuts, revisited

April 4, 2026

In case you missed it, last week I posted something I have been needing to get out of my system for a while, a counter-rant against the false labelling of mainstream media (whatever that is) and Canadian journalists as “left-wing.”

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There’s more mainstream media on the way, left wing or not.

The Weston family’s foray into non-profit news journalism, Be Giant, launched April 1st.

The Editor in Chief is veteran journalist Alison Uncles, commanding an initial newsroom complement of ten and a new magnet for freelance pitches.

Uncles describes the editorial mission as solutions-based and innovation-focussed news coverage: the branding is Canada’s potential to “Be Giant.”

The long-form journalism feels best suited to weekend readers and magazine lovers.

You can sign up for their weekend e-mail distribution: the business model is ad-free and subscription-free. In short, it’s 100% billionaire backed.

At first glance, Be Giant’s news genres put it in competition with the Globe & Mail and The Logic, but the solutions based mission means that smaller outlets like The Tyee, The Discourse and The Narwhal are going to face more competition for the best in Canadian freelance journalism.

With more than 20% (i.e. 100%) of its philanthropic funding coming from the Loblaw-owning Westons, the non-profit Be Giant will not be able to issue tax receipts should it start accepting donations from readers or foundations.

One thing seems likely: Be Giant will not lack for investment capital.

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Public financing of news journalism, public or private, does not exist at the federal level in the United States.

At the state level however, five Blue states representing almost a quarter of the national population have significant subsidies for local news. The biggest state (with the least significant subsidies) is California.

Perhaps not for long. Governor Gavin Newsom’s final budget proposal for 2026-27 (he terms out in December) eliminates the state’s $10M support to local news. The state contribution is the condition of Google’s matching $10M support.

Not discouraged, state assembly Democrats have tabled a bigger subsidy for inclusion in the budget.

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On the other hand, Newsom isn’t backing off the state’s recent doubling of the state’s 35% subsidies for film and television production, expanded from an annual $330M USD to $750M.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the grinding down of the Californian film and television industry continues as Hollywood sheds jobs, labour hours and its share of both US and global production.

With the next, and pre-midterm, federal budget cycle approaching, Hollywood is agitating for a federal production subsidy to match its own state subsidy. Unlike Canada, the US does not offer federal subsidies. (Canada’s combined federal-Ontario labour subsidy is about 35% for US productions, higher for Canadian content).

Over the last decade, the US has lost market share of video production and the main winners have been Canada and the United Kingdom that offer competitive subsidies and a supply chain of world-class production clusters that Hollywood producers have integrated into their business models.

graphic from the Hollywood Reporter

Months ago, President Trump touted slapping tariffs on movies shot abroad for the US market, paid for by Hollywood studios. This is not what Hollywood studios want: they want federal subsidies. The analogy to continental auto manufacturing seems apt.

The story in the Hollywood Reporter notes that David Ellison’s Paramount, the winner of the Warner Brothers merger sweepstakes, has committed to producing at least 30 movies annually to fend off anti-trust objections. That opens up a scenario in which the Trump FCC ties the location of shooting to the merger approval, a move that would impact the UK more than Canada.

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Two weeks ago MediaPolicy pointed out some big Liberal cuts to cultural funding in the Parliamentary budget process, the “Main Estimates” for 2026-27.

Impacting News:

CBC: elimination of $192M from the $1.454 billion parliamentary grant;
Canadian Periodical Fund: cut $13M from the $86M budget with a further $14M cut in 2028/29;
TV5: cut $2M from the $13M budget.

Impacting Culture:

Canada Book Fund: elimination of $3.4M from the $40M budget;
Canada Media Fund: cut $68M from the $203M budget, for a new budget of $135M;
Canada Music Fund: cut $16M from the $40M budget.

(The latter two media funds are co-funded by government, broadcasters and streamers).

My sources suggested that the cuts to the CBC and the Canada Media Fund might not end up being so dire. Possibly, some of the funding might be resurrected in a later, Supplementary Estimate, at a time of the government’s choosing.

Well, I wanted to know more before I cast my ballot at the advance poll this weekend in Toronto’s University-Rosedale by-election.

I e-mailed Canadian Heritage and asked what the story was. I found the answer less than 100% clear, but here is the information I got:

The Heritage spokesperson described the absence in the Main Estimates of the Liberals’ much touted $150M increase to the CBC in the last budget as a consequence of the new money being part of last year’s Supplementary Estimate (which just got Senate approval two weeks ago) and therefore not rolled into the 26-27 Main Estimate.

Moreover, the spokesperson said categorically the missing $150M is not part of the budget cutting under the government’s three-year Comprehensive Budget Review.

Bottom line: without promising the $150M is coming back, it seems likely it will.

But that leaves the fate of the remaining $42M cut to the CBC grant unclear. That $42M figure reflects the extra funding that the Trudeau government pumped into the CBC in 2024 as a response to falling revenues and mass layoffs announced by the CBC. Nothing in Heritage’s answer to my email clarified whether that money is coming back.

Heritage didn’t respond to my question about cuts to the other media funds, including whether the budget reductions were impacting civil servants or program subsidies.

The Canada Media Fund, which pumps extra subsidy cash into Canadian TV dramas, documentaries, and children’s programming, has been limping along on the same $135M base funding from the federal government since 2011.

In 2017, Heritage minister Melanie Joly committed to an annual supplement of $42M to neutralize the falling contributions to the Fund from the declining cable TV companies. Last year, the government publicly committed to extending that supplement for three more years.

The $42M supplement has never been part of the CMF’s base funding that shows up in the Main Estimates. So probably it’s coming back and/or the government is going to claw it back once the streamer contributions to the Fund begin.

On the other hand, about $20M in time-limited DEI funding for CMF-supported programming just expired and by the end of this budget year the remaining $5M will stop.

Final CMF budget cut: unknown.

The rest of the Heritage cuts are part of the comprehensive expenditure review and they are real. According to Heritage: “Reflected in the 2026-27 Main Estimates are planned spending reductions. Incremental reductions in 2027-28 and in 2028-29 will be reflected in future Main Estimates for those respective years.”

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“The Left Wing Mainstream Media,” and other acts of magic.

April 2, 2026

If there is one thing that sets my teeth on edge these days it’s the phrase “the left-wing mainstream media.”

I hear it from right-wing voices, both those I respect and those I don’t.

It’s as if the centre just fell out public life and disappeared with the wave of a magic wand. It suggests a world that does not exist.

Is it possible to move a discussion of newsroom culture, values and that hackneyed B-word, “bias,” from the realm of opinion to numbers?

Well buried in a recent scholarly article about harassment of US journalists is some supporting demographic data collected from nearly 15,000 journalists.

In 2022, US journalists expressed their “partisanship” (how they voted or were registered to vote) as:

Independent – 51%
Democrat – 35.4%
Republican – 3.4%
No Preference – 10.2%

The Republican numbers kind of pop out, don’t they?

A generation ago the Republican-leaning cohort among journalists was closer to 20%. It began to change quickly during the oughts, so this is not about Trump. Some would argue it’s about changing newsroom hiring preferences (in favour of college grads) but I’m not sure that’s true and I suggest we don’t step into that rabbit hole just now.

My point is that the voting preferences are a reasonable proxy for “left, centre and right” wing values among journalists. In the US, it’s decidedly centre-left within the prevailing spectrum of political values.

What about in Canada?

An in-depth study of Canadian journalists’ self-perception of their occupational role was published in 2019 with data collected between 2014 and 2016 and correlated to an ongoing global study.

The Canadian response rate of 342 (out of potentially 12,000 journalists) was not ideal, but you can’t blame the study authors for that.

Above all, the study demonstrates that Canadian journalists cleave to the dryly described “monitorial” role (I call it the “watchdog ideology”):

Be a detached observer
Report things as they are
Monitor and scrutinize politics and business
Provide analysis of current affairs
Tell stories about the world
Educate the audience.

They identified less with “the interventionist journalist role,” although they were dead-centre in the agree/disagree spectrum over “advocating for social change.”

They tended to be in stronger agreement with an assigned role for journalists to “promote tolerance and cultural diversity.”

As for “political stance” of these Canadian journalists, on a scale of 1 (Left) to 10 (Right) the mean average of self-identification was 4.22. Narrowly, centre-left. The authors noted that “60.5% of journalists who stated their political stance identified themselves in the centre-most range of 4, 5 and 6.”

If you insist upon data of their voting preferences, and why not, the data came back this way, covering the 2011 and 2015 federal elections:

Liberals – 27.1%
NDP – 23.7%
Conservatives – 13.5%
Bloc, Green, other – 13.5%
Did not vote – 4.8%

(And 22% of those surveyed ignored this question).

The actual outcome in the 2015 election was Liberals (39%), Conservatives (32%), NDP (20%), Bloc (4.7%) and Green (3.4%), numbers that are relevant to sketching out our own Canadian political spectrum of “left to right.”

Altogether, I read these numbers supporting the notion that the Canadian cohort of journalists is centre-left, although how much “left” is a little hard to say.

Now we’ve settled that, the next step is a discussion about how well Canadian journalists, hailing from various places on the political spectrum, practice the professional detachment of journalism; an imperfect but essential pursuit of The Truth.

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – The Dhanraj Show – Go away Paul Wells, you’re not a journalist – The OpenAI problem – Grand Theft Anna

March 14, 2026

Last September MPs on the Parliamentary Heritage committee (CHPC) voted unanimously to hold hearings on “the state of Canadian journalism.”

This happened after, or perhaps because, the Conservatives called for a Parliamentary inquiry into the dramatic departure of Canada Tonight host Travis Dhanraj from CBC Radio-Canada. At the time, MediaPolicy wrote about that dispute here, here and here.

On Tuesday, the curtain was drawn back for the first of five days of CHPC hearings and as the opening guest Dhanraj told his story. For a detached review of the blow by blow, here is Karyn Pugliese’s Substack post.

Dhanraj’s narrative is (a) the CBC is a toxic workplace that management tolerates, (b) he was tokenized as a brown skinned journalist and rebuffed in efforts to make his evening show more edgy and interesting, and (c) he was on the short end of a power struggle with the Rosemary Barton of the National and David Cochrane of Power & Politics, preventing him from booking Conservative MPs on his show.

The side of the story he doesn’t tell is CBC’s management view that so long as the CPC was boycotting those two flagship news shows, they weren’t getting on Canada Tonight. Bruce Arthur’s column in the Toronto Star delves into this. So far, the CBC isn’t saying much and is keeping its litigation powder dry (Dhanraj has filed a human rights complaint).

A thread pulled on during the hearing is a list of 45 “do not book” guests that Dhanraj says he got from CBC management. Depending on what the list is for, and who is on it, there could be fireworks.

It’s fair to say that CPC Heritage critic Rachael Thomas is getting as much mileage out of the Dhanraj affair as possible and going after the CBC with gusto. Dhanraj, whose lawyer Kathryn Marshall is well connected in Conservative circles (she’s married to CPC insider Hamish Marshall), says he’s not bearding for the Conservatives.

MP Thomas is building on a theme over the five days of hearings by calling witnesses such as Honest Reporting (critical of CBC reporting on Gaza and an on-air anti-Semitic rant by Radio-Canada’s Washington corro) and inviting the Canadian Ethnic Media Association to amplify its dissatisfaction with the CBC’s reporting on mass protests in Canada against the Iranian government.

Still to come, compulsory Committee appearances by both the Heritage Minister Marc Miller and CBC CEO Marie-Philippe Bouchard.

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That pesky issue of defining a journalist never goes away.

Last week Blacklock’s Reporter broke a story, picked up on by The Hub, of communication staff in two federal government departments appearing to require reporters seeking information or comment to be employed by news businesses certified by the Canada Revenue Agency as a Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization. The purpose of QCJO certification is to vet news outlets for labour tax credits, i.e. subsidizing 35% of journalist salaries.

I say “appear” to require QCJO certification, because the federal websites for Immigration and Global Affairs said comms staff would only speak to journalists employed by news organizations that are QCJO certified or abide by “similar” standards of journalism.

“Similar” is an important caveat. The key standards of QCJO certification are first hand reporting (“original news’) and adherence to an editorial code of accountability: picking up on those rules, the private journalism consortium that disburses $100M in Google news money every year under the Online News Act also requires news outlets to meet standards of news gathering and editorial accountability. Hence, the departmental caveat “similar to.”

Still, the federal department websites repeatedly refer to “QCJO” and quote word for word from the QCJO tax guidance on original news reporting and other program red lines. And when this happens in two different federal departments, you have to wonder about the group think behind it.

Of course two federal bureaucrats can get the same thing wrong at the same time out of ignorance: for example, maybe the light didn’t go on that the QCJO program is not available to thousands of broadcast journalists, freelancers, or reporters employed by magazines and community weeklies. It seems doubtful the government departments won’t talk to CTV, Global, TVA or CBC Radio-Canada reporters.

It gets worse. The QCJO rules quoted by the two departments reiterate the “two employed journalist” threshold that sets a minimum size of a newsroom that is eligible for QCJO subsidies. Following such a rule, it appears the departments won’t speak to any freelance journalists, no matter who they are. Paul Wells and Linda McQuaig need not apply.

Who defines a journalist anyway? Canadian journalists are not government regulated, nor self governing except to the extent that their news organizations voluntarily participate in Press Councils or the Press Galleries in Ottawa and provincial capitals.

Even then, the peskiness of hair-splitting definitions arises. Recently in Washington state, a federal judge upheld the legislature’s exclusion of three right-wing media personalities from enjoying the full run of the state building granted to professional journalists on the grounds that their primary identity was in the role of political actors.

In Canada, the Supreme Court already acknowledges the unregulated status of journalists by expanding the libel defense of “responsible communication” to include anyone, not just professional journalists.

On the other hand, in 2017 Parliament needed a legal definition of a journalist in order to create a whistleblower law that shields confidential sources. Under that statute, a journalist is defined as “a person whose main occupation is to contribute directly, either regularly or occasionally, for consideration, to the collection, writing or production of information for dissemination by the media.”

It took a few days, but Immigration reacted to the bad publicity and the intervention of the Canadian Association of Journalists. It says it’s reviewing its definition of journalist.

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The tragic role that OpenAI played in the Tumbler Ridge mass school shooting, by flagging but not reporting the killer’s homicidal ideation, has policy experts thinking hard about what kind of regulation we need to see in an online harms bill.

Taylor Owen has an important LinkedIn post, worth the two minutes of reading time. Here’s an excerpt:

Here’s the thing that doesn’t get said enough: your conversations with ChatGPT or Claude or Grok are not private. Employees, and AI, can read what you type. OpenAI is about to start selling ads against those interactions. While, the product is designed to feel intimate, simulating patience, attentiveness, understanding, it is ultimately a content serving product. But it is a product that many open up to in ways they would to a person. It is a psychological bait and switch that capitalizes on a disconnect in norms. But because we have an illusion of privacy with these products, mandatory reporting to law enforcement, if not designed carefully, risks layering a surveillance obligation on top of what is already, fundamentally, a surveillance product.

What could actually help? I have been arguing for a Digital Safety Commission with real enforcement powers, mandatory risk assessments, transparency over safety protocols and age-appropriate design standards. Upstream regulation that changes how these products are built, not downstream surveillance that monitors how people use them.

If I understand Professor Owen correctly, he thinks that if AI and tech companies are compelled to adopt robust and transparent safety design of what their bots will give advice on, the less we will have to worry about the surveillance and reporting of private activity on the web.

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Because I have decided your weekend reading list is still incomplete, if you care about books you must read yesterday’s Substack post from Sutherland Books publisher Ken Whyte. It’s about book publishers’ court challenge to the industrial-scale theft of copyrighted content by Anna’s Archive, an unauthorized aggregator of digital content.

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – “we the people:” influencers, activists and journalists – is this microdrama’s punk rock moment ?

February 22, 2026

Prior to last year’s federal election campaign, a cadre of protesters gathered on my block in a highly successful effort to disrupt Chrystia Freeland’s nomination meeting. The image that stuck in my mind was the young man in the thick of it who was wearing a “Press” ball cap.

I was reminded of that last week when reading Stephanie Taylor’s analysis and profile in the National Post of three high-profile conservative “influencers”: ‘The Pleb Reporter’ (Nick Belanger), Mario Zelaya, and Jasmin Laine. The Post article charts their informal relationships with Pierre Poilievre’s campaign team and their own ambitions.

At the most recent Conservative convention in Calgary, the Party granted influencers “content creator” status, waiving the $1000 observer fee and putting them on par (or with better access) than mainstream media journalists covering the same event.

The right wing influencers —-don’t worry, they have plenty of counterparts across the partisan aisle—- offer no apologies for their boostership of Poilievre or the CPC. They’ll point to their likes and ‘Ks of followers.

If you got it, flaunt it.

What sometimes galls the old schoolers is when influencers and activist reporters mooch off of the credibility and trust of capital-J journalism, hard earned by thousands of serious journalists over decades.

Or perhaps it’s the nihilism that’s most disturbing: “everyone lies, mine are true if they get lots of clicks.”

It’s discouraging of course, but journalism is a profession (or a craft, or a vocation, whatever) that holds no entrance examinations.

On this point, I commend a second piece of reading to you —Peter Klein’s op-ed in the weekend Globe & Mail—-that probes these questions. He begins with the well known case of award-winning photographer Amber Bracken being arrested by the RCMP for her presence (or extra-professional participation, according to the cops) in an injunction-defying land protest.

Then Klein observes that “today as a journalism professor, I’ve watched a generational shift: More students arrive without a clear sense of where reporting ends and advocacy begins, and some have no interest in drawing that line.”

If you meet or listen to journalists from war torn countries or despotic regimes, you will often hear a clear message: ‘we are for the people, we are of the people.’ You would be pitiless to deny them.

Here in a liberal democracy, there are also those who reject journalistic detachment and take sides, convinced of their moral certainty.

There is a line, says Klein, but the question is where and who gets to decide. The contempt charges against photojournalist Bracken (for allegedly violating the court’s injunction) were dropped, but she is suing the RCMP for damages. Legal arguments are scheduled for April.

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If there’s a buzz in the world of entertainment programming, it’s the rise of short-form video and micro-dramas, often shot in portrait mode for better “vertical” viewing on phones.

Platformed by YouTube and newly powered by AI tools, short form is changing video production before our eyes.

It’s disruptive. But is it premium entertainment?

Premium, schmemium. As media guru Doug Shapiro likes to say about this phenomenon, quality is what the audience consumes.

How viral will short-form go? Is it just a punk rock wave of a new entertainment niche or is it something bigger?

The other guru Shapiro, Evan, just posted this:

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Europe indicts TikTok – Age verification bill S-209 clears Senate committee – Bezos and the WAPO layoffs – CPC frenzy over “the Canadian media summit”

February 8, 2026

The European Commission has fired a shot across the bow of TikTok, and by implication other social media, by finding the social media giant culpable of addictive algorithm design and inadequate safety measures.

The Commission explained its preliminary ruling, which TikTok can either appeal or fix, as follows:

TikTok seems to fail to implement reasonable, proportionate and effective measures to mitigate risks stemming from its addictive design.

For example, the current measures on TikTok, particularly the screentime management tools and parental control tools, do not seem to effectively reduce the risks stemming from TikTok’s addictive design. The time management tools do not seem to be effective in enabling users to reduce and control their use of TikTok because they are easy to dismiss and introduce limited friction. Similarly, parental controls may not be effective because they require additional time and skills from parents to introduce the controls.

At this stage, the Commission considers that TikTok needs to change the basic design of its service. For instance, by disabling key addictive features such as ‘infinite scroll’ over time, implementing effective ‘screen time breaks’, including during the night, and adapting its recommender system.

The EU finding is made against the Chinese-owned app in the European market, not the American-owned TikTok across the Atlantic. But it will heat up the tension between the US and the EU over the regulation of online harms impacting US-owned apps operating in Europe.

The momentum of regulatory intervention around the globe picked up more steam when Spain indicated its intention to follow Australia and France in banning underage social media accounts.

As for Canada, Heritage Minister Marc Miller isn’t saying yet if a ban on underage access is part of the online harms bill he is preparing.

Last Monday, the influential Taylor Owen and his McGill colleague Helen Hayes called for a moratorium on underage access to social media while online harms legislation gets tabled, works its way through Parliament, and gets implemented.

Judging from Canada’s last two pieces of media legislation, the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act, the length of the entire process might be measured in years.

What might advance the timetable at the front end is Senate Bill S-209 that would require age verification for porn sites and possibly any social media site that permits porn. The bill passed committee last week and will likely get approved by the full Senate in the next few weeks, putting the governing Liberals on the spot.

Last week Senatrice Julie Miville-Dechêne, the bill’s sponsor, obtained committee approval for a series of technical amendments as well as a change that defined porn more narrowly to get at “X-rated” content and scope out the nudity and implied sexual activity common in mainstream drama. The new definition requires the exhibition of explicit sexual activity and exposed genitalia for the purpose of sexual excitement.

As drafted, S-209 still leaves the decision on whether to scope in porn-permissive social media apps to the federal government, either in a House vote on the bill or afterwards.

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Last weekend MediaPolicy noted the diverging fortunes of the New York Times and the Washington Post with the Times getting the Trump-bump in digital views and the Post sagging in the other direction.

Then on Tuesday the Washington Post announced a breathtaking round of newsroom layoffs, 300 of 800 staff. By Saturday, publisher Will Lewis had resigned.

The public reaction was what you might expect: a mix of shock and anger. Former Post Editor-in-Chief Marty Baron posted his condemnation of the layoffs and put at least part of the blame on multi-billionaire proprietor Jeff Bezos’ decision to ingratiate himself to Donald Trump. That included Bezos killing a planned editorial board endorsement of Kamala Harris’ presidential candidacy, which reputedly cost the Post 200,000 subscriptions, as well as vocal support for Trump’s demolition of the White House east wing and making a donation to the ballroom project to be built on its foundations. Recently, Bezos’ Amazon Prime reputedly overpaid the Trump family for the streaming rights to the documentary Melania.

Then American anti-monopoly advocate Matt Stoller published a long Substack post where he suggested that Bezos bought the Post in 2013 as political insurance against the Obama administration taking anti-trust action against his Amazon e-commerce business. The insurance policy, Stoller suggested, has become unnecessary or overpriced as Bezos literally put his money on Trump.

One piece of context is that while the Post’s declining audience numbers may be attributable to anti-Trump readers voting with their feet, the conservative and pro-Trump Wall Street Journal is experiencing the same decline, although not as steep as the Post.

There were also layoffs in Canadian journalism, suitably smaller in number. Bell Media CTV laid off 60, including 11 television journalists.

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The gong show otherwise known as the right-wing frenzy over mainstream media went viral last week when a video clip surfaced of Reynolds Mastin publicly thanking Prime Minister Mark Carney for “having our backs” and gushing that “we have your back too.”

There it was, proof of the blood pact between the federal Liberal Party and the mainstream news media.

But who the heck is Reynolds Mastin?

Mastin is the President of the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA), the industry group representing independent Canadian production companies that make entertainment programming. He was chairing the CMPA’s annual Prime Time conference in Ottawa when he made the remarks.

Readers may know, Mastin is not a journalist and he (and the CMPA) has nothing to do with news journalism. He was encouraging Carney to resist American trade pressure on the Online Streaming Act which requires US streamers to contribute to the Canada Media Fund.

Independent movie and television producers draw CanCon subsidies from the Canada Media Fund to make dramas and comedies. The CMF doesn’t spend a dime on news, although some make the mistake of thinking it does.

Nevertheless, the timing was was perfect for frenzy: the Conservative Party was in the midst of its annual convention in Calgary.

Here is Conservative Heritage critic Rachael Thomas MP describing “the Canadian media summit” as a news journalism event:

Thomas’ falsehoods then found their way into Conservative fund raising e-mails.

At that point, some conservative pundits urged Conservatives to do a fact check. The managing editor of The Hub, Harrison Lowman, was as brave as he was blunt:

Now speaking of Mr. Lowman and The Hub, I can recommend an excellent podcast he did in January with ex-New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet.

In June 2020, Bennet (whose brother is a Democratic Senator) cleared for publication an opinion column from Republican Senator Tom Cotton arguing that Donald Trump ought to deploy the military if necessary to deal with rioting and looting that flared in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd.

Bennet’s employment did not survive the newsroom uprising that followed.

A similar newsroom conflagration occurred the same month at Canada’s National Post when columnist Rex Murphy opined that Canada “is not a racist country.”

In any event, I found myself gripped by the full 35 minutes of Lowman’s interview of Bennet and you may find it worth the time as well.

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – YouTube’s fake AI Journalists – Go west, CBC – DM@X 2026

AI image by Perplexity

January 19, 2026

You like to think you’ll never fall for a digital fishing scam. You like to think you’ll never fall for a deep fake news video.

Ahem, I fell for a deep fake news video.

YouTube, in its algorithmic omniscience, pushed to me as its top daily recommendation a video of the famous Washington Post political corro George Will. As the NeverTrump Reaganite we know him to be, Will delivered a withering critique of US tariffs by pointing to Toyota’s investment of $40 billion in Canada. Later, after I searched for a news announcement and found none, I wised up. (My friend in the auto industry kindly reminded me that $40 billion equals eight new car plants).

But for a good ten minutes, I was all in. The AI-video had George Will on the screen, live and in the flesh, saying exactly what George Will would say and how he would say it, but strangely looking twenty years younger than his 85 years. Then checking the meta-data, the video creators claimed to be a George Will fan site. I very much doubt they were licensed to impersonate George. A week later, YouTube had taken it down.

A few days later YouTube pushed me a similar fake, this time tech journalist Kara Swisher. Fool me once, etc.

Digital deception is now a daily event, according to a Canadian poll. Fifty-two per cent of us are “very concerned” about it; a full 88% are concerned.

Canadians generally want action against digital deception and hold a mix of views on who ought to do the acting:

Meanwhile, news publishers are soaking their heads in an icy bucket of water.

The Oxford Reuters Institute posted a new year’s survey of 280 CEOs, executives and editors in 51 countries expressing, guess what, their deepening pessimism about the future prospects for journalism.

The collective wisdom was that news journalism is getting squeezed for audience attention (and ultimately revenue) on either side by AI and social media influencers. Thanks to AI-generated videos and Chat summaries, the latter published with or without links to digital news sites, publishers are expecting referral traffic to keep declining and more or less crash and burn.

If there’s a silver lining, twenty per cent of publishers believe they will make deals for significant licensing revenues, another 49% see a minor stream of revenue, and another 20% expect none. The latter group are concentrated in local media, public broadcasting and smaller countries.

A cause for optimism is that a lot of publishers are innovating by hiring digital creators to work with their journalists to compete in the influencer /video/ social media world.

Watch that space: I am waiting for someone to come up with a licensed AI-generated celebrity journalist/influencer who gets content up on the ‘net tout de suite in the news cycle. Someone like George Will.

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As I’ve been griping about for some time now, the CBC has been slow out of the blocks to put its five year plan into action and earn that $150M raise in the Parliamentary grant.

We may be getting somewhere.

Editor in chief Brodie Fenlon just announced that CBC “will add 33 local journalists and create 11 new bureaus, increasing [our] Canadian footprint from 66 to 77 locations. This “boots-on-the-ground” investment is in addition to last year’s local service expansion of 30 journalists hired in 22 communities across Canada. Many of the new positions are based in Central and Western Canada.”

Now for context, CBC has about 3600 news journalists in television, radio and online. It’s long been underweighted in western Canada, likely because of where the television and radio stations were located decades ago when our demography was a lot more central Canadian. In British Columbia, for example, the private television broadcasters collectively outspend CBC television 7:1.

The CBC has also hired a new head of English language services to replace the retiring Barb Williams. The new EVP is Doug Smith. He’s arriving from Paramount Canada and his CV stretches back to ViacomCBS, Rogers, and Alliance Atlantis.

A streaming guy. Let’s give him a couple of years and see what he can conjure up at CBC Gem.

Maybe we’ll see a shift to buzzy blockbusters that emulate the recent success of Crave’s Heated Rivalry in Canada and abroad.

Making hit Canadiana television that is validated by successful export is not new: Canadian broadcasters have done it repeatedly with Transplant, Flashpoint, DaVinci’s Inquest, Degrassi, etc.

At home, Bell Media can take credit for a hitting streak of popular and authentic Canadian shows, smacking doubles like Shorsey, LetterKenny and Late Bloomer, and now Heated Rivalry, a centre-field blast worthy of Bo Bichette (sorry, too soon?).

There’s no reason CBC can’t do the same. It can and has (Sort Of was genius). But as a paid subscriber to Gem (how many of us is a secret), my personal request is to pour money into the functionality of the high friction, algorithmically anemic streaming site.

(Correction: An earlier version of this post identified the number of CBC newsroom employees at 3400.)

***

This year’s annual coven of Media Policy conspirators is scheduled in Toronto in the first weekend of February.

Digital Media at the Crossroads will be held at the Faculty of Music building, University of Toronto, on Friday 6th- Saturday 7th. Here’s the program. See you there.

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Australia does Canadian style news aid – Californian news subsidy flounders – Hollywood merger fight continues

West Wing‘s C.J. Cregg is doling out the cash in California

January 10, 2026

Australia is close to cutting cheques to news outlets under its News Media Assistance Program (“News MAP”), similar to Canada’s QCJO federal aid to journalism.

The highlights to News MAP are:

$99 million ($92M CDN) over a three year period.
$67 million is targeted for news outlets delivered as salary subsidies of $13,000 AUS ($12,000 CDN).
$33 million to the Australian Associated Press, similar in staff complement to our Canadian Press.
In addition to the $99 million, it’s anticipated that a one time $30M “innovation fund” will be announced in the next two months.

There are other, less headline grabbing, features:

$3M of government advertising committed to news outlets for the next two years, a symbolic rather than substantial sum, but the kind of program that has been touted in other countries (including Canada, where Ontario has committed $50M annually).
$10.5 million over 4 years, backdated to 2023, to the Australian Communications and Media Authority to implement a Media Diversity Measurement Framework. The ACMA has already released its first biennial report, a thoughtful document worth reading. It describes and analyses the state of news journalism in Australia.
A three-year study of media literacy, possibly leading to a national media literacy policy in Australia.

Per journalist, the Australian News MAP is worth to news outlets about half of the dollar value of the Canadian QCJO program.

The News MAP program is being launched under the uncertainty shadowing Australia’s flagship public policy for news journalism, the News Media Bargaining Code. The NMBC was the policy template for Canada’s Online News Act.

In 2024 Meta refused to renew its payments to Australian publishers and broadcasters (reputed to be a third of the $200M AUS contributed by Meta and Google). Presumably Google is considering its options.

That $200M AUS was about twice the value of the $100M CDN Google payment in Canada, for a country two-thirds our size, so you get the picture of how the combined Canadian and Australian programs for government subsidy and Big Tech payments are comparable, if asymmetric.

The Australian government is signalling that News MAP is truly a time limited three-year program. The Albanese government, strengthened by its majority-election victory in 2025, is moving forward with public consultations on proposed legislation that would strengthen its NMBC by assessing financial charges on Google and Meta, regardless of whether the tech companies escalate by banning news links on their platforms.

***

In 2024 MediaPolicy posted about the state of California’s attempt at imitating Canada’s Online News Act and Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code that compel Google and Meta to make mandatory licensing payments to news outlets.

The initial Californian scheme that earned the support of Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom was valued at $250M over five years, combining matching contributions form the state budget (akin to Canada’s QCJO program), Google dollars, existing philanthropic projects, and the possibility of a $62 billion tech fund to support AI tools in the newsroom.

Then California faced a budget crisis, whittling down its matching contribution to $10M annually. Google obliged by cutting its own. The AI innovation fund is grounded too.

The Californian bill can now be officially designated a debacle. Politico has a story on how that happened, here.

One of the key problems, still unresolved, is that even the $20M in matching state and Google funds remains undistributed to Californian news outlets. The University of Berkeley was initially contemplated as the gatekeeper but withdrew after the state rejected the journalism school’s plan for bespoke allocations to favoured projects and news outlets.

Then the program distribution landed with the state librarian. Then it was moved to the Governor’s office of development, headed by former Bill Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers (the real-life C.J. Cregg of West Wing). Now Myers is trying to set up a third party to distribute the funds, however her office will retain the final say on allocating the $20M.

News outlets haven’t seen any of the money and Governor Newsom’s final term in office ends in 2027.

***

Here’s an update on the battle between Netflix and Paramount to buy Warner Brothers’ studio and streaming businesses.

The board of Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD) has rejected a second Paramount bid, insisting that the Netflix offer is still better.

If the WBD board stays the course, there will not be any shareholder vote on the Paramount bid.

For WBD to go forward with the tentative deal with Netflix, Netflix must first get regulator approval of its bid document, send it to WBD shareholders, and then a special shareholder meeting will vote on the Netflix offer. Nothing is scheduled yet.

Paramount is focussing on persuading the WBD board, and shareholders, that WBD’s television assets that aren’t in the Netflix bid are worthless and Paramount’s offer is better because it takes those channels off the hands of shareholders.

If WBD and Netflix consummate their deal, the federal Department of Justice could consider an anti-trust court challenge.

***

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I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Online harms bill is coming back – Canadians are alienated – Manitoba action on local media

(AI image)

December 23, 2025

The Online Harms bill is coming back to the House of Commons.

The Liberal Bill C-63 that died on the order table when the April 2025 federal election was called was initially a three-in-one omnibus.

It was an anti-hate bill that increased prison terms for existing Criminal Code hate speech offences and hate-motivated crimes as well as codifying the judge-made law on defining hate.

It also reinstated the abolished right of individuals to bring human rights complaints against hate speech.

And it charged social media companies with the responsibility of developing and enforcing safety practices to mitigate online harms, particularly to kids. This was the long expected policy piece that was born of lengthy public consultations, taking aim at Facebook and Instagram.

Michael Geist was right (he is, occasionally) in condemning C-63 as three controversial bills wedged into one. Others agreed and the Justice Minister Arif Virani split the legislation into two bills. But the election call killed them anyway and when the government reformed the new Justice Minister Sean Fraser messaged he wasn’t committed to C-63 as it stood.

Since then, Fraser has tabled bills that are policy-cousins to C-63. Bill C-9 takes up the supercharging of prison terms for hate-motivated offences, permits the police to charge hate offences without waiting for the green light from the Attorney-General, and picks up the judge-made law on defining hate (detestation or vilification is hate, but disdain or dislike is not.)

As part of a broader criminal justice reform, Fraser also introduced Bill C-16 to make it easier to prosecute blackmail threats of online sexual humiliation and deem the posting of deep fake sex videos a criminal act.

Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s Bill S-209, a proposal to use age verification technology to keep kids away from online porn, is paused in Senate committee but will probably re-emerge in February.

Now the Hill Times is reporting that Fraser will return some time in the new year with an online harms bill that may offer an organized government policy on online hate, harms and safety.

***

There are the standard ways that we like to take the temperature of public opinion on media.

The go to is whether one “trusts” media. Asked that simply, the polling outcomes reflect likes and dislikes of news outlets as much as reliability or manipulation.

I like this news outlet; I trust it. I hate this news outlet; I don’t trust it.

Occasionally pollsters try to dig a little deeper. The latest poll from Innovative Research doesn’t probe trust-in-media per se but rather the thing that drives trust and mistrust of public institutions: “cultural alienation,” a state of disengagement from the other, where the other is believed to be harmfully powerful.

The Innovative poll reports shocking levels of popular alienation from Canadian “elites” (another piece of terminology, like “trust,” that can barely shoulder the weight it is asked to bear).

As for the pollster, it describes “culturally alienated” thus: “A full-spectrum pessimistic bloc that believes Canada’s institutions are broken, elites are disconnected, our shared identity is lost, and the country is headed toward crisis. Their worldview is consistently bleak.”

According to the poll, there is a large pool of culturally alienated Canadians, about 28%.

The culturally alienated are joined in their disaffection by “anti-elite populists” who are “Canadians who feel strongly that the system is rigged and elites don’t care about ordinary people. They are less concerned with institutions or national identity collapsing.” That’s another 29%. I know a lot of people matching the description and I am guessing so do you.

Added together, the numbers look dire.

Now if that puts you into too dark a mood, keep in mind the poll was taken from a standing opinion panel of opted-in respondents, not a random sample of Canadians, so it is disproportionately asking questions of opinionated Canadians.

Also, the results might be skewed pessimistic by the questions. Many of the mood-testing questions are necessarily binary, asking respondents to answer yes or no to questions like “Canadian institutions are broken” and “Canadian elites don’t care about ordinary Canadians.”

Ask an emotional question, get an emotional answer.

I keep telling myself, it isn’t as bad as it looks. That makes me a moderate pessimist, apparently.

***

An all-party committee of the Manitoban legislature is recommending Premier Wab Kinew’s NDP government follow the lead of provincial governments in Ontario and Québec to financially support local media.

If the NDP acts on the recommendation, it will copy the Ontario procurement practice of reserving 25% of $200 million in government ad spends for placement with local media.

Also, the MLAs propose that Manitoba offer a journalist salary subsidy similar to Québec which provides a 35% salary subsidy (up to $26,250 annually) that stacks on top of the federal 35% salary subsidy (up to $29,000).

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – CUSMA snooker – CRTC copyright ruling appealed – shareholder vote on Netflix v Paramount – the Oscars on YouTube

December 20, 2025

This week the US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told US Congress what American stakeholders want from CUSMA trade talks with Mexico and Canada in 2026.

Greer’s report was an opportunity to be performative about US interests. As a member of President Trump’s cabinet, he wasn’t offering a blueprint for trade negotiations or even hinting at what’s the most important to his boss.

Only Donald Trump knows what he really wants. Does he want to run the table and steamroll Canada and Mexico?

Well, imagine a snooker game with a full rack of balls on the felt. What strikes you immediately upon reading Greer’s report is how many meaty issues there are in a long list of industrial sectors.

For those concerned about Trump’s cultural hit list, you would be surprised how brief and perfunctory Greer’s comments were.

As we’ve known for some time, the US streamers hate our Online Streaming Act. Google and Meta hate our Online News Act. Prime Minister Mark Carney already gave away our digital services tax, the thing the US companies hated the most.

On the other hand, the American companies canvassed by Greer like the Digital Trade chapter in the CUSMA trade agreement just fine.

As a very permissive set of trade rules, it may be up to Canadian negotiators to carve out of the Digital Trade provisions a wider scope to exercise our sovereign right to set the terms of AI services.

***

In case you missed it, read my rant about the CRTC’s ruling on copyright and intellectual property in Canadian video content.

Sounds like a snoozer when I describe it that way, but Canadian ownership of CanCon copyright is central to whether the federal government’s Bill C-11 the Online Streaming Act accomplishes what it was meant to do.

My rant was that the CRTC effed it up. The Canadian Media Producers Association appears to agree: it just filed a court appeal against the ruling.

The CMPA’s legal filing, asking the federal court to hear its appeal, argues one of the things I wrote about in the blog post: Bill C-11 was written to ensure that Canadian TV and film producers reap the fruits of their labour, what industry insiders call the “long-term commercial exploitation of intellectual property.”

Mere copyright “in the title” of a show isn’t that, says the CMPA.

In the words of the statute, the Commission is supposed to consider whether Canadian producers enjoy “a right or interest in relation to a program, including copyright, that allows them to control and benefit in a significant and equitable manner from the exploitation of the program.”

That means revenue, in other words a stake in the profit earned by Canadian shows from distribution and other monetization opportunities until the lemon is squeezed dry.

***

This week the board of Warner Brothers Discovery rejected Paramount’s hostile takeover bid. That leaves the winning suitor Netflix as Hollywood Rex for now, but WBD shareholders vote on Netflix’s $82 billion offer in January.

Paramount isn’t rushing out an improved bid: CEO David Ellison is making the case to WBD shareholders for his all-cash bid, arguably better chances than Netflix of clearing anti-trust hurdles, and the fact that Netflix’s offer for the WBD studio and streaming assets doesn’t include taking WBD’s lagging television assets off the hands of shareholders.

In the meantime, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner withdrew from Paramount’s financing consortium. Then business analysts questioned whether Larry Ellison’s money was good: his participation in his son David’s takeover bid is through a revocable trust, subject to change by Ellison senior. (Update, 22/12/25 – Ellison Sr. responds with personal guarantee).

Almost unnoticed in all of this, Pa Ellison is now officially a part-owner of TikTok-USA after the Chinese company ByteDance completed the sale of its American operations to a consortium of US interests, including Ellison.

***

Netflix may be the undisputed king of streaming. But YouTube is the lord of video consumption.

YouTube’s market dominance is a reflection on the growing popularity of short-form video of course. Yet not long ago I posted about YouTube’s plan to go all out into bidding for the rights to big events in premium, long-form video.

Last week YouTube scooped the exclusive global rights to the Oscar awards, beginning in 2029. That seems like a big deal for boomers raised on Hollywood glamour, although we could remind ourselves that at 20 million viewers, the Oscars trail the Super Bowl (130 million) and Game 7 of the World Series (50 million).

No word yet on the consequences for Bell Media’s CTV network which has held the Canadian distribution rights for the Oscars since 2003.

***

There’s a new American opinion poll published by Pew Research which rattled my optimism about the future of news journalism.

According to the poll, young people are more likely than older Americans to trust news influencers, concede a wide definition of who they recognize as a journalist, and are more likely to find it acceptable for journalists to be advocates for a cause and sport their ideological colours brightly.

***

The Washington Post’s newest AI widget (proprietor Jeff Bezos holds a minority interest in the AI app Perplexity) is in Beta. It has a long, long way to go.

A six minute daily podcast features two AI agents summarizing WAPO’s top three stories of the day. You can customize your topics or WAPO’s algorithm will figure you out.

Other than saving on two journalist salaries, the added value of this AI widget is a mystery. It’s a downmarket product offering from an upmarket news outlet.

Real life podcasters at the NYT Daily, fear not.

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Ranting about CanCon – Danish news subsidies – Meta lobbies Feds on age verification – the NFB’s gripping sailing documentary

November 29, 2025

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.

***

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.

In related stories, Australia’s social media ban on under 16s comes into force in December. The EU Parliament just passed a non-binding resolution to do the same.

***

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.

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

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