One of the long-running campaigns of the right is to defund the CBC. Some are dressing this up with the idea of paywalls.
One of the long-running principles I have when it comes to news is to maintain a free (albeit ad supported) news website so that the most people possible can access high quality information. While I do offer subscriptions for those who wish to support my efforts in building a news website that actually understands technology in this crazy world we live in these days, the news remains free to the public because I believe that an informed population is a good population.
Unfortunately, right wingers in Canada doesn’t see it that way. For some, an informed public is not good. Information should only be available to those who have loads of money to burn. This is just not reflective of reality today where people are continuing to be more cash strapped than ever before. While some might argue that it’s only $5 per month, $10 per month, or whatever each organization chooses as a going rate, the problem is that there are numerous outlets out there. If each of them charged $5, you could easily be paying $60 a month to get a half way decent diet of news and information around the world. That’s $60 a lot of people out there simply do not have. This as they navigate the increasingly impossible to afford cost of living these days.
That is why it is hugely important to maintain a news ecosystem that offers free news to all. It prevents the increasingly large gap between the haves and the have nots from further expanding. For some older right wingers, this is a foreign concept to them. After all, they got a good paying job. They didn’t have to really worry about affording a house to live in. What’s more, they got a nice million dollar plus nest egg to work with in their nice comfortable miniature mansion. For them, even $100 per month is nothing. If they made it in the era of the Horn of Plenty, well heck, anyone can make it at any time.
This is partly why I find the idea of demanding all news organizations go paywall only so offensive. We, as a society, shouldn’t be walling off news and information to the less fortunate. Being informed shouldn’t be a rich person only attribute. If you want to be informed and you take the time and effort to being so, money shouldn’t be an insurmountable obstacle thrown in your way. Yet, this is precisely what some right wingers have visualized.
Another aspect to this whole debate is the political angle. For years now, far right wing extremists have demanded that organizations like the CBC should be “defunded”. The claim for them is that it costs Canadian taxpayers money to keep such an organization afloat. The thing is, this loosely masks the real intent of this whole campaign. Indeed, the CBC sometimes covers topics that the far right doesn’t like. Whether that is the scientific fact of climate change, some of the stupid shenanigans Republican lawmakers get up to, or even some of the failtacular things that happen with Conservative party members and leaders. For them, the media should be serving their political interests specifically and anything short of that is “bias” or “fake news”. These calls have only been emboldened thanks to Trump’s efforts to destroy the media south of the border.
As such, calls to “defund the CBC” should be dismissed for the insane rantings of lunatics that they are. It is little more than an effort to further consolidate the media and to control messaging in an effort to shut out anything they don’t like from being discussed in the broader public sphere. After all, private sector organizations can be bought out by the right wing establishment and transformed into a right wing propaganda rag. A public broadcaster? Not so much. As such, it wasn’t even really worth entertaining as a dedicated news article in and of itself.
Recently, however, one of these right wingers have opted to dress up these calls by throwing in a push to paywall off the CBC in a subscription model. The thing with this particular right winger is that, unlike most right wingers, he does raise some good points from time to time. Obviously, in this case, he is way off point on this one, but since this is something of a novel argument, it seemed appropriate to address why its a crummy idea. First, of course, the argument:
Does the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation have a future as a publicly funded broadcaster? Should it?
With a federal election looming, the fate of the CBC seems to hang in the balance. As private media organizations complain about unfair competition, and many Canadians express frustration with what they believe to be overt political bias, the Official Opposition is vowing to slash funding for the 88-year-old broadcasting corporation. The ruling Liberal government, meanwhile, warns that cuts to the CBC will severely harm Canadian culture and leave Canadians at the mercy of “fake news.” Caught in the middle are taxpayers, who pay $1.4 billion annually to keep the “Mother Corp” afloat in both languages.
For the anglophone market, there is a strong demand for trusted news delivered in an objective fashion. Unfortunately, public funding for CBC News – by far the largest news media player in Canada – distorts this market and fails to provide a level playing field for other news organizations seeking to serve it. Its mandate includes public interest programming and editorial independence from the government, which involves being impartial and trustworthy. It has also veered too far away from standards of neutrality and the portrayal of a balance of perspectives, especially important for a national broadcaster that ought to be representative of the diversity of views. As a result, the government has chosen to also subsidize private-sector news media, at a huge cost to Canadian taxpayers. Therefore, anglophone CBC should no longer receive federal funding. Instead, a much more targeted English-language CBC should be transitioned into a new company financed through donations and subscriptions.
First of all, you can tell that there is that sense of tone deafness in that if it’s a right wing belief, then it is a belief shared by all. That’s obviously not the reality. Of course, like any convincing argument, there is a kernel of truth to it. That kernel revolves around the CBC coverage of the Online Streaming Act, Online News Act, and the Online Harms bill. In those debates, the CBC did, in fact, push out blatant propaganda that held no semblance to reality. An example of this was that platforms hosting links to news articles is stealing which is one of the many blatant lies that was put out there. This lie ultimately burned organizations like the CBC after Facebook dropped news links, costing the mainstream media an estimated $230 million per year, forcing them to rely on taxpayer bailout money to cover up their stupid idea. That is established fact.
The problem here is that the CBC wasn’t the only offender of pushing out disinformation in those debates. There were plenty of others like the Toronto Star, CTV, National Post, and others. So, it wasn’t just the publicly funded broadcaster, but also private media sector corporations that did this as well. We here at Freezenet had no problem calling out these ridiculous lies and documented the consequences of these terrible actions by the mainstream media because we are about getting to the truth more than anything else.
With that said, that’s not necessarily what Peter Menzies is getting at here. For Menzies, any coverage that makes the Liberal party of Canada look good and/or makes the Conservative party look bad is “fake news” and political “bias”. Anything short of the media outlets acting as the mouthpiece for the Conservative Party of Canada is a marketplace problem that needs to be “fixed”. It’s a sentiment echoed by US president, Donald Trump, who views any news organization that publishes anything that is unflattering to him personally is an “enemy” of the American people and must be punished to the fullest extent of the law. While Menzies position is by no means as extreme as Trump’s position (in no way is he advocating for people to be thrown in jail for thought crimes against right wingers), it’s a step in the Trump direction for media in the first place.
Now for the more novel part of his argument. That revolves around the call to turn the CBC into a subscription service. This is, of course, deeply problematic on a number of fronts.
First of all, a healthy news ecosystem consists of news organizations of various shapes and sizes. That includes news organizations that have various business models as well. If you want a business model that is paywalled, knock yourself out. If you want a strictly free service, then hey, by all means, go for it. If you are like us and have a mixed service where people can throw money at you for doing a good job while keeping the news free for all, then I think that should be welcome as well. There is nothing to be ashamed about having a different business model from another news organization.
For Menzies, I’ve observed that he has largely favoured a one-size fits all approach to media. Specifically, he seems to believe that every news organization should employ a paywalled system. This with the thinking that any news worth its salt should have people wanting to pay for it. If not enough people can personally fund it, then it clearly didn’t deserve to survive in the first place and it should be allowed to fail. Any other business model that deviates from that is inherently “unprofitable”. This is probably where his idea of paywalling the CBC comes from as he slaps it onto the Conservative calls to completely remove all funding from the CBC entirely.
The problem with that position is that the only people who are funding these organizations are those who are generally more affluent. So, for instance, if you publish an article showcasing, say, the science of climate change, then people who are big oil patch supporters who happen to work in the oil fields will object to science being put forward because it could be perceived as threatening their livelihoods. There was nothing wrong with the report as it is factual, but those kinds of people will likely object and threaten the revenue stream of the news organization if they dare continue publishing articles referencing science and climate.
As a result, that news organization is beholden to the wealthy of the nation and is actively “encouraged” to avoid coverage that inconveniences the wealthy.
The second problem, and it’s a problem I referenced earlier on, is that this whole concept of transforming all media into a paywalled ecosystem is that it also makes these news organizations more vulnerable to the takeover of the ultra wealthy. So, if a slowdown in subscriptions just so happens to appear, then some venture capitalist billionaire coming along flashing a briefcase full of money suddenly looks more attractive. It becomes tempting to just take the money and live the rest of your life without a financial worry in the world. This as the venture capitalist hollows out a once credible news source and, through editorial meddling, transforms it into a right wing rag that is just like the others. If the organization fails, meh, that venture capitalist already owns all the other outlets, so they can just shut the whole thing down and lay off all the staff anyway.
The third problem to this vision of a paywalled news ecosystem is that it also robs people who can’t afford much access to credible news at all. As a result, the choice becomes either paying through the nose for right wing propaganda or simply doing without entirely. As a result, those who happen to be less affluent have absolutely no access to the news that matters to them because all the outlets that did so before have been hoovered up by the hedge fund billionaire class completely.
Further to this is how deeply problematic it is to push the idea of paywalling the CBC specifically. After all, the CBC is the publicly funded news organization in Canada. Few can make the argument that the CBC hasn’t produced anything of value for the public (and I can’t think of a way to make such an argument myself). Yes, there have been problems with the CBC in the past, but such problems can be fixed. Completely dismantling the CBC is the equivalent of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Yes, it is debatable whether the CBC should be getting ad revenue when it is already publicly funded. That’s why it is actually not a bad idea to float the idea of increasing the amount of government funding as the broadcasters presence with the advertising market gets dissolved. This would, at the very least, solve any problems of “market distortions” the private news broadcasters have long complained about. In fact, it would arguably bring the CBC a big step closer to being run more like the BBC in Britain which is a system that has worked well for the broadcaster.
Another problematic aspect of Menzies argument is the fact that he conflates the problem of government subsidizing the entire media landscape and government funding the CBC as a one in the same problem. It’s actually ironic that Menzies argues that to increase the diversity in the news sector, we should eliminate the very diversity that has come to define the CBC – which is that it is a publicly funded news organization. So, let’s separate the two elements out here.
Indeed, the fact that so many news entities are wholly dependent on government bailout money is deeply problematic in the news sector. Fundamentally, a journalist depending on the government to write their paycheck will inherently affect their coverage. After all, if the government doesn’t like the coverage, it’s entirely possible to threaten that news organization with axing their revenue stream entirely if they don’t, say, fire that journalist for the crime of questioning the government. This, of course, isn’t even theoretical. This actually happened last year when the Quebec government tried to crack down on a newspaper. Another example from last year was Doug Ford getting positive coverage after announcing his intention on spending government money on advertising. For all the bravado from news organizations saying that nothing influences their journalism coverage, especially not from advertisers, reality sure has a way of showing otherwise.
This, of course, is deeply problematic because now you are seeing a scenario where news organizations are now beholden to the interests of the federal government and, as such, act as mouth pieces to whoever happens to be in power. This under the threat of suddenly going bankrupt if they reported on things “incorrectly” from the governments perspective.
While that is a huge problem, this problem is vastly different from simply the CBC getting funding from the government. We’re talking about one organization that was built on the idea that publicly funded coverage exists in Canada. In that case, if you don’t like the coverage, you can simply switch to a different source and the marketplace of ideas can take over from there. It always struck me as kind of funny about how Conservatives have long proclaimed that anti-conservative “bias” on the CBC means that no one is watching the CBC. This as they also happen to sit with their eyes glued to the CBC so they can angrily post on famed Nazi bar, X/Twitter, about how they are so upset about the biased coverage of the CBC after. For all the “not watching CBC” Conservatives say they do, they sure spend a lot of time watching the CBC to find things to get perpetually angry about.
In short, though, there’s a big difference between the entire news sector being dependent on government bailout money and one news organization being publicly funded. In fact, an argument can be made that says that the fact that the CBC is publicly funded actually increases diversity in the news ecosystem, not decreases it. In fact, being able to freely criticize organizations like the CBC when they legitimately do something stupid (as we have) also increases accountability of organizations like the CBC.
Defunding the CBC was always going to be bad for society in the first place. There is a place in the news ecosystem for a publicly funded news organization. The percentage of revenue for which it can be publicly funded can be debated, but actively removing such a news organization entirely is a terrible idea. Dressing this call up by throwing in the fig leaf of putting the whole thing behind a paywall doesn’t make the idea any better. In fact, paywalling the CBC is almost just as bad of an idea as doing away with the organization entirely. It’s the difference of making the CBC disappear and making the CBC a shadow of its former self – neither of which serves the public interest. What’s more, such an idea does nothing to address any of the actual problems the CBC has at this point (some problems are legitimate while others are completely imagined).
Still, this shows, yet again, that right wing commentators and Conservative party members are still pushing this agenda, even as we inch closer to an election. Hopefully, the electorate will see this and realize just how unfit for office the Conservative party truly is in its current form.
