There is a good analysis piece by Gretel Kahn that reviews the distribution of the $100 million Bill C-18 Google payments to Canadian news outlets and the Meta ban on Canadian news.
The criticisms from various publishers and commentators on where the Google money landed are fairly predictable. Mainstream media, especially the US-controlled Postmedia chain, come in for a bashing and the most vivid quote comes from Christopher Curtis, the online publisher of local news outlet The Rover, who opines that “this whole thing has been a huge gift for foreign-owned legacy media and a spit in the face of small outlets like ours and Indigenous-owned outlets.”
Got it.
The fresh stuff that Kahn digs out is how news outlets are adapting to the Meta ban on Canadian news. One publisher points out that Meta’ s traffic referrals to news sites were falling well before Mark Zuckerberg responded to the Online News Act Bill C-18 by banishing most news organizations from his platform.
Many of these publishers are figuring out work arounds on Meta applications, buying Facebook ads to promote their hyperlinked news or posting unlinked news items on Instagram. Others are leaning more heavily on YouTube and TikTok distribution. As one publisher comments in the story, it’s “better not to build on rented land,” a nod to heavier reliance on their own e-mail and subscription distribution instead of Search and Social platforms.
But all of that may be yesterday’s problem. The new disruptors of journalism are the Internet-scraping AI companies, including the same Big Tech platforms that make news available through hyperlinked news snippets.
Canada’s Online News Act C-18 doesn’t regulate AI ingestion of Canadian news content. So far, the AI companies have got away with being the dog that eats your book, barfs it, and claims the ingestion was okay because it’s no longer a book.
If the Liberal government has any concern about that, or any interest in amending copyright law to get at the problem more quickly, it has yet to show such interest.
In the meantime, the referrals of audience traffic from AI-enhanced search engines to news sites are way down. Yet a news report suggests that the few AI companies deigning to make licensing agreements with a handful of news agencies are sending more traffic to these chosen outlets. In these early days, the AI horizon facing news organizations appears to range from catastrophic to not-so-catastrophic scenarios and the question of which news sites get licensing deals may be determinative. If this sounds like the problem of oligopoly in content distribution that lead to Bill C-18, it should.
Federal AI Minister Evan Solomon just announced the advisory panel for his federal AI Strategy Task Force. The list of strategic priorities does not include news media. The panel is dominated by experts on AI development and economic opportunities. The only member appointed to the 23-person panel who is focussed on the downside harms to the media ecosystem is McGill University’s Taylor Owen.
Whatever is coming from AI, so far the Liberal government does not seem interested in riding to the rescue of the media or creative industries. The Parliamentary Heritage committee is scheduling hearings beginning October 6th and 8th that may put the issue into the public policy spotlight.
***
The Bari Weiss deal is done now. The iconoclastic publisher of The Free Press has sold her publication to the newly consolidated Paramount, owned by David Ellison.
Weiss becomes the editor-in-chief of CBS News and, given her MAGA affinities, the editorial curation of the mainstream broadcaster could change.
Paramount joins Fox, Warner Brothers Discovery (CNN, TBS), Disney (ABC, ESPN) and Comcast (NBC) as a media superpower in both news and sports & entertainment. But Ellison has a special edge and the potential to dominate global media to the extent that he works in cooperation with his father Larry Ellison, the second richest man in the world. Ellison pater is expected to become a significant minority owner of the US-operations of TikTok once that deal with Chinese-owned ByteDance is consummated.
The Washington Post has a good story on the Ellisons, their businesses, and their relationships with the White House.
And if you want to listen to an interview full of unexpected personal insights, I recommend the engrossing New York Timespodcast interview of the actor, artist and activist Sean Penn. The interview was recorded in two parts, divided chronologically by the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
***
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Last week Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault showed up at the House of Commons’ heritage committee for his root canal.
The Conservatives were on him immediately about former CBC host Travis Dhanraj’s charges that the public broadcaster violated the Human Rights Act by treating him as a token “brown guy.” MP Rachel Thomas cited CBC’s “toxic environment” as a fact.
Guilbeault appeared to take Dhanraj’s allegations at face value, expressing “regret” at “what happened to him” but distanced himself from the CBC’s handling of the dispute.
MediaPolicy has covered the story here, here and here but I was waiting for more details on Dhanraj’s claims against unnamed colleagues in CBC’s Ottawa bureau and how CBC management handled the whole situation.
Now Dhanraj has given a more fulsome version of his story on episode one of his new podcast, Can’t Be Censored, produced with former CP24 reporter Karman Wong.
The episode is over an hour long and it’s pretty clear that without naming David Cochrane, the host of CBC’s parliamentary show Power and Politics, that is who Dhanraj is identifying as his nemesis (Cochrane has declined comment). Dhanraj says that “three or four” journalists are running the Ottawa bureau’s news coverage as their own club.
Dhanraj’s narrative is that CBC headhunted him, first as a national reporter and then as the host of Canada Tonight, a current affairs show. Dhanraj tried to make the show edgy and popular by inviting controversial guests. They included former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose appearance CBC management vetoed on the grounds that Carlson is a white nationalist, although Dhanraj says in the podcast he doesn’t agree with that description.
What got him into hotter water was inviting Conservative Party deputy leader Melissa Lantsman onto his show while the Conservatives were boycotting Cochrane’s hot seat on Power & Politics. As it turns out, CBC management already had an internal protocol that forbade the Conservatives end-running Cochrane in favour of a preferred host. Dhanraj tried to convince his boss that it was good journalism and better for the CBC’s reputation as a big tent public broadcaster to get the Conservatives onto any CBC show at all. He even quoted the Broadcasting Act. His boss didn’t buy it.
There’s more in the podcast episode on other friction points between Dhanraj and the Corp. Assuming he has offered his best arguments, it’s hard to see his allegation of racist tokenism as anything other than his editorial gloss. Rather his story comes across as a tale of an ambitious television anchor making a play to upgrade a lesser show into a bigger one, some colleagues resenting that, and CBC not accommodating it.
If David Cayley’s new book critiquing the CBC had gone to press a little later, I am sure he would have devoted a chapter to Dhanraj. Earlier this week, MediaPolicy posted a review of Cayley’s book.
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Bob Iger is writing his own history, day by day.
Iger is the Disney CEO responsible for suspendingLive! host Jimmy Kimmel for his mockery of the US President’s odd reply to a journalist’s question about grieving Charlie Kirk’s death. Then the viewer and political backlash hit Disney. Iger turned Kimmel’s “indefinite” suspension into a one week cancellation.
US media commentator Evan Shapiro has a LinkedIn post breaking down the events leading up to Iger’s actions against Kimmel.
Bottom line: the threat by Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr to strip Disney’s ABC affiliate stations of their broadcasting licenses was an idle one. Up until now media moguls have blinked because they won’t play the long game against the Trump administration’s campaign to tame mainstream media.
Kimmel’s show is back on the ABC network, but initially two major station affiliates refused to air it. One of them is a big Trump supporter. The other needs the FCC to approve a merger.
That lasted three days. Yesterday the two affiliates that include 56 stations across the US reversed course and agreed to resume airing the show.
It ain’t over. Trump replied on Truth Social, “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do.”
***
It’s World News Day tomorrow which is a reminder from major newsrooms around the liberal democratic globe that you’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Pairing up with that, my alma mater Unifor —-which represents journalists and media workers across the country—- has launched a middle brow version of the same, a public service campaign branded CheckFactHere.
Video and print ads created by Unifor will appear in Canadian media who are donating the inventory.
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A few sunny weeks ago MediaPolicy posted a dissent from a Canadian Press story concluding that PM Mark Carney was considering repeal of the government’s Online News Act C-18 and its $100 million tithe on Google that compensates Canadian newsrooms for their stories appearing on Search. I didn’t think that Carney’s mangled response to a Kelowna journalist’s question about C-18 actually said that.
It took some time to pin down the government for a clarification, but Politico.com asked Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault for comment and his press secretary replied “the federal government has no intention of repealing either of the acts,” referencing both C-18 and the Online Streaming Act C-11.
Then the National Poststory added that Guilbeault’s office hedged a bit, saying “for us, currently, the intention is not to repeal those acts… But I can’t pretend to know the end result of the negotiations with the United States” which are “very much” the main factor that will determine the future of both acts.
Somebody needs to put this question to Carney.
While we are talking about C-18, when the Canadian Journalism Collective announced the distribution of the $100 million in August, Media Policy posted that the conservative news outlet Western Standard was getting a $68,000 cheque. What I didn’t mention is that I e-mailed publisher Derek Fildebrandt asking him to confirm that he wasn’t also receiving the federal government’s “QCJO” journalist subsidy. His publication was part of a coterie of anti-subsidy news outlets who published a public oath they would never take that kind of money. Fildebrandt didn’t reply to my e-mail.
Now we know why. He’s taking the money. In an email to his subscribers, Fildebrandt said he couldn’t compete without the federal cash and ——I am reading between his lines here— without Pierre Poilievre in power those subsidies will continue to flow to his competitors.
Fildebrandt’s books aren’t public, so it’s also possible he couldn’t remain solvent without federal and Google money. In any event, my condolences, climbing down from high moral ground is never fun. Just ask Mark Carney.
***
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The former producer of CBC’s radio show Ideas has a new book that asks and answers a question too often ignored: what is a public broadcaster and why isn’t the CBC behaving like one?
David Cayley’s “The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And how to get it back)” is prosaically titled but elegantly written. Cayley loves ideas of course and his argument is grounded in a series of cerebral set pieces that situate his message that CBC News is too much the storyteller and too little the convenor of open-minded dialogue.
If theories of media communications and linguistics are your thing, Cayley explores and applies the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Noam Chomsky, The Frankfurt School and a host of other thinkers you may never heard of. If you have a taste for this (I do) or consider yourself a left libertarian, there’s lots to eat. Otherwise, you may need to be patient with Cayley.
Each of his excursions into theory provide the context for his core message, which goes something like this:
For decades now, the CBC has strayed from its Parliamentary mandate, for which it is provided with big subsidies, to be the non-judgmental convenor of public debate instead of just another corps of journalists holding inflated ideas of their clairvoyant understanding of Canadians. The CBC suffers from cultural orthodoxy —let’s call it an overweening confidence in the destiny of liberal progressivism— and the newsroom’s belief that it has a special talent for divining truth and misinformation.
It’s a heck of an indictment and the prosecutor makes his case, beginning with Exhibit A: CBC’s coverage of the Covid pandemic and the three-week occupation of downtown Ottawa by the so-called Freedom Convoy, whose participants “manifested a large and vibrant new public,” according to Cayley.
In his view, the federal government, echoed in its messaging by mainstream media and the CBC, treated the participants in this “generally moderate Freedom Convoy” as enemies of the state and this demonstrates the dangerous polarization of the Canadian polity and the pressing need for more civic dialogue in this country. Cayley just published therelevant bookexcerpts in the National Post. On the other hand, the CBC Ombud’s judgment is here.
If you choke a bit on that lionization of the Freedom Convoy, you may be recalling that it was riddled with avowed insurrectionists and defiers of public health directives enacted by a democratically elected government in the name of reducing critical infections that threatened to kill untold thousands and overwhelm hospital emergency rooms. The incipient threat of violence associated with clearing the occupation was never far away.
Cayley is a skeptic of anything described as a consensus by the medical and science establishments and he reminds us of this when he lampoons the worldwide public health response to Covid as “comprised of speculative computer models whose probative value lies just north of tea leaves and bird entrails.”
He argues that Convoy participants were vindicated in their opposition to Covid vaccine mandates by later findings that vaccines became less effective over time in preventing the spread of the disease. Meanwhile the CBC and other media organizations disparaged the occupiers’ dissent as “misinformation,” unworthy of serious news reporting.
In this review I am not going to litigate this public health issue, or the openness of media coverage, to a conclusion. But suffice it to say it’s a contentious point on which to rest his argument that the CBC newsroom is swaddled in its own filter bubble.
How the CBC became its own biggest fan, says Cayley, can be traced back to its early departure from a more neutral role in public dialogue and its quest for mojo as an edgy news organization in television shows like the investigative journalism of This Hour Has Seven Days. Despite the fact that Seven Days, which ran only two seasons from 1964 to 1966, was cancelled by CBC management —guaranteeing its legendary status as Canada’s media iteration of the Avro Arrow fighter jet— its strong editorial voice and visually manipulative narrative style exemplifies for Cayley what’s always been wrong about CBC’s news journalism.
Cayley connects the immense popularity of Seven Days with a “populism” that seats media gatekeepers into the role of the audience’s surrogate, as its watchdog over the powerful, its advocate for justice, or (using just one more metaphor) the high priests of a media church sermonizing the congregation, vindicated in their righteousness so long as attendance remains high.
What suffers when the CBC insists on being the audience’s surrogate, he says, is the neglect of its core Parliamentary mandate, articulated by the first two words in its mission “to inform, enlighten and entertain.”
Once upon a time, the old guard in the early CBC were more inclined towards “adult education” and news you can use, rather than theatrical news reporting and laying claim to Canada’s voice. Cayley wants the CBC to get back to that “inform and enlighten.”
Cayley never makes it clear if he wants to blow up CBC’s editorial identity as a news reporting organization entirely or just re-set the newsroom mindset to something better aligned with “inform and enlighten.” He cautions that he is not advocating for a University of CBC.
Mostly, he critiques the CBC’s workplace culture as suffering from a baked-in orthodoxy of thought. He can be quite funny writing about this: his insider account of CBC management’s top-down reset of its corporate culture is relatable to anyone who has ever endured the same. His cheeky disparagement of Jian Ghomeshi’s popular radio show Q may leave a smile on your face or okay boomer on your lips.
But the prosecutor Cayley gets himself into trouble when he puts forward Exhibit B which purports to quantify the pervasive reach of the orthodoxy inside the newsroom.
He begins by citing a Léger poll commissioned by the Macdonald Laurier Institute that self-identified leftists outnumber conservatives in Canadian universities by a ratio of nine to one and that this is killing dissent and fostering self-censorship among the minority. From this poll he links to the CBC’s culture, claiming “the case is the same at the CBC, as I have already shown.”
Well no, he doesn’t show that at all.
To rebut, let me first note that the Léger poll was non-randomized and relied on voluntary participation. It collected lopsided data culled mostly from faculty in the humanities and social sciences —prolix socialists, all— and under participation from STEM departments.
More to the point, where’s the proof that CBC staff are nine-to-one lefties versus righties? Cayley points to three journalists (Exhibit C), one of whom is neither a journalist nor works for CBC but once wrote an analysis of CBC’s news coverage of Saskatchewan’s transgender laws.
He notes the troubling story of a veteran CBC Winnipeg reporter Marianne Klowak who quit in disgust at a management kibosh on her reporting that gave voice to vaccine dissenters.
He cites the departure of CBC Toronto news producer Tara Henley who also quit in disgust, issuing a public indictment of the “cognitive dissonance” created by the CBC newsroom’s groupthink.
Two journalists (make it three including Cayley) out of 3,000 is not enough evidence to support his claim, but to be fair it would be difficult to rely on anything but anecdotal evidence without the kind of newsroom polling that is impossible to provide.
Still, Cayley once lived in the belly of the beast and is likely on to something. Common sense tells you that a newsroom where most reporters live in three big cities may well list to the leftish values of urban progressivism.
On the other hand, my own experience of a lifetime representing reporters and journalists —although never at the CBC — convinces me that the left-right thing is for the opinion pages and eclipsed by the dominant spirit in all newsrooms: a Watchdog ideology that posits white-knight journalists at the service of the public by “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” Nevertheless, Cayley views the CBC’s self-coronation as public champion as the problem that needs replacement by a more passive role as the convenor of civic dialogue, the aforementioned “inform and enlighten.”
His intriguing idea is there for your consideration. But in Exhibit D, the prosecuting Cayley again goes too far when he says that “what is more serious is the way the CBC has lost the country’s attention”.
I beg your pardon, it has not. CBC radio is a market leader across the country. Its online news website earns top ratings, vying each year with CTV for the most consumed or most trusted online source. Even CBC’s much maligned television ratings —which lag behind CTV and Global— are weighted down by flagging audiences for CBC’s entertainment programming which must compete head-on during prime time against American hit shows on private Canadian networks and also a little streamer named Netflix.
Cayley’s overstatements don’t detract from his deepest conviction: that Canada is becoming increasingly polarized, even a “fatally divided polity,” and a public broadcaster needs to engage the participation of all. A more open-minded programming culture of inquiry and intellectual curiosity may be the tonic. More reflection, fewer snap judgments.
Most book-length critiquesof CBC tend to focus on news programming rather than television drama, which is too bad (Richard Stursberg being a notable exception). In fact, Chris Waddell and the late David Taras go so far as to recommend jettisoning entertainment programming altogether and saying uncle to Netflix.
Cayley discusses entertainment programming briefly, mostly in the context of the unstoppable tide of American shows that sets the cultural tone for Canadian content.
He calls upon the CBC to rely less on knock-off genres of television drama, set in classic Canadian landscapes, and more on historical and contemporary stories of Canadian self-discovery. Amen to that, but it’s not clear to me that the CBC isn’t already doing this with the limited production budgets that it has. When it wants to step up its game for bigger audiences, it makes co-venture deals with Netflix.
Finally, Cayley says almost nothing about Radio-Canada, an understandable limitation on the scope of his essay. The application of his critique and his solution, the question and answer about the CBC’s public broadcasting mission, might provoke more insights if anyone in Québec were to take up and explore his views.
***
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French journalist unions have won a share of the licensing fees negotiated by publishers with AI companies whom are paying for the news content they scrape off the Internet, according to a report in Nieman Lab.
If not for the French: always the first to fight for content creators. Several years ago, journalist unions got their members a share of the “Google money” paid out in Europe under its news licensing framework in the last few years. Le Monde reporters earn an additional 275 euros per year.
Now that there is a new content licensing deal between Le Monde and OpenAI reporters get 25% of the cash. No reports on how much that is.
By his own description, the judge exercised occupational “humility” by going easy on Google. The most significant thing he had to say, much cheered by Google, was that whatever skullduggery allowed Google to solidify its dominant market position over Search, the competition for the AI market is a horse race.
The judge handed out consolation prizes by requiring some limited data sharing with Google’s search competitors, a remedy disparaged by the CEO of Duck Duck Go as “a nothing burger.”
Also, the judge ruled that Google’s multi-billion dollar agreements with Samsung and Apple for making Google the default search app on their phones can continue. Those commercial agreements were significant in the judge’s earlier finding that Google’s monopoly was illegal.
On the other hand, Google is looking a gift horse in the mouth and will appeal both the limited remedy and the original finding of monopoly.
The Big Tech giant may have escaped the worst consequences of the Search monopoly-ruling but it has other concerns. A US Justice Department anti-trust lawsuit against its domination of digital advertising is well underway and yesterday European Union regulators fined Google nearly three billion euros for the same market domination. The regulator’s fine was immediately entangled by US-EU trade tensions and could be delayed.
Meanwhile Google’s share price bumped 8%, so at least someone is happy.
It’s an elaboration on what it means to defend “digital sovereignty,” a new catchphrase describing a public policy gamut stretching from communications infrastructure to software and the regulation of online content. Or as one Comment column in the Globe and Mail put it recently, more Canadian autonomy over “data, code and compute.”
The basic idea is to recognize the new geopolitical environment in which digital technology is increasingly controlled by states, namely the United States, and becomes more than just a regulatory issue but a matter of economic self sufficiency and political security.
An executive summary of the new Open Letter is here:
I made a needed correction to last week’s MediaPolicy’s report that independent Canadian broadcaster Wildbrain had abandoned its CRTC licenses and pulled its suite of family channels from cable TV.
I reported that Wildbrain is selling out to American interests, which its spokesperson says it isn’t, rather it is taking advantage of its new status as a digital-only broadcaster by removing Canadian ownership requirements from its public share structure.
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I am enjoying a left-wing American Substack I just discovered, The Argument.
It published a poll on political attitudes that was interesting but I am not inclined to just map its findings over to the Canadian experience.
But still, I was left agape by the poll finding that 40% of Kamala Harris voters would consider cutting off contact with a family member “for opposing political views.” Only 11% of Trump voters would do that.
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The ka-ching is the responsibility of the Google-appointed gatekeeper, the Canadian Journalism Collective, to decide who gets what.
The conservative website The Hub gets $22,248 and is donating it to the March of Dimes charity. The Western Standard, operated by former Wildrose Party MLA Derek Fildebrandt, is down for $68,377. Rebel News didn’t apply.
None of that is surprising. The Hub and the Western Standard were previously vetted by the Canada Revenue Agency as Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations, becoming eligible for federal news subsidies or reader tax credits (but not necessarilycollecting them). Rebel Newswas not.
An unusual outcome of the Canadian Journalism Collective’s distribution was that the CJC approved the licensing cash for the current affairs website The Conversation (sub nom the Academic Journalism Society) after the CRA rejected it as ineligible for the QCJO subsidy program. The CRA’s rejection (on the recommendation of its independent advisory panel) was upheld by the Federal Court of Appeal in 2024.
The difference in result appears to be how the CJC is interpreting what it means to produce “original news.” That’s a requirement under both the CRA guidelines for QCJO and the Online News Act regulation 2023-276 for Google news payments.
But the difference seems to be that CRA guidelines explicitly require first-hand news gathering “such as independent research, interviews, and fieldwork. For example, a news article orreport about an event would be original if it is written or reported by a journalist and is based on first-hand knowledge that journalist gained by conducting independent research, attending or witnessing the event, or interviewing people who organized, attended, or witnessed the event.”
The CJC guidelines are far less precise. Tersely, “news content should be original, produced on an ongoing basis.”
I did my best to get the Canadian Journalism Collective to explain how it arrived at a different assessment than the Canada Revenue Agency of whether The Conversation is now producing original news with first hand reporting, or if the CJC rules are somehow more forgiving.
All I got was that the CJC’s eligibility criteria was applied and the news content submitted by The Conversation, like all applicant news organizations, will be reviewed each time there is a new cash distribution.
The Conversation’s parent organization, the Academic Journalism Society, has an unusual structure. Its newsroom consists of staff editors who collaborate with university professors who do the writing, based on the academic work of others or their own scholarly writing.
AJS funding comes 80% from participating universities and 20% from readers, philanthropists or government programs. But its financial structure is not an obstacle to qualifying for either QCJO or Google funds. It still comes down to whether the content is original. The QCJO program requires first-hand reporting but it’s unclear if the Google cash distributed by the CJC requires it. In the end I couldn’t get a satisfactory answer.
It’s important to get that answer, in fact it’s vital.
If there is no requirement for first-hand reporting activity, then news organizations are either aggregators of first-hand reporting done by other newsrooms and contribute nothing of their own, or they are opinion websites.
Opinion is cheap to produce and plentiful in supply. Do we need to underwrite opinion writing, or in the case of the Online News Act, devote Parliamentary bandwidth to wresting cash out of the hands of Big Tech?
In a sea of online opinion, commentary and blather, talk is cheap. Meanwhile the far more costly endeavour of news gathering is the value proposition that journalism offers to the public. Looking in the mirror, MediaPolicy.ca isn’t “original news” and deserves no subsidy or special favour.
And there are more good reasons to draw the line between news gathering and opinion.
The Online News Act was opposed by some as an unwarranted state intervention into the ecosystem of online information that Google and social media platforms have provided.
Sure, the monopolistic platforms Google and Meta exploit their market power in content distribution, stiffing news organizations on fair (or any) licensing payments.
But to critics of the Online News Act, this was justified by the overriding public interest in free information, benefiting both liberal democracy and public education.
On the other hand, what the EU, Australia, and Canada did with their legislative intervention on behalf of news organizations was to carve out news journalism from the unregulated Internet as a special case because of the public interest in, well, political and educational information.
As I said, news gathering is the value proposition of journalism.
I could be wrong of course. When Scott White moved on from his role as editor of The Conversation a year ago, he published acri de coeur on LinkedIn. The gist was that the CRA ruling against his news outlet was narrow minded and rooted in legacy thinking.
In an academic article published earlier this year, Nicole Blanchett and her co-writers suggested that “rigid journalism definitions risk excluding hybrid platforms like The Conversation Canada, limiting innovation and diverse voice in public discourse.”
Not to be coy about it, the authors speculated that the troubles encountered by The Conversation should be seen through the lens of legacy media defending its turf:
Answers to these [research] questions were primarily analyzed through boundary work. Boundary work is at play “when the goal is expansion of authority or expertise into domains claimed by other professions or occupations” (Gieryn, 1983, p. 791). Specific to journalism, it includes “expansion” of journalistic practice that can lead to the attempted “expulsion” of outside actors or inside agitators, as a means to protect the professional “autonomy” of journalists (Carlson, 2015, p. 9). As media startups look to attract the same eyeballs as legacy organizations, “efforts to restrict or extend access to technologies, reporting resources, or press credentials are all acts of boundary work that are simultaneously material and discursive in nature. As such, talk about journalism cannot be isolated from practice and context” (Carlson & Lewis, 2019, p. 132).
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The Public Policy Forum has followed up its February report “The Lost Estate” on the state of local news with a study of news poverty at election time.
“Uncovered” advocates scaling up a philanthropy-funded news pilot project launched during April’s federal election in select Canadian cities and rural areas.
The harm identified in the Report is the lack of public engagement with federal MP candidates over election issues that have special resonance in the local area, for example fishery issues on either coast.
The report includes vignettes of five local races where news poverty might have been a big problem in April. The most glaring was the news desert of Bonavista in Newfoundland and Labrador, a rural riding won by the Conservatives in a razor-thin judicial recount.
On the other hand, the report finds that Yellowknife NWT was well served during election time by a robust local news ecosystem in an isolated regional hub.
The report echoes what TMU’s Local News Research Project identified some time ago: the worst effects of deteriorating news ecosystem are felt in rural areas but also in neglected suburbs of media-rich cities (Richmond BC and Vaughan ON are two such vignettes in the Uncovered study).
Uncovered recommends more philanthropic fundraising for local reporting in future federal elections.
The message running throughout the Report is the importance of local news as a gateway to civic engagement —-and voter education—- for Canadians that are exhausted by polarizing national and international news and hungry for information about local issues that more directly affect their daily lives.
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The meme of New France’s fall to the English runs throughout the L’Actualité feature story, “What will remain of our national idols?”
Québec’s Culture Minister Mathieu Lacombe enthusiastically reposted thisfeature story in L’Actualitéwritten by Guillaume Bourgault-Côté on Bill 109. That legislation tabled just prior to the summer recess is the CAQ government’s bid to compel foreign streamers to make French language audio and video content more prominent in Quebec.
I’ve written about this issue more than once, I think it’s a political sleeper.
Lacombe’s bill is probably unconstitutional because the plan to make streamers offer a library of French language content as well as giving it prominence on the prime real estate of streamer and SmartTV home pages intrudes on federal jurisdiction over Internet broadcasting in the Online Streaming Act.
Were the CRTC already taking bolder steps to make French language content more easily discovered, his bill could be dismissed as performative politics. But the Commission hasn’t, at least not yet.
The L’Actualité story covers all of this familiar ground. Bourgault-Côté opines that “digital giants are now burying local cultures under tons of American productions. Quebec, supported by Senegal, France, and Switzerland, among others, is leading the resistance… while Ottawa dithers.”
Louise Beaudoin, the former provincial culture minister who wrote the key government report creating the policy foundation for Bill 109, is quoted saying “we absolutely must be as numerous as possible. Otherwise, the Americans will run us over.”
But the good inside baseball stuff comes at the end of the feature.
Bourgault-Côté chronicles the political tension between Lacombe and federal Culture minister Steven Guilbeault over the Carney government’s tip-toed support for Lacombe’s efforts to entrench stronger international legal standards, specific to Internet streaming, in amendments to the 2005 UNESCO convention on cultural diversity.
The energy in that tension is Lacombe’s opportunity to drive Bill 109 into the public eye during an election year in Québec and a minority Parliament in Ottawa.
Lacombe’s CAQ is trailing the Parti Québécois in the polls and language policy is one way to make up that ground.
In Ottawa, the Bloc Québécois may take up the standard. A federal Liberal minority government that owes its incumbency to its voter base in Québec cannot afford to leave too large a gap between a cautious approach to regulating foreign streamers and cultural nationalism.
And then there’s the uncomfortable situation for the new leader of the provincial Liberals, former federal Heritage minister Pablo Rodriguez (the sponsor of Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act). If it comes to a federal-provincial scrap over Bill 109 or Canada’s approach to strengthening the UNESCO convention, whose side is Mr Rodriguez on?
The next UNESCO event is scheduled in Barcelona at the end of September and no doubt Lacombe will try to put the federal Liberals on the spot.
And when Lacombe’s Bill becomes law and his government implements regulations on French language content, there’s the strong possibility of a legal challenge by the foreign streamers. At that point, the federal government will have to decide whether to endorse the streamer argument that a provincial government has no jurisdiction over online broadcasting.
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Here’s a short but interesting read. Harrison Lowman interviews Andrew Coyne in the The Hub.
I think we could designate Coyne as Canada’s best known English-speaking intellectual, thanks to his considerable talent but also his privileged positions in the Globe and Mail editorial pages and CBC’s At Issue television panel.
I’ve long written off Coyne as an irredeemable libertarian (sorry, libertarians) who is only brilliant when I agree with him (which is usually when he’s being pragmatic about domestic policy or commenting on international affairs).
In the interview, Coyne gives us some insights into his thinking about what it means to be Canadian as opposed to North American.
His comments about the Canadian Charter of Rights suggest his free market liberalism is tempered by a pragmatism and respect for collectivist public policy. It takes a true policy nerd to say I’m a fan of constitutionally reasonable limits on freedom.
But when it comes to media and cultural issues, what Coyne is missing or dismissing is an appreciation of the overwhelming, anti-competitive American market power in the Canadian attention economy.
That was why he could never see how the Online News Act was (at least in its original design) a competition remedy to Google and Meta abusing their gatekeeper power to stiff Canadian news outlets on a fair licensing fee for their content.
Same thing with the foreign media-tech juggernaut in video and audio entertainment. Same thing with his support for defunding the CBC.
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The AI Death Star posts that recently appeared in this space raised the question of where the AI giants are going to get reliable information for their products if they put news outlets out of business.
That prompted a reader to remind me about the agricultural aphorism “don’t eat your seed corn.”
Wouldn’t you know it, the Globe and Mail’s Ian McGugan had the same thought in this insightful analysis.
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The latest development in the AI Death Star powering up to blast news journalism is Google’s AI Mode.
AI Mode is the longer form iteration on Google’s AI Overviews that presents brief information summaries in response to user inquiries on the Search platform. AI Mode has been released in the US and UK, but not Canada yet. It’s reported to be able to handle more complex information requests.
What AI Overviews and AI Mode have in common is they greatly reduce click throughs to news publishers’ websites that normally display as an algorithm-driven search response or links that might even be cited in the summary response. That means less eyeballs and less advertising revenue for news outlets. Way less.
That outcome raises the obvious question: if news outlets become AI road kill, who will feed fresh content to AI?
All of this ought to be on Evan Solomon’s mind. The former career journalist is now the federal AI Minister. In a recent interview in Toronto Life, he said “my job is to develop a sovereign AI strategy while asking, ‘How can we make sure it causes more good than harm?”’
Solomon touted the opportunity for Canada to thrive in a job-rich AI sector. A more vigorous follow-up question might have been how he saw that happening.
He didn’t point, but might have, to the recent announcement by Bell Canada and the Toronto-headquartered AI outfit Cohere of a co-venture targeting business and government clients in need of AI tools and the supporting infrastructure.
A Globe and Mail story makes it clear that Cohere is a favoured Canadian company, part of an evolving federal strategy for digital sovereignty.
That includes a $240M allocation from the federal government’s $2 Billion “sovereign compute” program that is aimed at match-making Canadian suppliers with Canadian consumers of AI tools.
Cohere, it might be noted, is being sued in the United States by various news publishers for ingesting copyrighted content without a license or compensation. As a former journalist, Solomon must have connected the public policy dots.
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The plight of the Canadian “musician middle class” —maybe we could just acknowledge it is more accurately described as an artist working class— is the subject of the best thing I have read yet on the topic, Luc Rinaldi’s long feature “The Death of the Middle-Class Musician” that was just published in The Walrus.
There is a street narrative out there that says the music streaming gorilla Spotify is a soul-sucking, musician-impoverishing monster. Might be true, might not.
Rinaldi’s piece is sympathetic to musicians (hands up those who are unsympathetic) and, given the difficulty in obtaining data on musician earnings, provides strong indirect evidence that there is a real threat to Canada sustaining its supply of homegrown music. And that is despite the fact that Canada has a reasonably generous program of public and CRTC-generated subsidies, by international standards.
But Rinaldi also wisely puts his finger on the important thing, namely the supply and demand for music in a sea of global content:
“The carrot that’s being dangled in front of an artist is their dream,” says Kurt Dahl, a Saskatoon-based entertainment lawyer…. “When people’s dreams are in play, they’re often not as rational or reasonable as they might be in the regular business world.”…
“You’re up against everything, from everywhere, all the time,” says Patrick Rogers, chief executive officer of Music Canada, an organization that represents the country’s major labels. “And if you’re willing to take on that challenge, the industry is in a position to help you.”
The challenge for media policy in music streaming is that the Internet-driven fragmentation of media creation and consumption has over rewarded a tiny elite of hit-makers, well beyond what existed pre-Internet. Everyone else lives on scraps.
Or at least that’s the view of media thinker Doug Shapiro, and he’s a smart guy.
His latest blog puts forward his theory on this but i couldn’t get past the paywall ($18 per month, forget it) to read the whole thing. However his earlier and unpaywalled version is available here.
A crude summary of what he’s saying is that the “informational and reputational cascades” of popular content work fabulously well on the Internet.
Roughly translated, he’s saying that algorithms perfectly capture our human tendency to sift through an ocean of content by paying attention to what other people found to be good content (informational) or what we need to consume because its a pleasing experience to connect with other human beings through a common culture (reputational). Maybe a little too perfectly.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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