Musings on Media

A massive report on Canada’s media was released a couple of weeks ago. It aimed to study the country’s corporate media landscape – newspapers, radio, television, Internet – and report to the federal government on what can be done to make sure that 1. journalism survives and 2. democracy also survives because without journalists, no one keeps politicians in check. This is why Donald Trump is attempting to repeatedly discredit major media. But I digress.  

Among other things, this report suggested that $400M in tax revenue is needed to shore up Canada’s media companies who are facing declining revenues because of online competition. I don’t think people will go for that, nor do I think it’s a good idea. The report went on to say that as people increasingly turn their attention to online news sources that don’t use journalistic standards, fake news will become even more prevalent. Let’s call fake news what it is: propaganda. And it’s true. We see it in the listener responses we get at the radio station every day. Many people don’t know the difference between a tweet from some handle with “news” in the name, and a story that’s been researched and confirmed by an actual journalist.

The morning after someone opened fire in a Quebec City mosque and killed six Muslim men who were praying, we were deluged with texts, emails and social media posts from people who accused us of “hiding the truth” that this was a “Muslim-on Muslim crime”. They were reading speculative tweets and assumed they were true. As we all know, real journalists asked real questions and confirmed real facts. A young Quebec university student had murdered those men. A Trump-style immigration ban wouldn’t have stopped this attack. I digress again.

If the government wants to step in and shore up Canadian media, it should set some standards for how corporations must operate when they swallow up newspapers and broadcasting outlets. It should take note that there are about a dozen reporters deciding for the whole country how they should perceive a political party, a terror attack, or whatever happens to happen. Voices have been silenced as these companies shed staff every couple of quarters to make the bottom line look better. In the sad and telling words of PostMedia CEO Paul Godfrey, commenting on the decline of the quality of his newspapers including The London Free Press, The National Post and the Sun papers: “they haven’t become unacceptable.”

If the federal government wants to see the problem with the way media outlets are run, all they need to do is read Mr. Godfrey’s interview with Toronto Life Magazine. It’s horrific. He admits that he told the Competition Bureau that no jobs would be lost when PostMedia bought SunMedia but in 2016 alone, he shed 600 full time employees. That’s where the government should be looking if it wants to save Canadian journalism. Don’t make the taxpayer cough up more money for an industry that rewards failing CEOs with $900,000 bonuses while they lie to government agencies. That would be a good start.