Drew Wilson warned about the increased vulnerability of Canadian media through the subsidies that resulted in Bill C-18. It appears he had a point.
Throughout the Bill C-18 debate, a bill that is now known as the Online News Act, I had long warned that the platforms might not be as willing to just randomly hand out money as the media thought they would. Repeatedly, people like myself were dismissed as idiots because, in the supporters of this legislation’s minds, platforms cannot operate without news content and they have a slam dunk proposition that could not possibly fail.
My point all along was for the media to simply produce better content and give people a reason to view their content rather than some of the garbage coverage we see today. This has long been the way out of the hole the mainstream media dug themselves into. Of course, for the supporters of the legislation, that’s just all crazy talk. Just push shoulder to the wheel on the big lies that sold the legislation in the first place and it’ll all work out in the end. Surely!
Well, as it turned out, simply insisting on living in an alternate reality where platforms wholly depend on news links and just wishing it into reality is by no means going to ensure that it becomes a thing in real life. In response, Meta blocked news links on Facebook and Instagram. As a result, at a time when the media needs more attention to keep their bloated CEO bonuses paid, traffic to media outlets collapsed. Now, you would think that this would ultimately be the hand on stove moment for the mainstream media, causing them to rethink their strategy, but no, not even close. Even a whole year later after this obvious policy blunder, the mainstream media continued to push their ridiculous lies, suggesting that they aren’t going to stop these insane lies in their “news” coverage. This even as the mainstream media became the ones to come crawling back to Meta with their advertising dollars as opposed to Meta coming crawling back to the news to negotiate a “deal”.
So, how did we get here where the media bit the hand that feeds them and they kept chewing anyway? A hint here is that it wasn’t as though going without Meta platforms didn’t hurt them. Quite the contrary, it hurt them a lot. So, where is the money coming from to continue advertising? Simply put, the Canadian government bailed out the media afterwards. Simply put, for the mainstream media, this is an absolutely humiliating development. Why? Because throughout the debates when this was still Bill C-18, supporters touted the legislation as a way to help keep funding going for mainstream media outlets without adding cost to Canadian taxpayers. At this point, quite the opposite ended up happening and the Canadian government basically got Canadian taxpayers to eat the losses caused by arguably one of the biggest, if not, the biggest policy blunders of all time.
Clear back in February of 2024, I wrote an article discussing the bailouts and how the mainstream media has now become wholly dependent on bailout money to keep themselves afloat. At the time, one of the paragraphs I wrote was as follows:
There’s multiple reasons why the media companies need to get off of government handouts. For one, it damages the credibility of the news sector. Are you really going to criticize a government that you are wholly dependant on to write your paychecks? Not really. Additionally, if an election happened and a new government comes in, there is that risk that the new government would decide that the bailouts are a stupid colossal waste of money and axe them, causing the businesses to go under pretty much overnight. That should never be a risk. Additionally, less bailout money to the sector could translate to that money being spent on things like a better healthcare system, assisting in a green transition, tackling drinking water problems and internet connectivity problems in rural and indigenous communities, and other problems that really need to be tackled.
(emphasis added)
At the time, members of the Conservative party, not to mention their devotees, were pushing campaigns like “Defund the CBC”. Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative party leader, had already accused the CBC of being Liberal propaganda at multiple points. Other major media outlets were also the subject of Conservative ire. In some cases, major media outlets were accused of being the enemy of the people as well. So, I had damned good reason to warn that the risk would be that if the party gets elected that they would pull the rug out from under those media outlets as a way of exacting revenge against these media outlets over whatever the hell their personal grievances happen to be (often imagined).
Well, fast forward nearly a whole year later and it is pretty clear that unless something politically drastic happens in the short term, we are simply months away from an election with the Conservatives enjoying a major lead. For the mainstream media, who seems to think it’s a fantastic idea to continue to portray the Conservative party in the best possible light while trying to cover up as many of their major flaws as possible, this is actually quite problematic.
Simply put, it increases the odds that the rug gets pulled out from under the mainstream media outlets. After all, a critical step in that direction is an election victory on the part of the Conservative party. The best case scenario is right wingers have forgotten all about this and that this idea would magically disappear in the ether, thus allowing the mainstream media to dodge a bullet here. Well, if some right leaning commentators are anything to go by, they haven’t actually forgotten. From the Hub:
I always expected that the closer we got to a federal election, the more we would hear from taxpayer-subsidized media about the menace posed by a change in government.
So it was no surprise when the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) got the ball rolling with an analysis by Delacorte Fellow Lauren Watson headlined: “Bracing for Poilievre—Canada’s likely next prime minister threatens to gut the country’s press.” Yes, CJR is American and not subsidized by the Government of Canada. But, like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show was for Mark Carney, it’s as good a place as any to launch a campaign.
The author interviewed a chorus line of respectable left-leaning sources concerning Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s vow to “make sure the government does not use tax dollars to leverage news coverage in its favour,” noting that “Canada’s press ecosystem—both for-profit and nonprofit—largely depends on public support.”
“Poilievre wants things to work differently,” Watson writes, by letting “media make money winning eyeballs and earlobes.”
Imagine.
Watson opens by quoting a distressed Richard Hartley of the Lake Report, the Niagara weekly that achieved a national profile by taking Poilievre to task on its publicly-funded pages after he “started bashing” the concept of subsidized media.
She then works through the “defund the CBC” issue and vividly describes how the Canada Periodical Fund and Local Journalism Initiative (LJI) are “liable to come under Poilievre’s knife” before offering the insights of Dru Jay of The Breach. Jay sees earning revenue based on the merit of a platform’s quality as “the least progressive way to fund news…Because you’re not incentivizing journalism. You’re incentivizing moneymaking.”
Peter Menzies, who wrote this, is definitely right when he says that the mainstream media has a reason to be spooked. The fact that even right leaning commentators are still talking about this suggests that those on the right haven’t simply forgotten about the plan. In fact, it’s one of the many things top of mind for those people.
Now, to be clear, this truly is a situation of the mainstream media’s own doing. They brought this onto themselves. Had they listened to experts like us who warned about the dangers of passing Bill C-18, halted the legislation dead in its tracks, and went back to the drawing board on how to fix the horrible mess that the mainstream media has gotten themselves in, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation in the first place. Mainstream media could still be expanding their audience on Facebook and Instagram and still have the runway to enact reforms that would continue to allow them to independently make reasonable amounts of revenue.
Instead, the government, to the cheering of the mainstream media, rammed this legislation through all the while giving the people that were giving sound advice the finger by accusing us of being “shills for Big Tech”. Sorry, but we damned well knew what the hell we were talking about at the time (and still do). We didn’t devote our whole lives to understanding law and technology to simple sit around and be dumb dumbs all day.
So, what was the correct move in all of this? Yes, no matter what, the mainstream media is going to be in a bad spot (a situation largely of their own making). Still, there were options to improve the situation. This biggest one for me would be working to rescind the Online News Act. I know for some, this sounds like suicide at this point, but that was the correct move.
Why? Simply put, rescinding the Act would give Meta all the reason in the world to restore news links on their platforms. That would bring in an estimated $230 million in value per year for the sector (possibly more accounting for inflation). Yes, that would wipe out the $100 million, but the media would already be up by around $130 million per year anyway. More importantly, it would give the mainstream media more runway to expand their reach by reaching larger audiences. Mainstream media absolutely needs to grow their audiences and the large platforms are their best most immediate shot to do this (they could build their own platform, but that would take the kind of time they no longer have at this point).
With the Act rescinded and links restored, strategies to grow the audience can unfold. Maybe expand operations on their social media presence and devote content exclusive to internet operations (widely available and free to incentivize audience growth). Another important aspect is to stop treating the internet as the enemy and more as a business partner. Demonizing the internet has long been a failed strategy as it alienates the audiences who grew up with the internet (and older members of that cohort are already looking at retirement in a few years).
While I could go on about other strategies the mainstream media could deploy to get themselves back on their feet, the bad part about all of this is that these sorts of efforts should have been under way… last year. Politically, I don’t see any viable method of rescinding the Online News Act before the election. Sure, the Conservative party will probably rescind it, but that would likely come with pulling all the subsidies anyway – meaning the media outlets affected get completely screwed.
I think at this point, the media outlets are basically screwed. Their best hope at this point that the Conservative party does not win – better start praying for that now. The next best hope is that the Conservative party does win, but doesn’t follow through with killing off the media by axing all the subsidies (between the “Axe the Tax” campaign and comments like the ones above provided by Menzies, that is looking doubtful).
While some may be salivating at the prospect of the major media outlets getting killed off, I’m not one of them. I know full well the goal for those gunning for the killing off of the major media outlets is to silence as many voices that disagree with the far right movement while replacing them with far right voices altogether. This would be absolutely horrible for the country because it bolsters climate change denialism, health science denialism, general hate to minorities, and more. All of the above makes society worse.
Honestly, if I were someone in the mainstream media, I’d be crapping my pants by now. After all, the threats are there at this point. They better hope they can make do with a whole lot less in the future if the election doesn’t go their way. Otherwise, I’m not really sure how well they are going to survive over the medium and long term.
