Ray Pennings

Executive Vice President

HERE'S MY TAKE

May 13, 2023

There’s been a fair bit of news about what should make the news this week.

• Delegates at the Liberal Party’s national convention passed a controversial resolution last weekend. They’re calling on the government to hold online and media outlets accountable for the truth of what they publish and “limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced.” The backlash on this resolution had the prime minister creating distance and Liberal MPs backtracking from their expressed support for this policy.
• Former deputy Prime Minister of Britain Nick Clegg, who currently serves as Facebook’s president of Global Affairs, refused an invitation to appear at a Canadian Parliamentary Committee hearing about “Tech Giants’ Use of Intimidation Tactics.” MPs were reportedly “aghast” at Mr. Clegg’s chutzpah and voted to issue a summons for him to appear. (For the record, it’s not at all clear that a Canadian Parliamentary committee can demand a British citizen’s participation.)
• Meanwhile executives from Meta, the parent company which among other things owns Facebook, did appear at that committee holding hearings on Bill C-18, which would force tech companies to pay media companies for news content that is posted on their platforms. Meta has said it if C-18 becomes law, it would make the business decision to stop the posting of Canadian news content rather than pay the legislated fees.
• TorStar President Jordan Bitove appeared on Peter Mansbridge’s podcast to explore whether print journalism was “dying or even dead.” Given that Bitove recently purchased a controlling interest in Torstar–a company that owns 82 newspapers including its flagship Toronto Star–for a reported $60 million, his attempt to put a more positive spin on the vitality of the media was not surprising. However the conversation went well beyond the sustainability models for the media industry. The built-in assumption was that online disinformation was a problem that only government and regulation could and should solve and that legacy media would continue to be the primary delivery channel.
• Defunding the CBC continues to be one of the most significant applause lines in Conservative leader Pierre Pollievre’s stump speech, at least for his supporters. Those turned off by Poilievre continue to find his call an annoyance.
• Meanwhile the stock price for Meta continues its surge. It went from $98 per share on the NASDAQ Stock Market in October 2022 to a high of $244 per share last week.

I can’t in this space do a proper job of sorting through the complex connections among these six seemingly unconnected recent news tidbits. But as I try to sort through these, there are at least three questions I find myself asking:

1. What is the role of the media?
2. What is the role of government?
3. What does a future media viability model look like?

Are media companies just another part of the private sector where markets and consumers’ individual choices ultimately determine which survive and which don’t? And if we aren’t going to pick favourites among companies, should we be doing so to entire sectors? Does it really matter if we end up with no newspapers?

Media influence on society is quite different from what we conventionally think of as business. (I would caution against taking that thought too far, of course. Apple’s influence on our lives and on society has been far greater than any one media company and it too is a private company.) However, putting “freedom of the press” in the constitution probably makes the case that there is something unique about media as an industry, even if that need not apply to each individual media company.

We sometimes refer to media as the “fourth estate” (the first three being the king, the clergy and commoners), a term that wasn’t coined until the nineteenth century. In fact, it is worth reminding ourselves that mass media outlets, as we understand them, didn’t really exist until both the printing press had been invented and literacy was common. Sure, there have always been different ways of communicating truths that the powers that be would prefer the commoners not to know. Graffiti and wall art are among the most ancient. There are many ways to share information but the concept of a press that is independent of other power structures and is free to seek out and publish truth is core to democracy. A media friend once quipped that the newsroom defines news as “the stuff that someone in power wants to keep secret” and it’s the exposing of secrets that provide journalists with vocational pride and satisfaction. While editors priding themselves on journalistic integrity would certainly include the owners of their newspapers as those whose secrets they’d like to tell, natural instincts of self-preservation have always had at least an implicit impact on which stories get told and perhaps even more importantly, which ones don’t. So yes, it has always mattered who pays the bills of the person you rely on to bring you the news.

In an age where the internet has lowered the bar and created the possibility for anyone to publish “news,” democracies have struggled to keep a sense of what is reliable public information. The abundance of supply has made the more costly content-creation process uneconomical. Fact-checking, editors, and adequately resourced journalists who do the time-consuming work of digging to the bottom of a story all cost money. So, that leaves most of us with access to the cheap (often free!) abundance of information with little way of knowing what is true, making much of it (including that which is true but you can’t be sure about) of comparatively little value.

Many have argued that governments must fix this. And so we have a steady stream of media bailout funds, internet regulation, and the forced payment by social media companies to the media for content. Most media have ignored the debate. (While the debate is happening in some places, it isn’t too prominent in the news for obvious reasons. See above about editors talking a good game about telling secrets, but backing off when it comes to critiquing those who are providing their paycheques.) The prime minister regularly decries “disinformation and misinformation” as the stuff that is corroding democracy and which he feels compelled to fix. Certainly the delegates at the Liberal convention didn’t give it a second thought.

Forget the details of the funds or the regulation. They are secondary. More fundamentally, what is alarming is that the government–the institution in society that has the most self-interest in keeping secrets and shaping the news–is stepping up to the plate. History shows that this rarely ends with a thriving and independent media, no matter how many assurances we receive that there will be “no interference” and that editorial independence will be preserved. Our starting premise must be that this is a real problem but not government’s primary responsibility to fix.

So if governments can’t solve this, who can? Back in the 1960s, the term “fifth estate” overtook the “fourth estate” in the lingo that emerged from counter-cultural alternatives to mainstream media. The implication was that “press barons” had too much influence in the news and that people needed alternative sources of uncovering the uncomfortable truths that media owners and the business community (which effectively paid for media through advertising) preferred to keep secret. To be sure, business interests can influence the news as much as government does when they write media cheques. However, where multiple businesses are writing the cheques, with competing and diverging interests, it’s easier for “uncomfortable” truths to become public. When governments get involved, there are no competing interests. The government’s interests prevail.

I don’t pretend to have the answer. Whatever it is, I suspect it involves some element of consumer choice. A decade ago, I paid for four newspapers to be delivered to my front porch each morning. Today my media budget is much greater (even after accounting for inflation). Even with five Substack subscriptions, an Apple News subscription (which gives me access to more sources than I can keep up with), and three online newspaper subscriptions, it takes more work to get a less confident read on current events than what my newspaper subscriptions provided just 10 years prior. And from what I understand, not many of the content-creators are making money today.

As these things are being sorted out, it behoves the prudent news consumer to pay attention both to the news being provided and to the news about the news-making process. It’s worth reminding ourselves that whoever is paying the bills is a big factor in determining the news we’re reading, watching, or hearing–and perhaps even more significantly, what doesn’t enter our news feed. 

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WHAT I'M READING

Tik for Tok

The federal government took a week to expel the Chinese diplomat alleged to be involved in the intimidation of a Canadian MP. (It’s actually two years if you start the clock when CSIS drafted the briefing note drawing attention to this affair.) Predictably, Beijing responded by expelling a similarly ranked Canadian diplomat within 24 hours. Sean Speer argues that current events demonstrate that the government’s commitment to a new Indo-Pacific strategy that was not as China-reliant for trade– announced with some fanfare in November–doesn’t live up to the hype. 

Debating Debate Strategies

Author Anand Giridharadas suggests that for democracy to withstand its current threats, democrats need to focus on narrative rather than winning arguments in their communications tactics. Working from an explicitly progressive perspective, Giridharadas notes that the present “battlefield of big politics” is being fought on “the terrain of emotion, of psychology, and of anxiety” and for the left to succeed, they will need to address people “where they are” and not “as we wish they were.” It was interesting to have this article cross my screen (h/t to the Insights reader who forwarded it) the same day as Ginny Roth argued on thehub.ca that part of the challenge of public dialogue is that debating is a lost art. She contends that the cancel culture impulse within post-secondary education is not only silencing arguments, it’s also reducing our collective capacity to argue at all.  

Drug Funding

The debate rages on about whether providing a “safe supply” of drugs to addicts actually saves lives and reduces overdoses caused by tainted drugs. While the complexity of drug addiction and its impacts goes beyond simplistic solutions, the fact that there are more opioid-related deaths than car accident deaths in Canada each day confirms the significance of the problem. Adam Zivo’s investigative report in the National Post  this week highlighted another dimension of the problem. Zivo writes that a good proportion of the “safe supply” government provides is being sold on the black market. Contrary to their intent, “safer supply programs do not curb the fentanyl market–they subsidise it.” 

Debt Ceiling 

In the context of ongoing coverage of the United States government running up against its debt ceiling and needing some solution before June 1st in order to pay its bills, this Globe and Mail primer helpfully explains what is going on. It has a clear political bias in suggesting the debt ceiling law is just a political football rather than a tool for accountability (for which there is some argument based on how it’s been used by both parties), but one does not have to agree in order to benefit from the primer. 

MEANINGFUL METRICS

Cost of Intelligence

I had never given the subject any thought prior to seeing this Visual Capitalist chart but I wasn’t expecting to see the inverse relationship between national income levels and the optimism regarding the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. I would note that the data was collected last year, before some of the headline-grabbing ChatGPT technologies became more mainstream. Still, it does speak to the impulse that those who have fewer resources are more hopeful about how technology will improve their lot.

TAKE IT TO-GO

I hear the Train A-Comin'

Hockey Night in Canada host Ron Maclean produces puns as predictably as railway engines produce smoke. So, when his opening commentary to Wednesday’s playoff game referenced the possibility that Toronto Maple Leaf playoff aspirations would be derailed, the whistle that went off in my brain was an echo of the first notes of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” (It has to be said, that if we ended up with a Toronto-Vegas final series by some miracle, a big stand-up check would give “I shot a man in Reno” a whole new meaning.) I’m not comparing my TML fandom with a prison sentence but it does produce blues that go beyond the loyalty swag. And hearing train whistles has been more frequent than hearing goal horns in these low-scoring playoff bouts.

Thankfully on Wednesday, the Leafs managed to engineer a win (with just two goals). I know–one win when you need four isn’t the same as arriving at your destination. Maple Leaf management has spent years trying to figure out how to make their playoff trains run on time and all we fans can do is go along for the ride. As I write this, there’s a flashing red light jumping before my eyes. When you read this, Friday night’s game will have occurred and the possibility is real that the TML season will have ended in a wreck.

But you get on a train expecting to arrive at your destination. As a fan who hasn’t seen the sunshine of playoff success since who knows when, I’m going to celebrate the fact that at least at the time of writing, our playoff dreams are still on track. The cargo of hockey happiness might still be delivered. Whether or not that’s still true next week, have no fears. I will still have Insights in your inbox early on Saturday morning.

Have a great week.