Bought and Paid For – and Scared

I open with a tip of my hat to Andrew Coyne, whose op-ed piece in the Oct 4 Globe, titled ‘Nice little news network you got there. Pity if anything should happen to it’ inspired this post. [I will add – that’s a good headline for the article, not something I say often.]

A word about Coyne. I have been reading him since he was The National Post’s token liberal commentator, and continue to do so now that he is the Globe’s token conservative. I also watch him on CBC’s At Issue panel on Thursdays, but in truth I watch that mostly to hear what the redoubtable Chantal Hebert has to say about Canadian politics. Chantal is awesome.

Andrew has a few things that he write about regularly, from which I infer they matter to him a lot. Here are three of them, which I’m bothering to list here because they matter to me, also.

1. First-past-the-post (otherwise known as plurality rule) electoral systems, as are used in Canada, England and in US congressional elections, are bad, and should be replaced by proportional representation systems.
2. Much of what is wrong with current Canadian politics and governments arises because it is now necessary to have the approval of the Party leader to be nominated to run in any riding as the candidate for that Party.
3. It was wrong and will lead to a diminishment of Canadian democracy for the federal government to set up a system for subsidizing (selected) news media outlets.

Full disclosure – I disagree completely with Mr Coyne about issue 1, but agree with him almost entirely with regard to issues 2 and 3. I am going to say nothing here about 1, it is a complex subject, one I spent a good bit of my professional career thinking and teaching about. Someday I may write a long post or three about it, but not now.

I agree with Coyne about 2, and I will at this point say only this about it. If you wonder why MPs from the Liberal Party of Canada did not long ago force their highly unpopular PM and party leader to step down, you have only to note issue 2. Those MPs rely on the leader of the party to sign off on their nomination have even the chance to run for office in their riding in the next election. They are not about to piss JT off. I say no more at this point, even though there is much more to be said.

On to 3, the topic of this post. To his credit, from the moment the idea of having ‘approved’ news media organizations receive financial subsidies from the federal government was suggested, Coyne has written piece after piece saying ‘this is a terrible idea’. The press cannot, must not, be seen to be in the debt of the federal government if they are to play their role of holding government ministers and bureaucrats accountable for their decisions. Full Stop.

That argument is unassailably correct, as far as I am concerned, but of course those subsidies are now in place anyway. The first big problem with this system is  – which orgs get such a subsidy and how much does each get? That the CBC gets a subsidy in the current regime, on top of the more than $1Billion they get directly from taxpayers, should tell you immediately that the subsidy-receivers are going to be tilted toward BIG establishment news outlets. According to CTV news (a CBC competitor, to be sure), CBC got $1.4B in the most recent federal budget, an increase of about $90million from the year before. How much of this is the ongoing subsidy they receive every year and how much is from this new, broader subsidy regime, is not clear.

Coyne’s Oct 10 piece above simply points out two more emerging consequences of the existence of this subsidy regime. One is Pierre Poilevre’s recent attack on CTV News, forbidding Conservative MPs from speaking to reporters from that org, in response to two CTV employees splicing together some video of Poilevre so as to make him seem to say something he did not actually say.

I agree with Coyne that what those CTV employees did was flat out wrong, but Coyne’s point is that CTV was over-the-top apologetic about it, issuing two separate apologies, firing the two employees, and that CTV did that – in Coyne’s view – because they know they have pissed off a likely future PM, who is going to soon be in a position to influence their subsidy.

The larger point is: how can news org’s claim to be ‘independent watchdogs’ of the government  of the day – you know, the vaunted ‘fourth estate’ – while receiving a subsidy from that government? Coyne goes on to say that political abuse of the system is already a bi-partisan matter, citing a tweet on X in which a Liberal MP says to a National Post reporter “Your paper 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.”

In other words – ‘what are you doing criticizing my party, you ungrateful cur. You would not have a job without the subsidies my Liberal-party-led government pays you’.

This is a terrible situation news orgs have put themselves in, and it’s only going to get worse. The Conservatives have for decades been unhappy with what they see as a CBC that is Liberal-sympathetic and antagonistic to them. I think the Conservatives are not wrong about that bias, but the point is that they will find a way to reduce its subsidy if they form a majority government. I will not be terribly unhappy if they do, but that is not the point – one must ask, will every change in government now result in a list of previous subsidy recipients being taken off the news media gravy train and replaced by others? Is that the kind of ‘free press’ Canadians want?

Coyne is right, government subsidized journalism is a terrible idea. That implies that the CBC was a terrible idea before this added subsidy regime was born, but widening the subsidies to take in more organizations makes a bad idea worse. A press that relies on government subsidies to stay in business is not, in any relevant sense, a free press.

I understand that the claimed reason for this is the inarguable fact that the news business is in bad financial shape. Few media orgs are able to make any profit in our brave new internet world, and almost no local news orgs can do so. Local radio stations and newspapers and even TV stations are closing their doors on a regular basis. However, Coyne’s concern – which I share – is that this subsidy regime represents a cure that is worse than the disease that spawned it. A better way to support local news media needs to be found.