Tag: journalism

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – News bias at the CBC – Online harms back on the menu – Doug, Donald and the 51st state

Exporting Canadian content, c. 1814

December 7, 2024

The closer we get to a federal election, the more the debate about the CBC heats up. 

It’s televised too. Check out the Parliamentary video channels ParlVu and SenVu. Both the Commons Heritage committee (CHPC) and the Senate Transportation and Communications committee (TRCM) are conducting ongoing hearings where Parliamentarians question invited witnesses.

Unfortunately the CHPC is often a gong show as MPs posture for the cameras, so the policy content is low. On the other hand, the unelected Senators on TRCM continuously engage in a serious investigation. Geraldo or the Dick Cavett Show, your choice.

This week the Senate invited former CBC journalist (and union president) Kim Trynacity as well as Richard Stursberg, the former CBC Vice President who recently provided a guest column for MediaPolicy. Both witnesses emphasized that CBC television’s best bet to recover its audience ratings is to double down on local and regional news.

Trynacity made the point that we just can’t wish it so: funding shortfalls were taken out of local television years ago, money would have to be put back.

Stursberg suggested there are unexplored synergies between CBC radio news coverage and cbcnews.ca and that perhaps there are localities where resources from the inherently expensive television news operations could be diverted to sister platforms. 

That’s a pragmatic idea if the gap between ratings and funding can’t be narrowed, but maybe not so enticing to audiences wedded to local news on that medium.

That’s just a taste of an illuminating policy dialogue.

On another policy topic I’ve video clipped three minutes of Stursberg’s time on the witness stand where he commented on accusations of journalistic “bias” against the CBC, the rallying cry that fuels Conservative fund raising to “defund the CBC.”

Stursberg reminded Senators of an external study on CBC editorial performance that he commissioned in 2010. The well publicized results suggested that CBC was being unfairly criticized for partisan bias. 

The advice Stursberg gives now is that the CBC ought to subject itself to this kind of public accountability every year. 

The review would be even more persuasive if expanded beyond partisan reporting (fair or not to political parties) to the hot button issues that routinely feed the culture war of impugning mainstream media. 

On that point, check out this 3-minute video recorded in 2015 by former CBC news anchor Peter Mansbridge who vehemently denies partisan motivations lurking within the CBC. But he posits a “Toronto-centric” mindset of the Front Street journalist corps leaking into its journalist culture and news coverage.

While we are talking about bias and the CBC, this is the opportunity to revisit Pollara’s survey results from last July that I posted about at the time.

First, here’s the headline number on how much Canadians trust CBC News in comparison to other outlets:

Then there’s the question of “nobody’s watching the CBC:”

The latter chart is obviously a polling of audiences on all platforms, not just television.

Now here’s a clue to some of the CBC-bashing:

These trust gaps are clearly driven by party allegiance, a proxy for a diversity of world view and perhaps a visceral cynicism about media (only 25% of Conservative supporters trust the National Post).

Regardless, the exaggerated trust gap for the CBC is a concern, no matter how you look at it.

On the other hand, if the concern is that polarized opinion on CBC “bias” is dividing the country regionally, consider this outtake from the 2024 Sparks poll that compares opinions in Alberta to those in Québec:

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The Liberals’ Online Harms bill has been plucked out of the Parliamentary wilderness. “Pre-study” hearings at the Commons Justice committee resume Monday.

Justice Minister Arif Virani finally acknowledged political reality and split off the anti-hate provisions of the bill which expand criminal sanctions and re-open the door to human rights litigation. The core of harm prevention in the legislation is a self-regulation regime for social media platforms and that will go forward on Monday.

Given the election calendar, don’t expect much progress. Also expect the Conservatives to filibuster in committee. The CPC has its own harms bill it wants to advance: ironically, it’s a crime bill (although directed only at harms against children).

***

Ontario Premier Doug Ford annoys me so much that I often wish I could vote twice, once for a different Premier and once for a different mayor (oops, he’s not really Mayor of Toronto, he just governs as if he was).

But today I thank my Premier for zipping it to Donald Trump after la grande orange quipped about Canada becoming the 51st American state. I suppose we shouldn’t take offence: after all Trump only wants to annex us, not insult us. 

Globe editorialist Tony Keller has the story of Doug’s retort here, with a bucket of Canadian trash talk for Trump.

AI-generated photo of Donald Trump viewing the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps

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Let me recommend a gripping start-to-finish episode of Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast —-only 80 minutes long!— acknowledging that it may be of more interest to my fellow progressives. 

Klein interviews Faiz Shakir, a senior staffer from the Bernie Sanders camp, on whether Democrats are overdue to embrace “Bernieism.” 

Shakir believes Democrats can win with economic populism, a brand and policy platform that is based on what he describes as the majoritarian sentiment in the United States that capitalism is rigged and an authentic politician with bulldozer appeal can deliver change “for you.” 

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – CRTC’s Netflix plan – breaking up Google? – Meta’s news ban defiance -more CBC debate

November 23, 2024

This week MediaPolicy published a report of the CRTC’s announcement on November 15th laying the groundwork for how Netflix and the other foreign video streamers will contribute to Canadian content under the Online Streaming Act.

Released on a Friday, the announcement flew quietly under the radar of the daily news cycle, possibly because there is no immediate price tag attached to Netflix’s future obligations to make or license Canadian shows.

Last June the CRTC imposed on the foreign streamers $140 million worth of annual contributions to Canadian television subsidy funds for news, drama and kid’s programming: last week’s much anticipated announcement might end up being worth five times as much in streamers’ programming budgets for Canadian content.

You can read MediaPolicy’s take, here.

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There are times when the impact of American public policy initiatives on Canadian media policy dwarves anything we might do north of the 49th.

As you may recall, the trial judge in an anti-trust suit begun by the Trump White House and several states against Google resulted in a legal ruling declaring Google an illegal monopoly in Search and search related advertising. 

Following up, the collective of Attorneys Generals spearheaded by the federal DOJ have now tabled remedial requests to the trial judge. 

Just for starters, they are requesting that Google divest its Chrome web browser and its Android mobile operating system. And there are important requests focussing directly on bootstrapping would-be competitors to Google in the Search market by giving them “catch-up” access to Google’s treasure trove of consumer data. Radical stuff for radical times.

There is a useful news summary from the New York Times. But if you can afford the time for a ten-minute read, I recommend Matt Stoller’s excellent explainer.

As I read Stoller’s piece, it easily came to mind how unlikely it is that Canadian news publishers would have successfully pursued the news licensing payments in the Online News Act if instead of Google’s monopoly on search referrals there was robust competition in the Search Engine market.

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More than a few times MediaPolicy has raised the question of how Meta is getting away with its selective ban on Canadians news content, its response to our Online News Act. 

The Heritage Minister raised the same question publicly but she is constrained by the fact that it’s the CRTC’s jurisdiction to investigate it.

It’s possible that federal cabinet considered but dismissed the idea of sending the CRTC a policy directive asking the Commission to look into why Meta permits the sharing of some news items, but not others, and why it has flat-out restored news posting privileges to outlets such as Narcity.

The Commission is twiddling around on this one. In early October it asked Meta to explain the rhyme and reason for allowing some news content on its Facebook and Instagram platforms while banning the vast majority of news organizations.

Meta filed a letter in response and, according to a Canadian Press story, it appears that Menlo Park submitted something, but it’s not clear what. And beyond whatever details of its selective ban it provided, Meta has claimed confidentiality and opposes the public release of its answers to the Commission.

This minor legal drama will play out in the fifth dimension of regulatory time.

Meanwhile the public is still in the dark as to whether the Commission thinks there is a basis for playing hardball with Meta by, for instance, officially designating its platforms under the Online News Act so that banned news organizations can file an “undue preference” complaint and get equal treatment to Meta’s favoured news outlets.

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I’m pleased that so many followers of this blog liked Richard Stursberg’s guest column on the CBC, his advice for the incoming CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard. It’s now the most popular post in MediaPolicy’s short history. 

Now there’s an interesting column from The Hub’s Managing Editor Harrison Lowman in which he identifies the “defund the CBC” problem as the public broadcaster’s news curation and journalism culture. His bottom line: fix it, don’t destroy an important Canadian institution and a vital provider of news journalism.

Lowman’s piece —-clearly not toeing the Conservative Party line—- was immediately disputed by The Hub’s Editor-At-Large and former Harper policy chief Sean Speer. 

Speer’s says his support of defunding the CBC is not founded on an allegation of biased news reporting. Gosh no. It’s about the CBC’s declining audience share (him citing poor television viewership numbers, but ignoring strong digital and radio numbers). His colleague Lowman is just being “nostalgic” about the CBC.

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Stursberg’s CBC advice – friends of ‘Scrap the Tax’ – Heritage report on Big Tech astroturfing

November 17, 2024

This week MediaPolicy hosted a guest column on the future of the CBC from Richard Stursberg, the author of The Tangled Garden: A Canadian Cultural Manifesto and the 2012 Tower of Babble, a memoir of running English language services at the CBC. The column welcomes the new President of CBC, Marie-Philippe Bouchard, with some advice.

Stursberg’s column follows an interview that MediaPolicy published recently with Chris Waddell about his book, End of the CBC?

You see exposed now, my naked agenda: more talk about how to reinvent the CBC and present an alternative to Pierre Poilievre’s promise to defund it. I hope to keep this going with more discussion on this platform.

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Here’s one piece of my mind I offer about the CBC.

Pierre Poilievre has many political goals to be achieved by defunding the CBC, not the least of which is repaying donors so he can convince them his audacity is genuine.

The other purpose of “defund the CBC” is to effect a seismic shift in the media reporting universe. Silencing the CBC through defunding is the right-wing version of cancel-culture, something you might have heard is a bad thing. The reputed CBC “news bias” will be eliminated along with  the work of 3000 unwanted journalists.

For a thought provoking video clip, here is CBC news host David Cochrane putting forth a plausible hypothetical in a Canada purged of the CBC:

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On November 15 the CRTC announced that it is commencing hearings on March 31, 2025 that will dive into the meatiest of remaining regulatory issues for video streamers under the Online Streaming Act Bill C-11. MediaPolicy will have more to say about that in mid-week.

Even though the federal cabinet gave the Commission until December 2025 to complete the regulatory “framework” for the bill, the Commission’s laborious pace is awkward given the Conservative election promise to repeal it.

On Friday the Commission made it clear that the best case scenario for completing its work including the specific requirements for online and traditional broadcasters is in 2026 and, as expected, it will pause this work the moment that the election writ is dropped.

That means voters in the a federal election to be held no later than October 2025 will be relying a great deal on what political parties say the legislation is about, rather than how it is actually implemented. We deserve better.

The campaign against C-11 continues uninterrupted.

As covered by MediaPolicy in these two posts, the coalition representing Spotify and the Big Tech music streamers recently launched the public campaign “Scrap The Streaming Tax,” a reference to the CRTC’s CanCon levy authorized by C-11. The Washington D.C.-based Digital Media Association (DiMA) behind the campaign was fortunate to land Canadian rocker Bryan Adams as an ally and supporter of the campaign.

Now DiMA has sponsored —-paid for—- an opinion column from The Hub’s Sean Speer in which Stephen Harper’s former policy chief proposes the repeal of Bill C-11.

The column, illustrated with art from DiMA’s “Scrap the Tax” campaign, signs off “this article was made possible by the Digital Media Association and the generosity of readers like you.”

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The Parliamentary Heritage Committee has issued its final report on hearings convened in reaction to the political campaigns and news throttles conducted in Canada by Meta and Google in 2022 and 2023. The modest title of the proceedings was: “Tech Giants’ Intimidation and Subversion Tactics to Evade Regulation in Canada and Globally.”

Alas, the committee’s majority report (the Conservative MPs dissented) is anti-climatic. When the hearings commenced, MPs demanded that Meta and Google cough up e-mails that might reveal “astroturfing” alliances between the Big Tech giants and grassroots Canadian organizations opposing Internet legislation.

In the end, there is nothing in the report about those e-mails. It’s just as well. The Big Tech funding patrons and campaign alliances were openly acknowledged by those Canadian organizations.

The Committee made five recommendations for regulating Big Tech’s activities in Canada, four of which are addressed by the Liberals’ Online Safety Act C-63 that currently languishes in Parliament. 

The fifth recommendation is a reprise of the Heritage Committee’s 2017 proposal to “Close the Loophole” in section 19.1 of the Income Tax Act that exempts online advertising from the tax presumption against placing Canadian advertisements in foreign media operating in Canada. The policy idea is to encourage Canadian advertisers to reach online Canadian audiences through Canadian media.

A footnote: the Conservative Party’s dissenting statement declares its intention (or that of its committee MPs) to repeal the Online News Act, C-18. While the Party and its leader have repeatedly opposed and criticized the Bill that delivers $100 million annually to Canadian news organizations, this is the first time I have seen them commit to repealing it.

By coincidence, this week CBC News announced it is using its $7 million in Google money to hire 25 journalists in underserved regional markets with a focus on Western Canada.

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The ability of Canadian governments to regulate Big Tech operations is always limited by the reality that we are a small country and the US is a big one that uses trade power to defend the interests of its corporations. Anything we want to do differently from the US in respect to Big Tech is difficult; anything the US Congress does on its own accord would be easier to mirror in Canada.

So the impact of the Trump and Republican victories in the recent election upon Big Tech is all important. The Washington Post published a summary of the live Tech regulatory issues in 2025 such as AI, child safety, and Elon Musk (he’s his own issue). 

The Post speculated that the selection of the new majority leader of the Republican Senate might be crucial to tech issues and indeed the job was captured by South Dakota’s John Thune, despite Musk’s vigorous opposition to his appointment. Thune is sometimes identified as a traditional Republican and more likely to work constructively across the aisle with Democrats.

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – The Spotify stonewall – Debating the CBC – Ottawa’s warning label on TikTok – more Corus misery

November 7, 2024

On the weekend MediaPolicy published a lengthy explainer about the new “Scrap the Streaming Tax” campaign launched by the global music streamers to fight CRTC regulation. 

The post’s opening hook —-how Canadian rocker Bryan Adams stepped forward to become the celebrity face of the campaign—- adds a little colour to the debate over the regulatory environment for “CanCon,” something Adams once said “only breeds mediocrity.” This week, Adams launched his own channel on Bell Media’s iHeart radio.

The main point of my post was that the music streamers appear to making no efforts to come to grips with the biggest of cultural challenges within Canadian music: the enormous and baffling underconsumption of French language music on their streaming platforms in Québec.

Right on cue, La Presse published a story on its journalist’s discovery that part of Spotify’s song algorithm is, not surprisingly, a popularity index that rates songs based on global listens and the time freshness of that audience. The result is not a shock: the popularity index of French language Canadian music is not in the same ball park as English Canadian songs, to say nothing of the indexing of the most successful global artists. 

La Presse’s attempt to get Spotify’s comments were met by stony silence, as were previous inquiries by MediaPolicy.

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Former CBC executive Richard Stursberg wrote in his 2012 memoir of his tumultuous tenure at the helm of English language services that one of the things that the CBC excels at, and should focus on, is “smart talk,” his description of programming that curates debates about important public issues.

In the swirling discussion over the Conservative Party’s promise to defund the CBC, that smart talk is what CBC host Elamin Abdelmahmoud just put together on his Commotion podcast, first with a panel of three critics of the CBC and next with three defenders.

Separating the sparring teams was a good idea: you will be better informed and spared the tedious cross talk of face to face debate.

Harrison Lowman of The Hub warned the CBC “that your days are numbered,” something he does not relish personally, and that a dramatic re-engineering of the public broadcaster is required for survival. On the other hand, writer Rupa Subramanya is not for saving the CBC: she would defund CBC television, CBC2 music radio, and provide “tiny” funding for CBC Radio One (perhaps inadvertently, no comment on CBC.ca).

In the other room, National Observer columnist Max Fawcett regarded Subramanya’s claims that the free market will provide Canadians with their own media as “delusional.” 

What makes the two podcasts so engaging is how everyone addresses the elephant in the room with honesty. That elephant is a composite of belief, caricature, misrepresentation and reality that CBC’s institutional culture is dominated by its location in downtown Toronto and that this culture suffuses its programming throughout the rest of the country, creating resentments, hostility and worst of all indifference. 

We live in an age of cultural wars that animate political polarization, with tribes suspecting the worst of each other. Together the two podcasts are a tonic. Which is what the CBC mandate can be.

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A news story that is going to hang around and get a whole lot bigger is the federal government’s decision after a lengthy national security review to ban TikTok from operating on Canadian soil but allow private citizens to use the app. In short, it’s a “use at own risk” advisory.

There’s an informative story on this in the Globe and Mail (which has followed the federal government in banning its employees from using the app out of surveillance concerns).

US Congress had ordered the Chinese-owned TikTok to sell its American operations or face an Internet ban in that country. But with President-Elect Trump making friendlier noises about TikTok, that’s in doubt.

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Life at Corus Entertainment must be a misery these days.

The profitable but debt-laden company is the target of acquisition by Canadian media rival Québecor which hopes to buy Corus at a discount. The unsecured creditors see this coming and are manueuvring for a more modest haircut on their loans. 

Meanwhile, Rogers is showing no mercy to its vulnerable competitor. In addition to its scoop of Corus’ best American programming, it is now seeking to dump Corus’ kids channels from its cable service. 

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – local news poverty is dangerous – a new CEO for CBC? – Jeff Elgie’s big idea – the Bowie vibe

October 21, 2024

Last week I was in Charlottetown attending a conference on local news. 

I posted a brief summary of the keynote speech delivered by Steve Waldman here.

Waldman is the American journalist who heads the Local News Project and the Report for America intern program. If you want to place him in the Canadian constellation of public journalism, consider him an American counterpart to our Ed Greenspon or Margo Goodhand. The headline graphics above and below are from Waldman’s slide deck.

Waldman’s pitch, and the idea behind the conference, was that saving local news journalism is job one. 

The argument he makes is that there is a great deal of evidence in the US suggesting that towns and rural areas living in news poverty —with too few or no community news outlets — are ripe for misinformation circulating on social media and also political polarization when searching for news on more partisan sources at the national level. 

There is a connection, he says, between being underinformed or misinformed about local events, issues, and politics and on the other hand the rising national tide of political polarization where citizens sort themselves into tribes and stop listening to each other. 

One should be cautious about copy and pasting Waldman’s analysis from the US to Canada, but his view will strike many as true.

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The National Post scored some of outgoing CBC President Catherine Tait’s e-mails, commenting on the Conservative “defund the CBC” campaign, through an access to information request. Alas, her comments weren’t very juicy. 

Tait’s replacement is due to be announced by the Heritage Minister any day now: LaPresse and Le Devoir had stories claiming it will be Marie-Philippe Bouchard. She is currently the CEO of the Canadian broadcasting consortium TV5 Unis that partners with global francophonie broadcaster TVMonde. She was at CBC-Radio Canada for 26 years before that.

Bouchard’s reputation precedes her, at least in Québec, where reaction to her possible appointment was roundly positive.

Appointing Bouchard to replace Tait would fall in line with the important tradition of alternating between Québec and English Canada.

Peter Menzies raised the obvious question: it’s the current state of English-language CBC that needs review in response to Pierre Poilievre’s promise to defund CBC but not Radio-Canada, so why not pick someone from another province?

The answer may be that she spent 12 of her 26 years at CBC working as legal and regulatory counsel for both sides of the corporation. You can expect the question to be raised again if Bouchard is appointed.

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A notable absence from the Charlottetown local news conference was Jeff Elgie, CEO of the expanding Village Media chain of local digital media sites.

Elgie has seemingly defied gravity for the last ten years by growing from one local site in Sault Ste. Marie to more than thirty in Ontario. Along the way he’s built a popular proprietary publishing system and even added a legislature news bureau. 

I interviewed Elgie back in March and it is one of the most popular posts in MediaPolicy’s short history (he’s only got a 100 or so employees, so it’s not what you think).

Besides launching his first Toronto site in the next weeks, his next big idea is “Spaces,” a social media platform for chat groups moderated by community hosts. 

I just signed up, so wait for a report.

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My recommended read is for media nerds only. Doug Shapiro has another crystal ball blog, this time about the impact of Generative AI on video creation. It has the feel of David Bowie’s famous 1999 “tip of the iceberg” prognostication about the Internet.

Here’s a teaser from Shapiro’s “GenAI as a New Form” about what might lie below the water line:

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Independent news publishers chart a path through the local news crisis

October 17, 2024

We are into year seven of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Local News Research project issuing regular reminders of the steady decline of local news outlets and the matching rise of “news poverty” (no news, or less news) in communities across the country.

The most recent report is here. Represented graphically above as a tally of closings and start-ups (not necessarily in the same communities) it presents a disturbing picture of Canadian news poverty.

The Michener Awards Foundation —the public service journalism organization that co-manages its well known annual awards with the Rideau Foundation—  just assembled a meeting of 40 or so independent news publishers and editors in Charlottetown, hoping to survive and chart a path to “innovation and sustainability.”

The first two hours of the conference were the most compelling as news outlets swapped strategies of audience engagement. The common denominator could be summarized as “independent local ownership equals brand trust and community engagement with readers, advertisers and community organizations,” the latter being particularly effective in generating popular local content. 

The keynote speaker was up next: Steve Waldman of the American Rebuild Local News project and the national intern program, Report for America. His elevator pitch was already known to anyone tracking the news poverty crisis. Measuring by polling metrics, citizens living in communities that have lost most or all of their local news outlets are prey for misinformation spread on social media, increased political polarization and alienation. It’s a democratic crisis, not a business crisis. Or as one publisher told the crowd, “this is not a business. This is a public service that I have to run as a business.”

Familiar to Canadians, Waldman’s prescription is a variety of public policy solutions, that is subsidies of one kind or another at the state or federal level. 

One intriguing idea, as yet not floated north of the 49th, is government assistance to local businesses that place ads in local media. An obvious policy companion to the existing federal reader subscription tax credits, this kind of assistance has the merit of being market-facing. Plus, I speculate, it could be catnip to politicians courting small business as a political constituency.


After speaking, Waldman sat down and tried to eat his sandwich while MediaPolicy and others peppered him with questions about the American experience with public policy solutions (he was just as interested in what Canada is doing).

His political reporter’s account of US legislation falling short by a whisker —in US Congress and at the state level— make it clear that bipartisan Republican and Democrat support is indispensable but within reach. 

That political reality offers a segue to our own Canadian politics of saving local news. The publishers at the conference were grimly aware of Pierre Poilievre’s invective against government assistance to media. 

If the likely winner of the next federal election cannot be persuaded to see the wisdom in the current federal program of subsidies tied directly to the employment of news gathering journalists in communities, it’s possible he might be enticed into a re-design that keeps some form of that program and expands the market-facing policy solutions. 

On the other hand it may be necessary to take Poilievre’s nihilism at face value. His hostility to the mainstream media in general and federal aid in particular is, when combined with his prowess in reaching voters directly through social media, a little too close to Donald Trump’s political strategy. 

It may or may not be fair at this point to make a one-to-one comparison of Poilievre to Trump for demonizing the media, but the Canadian populist’s provocative style is on voters’ minds.

***

Steve Waldman’s presentation deck includes this slide charting American public policy proposals for funding local news, compared to Canada. The chart would appear to be missing the Big Tech news licensing payments flowing from Canada’s Online News Act:

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