Canada's Government Media Funding Strategy is a Total Failure
Legacy media is still dying. Half of all CDN legacy journalists expect to get laid off after the next election while MP's and Senators now assert their "obligation" to "correct" media editorials.
Back in 2019, the Justin Trudeau Liberal government proposed a $600Mln “media bailout” of tax credits and other incentives aimed at propping up both “struggling news outlets,” along with larger businesses like the Post Media Network, a foreign-owned Canadian-based media conglomerate which owns both the conservative National Post and the business focused Financial Post.
And while the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) wasn’t included in this total, it’s generally conceded that up to half of Canada’s legacy media journalists work for the CBC and the CBC is mostly government funded.
But even then, as outlined in the May 23rd, 2019 CBC News post, “Journalists question Liberal government's $600M media bailout plan,” there were those who questioned the government’s charity.
Since then, Canadian media funding has grown by leaps and bounds, most recently, as outlined in the July 7th, 2024 Government of Canada post, “Local Journalism Initiative” with a “$58.8 million investment to extend the Local Journalism Initiative for the next three years (2024-27).”
As outlined in the November 30th, 2023 The Hub post, “Half of private Canadian journalism could now be government supported,” Canadian government funding for “qualified” journalist increased last winter:
Canadian Qualified Journalism Organizations were already eligible for the Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit which provides refundable tax relief of 25 percent up to an annual cap of $55,000 per eligible newsroom employee.
Last week’s Fall Economist Statement announced that the government will increase the generosity of the tax credit to 35 percent and the annual cap per newsroom employee from $55,000 to $85,000.
While the funding was intended be temporary designed to slow and eventually reverse the ongoing collapse of Canadian media since 2008, that’s not exactly how things have turned out.
Over the last month, a new crisis has exploded on to the pages of legacy media outlets.
We begin with the Roasting the Press Episode 41 for Sunday, September 29th, 2024 segment on “CTV vs the Poilievre Conservatives.”
The post discussed the “dumb editing mix-ups, omissions and perhaps intentional errors with a recent CTV story about Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.”
It also referenced the September 28th, 2024 Toronto Star opinion post, “CTV wasn’t out to get Pierre Poilievre. The truth is more alarming,” which noted that the error in CTV’s reporting was not due to “intentional bias against Poilievre,” but rather an example of “systemic issues in Canadian media.”
The biggest of those “systematic” issues is, of course, money.
Billions of dollars of Canadian government “fiat” currency are provided to government approved media outlet every year to support their activities through Heritage Canada, the Canada Revenue Service (CRA) and other government agencies.
The Toronto Star opinion post noted that:
There is going to be something ugly about the coverage of the next election, because more than half the people covering it are going to be doing so with the knowledge that (Federal conservative leader Pierre) Poilievre may end their employment – by defunding the CBC, ending subsidiaries to newspapers or exacting revenge on Bell (which owns CTV) in ways we do not understand.
The comment is a strong statement that up to half the legacy media journalists consider Canada’s official Federal opposition party to be a threat to their future employment and they will likely react accordingly.
Since we published our original Roasting the Press segment, Freedom Forum has noticed other, scarier stories and commentary referencing the same topic.
An example of our current mess comes from media pundit and academic Michael Geist and his September 30th, 2024 Law Bite’s podcast, “Episode 214: Erin Millar on Trust in Media and the Implementation of the Online News Act.”
The podcast discussed a lot of interesting things which Freedom Forum also tracks, including the Online News Act (ONA) and the Canadian Journalism Collective (CJC), which Erin Millar heads and which is responsible for disbursing $100 Million dollars annually to “qualified” Canadian news outlets.
The Law Bite’s podcast focused on how to develop trust in a legacy media where ½ or more of every legacy media journalist’s salary is dependent of Canadian government legislation and funded through the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Guest Millar mentions how developing trust under these circumstances is difficult, but the CJC is doing its best to do so.
Of course, the real story isn’t in the actual interview. The real story is in the comments.
One of the commentators in the Law Bites post referenced the September 12th, 2024 MacDonald Laurier Institute post, “The Liberals say the quiet part out loud.”
That story, written by Peter Menzies, the former publisher of the Calgary Herald and a previous vice-chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), notes recent social media comments from Liberal MP Taleeb Noormohamed criticizing Terry Newmann, a senior editor & columnist at the National Post, for his recent editorial comments disparaging the Canadian government.
According to Noormohamed’s September 7th, 2024 post on “X”:
Your paper (the National Post) wouldn't be in business were it not for the subsidies that the government that you hate put in place - the same subsidies your Trump - adjacent foreign hedge fund owners gladly take to pay your salary.
Noormohamed is Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, the Federal department responsible for administering most Canadian media grants and funding.
Given his role, it’s natural to assume his statements have more power than most other government statements in this area.
Noormohamed notes the mostly foreign ownership at the National Post, mentioned that it wouldn’t be in business without government funding and suggests that much of the tens of millions of dollars of Canadian Heritage department money allocated to the National Post each year ends up in the hands of foreign based enemies of the state “adjacent“ to republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The inference of Noormohamed’s comment is obvious. National Post employees should be nicer to the government.
The MacDonald Laurier post notes that, “As inappropriate as MP Taleeb Noormohamed's comments were, those who care about maintaining a media industry free from government influence should be glad he said the quiet part out loud.”
According to the post:
Nothing Noormohamed said was untrue. He and I (author Peter Menzies) are in perfect alignment in the view that were it not for the patronage of the Justin Trudeau government, Postmedia (and likely the Toronto Star) would by now have ceased to exist.
Some of its titles may have sold for parts, but most of its zombie products would have been dispatched long ago with a bankruptcy bullet to the brain, allowing new media to spring forth from decay.
About that, he was not wrong, even though what he did was very inappropriate, even more so because Noormohamed is not just some schmuck MP making up the numbers in a minority Parliament. He’s Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Heritage, Pascal St-Onge, in whose office most of the decisions regarding the plethora of funding arrangements for Canadian news media are made.
In essence, the Macdonald Laurier post notes that Noormohamed’s comments were accurate but inappropriate and contrary to the official Federal government position that media subsidies support a dynamic, viable industry with independent viewpoints able to insure that government’s are accountable for their actions.
Noormohamed was simply stating the obvious when he noted that the legacy media couldn’t survive without government assistance and is in no position to object to anything the government might see fit to do.
Given that this post was published on the website of one of the premier Canadian social policy “think tanks,” its a safe assumption that most senior people in government and media are aware of the situation.
Noormohamed isn’t even the only Federal politician weighing in on the “obligations” of legacy media outlets who receive Federal funding.
As outlined in the September 19th, 2024 Toronto Sun post, “Senator admits getting Ottawa weekly to correct an op-ed by Senate Opposition leader,” Liberal-appointed Senator Lucie Moncion feels the federal government is within its rights to correct editorials in the media, even when they’re written by political opponents, in this case Senate Conservative leader Donald Plett.
As outlined in the October 10th, 2024 Rebel News post, “Liberal-appointed senator apologizes for censoring Conservative op-ed,” the Ottawa based Hill Times initially complied with Moncion’s, “request to edit,” even though the editorial “did not involve any libel or misstatement of facts” and was written by a political opponent.
Fortunately for the legacy media, and as outlined in the RebelNews post, Senator Moncion eventually backed down from that claim.
But the Hill Times, the Ottawa based twice-weekly newspaper and daily news website, which covers the Parliament of Canada, the federal government, and other federal political news and is generally considered an “authority” on government activities, lost a lot of credibility for its initial decision to comply with Senator Moncion’s “editorial oversight.”
In retrospect, it seems that all of the original legislation and funding enacted by the Federal government to protect the “independence” of the legacy media has failed.
Federal government MP’s and Senators are starting to believe their funding allows them to exercise editorial control over legacy media outlets while legacy media funded journalists are “threatened” whenever a politician discusses reducing Federal media funding.
Sometimes, legacy media publications like the Hill Times comply with government requests to censor and revise stories even if the original story “did not involve any libel or misstatement of facts” and was written by a legitimate, office holding political opponent.
Perhaps the Hill Times also felt threatened.
Academics and “think tanks” publicly note this situation and government websites like the February 13th, 2024 Statistics Canada post, “Confidence in institutions and the media, 2023,” acknowledge the enormous catastrophe currently consuming Canadian legacy media and the loss of confidence caused by the government’s 2018 decision to fund legacy media to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
So where do we go next? Stay tuned.
What the majority of people don't understand is the ethics behind these payouts that started back in 2018... which are completely "unethical"! This is WWII propaganda tactics! Rebel News leaked documents of the Government's Media Bribes back to 2020 and I have the lists of all media pay outs. Pharma has also bought out all MSM outlets worldwide, since 1986 The Act. This is WWIII, an extension of the propaganda tactics used in WWI compounded in II! It never ended. View my substack - https://sterry448.substack.com/p/the-secret-covenant-and-pharmacology?r=pvup8