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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Village Media expands to middle America – Meta says Canadian news ban is good for its stock price – Paramount and US states face off over Warner Bros. merger

Facebook post, Narcity Canada

July 25, 2026

The late and first Lord Thomson of Fleet, Canada’s Roy Thomson, built the ground floor of his media empire on home turf in northern Ontario. During the 1930s and 1940s he expanded into a string of radio stations and 20 daily Canadian newspapers, most of them in mid sized and small towns. He bought the British establishment newspaper, The Times. Today his grandson David Thomson owns the Globe and Mail and the global media giant Thomson Reuters.

Now that’s a tough act to follow but Village Media’s Jeff Elgie seems to have picked up the Thomson vibe, if not the empire.

Village Media is a network of digital community media websites in 27 modestly sized Ontario communities. Like Thomson, Elgie started in Ontario’s near north.

This week Elgie announced a joint venture of a further 15 community sites in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Illinois in partnership with the Knight Foundation, the well known American charitable fund with close historical ties to news journalism. The partners will quite literally find out whether the Village business model plays in Peoria, Illinois.

Including Peoria, the tentative list of fifteen US communities are all under 115,000 in population.

The green light for launch in each case will depend upon Elgie’s success in recruiting the local staff he wants. Village will run the network day to day and control editorial.

Village Media’s business model is strictly digital publishing, 100% ad supported, and seeks out smaller markets that have a strong local identity but an unsaturated supply of local journalism: watering news deserts, in other words.

Unlike many single-outlet Canadian digital news start-ups, Village’s multi-location network provides operational scale and financial ballast for launching start-ups in additional communities.

And although Elgie has licensed his proprietary digital publishing software to Canadian community news networks outside of Ontario, he has yet to expand his own operations into other provinces.

He told me that his move across the border into the US market was motivated by the right market opportunity and the personal connections between Village (whose board is chaired by Google’s former VP News Richard Gingras) and the Knight Foundation.

Knight is investing in the three state news network. Unlike Canadian charitable tax rules, US laws permit “program related investments” in for-profit news journalism. According to Elgie, it is possible that Knight might liquidate its investment in a couple of years if its collaboration with Village Media is successful and move on to similar local news projects in other states.

Elgie says he is not ruling out future expansion for Village Media into other Canadian markets but for now the US project with Knight fits within his corporate bandwidth.

***

For months MediaPolicy has been following this story: is Meta cheating on its ban on postings of Canadian news articles on Facebook and Instagram?

The Meta ban began in August 2023 as a legal maneuver designed to escape from mandatory licensing payments under the Online News Act. That left Google as the only “digital news intermediary” liable to make payments to Canadian news outlets.

It took 18 months of Meta’s news ban being in place before a Canadian news entity —in this case, the “LITS” coalition of local independently-owned television stations— challenged it by filing a complaint with the CRTC. The LITS allegation is that despite its “news ban” Meta turns a blind eye to the posting of original Canadian news content by unbanned news outlets or by ordinary Canadian citizens.

Meanwhile, mainstream news outlets, their news reporting, and even their opinion commentary all remain banned from the two Meta platforms.

LITS wants the CRTC to name Meta as a digital media intermediary under the Online News Act in order to trigger the mandatory news licensing scheme in the statute.

The legal filings are complete now. The Commission closed its portal for public comment (File 2026-0066-8) at the end of March.

Meta’s lawyer filed its response in April (see the letter below). Meta says it tries its best to maintain the integrity of its ban by deleting hyperlinks to original news content as users post them. Of interest to legal beagles, Meta insists the posting of news content screen shots falls outside the Online News Act’s definition of the “news.”

The days pass like months in Ottawa but the CRTC may some day sort out the LITS allegations of which Exhibit A is that Meta allows Rogers City-TV to post digital content from its Breakfast Television show while blocking digital content from BT’s direct morning show competitor, Hamilton’s CHCH-TV.

MediaPolicy’s Exhibit B (not filed at the Commission) is that Meta has allowed Narcity Canada to post breaking news stories from Canadian Press on a daily basis. Canadian Press qualifies as a news outlet under the Online News Act.

Mostly a travel and lifestyle site, Narcity does not publish enough of its own original news to qualify for federal QCJO subsidies and, by implication, news payments under the Online News Act. According to Narcity CEO Chuck Lapointe, he signed Meta’s waiver that says Narcity is not a “news outlet” under the Online News Act and will not claim compensation from Meta.

In case you think I am nitpicking about the selective nature of the news ban, a recent academic study found that Narcity is now the leading Canadian publisher of news on Instagram (the study did not have data on Facebook posts).

In this graph from the study, note which Canadian news organizations lead in posts and engagement on YouTube and TikTok, compared to Meta’s news-embargoed Instagram:

And in case you are wondering why Canadian Press did not intervene in the CRTC proceeding initiated by LITS and has nothing to say about CP content being published daily on Facebook and Instagram by Narcity, well so am I. My direct inquiry to Canadian Press on this matter did not elicit a reply.

In related news, the municipal council of Sturgeon County in the greater Edmonton region had Meta’s Canadian spokesperson Rachel Curran in front of them last week to answer questions about the $13 billion data centre planned for the area.

When the questions turned from the proposed data centre to the Meta news ban, Curran had a quotable defence for it:

“These publishers share information and articles on our platforms because it benefits them in the form of distribution. We have a responsibility not to do things that are going to unnecessarily exert downward pressure on our stock price.”

CRTC redacted Meta Response t 08-MAY-2026 Download

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Paramount can see the finish line in obtaining approval of its $111 USD billion merger with Warner Brothers Discovery. But first it faces a court hearing in two weeks: numerous Attorney Generals for California and 12 other states will ask for an injunction blocking the deal while they seek to derail the merger on anti-trust grounds.

Paramount’s Ellison family ownership has the wind at its back. The US Department of Justice took a pass on blocking the merger and this week both Canadian and European Union competition authorities did the same.

Paramount is offering the courts a legal justification that will be familiar to Canadians who followed the Rogers-Shaw merger, blessed by the CRTC in 2022: that no matter how big a streamer, film studio and television company that Paramount becomes, it’s still a smaller media conglomerate than Netflix, Google, or Apple.

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Plan B for AI’s content theft – AI scorecards of news journalism – does Canada Post neutralize news subsidies? – minister Miller’s book briefing

July 18, 2026

News publishers around the world are about to get their asses handed to them by AI companies. And they know it.

What to do? Well there’s Plan A and there’s Plan B.

Plan A is for news publishers to combat the AI chatbots’ illegal scraping of digital news content by filing lawsuits seeking license payments. On that score, sympathetic legislatures could move the needle on compensating news publishers faster, more lucratively, and more broadly to all news publishers by legislating clear copyright ownership of the content that AI chatbots are ingesting without paying for it.

Something like Plan A has been tried before, as you recall.

Over the last decade, the European Union, Australia and Canada have legislated a fair market in news licensing payments from Google and Meta with mixed success.

Landing in Canada as the Online News Act, Bill C-18 was a classic anti-trust remedy to the monopoly power held by Google and Meta over the ad-supported distribution of digital news hyperlinks and snippets on search engines and social media.

The legislated backstop of commercial arbitration meant that the “net exchange value” —-an independent measurement of the offsetting monetary value of publishers’ news content versus Google and Meta’s traffic referrals back to news sites — rebalanced bargaining power over news licensing payments from the monopolists in favour of hundreds of news publishers.

Once Bill C-18 became law, Google opted to pony up $100 million annually to Canadian news publishers. Deciding not to face the music of an independent assessment of net exchange value, Meta banned mainstream news from appearing on Facebook and Instagram.

Despite American trade pressure, Mark Carney hasn’t given away our Online News Act. But his obeisance to Donald Trump on the digital services tax —introduced to counteract Big Tech tax avoidance — and his climb down on the CRTC’s levies on Netflix and the foreign streamers are unnerving to say the least.

By contrast, Australia’s PM Anthony Albanese has been outspoken and defiant while moving slowly on implementing a new law that would put down the same mutiny that Meta staged in 2024 when its first and only licensing deal with Australian publishers expired.

In a recent speech at Sydney University, Albanese outlined a vision on AI that might have been cribbed straight from Carney’s “AI for All” national policy until he went where Carney wouldn’t go: support for copyright and creators’ IP:

But let me make this crystal clear: not everything produced in Australia is up for grabs. Not at all. Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists must retain ownership and control of their work. Our laws will spell that out, plain as day. An artist’s creative endeavour is their work and their property. No company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI without the artist’s control. That includes the artist’s control of the price and value of their work. Anything less, is theft. No country has got this right yet. Nowhere do artists or rights holders have sufficient control of their work, when it comes to AI training.

That is why the best way to secure the strongest copyright protections for Australian artists is for Australia to be active and involved. To build the best possible solution for ourselves. And to preserve the creativity that is fundamental to who we are to our national identity and the journalism that is essential to our democratic society.

Stirring words, but talk is cheap. Plan A on AI news licensing is still just a plan. Remember how hard it can be to execute.

I would be surprised if news publishers aren’t spending every day contemplating a Plan B, i.e. how to survive AI without government intervention.

The question is what kind of ingenuity and resources can news publishers bring to the table that would change the balance of commercial bargaining power between them and the AI companies? How do news publishers negotiate licensing deals that give them fair compensation, brand visibility, and drive audience traffic back to their proprietary websites?

One of many ideas is news companies charging AI chatbots micropayments instead of selling them all-access licenses. Previously, pay-per-article failed as a news subscription strategy because, as Substacker Ulrike Langer puts it, “micropayments turn every act of consumption into a small purchasing decision, and humans will pay extra [in the form of an all-access monthly subscription] to be spared that unwelcome feeling.”

But could it be different if the news subscribers were emotionless AI scrapers trolling for just the right on-time content to satisfy the latest AI prompt? Langer isn’t sure, but whatever the potential in that kind of innovation might be, it surely isn’t a game changer for news publishers (although perhaps AI micropayments would be better than nothing for the small news publishers likely to be shut out of big licensing deals).

Making a real difference in this unequal contest of commercial leverage may depend upon the brand power of trusted news outlets. If AI companies want their own subscribers to trust their news content over the information offered by competing AI chatbots, they will pay bigger licensing fees to news organizations that are hitting it out of the park on audience trust.

This graphic from a recent academic study, the “The News Canadians Actually See,” illustrates how deeply skeptical Canadians remain about getting their news from an AI chatbot instead of traditional media.

We should probably assume that Plan B is only a plan for the very best and biggest news organizations.

That brings us back to Plan A, which is a legislative intervention to rebalance the bargaining power between Big Tech and Little News.

***

Speaking of hitting it out of the park on brand trust, I’ve been opining about trust in news journalism in my last two posts and perhaps I should stop. But not just yet.

South of the border, Big Tech titan Peter Thiel is bankrolling a couple of AI businesses doing interesting things with journalism.

State Affairs is a news organization that hires journalists to report from US state legislatures. It feeds their reporting into an AI news product. In other words, it’s a hybrid human/AI news outlet (see Plan B, above).

State Affairs’ co-founder Evan Burns told The Washington Post that “AI can’t build sources. It can’t ask follow-up questions. It can’t go knock on the doorframe of the chief of staff of the whatever.”

Less altruistically, the media-hostile Thiel is also the money behind The Primary, an AI-fueled rating agency for news organizations and individual journalists. The Primary publishes a trust scorecard. Here are the ratings of news outlets and here is another scoring of bylined journalists (including those that report on the AI companies that Thiel owns).

The Primary scores don’t seem outrageously skewed although they definitely suggest a right-of-centre standpoint (for example, the New York Times is rubbished).

The idea of a media watchdog keeping tabs on journalist watchdogs is hardly new: media criticism podcasts and columns abound. But the marriage of media criticism and AI tools is new.

AI analysis of bias in media is just getting off the ground in Canada. A few months ago, Substacker David Clinton of The Audit published an AI-assisted review of CBC News coverage. Honest Reporting Canada did something similar on the “emotional sympathy” extended to various news subjects and public actors in CBC’s coverage of the Gaza conflict.

There are also media websites like Briefly News which appears to use AI tools to rate global news companies for bias and trust. You will find two Canadian outlets there, the CBC and the Globe & Mail. The site has no masthead, corporate information or country of origin.

The idea of a machine intelligence stepping forward to referee disputes over news bias has its allure for anyone looking to comment upon trustworthy news journalism.

It would be premature to say that right now that AI tools can reliably improve our ability to measure fairness in news journalism. But I have a feeling we’re going to be talking about it a lot more.

***

In the centrifuge of public policy and competing priorities, sometimes governments do things at cross purposes.

Take the example of the federal government and its historic support for small, mostly rural community newspapers. Since before Confederation, we have subsidized news outlets. At first it was through discounted postal rates and subsequently through direct subsidies in the Canada Periodical Fund, all pre-dating the more controversial journalism labour tax credits for daily and mostly urban newspapers.

I don’t need to re-tell the story of how the advertising market was captured by digital platforms and undermined the business model of community newspapers, subsidized as they were. I reckon the federal government is now paying 50 cents on each dollar of publisher costs.

On a completely separate track from newspapers (and under the aegis of a different government department), Canada Post met its own paradigmatic shift in its legacy business model by going all in on door-to-door distribution of retailer ad flyers, piggybacked on its regular mail delivery.

Since its introduction in the 1990s, the “Admail” Canada Post program has undercut newspaper companies who depend on flyer distribution as a major stream of revenue, offering free editorial content wrapped around local retail advertising inserts. There’s a chapter and verse history of the next thirty years in a News Media Canada op ed published today.

Fast forward, the problem just got worse. Enter the Montreal-headquartered Transcontinental, a national printer and distributor of local retail flyers through Raddar, its printing and home delivery program. Instead of a free newspaper and a bundle of flyer inserts, Raddar prints a single aggregated advertising flyer.

This spring Raddar struck a deal with Canada Post to break into new markets across the country by contracting for national Admail delivery on a discount offered by the Post Office at a rate that local news publishers can’t match.

This week the Winnipeg Free Press announced it is laying off its network of 817 distribution contractors that support its flyer business and shuttering the companion editorial product, the Free Press Community Review. That cedes the 200,000 local household market to the federally-owned Canada Post and Transcontinental. With that, goes 10% of the Free Press’s overall revenue, according to its publisher.

This looks like a case of cross-purposed public policy: the federal government’s revenue strategy for Canada Post submarines a major source of commercial revenue of the news publishers whom it subsidizes with federal money.

***

A few months ago I reviewed Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature. It’s a policy pitch for a better federal policy on supporting Canadian book publishers and authors.

As a follow up on that I think you will enjoy reading Ken Whyte’s last two Substacks on the same topic here and here.

The acid-tongued commentary asks why culture and identity minister Marc Miller asked his civil servants for an update on Canadian book publishing policy and got back advice that ignored whether it was effective. The answer might be that the minister didn’t ask that question, but perhaps he will now.

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Miller explains the Netflix bailout – Federal ad vouchers to support Canadian media? – US DOJ approves the Paramount/ Warner Bros merger

June 14, 2026

There are few things more refreshing than CTV’s Vassy Kapelos grilling cabinet ministers.

The host of Question Period had culture and identity minister Marc Miller in the dock on Saturday to ask him bluntly why Canadians would expect that his new Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34 won’t be given away upon President Donald Trump’s insistence, as were the Digital Services Tax and the CRTC’s assessment of cash and investment contributions to Canadian content by US streaming services.

Miller’s answer: there will be no surrender by the Liberals on his new bill. Protecting kids is not on the table, he said, “hard stop.” The minister thinks that similar legislative efforts being passed or proposed in Washington and various US state houses to protect children from online harms bodes well for Canada pursuing the same strategy.

Also, he said protecting children is more important than “redistributing money within an industry,” a reference to the CRTC ruling. (Public polling on conceding ground on the Online Streaming Act under US trade pressure is here.)

As for overruling the CRTC on streamer contributions, Miller said he wouldn’t comment publicly. That lasted about ten seconds once Kapelos went after him for “capitulation” to US trade pressure and American companies.

Kapelos asked Miller what Canada got, or might get, in CUSMA trade talks for coughing up the Digital Services Tax and the CRTC ruling.

“I’m not going to tell you,” replied the minister.

The minister then gave up some fresh talking points on the CRTC ruling and the $600M in federal funds that includes replacement of the streamer contributions:

The CRTC “is not the final arbiter” on implementing the Online Streaming Act, the government is.
The Prime Minister may have overruled the CRTC’s 15%-of-revenues assessment on foreign streamers but it is only because the 15% number wasn’t the right one. When the minister formally instructs the CRTC “in a few months” on the make-over of the overturned decision, there will be “a number.”
The annual $600M in federal funds announced on June 3rd will compensate for giving away the $200M in annual streamer contributions ordered two years ago by the CRTC in part because that streamer money is “tied up in court.” (The escrowed streamer funds from 2025-26 will have to be refunded to the streamers).
The federal $600M will include money for “independent journalism.”

***

There was an unexpected media policy post from Narcity publisher Chuck Lapointe last week that is worth reading.

Narcity is a Canadian news outlet with a heavy bent towards travel content. But it also publishes conventional news content and on a daily basis it re-posts Canadian Press news stories on Facebook in order to draw traffic to Narcity’s websites.

Lapointe can get away with this despite the Meta banishment of news from its Canadian platforms because he signed off a Meta waiver saying his news product is not the kind of content that triggers financial compensation from Meta under the Online News Act, Bill C-18.

Speaking of Meta, Lapointe’s policy post points out how foreign platforms now completely dominate the Canadian market in digital advertising with the well known impact on the ability of Canadian media to monetize their content.

A good policy move, he says, would be for Ottawa to put new federal dollars in the hands of Canadian advertisers on the condition they spend it on Canadian digital platforms. That kind of voucher system might spur innovation by Canadian digital outlets competing for that ad spend.

It’s a smart idea that’s been circulating in various US states for some time now. In Canada, Senator Andrew Cardozo and I included the recommendation of an advertising voucher in our recent report, Making News Media Sustainable.

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The US Federal Department of Justice has signed off on the blockbuster Paramount-Warner Brothers Discovery merger.

As often happens in government reviews of big mergers, the field of competition is configured to offer a rationale for the thumbs up or down. In this case, the FCC is saying it’s “pro-competitive” for Hollywood studios and streamers to consolidate in order to compete more effectively with Silicon Valley tech/media companies.

The merger story isn’t over. Some US state attorney generals, including California, are banding together to litigate an anti-trust action against it.

The merger also hasn’t been approved by the Canadian Competition Bureau. The European Union and the United Kingdom are also reviewing it: an early approval or the launch of further EU investigations might be announced in July.

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Back to the Online News Act for a moment and attention all journalists.

An independent researcher from Simon Fraser University is running a survey on newsroom opinions on the consequences of the Online News Act. (She confirmed to me that she isn’t getting funding from foreign platforms. Her research appears to be supported by a federal grants).

English : The Online News Act and its consequences for Canadian Journalism

En français : La Loi sur les nouvelles en ligne et ses conséquences pour le journalisme canadien

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

Catching up on MediaPolicy – CRTC will adjudicate Meta’s ban on Canadian news outlets – US juries find Meta and YouTube liable for online harms to children

Narcity news post

March 30, 2026

Today is the CRTC’s deadline for the public to weigh in on the application by several independent television stations to officially designate Facebook and Instagram as digital news intermediaries under the Online News Act and force Meta to bargain news licensing fees with the broadcasters.

Despite Meta’s ongoing “ban” on Canadian news, there’s still plenty of Canadian news to consume on Facebook and Instagram.

Forty-four per cent of Canadians surveyed by Reuters in its 2025 Digital News Report said they still got news from social media.

But if news is banned from the two biggest social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, how come so many Canadians find news on social media?

As you suspected, it’s because the Meta ban is selective.

For example, I follow the news site Narcity Canada on Facebook. I keep up with the biggest stories in the news cycle by reading its artfully presented posts linking to Canadian Press stories. Narcity also writes and posts travel and lifestyle news stories written by its own journalists, but not as much as it posts Canadian Press stories.

As the steady flow of Narcity posts suggest to the casual observer, Facebook appears to be a digital news intermediary that “makes news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada,” ban or no ban.

But the key is the phrase “produced by news outlets”: news publishers that would have a claim against Meta for licensing revenue if their news content wasn’t banned. If a news publisher has no claim, it isn’t banned.

This is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s legal strategy and, so far, it seems to be working: if Meta forbids Canadian “news outlets” to post news stories, or refuses to suffer others posting their stories, then he figures Meta doesn’t trigger its legal obligation to negotiate the mandatory licensing payments that the Online News Act contemplates.

That’s his plan, in theory anyway. The practice is different. Meta’s swiss cheesey news “ban” has holes:

According to CRTC filings, Meta only half heartedly deletes user posts of news stories published by Canadian news outlets. Some posts remain for months or years as pointed out by the broadcasters who found their own news content posted by others on Facebook and Instagram.
My own observation is that Meta doesn’t appear to be deleting news items posted by persons employed by banned news outlets (I’m not outing anyone!)
As pointed out as a flagrant example by the litigating news companies, Facebook allows Rogers to post news videos from its Breakfast Television current affairs show, my guess is someone has decided wrongly that’s not news.

But most significantly to Meta avoiding cash liability, it seems to be quietly making its own calls on who is a news outlet, and who isn’t.

Despite the stream of Narcity top news stories of the day, the CRTC does not seem perturbed by this kind of thing in its December 2025 staff letter that wound up its staff investigation into the Meta ban.

Back in 2024, Narcity publisher Chuck Lapointe publicly celebrated Meta green lighting his publication’s return to Facebook. His post indicated this was a mindful decision by Meta and linked it to a ruling by the Independent QCJO Panel that Narcity doesn’t publish enough of its own news reporting to become eligible as a “news organization” to collect federal journalism subsidies under the Income Tax Act.

Replatformed by Meta, Narcity’s posts are a firehose of Canadian Press’s current events reporting, with less frequent posts of its own lifestyle and travel news.

Presumably Meta had Narcity sign-off on any compensation based on this policy:

In the meantime, social media influencers like Mario Zelaya can post their own news content on Facebook, as can Canada Proud or freelance journalists like Rachel Gilmore. Meta doesn’t owe Gilmore or Zelaya any compensation for their content because a “news outlet” must employ at least two journalists under the Online News Act.

The bottom line is that Meta is not banning all news or news reporting, it’s only banning news published by news organizations that might make a legal claim for compensation as a “news outlet.” The rest, it doesn’t ban.

That draws the eye to section 51 of the legislation. It’s the undue preference provision which prohibits Meta from giving “undue or unreasonable preference to any individual or entity” while unjustly discriminating against or disadvantaging a news outlet.

***

The first two in a string of consumer lawsuits against Meta and YouTube has resulted in jury findings of liability and multi-million dollar damages against the social media platforms in Los Angeles and New Mexico.

The civil convictions were based on Meta’s and YouTube’s addictive design features, causing mental health damage to children.

The New Mexico case, where the jury awarded $375 USD million in damages, was also based on Meta and YouTube concealing the risks of sexual exploitation of children.

The juries made their decisions against YouTube and Meta regardless of the fact that US juries are prohibited by federal law from considering the harmful nature of the posted content —-shielded under a 1996 law that gives immunity to online common carriers of content posted by third parties— so plaintiffs must convince juries that the platforms’ addictive design features and the lack of default safety mechanisms are to blame for human harm.

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Local TV independents demand Meta bargain despite news ban – Radio Canada’s Amazon deal roils in Quebec – the clock ticks on Bell Media’s future

CHCH News Director Greg O’Brien

March 8, 2026

Just before the new year, the CRTC hit the pause button on its staff investigation into Meta’s leaky ban on news content posted to Facebook and Instagram, declaring a wait-and-see.

CRTC VP Broadcasting Scott Shortliffe issued the brief notice on December 3, 2025, noting Meta’s efforts to remove user posts of Canadian news and stating that the Commission would continue monitor the news ban.

On February 4th, the LITS coalition of 15 independently owned television stations filed an application to the CRTC asking the regulator to confirm that Meta, despite its news ban announced in August 2023, continues to “make news available” in Canada through either the replication of news content or linking to it on Facebook and Instagram. The broadcasting companies, which include Hamilton’s CHCH and Victoria’s CHEK, want the CRTC to order Meta to bargain with news outlets.

MediaPolicy wrote about this issue previously here and here, pointing out the regular news posting activities of Canadian digital outlets Telelatino, The Peak (on Instagram but not Facebook) and Narcity on both platforms.

Narcity publisher Chuck Lapointe claimed in a LinkedIn post to have an agreement with Meta to exempt his publication from the news ban.

Aside from these exempted news publishers, the LITS application to the CRTC cites a long list of news posts from Meta user accounts, often linking back to content posted on YouTube. The application offers the CRTC a number of examples of user-posted content from news sites that directly compete for audience with digital content published by the television stations on their websites. According to LITS, some of the posts were removed after several months, others remain.

CHCH News Director Greg O’Brien also points to Facebook permitting regular posting of video clips from the Rogers City-TV Breakfast Television morning show in Toronto, in direct competition with CHCH’s own morning show.

It’s a legality worth noting that the Online News Act does not narrowly define the “news content” that Meta must bargain for as hard news or political reporting. The Act describes news content as original reporting on “matters of general interest and reports of [Canadian] current events, including coverage of democratic institutions and processes.”

Asked why he thinks Meta is platforming CityTV’s Breakfast Television but blocking CHCH, News Director O’Brien said “we can’t understand this and can get no answers from Meta. Breakfast Television and [CHCH] Morning Live are competing morning news shows. We are banned from Instagram and Facebook and BT is not. It makes no sense and is unfair. Global Television’s morning show also has an Instagram page. It makes me think Meta has some side deals with them.”

LITS counsel Peter Miller expressed a similar concern when asked why it was the small independent television stations raising this issue with the CRTC on their own, so far.

“It’s also possible that Meta has done deals with large players. Certainly the recent stance [Meta has] taken with government —-drop the [Online News] Act and we’ll do deals that include [licensing of] AI—- suggests they’d rather only have to concern themselves with bigger news players. And the survival of smaller independent players and news media diversity generally is the most at risk here,” Miller told MediaPolicy.

Further details of LITS allegations can be downloaded below.

LITS Application Re Meta – Revised 23-02-2026 Download

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Another day, another controversy for CBC/Radio-Canada.

The Corp’s decision to broadcast its 24-hours national news television channels on Amazon Prime for a monthly subscription fee has been heavily criticized in the press, Québec’s Culture Minister and by federal and provincial political parties in Québec.

The criticism is that CBC is partnering with a foreign tech platform that is overwhelming Québec audiences with English-language content.

Making it worse, say critics, the same live news content is not available on Radio-Canada’s ici tou.ca (the CBC says that is coming to tou.ca, it’s already available on CBC Gem).

La Presse cultural columnist Mario Girard was so incensed that he speculated he might be unable to defend Radio-Canada funding in the future.

“In short, if we follow the logic of this agreement with Prime Video, Radio-Canada will be selling content (largely paid for by Canadian taxpayers) to an American giant that will, in turn, siphon off profits to further crush Canadian private media,” wrote Girard in his regular column.

CBC content is available on a number of non-Canadian platforms, on its YouTube channels in particular, as the public broadcaster follows the audience leaving, or never considering, conventional television. As well, media content is increasingly discovered on apps that are gated by foreign-owned operating systems installed in smart televisions and other connected devices.

This week the Hamilton-based and Canadian owned online distributor Parrot TV announced it is adding the ad-supported CBC National News Channel, CBC Vancouver and CBC Toronto to its other live news channels CHCH-TV and Newfoundland TV.

Besides the CBC news channels, Amazon Prime also carries live Canadian news channels on paid subscription from CTV, Global, and Rogers City-TV, but not Québecor’s TVA.

Update 14/3/26 – Radio-Canada has paused its deal with Amazon Prime until such time that it can offer its news channels on tou.ca.

***

Bell Media has responded to speculation about its long term licensing of Warner Brothers Discovery’s HBO content on Crave, now that Paramount has won its takeover bid for WBD. In a declaration kept short and sweet, Bell claimed its HBO deal was good for “the foreseeable future.”

Paramount has announced its intention to merge HBO into its own subscription service Paramount Plus and also fold in its advertising supported app, PlutoTV.

The expiry date of Bell’s licensing deal for HBO’s content remains a commercial secret. If I was a shareholder, I would want that secret told.

In the meantime, Bell must be planning to pivot hard to rebuilding its Crave platform into an engine fuelled by its own Canadian IP. There’s an excellent interview of Bell’s content VP, Justin Stockman, by Irene Berkowitz, exploring how Bell hopes to build on the success of hit shows like Heated Rivalry, Sullivan’s Crossing and Empathie.

***

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

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

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Meta’s “Faustian bargain” – Paramount, so much winning – Millennial beer buddies have at it on ‘Elbows Up’

February 28, 2026

Meta’s ban on Canadian news and the rumour mill about the federal government being interested in fixing it has dragged on for several months.

It seems that Meta and Ottawa are talking about something that touches upon licensing of news content for Meta’s AI tools, age verification for social media accounts, the Online News Act, and Meta’s news ban on Facebook and Instagram.

Earlier this month, Meta spokesperson Rachel Curran was invited to a ten-minute spot on David Cochrane’s CBC news hour to discuss Meta’s pitch to have the federal government impose age verification responsibilities on app stores (Google and Apple) rather than apps (Meta).

At the eight minute mark they pivot to the news ban and Meta’s recent chats with the Liberal government.

“We would love to have news back,” said Curran, which doesn’t exactly square with her adamant position that as an advertising-driven business they get no commercial value from news content.

Her read-out of Meta’s talks with the Liberals was that the government agreed with Meta’s view.

That’s an astonishing claim —not denied by the government as yet— given that the Online News Act was built on precisely the opposite foundation, the government’s policy conclusion that Facebook monetizes news content and exploits its commanding market position in social media to shortchange news publishers in what would otherwise be a fair market in licensing payments for news snippets and hyperlinks.

A more nuanced answer from Curran might have been that Meta is willing to pay for news content from some news publishers, but not from most others, and therefore a mandatory licensing regime doesn’t make sense.

The idea that some news content generates ad revenue for Meta, but some content does not, is a value proposition that could be true but it has never been proven one way or another and Meta has no intention of putting it to the test.

The Online News Act gave Meta a chance to prove such a claim by negotiating different price points for different news outlets. But prevented by the Online News Act from cherry picking news outlets, Meta instead chose the nuclear option of a news ban.

Now we’re back to “Go” on the Monopoly board and Meta wants to cherry pick deals with chosen news outlets for the ingestion of news content into the training of its AI tools.

Curran tried to obscure the cherry picking by making the shamelessly false statement that the Online News Act is preventing Meta and news outlets from engaging in negotiations over AI content (the Online News Act only regulates “making news available” to the public and would require amendments to apply to content licensing for the training of AI tools).

Alternatively, Meta wants news content in order to offer AI products that mimic search engines and embed news links in its chat replies. Yes, that might well be covered by the Online News Act and so Curran would be right, the Online News Act is an obstacle to implementing Meta’s evolving global model of monetizing third party content without licensing it.

But the important take-away here is that Meta is pitching a deal to Ottawa: repeal the Online News Act, let Meta cherry pick a few Canadian news outlets for licensing deals, and in return Meta will allow news publishers and their content back onto Facebook and Instagram.

The President of the Canadian Association of Journalists Brent Jolly dubbed this “a Faustian bargain,” but a more descriptive characterization would be “total capitulation by Ottawa.”

Removing the news ban would certainly help some news publishers, especially start-ups, who are still willing to put their business faith in Meta-controlled distribution. But the political value of the Liberals of taking such a lop sided deal seems minimal.

***

The battle to buy Warner Brothers Discovery is over.

This week the WBD board accepted Paramount’s improved $31 per share offer as “superior” to its tentative deal with Netflix, which declined to bid higher. It’s an $111 billion USD deal in the end.

You could spend the rest of your weekend reading analyses of the dramatic bidding war. For something short and punchy, here is Aakash Gupta’s X post.

The deal is supposed to catapult Paramount into a far better competitive position with the streaming thoroughbreds Netflix, Disney, YouTube and Amazon, improving upon its current also-ran position. With a mountain of debt financing sitting on Paramount’s post-merger balance sheet, major layoffs and studio production cost controls are a good bet.

Prior to the improved share bid, Paramount tried to satisfy the WBD board and its major shareholders with a key promise to buy its laggard cable assets (including CNN) and other guarantees around break-up fees and the reliability of its debt financing. In the end, it had to pay more.

Netflix didn’t want to pay more and may have been listening to the chorus of critics who thought they were overpaying, even with a lower per share price and Netflix stock swaps for WBD shareholders.

One interesting view was that Netflix might get more bang for its buck buying Spotify instead of a bigger share of the video streaming market through WBD’s prestige HBO content, WBD’s other IP brands and its massive movie archive.

Paramount is ultimately owned by Larry Ellison, third richest man on the planet and tight-with-Trump. The New York Times has a useful overview of Ellison’s budding media empire in technology, movies, cable news, and TikTok USA.

There will be at least two story lines for MediaPolicy readers to follow once the deal is closed.

The first is what happens to CNN News. In less than a year, Ellison has acquired control of CBS News and now CNN.

CBS News is already being repositioned towards a more conservative audience.

CNN —disparaged for years by Republicans as the “Clinton News Network”— seems a good candidate for being starved for cash, stripped for parts or transformed into Fox News 3 unless Ellison is shrewd enough to hang on to a centre-left audience for advertisers. Certainly his friend in the White House expects a conservative CNN.

On the latter point, Ellison may have jotted down notes on Jeff Bezos’ business misjudgment in humbling the Washington Post to appease Trump.

The other story is Canadian: will Ellison renew or let the HBO licensing deal with Bell Media expire and offer HBO as a stand-alone streaming service in Canada (in a bundle with Paramount Plus, or separately). (Update 2/3/26 – Paramount has announced that HBO and Paramount Plus will be merged into one streaming service.)

If Bell loses the profitable HBO content stream, its entire broadcast enterprise becomes very weak, possibly an intolerable drag on its bottom line.

This merger drama started by WBD CEO David Zaslav isn’t quite over of course. There are anti-trust hurdles for Paramount, even with a friendly government in Washington DC.

The Attorney-General of California Rob Bonta is talking out loud about challenging the deal. But anti-trust is notoriously a long shot both in timeline and chances of success.

Regardless, the deal may not close for a year, an election year, and the Congressional Democrats are not going to let this merger go gently into the night.

***

In December I wrote about the book Elbows Up, an anthology of centre-left English Canadian and Indigenous voices responding to Donald Trump’s annexation threats.

I wasn’t deeply impressed by the book and said so. But I recommend an entertaining follow up: The Hub’s Harrison Lowman video interview of the book’s editor, CBC Radio host Elamin Abdelmahmoud.

Lowman had the same problem with the book that I did: no conservative voices and more than a generous dose of settler-state vocabulary that seems at odds with forging the ecumenical political bonds and links required for resisting US hegemony.

His guest had no good answer for the parochial exclusion of conservative perspectives on a common Canadian challenge, the threat of annexation: he weakly implied a lack of interest from conservatives to meet his time sensitive call-out for contributions.

But Abdelmahmoud is quick-witted to say the least, and he did a good job of explaining the importance of Canada and Canadians integrating the Indigenous perspective of dispossession, domination and death into our national consciousness of who we are, what we want to be, and, as pointed out in the book, why Trump’s threats provide a perfect opportunity to advance our reconciliation project.

Lowman and Abdelmahmoud, conservative and progressive bookends, are good friends in their private lives and listening to the interview is like sitting back and appreciating a robust argument over beers. That makes it an almost perfect metaphor for the national conversation we might have.

***

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

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

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – the new season of Stursberg’s CBC – the federal budget – Le Devoir’s Meta work around – Australia will regulate Netflix

Image by OpenAI

Are you not entertained? Richard Stursberg wants CBC audiences to say yes

November 8, 2025

This week MediaPolicy posted a guest column from Richard Stursberg, the former Vice President of CBC’s English language service, reflecting on the public broadcaster’s recently announced Five Year Plan.

You won’t be sorry you spent five minutes with it. It’s a compelling read. Stursberg is one of the few commentators who puts as much emphasis on CBC’s entertainment programming as he does the news service.

Stursberg sets a simple performance bar for the CBC: is it good television? And then he offers a hypothetical new season(s) of great shows that could meet that standard and bring a real buzz to the CBC’s CanCon offerings, while satisfying our Canadian cultural cravings.

The CBC just got its $150 million booster shot in the federal budget. That money fulfilled an election promise. The 11% increase to the $1.4 billion Parliamentary grant (70% of CBC’s overall $2 billion revenue) won’t necessarily go into a bigger budget for entertainment programming: the Five Year Plan prioritizes local and regional news reporting. But it does give the public broadcaster more options.

The CBC’s new money was the Carney government’s sole increase to cultural funding in this week’s budget. Culture and Identity minister Steven Guilbeault told the Globe and Mail that the public broadcaster had also been spared from the “15% savings” spending review announced by the government several months ago.

Budget announcements for the Canada Media Fund, the Canada Music Fund, TV5MondePlus, Telefilm, the National Film Board and Special Measures for Journalism (community weeklies) are all multi-year extensions of supplemental funding previously put in place by the Justin Trudeau government.

On the other hand, the budget document includes projected cuts to Canadian Heritage expenditures which might be either civil servant salaries or “recalibrated” program spending. Guilbeault pointed out to the Globe that the $93 million savings figure was 5%, not 15% of expenditures.

The numbers on recalibrated programs might include the scheduled reduction of the federal labour tax credit from 35% to 25% of journalist salaries on January 1, 2027. As well, Guilbeault told the Globe the government was exploring a merger of the Canada Media Fund, Telefilm and the National Film Board.

The budget document included a brief note that changes are in the works for the Canadian Periodical Fund that subsidizes weeklies and magazines (the government only told me that the details would be communicated at a later date).

The status quo on cultural funding shouldn’t be surprising, given other priorities in 2025.

Still, TV and radio news outlets were miffed that the government didn’t end its arbitrary exclusion of broadcasting companies from accessing federal aid for their online news websites that —-but for the television and radio properties operated by their parent companies—- would be eligible for the $75 million pool of journalist salary subsidy available to all online news outlets.

***

There’s a useful explainer posted in Paula Clark’s Substack about the Blacklock’s Reporter litigation with the federal government over Parks Canada’s sharing of a paywall password obtained from an individual subscription, giving unlimited access to every article in the Reporter’s database.

The watchdog news website was in court last month, appealing a controversial trial ruling in favour of the government which appeared to bless the government’s actions and give short shrift to copyright protection.

Among the many legal frailties of the trial judge’s decision is that it appears to expand the public right of “fair use” sharing of quotations or text snippets to authorize redistribution of full articles and, thanks to the password sharing, Blacklock’s entire news archive.

It’s a legally complicated appeal, which is why’s Clark’s piece is helpful.

***

As you know, in 2023 Meta responded to Parliament passing the Online News Act by banning most news content from Facebook and Instagram in Canada (a news outlet can pay Meta to post content as an advertisement).

The ban hit the many Canadian news outlets relying heavily upon Meta platforms for content distribution. While the news blackout probably impacted free sites harder, paywalled sites were affected too.

The marketing director at Le Devoir is claiming a measurable success in making up for the lost distribution by working a lot harder at its direct engagement with readers, especially demonstrating the value of content to new subscribers.

Meta hasn’t entirely given up on Canadian news journalism of course. Just last week The Hub published a well argued commentary advocating against the federal government pursuing a digital sovereignty strategy. Meta sponsored the article.

***

The Australian government has moved the yardsticks on implementing something like Canada’s Online Streaming Act for Netflix and the other foreign video streamers, a move it has been mulling over since early 2023.

The legislation hasn’t been tabled with details yet, but the announcement suggests the streamers will have to spend 7.5% of their Australian revenues on local entertainment programming. Australian-owned television companies are already required to meet spending quotas for local content and they see the new law as a measure to “level the playing field.”

The news coverage of the announcement is unclear as to the impact of the legislation, as Netflix already invests in video production shot in Australia. It may depend upon the definition of local Australian content.

Significantly for Canadian observers, Australia is not proposing that the foreign streamers make financial contributions to Australian programming through contributions to third party production funds.

A report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation speculates on whether the announcement will provoke a reaction from the Trump administration.

***

If you have the twenty minutes, I recommend Natalia Antelava’s incendiary interview of Google’s Richard Gingras in Coda, just for sheer entertainment if not enlightenment. Gingras is Google’s former VP of News and is currently the board chair of Canada’s Village Media.

Antelava goes after Gingras for some of Google’s controversial decisions in foreign autocracies, like agreeing to Vladimir Putin’s demand to spike a voting app set up for the Russian 2021 elections by the dissident, Alexei Navalny, who later died, possibly poisoned, in a Putin prison.

However on the main interview topic of the power asymmetry between Google and the news industry, Gingras sticks to his story that Google’s relationship with publishers is collaborative, not exploitive, which requires him to engage in some grimace-inducing denialism about Google’s abuse of market power over news outlets in Search and digital advertising, both of which have been ruled illegal monopolies by US courts.

Another tidbit: Gingras claims that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was embarrassed by the now famous line-up of tech CEOs attending the Trump inauguration and suggests the photo op was “cleverly staged” by the White House.

“That’s the last photo Sundar ever wanted taken,” says Gingras. “We don’t support this administration.”

Only the ballroom.

Associated Press photo of Tech CEOs Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai and Musk.

***

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

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