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.
***
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.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
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).
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
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.
***
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.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
It’s a sheepish admission I make this week, but sometimes American culture wars can be so darn entertaining.
Take the recent exchange of verbal gun fire between President Trump, the US cable lords, and late night TV hosts that began with Stephen Colbert slagging his show’s owner, Paramount, for paying off on a meritless Trump lawsuit against CBS.
In case you’ve been ignoring it all, here’s a short news report from Global News explaining it.
More to my low brow taste, I enjoyed Jon Stewart’s satiric bird-flip to all those bending the knee to Trump, “Go Fuck Yourself.”
***
And then there’s the end of the world as we know it, otherwise known as AI.
I say this only half facetiously. What AI tools like Google Overview appear poised to do to news journalism may well be catastrophic, it depends on consumer adoption.
But it’s entirely plausible that Big Tech’s scraping of copyrighted Internet content —-there are now third party web crawlers that steal and sell paywalled stories to AI companies —— could mean that a handful of global AI engines become our dominant “news” outlets so long as there remain employed journalists somewhere to be scraped.
The US Senate is holding some hand wringing hearings on AI scraping but, so far, it has a performative feel to it. Congress doesn’t do anything anymore without the White House saying so.
Our own federal government is taking a wait and see approach. Or to put it in their own words, AI Minister Evan Solomon is “closely monitoring the ongoing court cases and market developments.”
***
There are no obituaries written yet for public broadcasting in the United States.
Congress finally passed the defunding of NPR radio and PBS television. In the US, public broadcasting was not as robustly funded as it is around the rest of the world. The annual Congressional allocation of $500M (USD) was about half of CBC funding for eight times the population and ten times the number of stations.
The federal dollars were only a sliver of overall funding of 1,000 local NPR stations, 350 PBS outlets and the national flagship operations. But funding was always heavily weighted towards local stations and local programming: the “left wing” national content that Republicans so despise is almost entirely privately funded.
The precise consequences of defunding at the national and local level will unfold in the coming months after the scheduled September payment doesn’t arrive.
The real-life CBC drama of Travis Dhanraj’s lawsuit and public campaign against his former employer released another episode this week.
The National Postposted a story sporting a “leaked” audio clip of Dhanraj and his union representative in a meeting with CBC manager Andree Lau. The occasion was a discussion of his April 2024 X-post criticizing CBC President Catherine Tait for declining to be interviewed about CBC finances on his show, Canada Tonight.
The edited audio file is a bit of a nothing burger. Dhanraj tries to get Lau to spar with him about the journalistic ethics of CBC coming down hard on him for the post. He gets the better of the argument, mostly by default. That’s about it.
It’s not clear from the clip whether the meeting was a formal grievance meeting, normally a privileged and off the record discussion. CBC responded to the Post story by saying Dhanraj broke his promise not to record the meeting.
***
The McGill University Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy released a report on its two-year study of what is to be done about the CBC. The Hill Times covered it here and CBC Newsreported on it too.
You may recall that the Centre published an opinion poll in October 2024 that revealed very high public support for the CBC, qualified by strong desire for “changes.”
One of the weird things about this result is that the CBC-is-no-longer-needed vote goes up after a hypothetical addressing of major criticisms.
As the report authors observe dryly, it’s difficult to distill “a single perspective” about what needs improvement other than the fact that 78% of Canadians want to keep the CBC running.
One thing the report is very good on is that “Canadians need to be assured of the value of the product they will be paying for. Regular and in-depth demographic reviews of the audience should be established to determine the kind of content Canadians require and the way they need to receive it. Models for this form of consolation include nation-wide town hall meetings, citizens’ assemblies and comprehensive surveys of the public (not merely existing members of the CBC/Radio Canada’s audience).”
In addition, the report says that Parliament should enshrine a cycle of five-year mandate reviews of the CBC so that the relevance of the public broadcaster to what Canadians want keeps up to date.
Times two, I say.
The report goes on to say that the CBC must “create meaningful, not performative, representation [in its content]. This goal addresses equity, diversity and inclusion, but more broadly, political and regional diversity as well.”
Put bluntly, the CBC needs to convincingly reflect an audience that is broader than the heavily urban demographics of its newsroom if it’s going to be funded and enjoyed by all Canadians.
Parliamentary funding of CBC is of course the bottom line, whether up or down. The Carney government has adopted former Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge’s report on the CBC and made European levels of funding its aspirational long-term target. According to St.-Onge, that would mean the moving the yardsticks from $32 per Canadian annually to $62.
Give the authors of the report credit, they have broken the taboo on pointing out that French-language Radio Canada already matches European levels of funding of $79 per head while English-language services (from which Indigenous language programming is financed) languish at $25 per capita.
The taboo remains powerful enough that the report doesn’t recommend what to do about this funding gap.
In the end the authors suggest their own idea of what Canadians want out of the CBC: “information sovereignty.” In other words, a public broadcaster that protects the national interest in reliable news and information.
Their argument is made in the context of rising existential threats to our national security; including extreme weather catastrophes, pandemics, threats to our territorial sovereignty, and the surprising aggression from the United States, a country that controls much of the media we already consume. They might have added AI as yet another existential threat to information sovereignty, as noted above in today’s post.
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
Travis Dhanraj’s lawyer is shovelling more coal into the litigation furnace by calling upon disaffected CBC staff to e-mail her with their complaints.
In a video interview with Candace Malcolm ofJuno News, Kathryn Marshall issued a series of claims to illustrate former news host Dhanraj’s allegation that there are systemic violations of employees’ human rights at the CBC. Marshall said her inbox was full of e-mails from former staff and invited more.
It’s doubtful that any e-mails Marshall solicits from CBC staff past and present would be legally admissible in the human rights proceedings she says she is initiating on Dhanraj’s behalf.
But they can be theatre props in the public trial that Conservatives hope to schedule at the Culture and Identity (formerly Heritage) parliamentary committee in the Fall.
The feeding frenzy of conservative attacks on the CBC occasioned by the Dhanraj controversy is hardly surprising, it’s a permanent feature of our political landscape.
The blood in the water would be salacious evidence of feuding between Dhanraj and the CBC Parliamentary bureau, described by Marshall in her Juno interview. Specifically, her claim is that “a very close knit gang of Ottawa correspondents” were resentful of Dhanraj’s success in getting Conservative Party guests on his show and tried to bar those guests.
Marshall said she has “names, receipts and e-mails.” Those revelations, says Marshall, are “the CBC’s nightmare.”
Marshall also told Juno News that the CBC sought to punish Dhanraj for his X-post about then CBC President Catherine Tait by taking away his show, demoting him, and demanding he sign a gag order. She described CBC’s actions as “Stalinist” and later in the interview accused Dhanraj’s union the Canadian Media Guild of collaborating with the CBC (which would be illegal).
You get the picture.
The point of this kind of public campaign as an accessory to a legal claim is to define the public narrative. So far that story is not only how Dhanraj was treated by the CBC, but the credibility of CBC news journalism itself.
The credibility of the CBC might appear to be in jeopardy according to Dhanraj and conservative critics, but that does not seem consistent with public polling.
Last week Pollara released its annual poll on Canadian news media. CBC News continues to top the charts on both consumption and public trust. In fact, it went up over the last year, as the graphic below shows.
Still, the endless right-wing barrage against the CBC destabilizes the public broadcaster (I exempt from this tar-brushing the perceptive podcast episode posted today by The Hub’s Full Press, which is worth your time).
The CBC has done nothing to counter the Dhanraj narrative of a corrupt news culture —-it’s issuing rote denials while awaiting the filing of Dhanraj’s human rights complaint. The result is that a bunkered public broadcaster leaves a vacuum for others to fill and they are obliging.
The appointment of a new CBC President in January is now seven months old. After an early spate of interviews given by Marie-Philippe Bouchard, we’ve heard very little about any new direction or bold plans to meet criticisms or disappointments expressed about the public broadcaster.
That might be because Bouchard doesn’t know yet if the Prime Minister intends to keep his campaign promise to boost CBC funding by 11% this year, and more over time. That was complicated by this week’s disclosure that as part of its spending review the Carney government has asked CBC to submit a draft plan for deep budget cuts in 2026-2027.
Or it could be that Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault is still working on a new bill to implement election promises of better CBC governance and long-term financial independence that would require amendments to the Broadcasting Act.
MediaPolicy asked the CBC if there are any significant announcements coming and was told to expect something in the Fall. A similar inquiry to the Minister’s office did not get a reply in time for publication.
***
AI-generated image
This past week TikTok ramped up political pressure to convince the Carney government to undo the federal government’s 2024 decision to ban TikTok the company from Canada, but not the app.
The Liberals’ decision on TikTok followed US legislation to ban both the company and the app on the grounds of national security. Subsequently it was given a stay of execution by Donald Trump in his effort to force a sale of the Chinese-owned social media company to American interests.
Like the US law, the Canadian ban is based on undisclosed and/or hypothetical national security concerns about data security and the distribution of malevolent content, sponsored by China.
TikTok says it is winding up its Canadian operations to comply with the federal ban. Meanwhile it has bought media advertising pleading its case to the Canadian public, posted a posturing letter asking for a meeting with Industry Minister Melanie Joly, planned layoffs of its 350 Canadian staff and withdrawn its funding of Canadian creator development and event sponsorships.
Aside from the sponsorship largesse, TikTok is a major distributor of Canadian cultural content. According to Scott Benzie of the creator group Digital First Canada, TikTok has engineered its algorithm to be a heavy distributor of local content for users that activate the location service on the app, perhaps as high as 50% of “Nearby” and “For You” video recommendations. That’s something that foreign streamers won’t commit to.
With a lawsuit against the federal government on the go, TikTok says Ottawa has taken “measures that bear no rational connection to the national security risks it identifies.”
For its part, the government insists its investigation under the Investment Act in 2023 revealed “clear and legitimate concerns.”
When the ban was announced in November 2024, then Innovation minister François-Philippe Champagne said “I’m not at liberty to go into much detail, but I know Canadians would understand when you’re saying the government of Canada is taking measures to protect national security, that’s serious.”
The entire mess feels a lot like the Facebook ban on Canadian news even though the circumstances are quite different.
Michael Geist has published several articles on the TikTok ban, including this one, which apart from the familiar Liberal-bashing on digital policy I found persuasive (and it’s worth marking the occasion).
Another angle on the problem is something every Canadian is painfully aware of these days: when the American elephant rolls over, we can easily get crushed. And the crushers run the White House.
The troubling question is who isn’t cynical about the merits of the American ban of TikTok in the first place? Or that we are just obediently playing a vassal state by following suit?
The answer to the dilemma is for Carney to publicly defend the ban with as much disclosure of the national security threat assessment as possible, or to repeal it.
***
The Big Tech/Big Hollywood court challenge to mandatory cash contributions to Canadian media funds might get an answer from the Federal Court of Appeal before Labour Day.
Until then, the MediaPolicy boycott of streamer subscriptions (Netflix, Amazon and AppleTV) continues. I don’t miss two of them.
In their absence, I’ve made better use of my CraveTV subscription. That allows me to recommend an excellent new Canadian series, Empathie, a sad and funny drama set in a Montréal mental health facility.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
Television host and journalist Travis Dhanraj – CBC Photo
July 12, 2025
The fireworks ignited by television host Travis Dhanraj’s public resignation from the CBC will not be a flash in the pan. Not if the Conservative Party has anything to say about it.
The Conservatives are demanding summer Parliamentary hearings, a sequel to the political inquisition that followed the CBC’s annual payment of performance pay to some staff in late 2023.
Conservative headquarters also launched a volley of fundraising e-mails [download, below] citing Dhanraj’s “bombshell” resignation and reiterating its campaign promise to defund the CBC under the leadership of Pierre Poilievre, now standing in the August 18th by-election in Battle River-Crowfoot.
Dhanraj is a veteran television reporter and host who returned to the CBC in 2021 as a National Affairs correspondent and two years later, to much fanfare, as the host of Canada Tonight. At the time, CBC’s press release highlighted Dhanraj’s commitment to “unfiltered” and “diverse” journalism.
But last week Dhanraj announced his “involuntary resignation,” denouncing the CBC’s commitment to diversity as performative and promising detailed revelations to come. The CBC denied the allegations and cited confidentiality obligations as the reason for the brevity of its public reply. It also announced his resignation had been refused.
It’s difficult to recap the sequence of events leading up to Dhanraj’s pyrotechnic departure: much of it is connecting dots but will become easier to piece together once his lawyer Kathryn Marshall files a human rights complaint on his behalf.
The jumping off point appears to be Dhanraj posting a tweet in April 2024 that criticized the CBC for not making then-CEO Catherine Tait available as a news subject on his show, presumably to answer questions about the performance pay.
A public statement issued by his lawyer in February 2025 suggested that at one point he went on medical leave because of the psychological harm caused by CBC management’s alleged retaliatory actions towards him.
In his own public statement, Dhanraj characterized his resignation this way:
It comes after trying to navigate a workplace culture defined by retaliation, exclusion, and psychological harm. A place where asking hard questions — about tokenism masquerading as diversity, problematic political coverage protocols, and the erosion of editorial independence — became a career-ending move.
In further statements, Dhanraj’s lawyer linked “the colour of his skin” to CBC’s alleged exclusion of conservative perspectives and news guests. Specifically, she said that CBC assumed when it hired him that as a brown man his news hosting would focus on liberal perspectives, to the exclusion of conservative guests and issues. A proven connection to race might violate the federal human rights code, if discriminatory.
Marshall welcomed a Parliamentary hearing and suggested that Dhanraj’s experience was “systemic” and goes to the heart of the CBC’s workplace culture and delivering on its public mandate:
Obviously, the issues that Travis has highlighted in his resignation letter and which will be part of a future legal proceeding are very serious, and they’re not just isolated to Travis. I’ve heard from a lot of other CBC employees who have similar stories. It’s a systemic issue, and it’s a workplace culture issue that goes very deep at CBC, which is very concerning given the amount of public funds going to the corporation and its public-interest mandate.
Sooner or later the Conservatives will take this up at the Culture and Identity committee, with MP Rachael Thomas grabbing the spotlight in the prosecutorial role she relishes. But it may bring more thunder than lightning due to the stifling effects of pending litigation.
If the Conservatives go as far as attempting a filibuster of other Parliamentary business (like government bills), the balance of voting power in committee will be held by Bloc Québécois MP Martin Champoux.
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
The 2025 Reuters Oxford Digital News Report was published this week, offering both global and Canadian break-out numbers.
It’s a trite observation that digital technology has turned media on its head, disrupting the advertising revenue that once paid our bar tabs for the consumption of media. The disruption has hit hardest in news journalism and stoked alarm about its knock on effect upon liberal democracy.
That’s probably why recurring polls and surveys tracking the arc of that disruption seize our attention, even if the trends are slow moving. For example, this year’s Rubicon crossed was that social media surpassed news websites as the leading access point for online news.
Cue the Reuters report, for my money the leading annual global survey. It tracks metrics on news consumption, platform preferences, news avoidance, misinformation, fear of misinformation, and “trust in media,” which is essentially a hybrid metric tracking legitimate skepticism of news journalism, alienation from public institutions, and audience polarization.
The global report also generates break out national numbers and additional polling for individual countries. Canada’s supplementary report on news consumption was written by University of Laval researchers Colette Brin and Sébastien Charlton.
Canada saw a 1% down tick in online news subscriptions from 15% in 2024 to 14%. In 2016 it was 9% but has been flat since getting a bump from the Covid pandemic and the 2020 US election.
Globally, the willingness of the local population to pay for online news ranges from 42% in Norway to nine per cent in Italy. Canada’s 14% is just slightly under the global water line of 18% of the adult population.
There was startling data that Canadians are world leaders in our readiness to shell out for foreign news subscriptions, clocking in at half of Canadian news subscribers. Together with Ireland, Canada’s sign up for foreign news sources is a global outlier.
But what really got my attention was a graph from the global study revealing that 71% of non-news payers say they can’t be tempted to subscribe through innovative options to bundle multiple news services, access more non-news content, or by pick-and-pay news content falling short of a full subscription. They just won’t pay for news, full stop.
As Hunter S. Thompson might have said, not paying is a matter of principle.
That suggests (excuse my confirmation bias) that in the best case scenario there is limited room to grow the subscription-model for Canadian news. The vast majority of Canadians are casual news consumers who will not pay to keep up to date on current affairs.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that the free-distribution CBC, CTV, Global News, the Canadian Press and hundreds of community news outlets continue to post news online (see the graphic below, where CBC leads the pack among English speakers).
Should that change, I’m not counting on the news subscription model to bail out liberal democracy. It’s more likely (and this is also reflected in the Report) that Canadians will turn to social media influencers to deliver news, reliably or otherwise.
***
A couple of follow-up stories for you:
Last month the CAQ Québec government tabled its Bill 109, aiming to deliver seismic changes to the rock bottom consumption levels for French language music on global streaming platforms operating in Québec.
The tabling of the bill by Culture Minister Matthieu Lacombe was timed to coincide with Québec City hosting the 20th anniversary of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression.
Unamended since its inception in 2005, the Convention is an aspirational international standard for sovereign nations willing to step into the commercial media market and push back against the domination of English-language and mostly American content.
Lacombe was looking for other countries to sign off on an upgrade to the Convention, specifically to match Bill 109’s claim to cultural diversity as a fundamental right of citizens backed up by regulatory efforts to move the needle on the consumption of domestic media content.
The Québec City meeting didn’t deliver for Lacombe. A few countries said yes, but more gave a muffled maybe.
The muffled included Canada’s federal government. Culture and Identity (and Official Languages) Minister Steven Guilbeault issued a statement that endeavoured to navigate the narrow channel between the cultural nationalism embedded in Lacombe’s bill and, on the port bow, the exclusive federal jurisdiction over broadcasting. Not to mention, Guilbeault’s boss the Prime Minister must be thinking it’s not an ideal time to piss off Donald Trump by making more announcements about regulating foreign streamers.
All this is happening on a parallel time track with the CRTC’s upcoming public consultation on regulating foreign music streamers operating in Canada.
Apple, which has more of a flair for corporate arrogance than you might think, filed a policy brief with the CRTC that sassed the Québec cultural groups who have asked the CRTC to build a stronger regulatory regime for music streaming. Said Apple:
Apple opposes the requests of groups such as ACCORD and APEM to obtain further information from online audio services in an effort to dictate approaches that supposedly will result in more streams of Canadian songs. Setting aside the remarkable fact that these organizations apparently think that they would be better at running the streaming services than the services themselves, these requests lead to a dead end. As Apple explained in its response to APEM’s application of more than one year ago, much of the information being requested is either not provided to Apple or does not even exist.”
American Big Tech disses Québec cultural leaders. Game on!
In addition to Apple, the world-leading music platform Spotify filed information with the CRTC culled from its annual report “Loud and Clear.”
The Spotify document claimed surging growth in musician earnings in the global market for French-language music. Musician earnings have doubled globally and in Canada since 2017 thanks to rising royalty payments to music labels. Spotify told MediaPolicy that earnings growth was experienced at all levels, from the poorest bands to superstars (but not broken out by language group).
The policy implication of Spotify’s claim is that it’s part of the supply-side solution to domestic music and that the demand-side of music consumption ought to be left to the unregulated market.
The earnings data reported by Spotify is 10,000-foot stuff. Royalty payments are probably 20% of total label and musician earnings, says the company. But without the streamers opening their books to public analysis it’s hard to say how well things are working out for individual bands, or in particular for Québec musicians who may be making money in the global francophonie but have less than 10% of their own domestic market.
The same data problem exists on the consumption side of the equation. Spotify has never contradicted the repeated claims made by Québec’s cultural groups that their third party data shows that less than 10% of streaming in Québec is in French and that French-language songs rarely crack the charts.
In response, Spotify says that half of Québec’s streaming audience “regularly” consumes French language music but chooses not to define “regularly” or provide its internal data on the proportion of English versus French language songs.
The coyness about data may come to a point in September when Spotify executives must appear before CRTC commissioners.
***
In last week’s post, MediaPolicy offered an update on the CRTC’s decision to extend news subsidies from the Independent Local News Fund (ILNF) to the Global News network of local stations.
Some of the Commissioners were nevertheless unhappy with the funding gap remaining between 34 independent local stations and the 45 operated by “vertically integrated” media companies Bell, Rogers and Québecor. If you want more context, check out last week’s post.
If some Commissioners think that the Big Three are getting the short end of the stick on news subsidies, imagine what the telcos think.
Bell owns 35 local stations in its CTV and Noovo networks and, according to filings, loses $40 million annually on news.
Here’s Bell’s illustration of the news funding gap it provided to the Commission:
But being sensitive to how the big telcos are viewed by their admiring public, Bell isn’t having too much of a moan.
Instead, Bell’s ask of the Commission is that they be allowed to reassign the remaining $13 million of their cable division’s funding of community programming to their broadcasting division’s network of local news stations.
In return, Bell wants the Commission to repeal its 2016 regulations requiring the vertically integrated Big Three to allocate 11% of their programming budgets for conventional television to local news.
Also, Bell wants the Commission to remove minimum exhibition requirements for weekly hours of news programming.
***
The best podcast I listened to this week was four Americans debating trade, Trump and culture war, courtesy of Canada’s Munk Debates.
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
The latest CRTC ruling (2025-133) on local television news has delivered a predictable outcome, but also the beginnings of an adult conversation about a broader CRTC strategy.
The Commission was bound to reclassify the Corus-owned Global stations as “independent” once they were cut loose from Shaw Cable in the CRTC-approved Rogers-Shaw merger. Denying them admission to the ILNF would have been difficult to explain and now the streamer money makes the numbers work.
The level of ILNF subsidy works out to approximately 70% of news production costs, a dramatic figure, although it varies from station to station depending on how much they spend on news and how many hours they produce.
A CRTC rule caps any station owner in a single regional market from drawing more than 12% of the $18 million (now $58 million) fund.
In this recent ruling, the CRTC added an “entity” cap which restricts the 15-station Global News network to 45% of the available money, somewhat less than the majority share they would be paid without a national cap.
Those are the headline numbers.
There’s some unfinished business.
The Commission says its going to develop an incentive —details to come later— to reward local news stations for increasing their news coverage of underserved communities (read Indigenous, minority French and Anglo communities and equity-seeking groups).
As part of that ruling, the Commission has imposed a quid pro quo for receipt of ILNF cash: stations must post all of their television news content on their websites; whether its available for free or subject to paywalls isn’t clear from the ruling. Many stations already distribute their video content digitally for free.
So far, so predictable.
But three —three!— Commissioner dissents from the ruling suggest that a more wholistic vision of broadcast news funding is coming. And in fact a general rethink of news funding is one of the issues the Commission is reviewing in its current consultation on audio-visual broadcasting by television and streaming operators.
Ontario Commissioner Bram Abramson decided to speak his mind in a way you rarely find in Commission rulings, suggesting the tweaking of the ILNF to satisfy Global’s admission to the subsidy club is only an “interim” (read, “timid”) step with more to talk about.
Abramson makes the taboo suggestion that the Commission consider access to the ILNF subsidy by local stations owned by the three major networks, the 45 stations operated by the “vertically integrated” (“VI”) Québecor (5), Rogers (5) and BCE (35) that own both cable services and local stations.
Abramson’s view is that what’s more important than ownership of stations is the market they operate in, in particular the extent of local “news poverty,” meaning the availability of news from other local news outlets.
Québec commissioner Stéphanie Paquette weighed in on this as well, arguing that because the French language markets are dominated by Québecor’s TVA network, which is ineligible for ILNF money, that means the production of French language news gets shortchanged by the only-for-independents ILNF.
Going back to the establishment of the ILNF by the Commission in 2016, the “VIs’” local stations aren’t eligible for that Fund. But they are eligible for a different CRTC cross-subsidy that redirects cable company patronage of their own hyperlocal community stations to their own network TV stations. But depending upon how you do the calculations, that VI news subsidy is worth half or three-quarters of an ILNF dollar.
The CRTC’s standing justification for two sets of subsidy rules for VIs and independents is that the big three networks have greater access to pooled news resources as well as deeper pockets for capital investment.
There’s compelling policy logic to the Commission’s traditional approach, however the bright red line between the financial capacity of VI and non-VI television stations can get muddied in practice, particularly where some of the ILNF-eligible stations are owned by big media companies that don’t happen to run cable operations.
Stingray and Pattison come to mind. Each company closed television stations last month in the rural Prairies, Stingray in Lloydminster (population 31,000) and Pattison in Medicine Hat (population 63,000). The closure of the Pattison station was influenced by the capital cost of renovating the television studio that had sustained major flood damage.
The Jim Pattison Group is a multi-billion dollar, multi-industry conglomerate.
The other notable thoughts from the Abramson dissent were directed at free content. The Commissioner was of the opinion that the availability of industry cross subsidies ought to be subject to a public policy favouring the free distribution of news programming under the conditions of a “Creative Commons”: in other words, a general policy of favouring free news content.
The implications of that thinking are far reaching. Certainly Google and Meta have been making the same claim: that the public interest in accessing news content overrides the desirability of mandatory news licensing payments through legislation like the federal Online News Act, Bill C-18.
***
The Republican defunding of “biased” public broadcasting by PBS and NPR in the United States is on track after the House budget bill narrowly passed and was sent on to the Senate.
Judging from this New York Times report, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson was able to mollify Republican holdouts with promises of reinstating some federal funding in the near future.
***
I attended a journalism conference recently where a focus on “essential standards of news reporting” inevitably turned into discussion about who is a journalist.
I’ll spare you my soapbox thoughts on the matter but I recommend an entertaining article in The Hubabout online influencers straddling the line between partisan activist and journalist.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
Sarah McLachlan will be a Canada Day headliner on CBC
June 7, 2025
Now that Parliament is back, and Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault is re-seated for a second tour of duty in his portfolio, there may be speculation about whether the Liberal government will do anything to bring Facebook and Instagram back into the scope of the Online News Act Bill C-18.
The Minister will keep an eye on Australia.
The Australians’ 2021 New Media Bargaining Code served as Canada’s model for Canada’s legislation that compels Google to pay $100 million annually in licensing payments to online Canadian news organizations.
In both countries, Meta’s response to bargaining codes was to ban news content from Facebook and Instagram in order to avoid regulation. In Australia, that meant Meta refused to renew the annual $65 million (AUS) value of its expiring voluntary agreements with news organizations which earned it an exemption from regulation in 2021.
Australia’s Labor government caught everyone’s attention last December when it announced that it would respond to Meta’s actions by legislating mandatory licensing payments regardless of the company’s ban on Australian news.
If and when it is enacted, a “News Bargaining Incentive” would provide a default cash levy on Meta, Google and TikTok if those platforms refused to bargain with news organizations, irrespective of any ban on news content.
The Incentive would be set at a price in excess of the estimated value of a voluntary agreement with news organizations. In late January the Australian government announced that a pre-legislative consultation paper would be “released shortly” but an election intervened.
Now that the Labor government has returned to a majority Parliament in a surprise comeback that paralleled the re-election of Canada’s Liberals, the expectation will be that it releases a white paper and legislates as promised in “late 2025.”
None of that will take place in a vacuum as the American tech platforms will seek the aid of the Trump administration and Congressional trade retaliation. Their lobby organization CICA has released a statement that characterizes the Incentive as “arbitrarily” targeting “select foreign companies” just like the Digital Services taxes that 11 OECD nations have enacted to collect corporate tax revenues that are alleged to be evaded by Big Tech.
An overview of different national versions of a news bargaining code is offered here.
There are also various attempts at the state level in the US. The Californian version was a flop as Google’s modest financial commitments have been scaled down in lock step with the Governor’s budget cuts to its parallel subsidy program. However legislation has been tabled in Oregon, New York, Washington and Illinois.
***
Three independent Canadian television stations closed last month.
In mid-May, Stingray’s twin stations in Lloydminster (respectively affiliated with CityTV and CTV) shuttered. Ownership cited plunging revenues and audience.
Then last week Pattison’s Medicine Hat station also went dark.
It’s an attention-grabber for the CRTC which is poised to release a ruling later this week on revised cash allocations from the Independent Local News Fund (ILNF).
In a June 2023 submission to the CRTC, the umbrella organization representing 19 independent television operators —not counting the 15 Global News stations cut loose in the Rogers Shaw merger— reported that collectively they cover 70% of news production costs from $18 million in ILNF grants.
***
Just as the window closed on submissions to the CRTC on audio regulation, industry leader Spotify published a news release touting the success of Canadian artists on its platform.
The gist of Spotify’s claim is that Canadian artists are growing their earnings on Spotify by expanding their global audiences.
The Canadian news release cites Spotify’s annual “Loud and Clear” global report on musician earnings that was posted in March. The break-out of Canadian data hasn’t been published other than summarized in the June 4th news release.
Significantly, the Spotify report does not cite any changes to consumption of Canadian music in domestic audiences in Québec or the rest of Canada. As far as we know, the CanCon share of domestic market remains at 10% of the Canadian audience and, in the French language market, less than that.
***
If you’re making beer and cedar deck plans for Canada Day, it looks like a good CanCon line-up for the televised broadcast from Ottawa, Vancouver, Yellowknife, and Summerside. It’s on CBC.
***
If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;
or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;
MediaPolicy.ca 