It’s bad enough that we get most of our news from hacks and flacks nowadays, but even worse is the trend to them taking over media research in Canada. The state of knowledge of our media is dreadful, as I have been saying for decades, because it has been polluted by self-serving industry misinformation and disinformation. The problem is unbelievably getting even worse, not better, for reasons that might have something to do with the millions of dollars in government subsidies that Big Media have been raking in for the past few years. Industry associations that once published reams of statistics for advertisers about their reach and power have either gone silent or moved into misinformation and disinformation that dwells on their demise while rarely mentioning the rise of online journalism. “Tellingly, News Media Canada has discontinued several annual reports on newspaper ownership, revenue and circulation,” complained Carleton professor Dwayne Winseck in the 2024 edition of his annual report on media industries here. “This is especially galling when these same news media groups have been benefitting recently from an increase in public funding and policy support.”

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In a bizarre development in the legal action, a letter filed in court revealed that the government plans to capitulate and “eliminate the base contribution requirement on streaming services and to provide government funding to replace those contributions.” Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller’s office, however, insisted that streamers will still be required to “reinvest” an unspecified portion of their revenues. The Wire Report, which covers telecommunication issues, reported that a spokesman for Miller told it that the feds “will not repeal the Online Streaming Act” and will instead “develop a new policy direction that takes into account affordability for Canadians, while providing greater flexibility for those contributing to the broadcasting system.” The mention of affordability reflects the reality that streamers could simply raise their rates to cover any required contributions, and some critics have pointed out that they could even quit the country.

The change in policy was first reported in June by the Globe and Mail, which cited unnamed senior government sources saying Ottawa would drop the requirement for streamers to fund local news and niche broadcasters and would instead negotiate “a more reasonable rate” of contribution with them. The revelation came shortly after Miller announced federal funding of $600 million a year “to provide stability and immediate support to Canada’s audio and audiovisual sectors and to keep our culture accessible and affordable for all Canadians.” That startling amount is triple the $200 million a year that was expected to be raised from streamers under the Act. Miller caused a furore in May with testimony to a Commons committee in which he estimated at a stunning $6 billion the cost of extending to broadcasters the Journalism Tax Credit that newspapers have received since 2019. He quickly walked that number back, however, stating that he had confused the planned initiative with film and video tax credits.

NDP Heritage Critic Heather McPherson called the move to release streamers from the CRTC’s funding requirements “nothing more than an act of appeasement to placate Donald Trump and his tech billionaire supporters.” The head of Unifor, which represents thousands of media workers and lobbied hard for the Online Streaming Act, called it a “crushing blow” to both local news and Canada’s cultural sovereignty. “The federal government is abandoning one of the most important measures designed to strengthen Canada’s broadcasting system and support Canadian media workers,” said Lana Payne. “The Online Streaming Act was about ensuring the world’s largest streaming companies contributed fairly to the Canadian broadcasting system they profit from.” Payne was even more pointed on social media, calling the move “devastating and wrong-headed.”

Taxing and regulating online streamers, which have increasingly taken viewers away from broadcast and cable television without paying taxes in Canada, first became an issue during the 2015 election. All three major political parties promised back then not to introduce a so-called “Netflix tax” if elected, and Netflix agreed two years later to spend $500 million on Canadian content over five years to stave off charging a sales tax on its Canadian subscriptions. With online streamers proliferating by the 2019 election and a global backlash against the web giants growing, however, all three parties reversed their position. The Online Streaming Act was first introduced in late 2020 as Bill C-10, but it died on the order paper when the 2021 election was called. Reintroduced in 2022 as Bill C-11, it was finally passed in the spring of 2023 and scoped in streamers under the Broadcasting Act. Implementing regulations under the Act was delegated to the CRTC, which initially ordered steamers to contribute 5% of their Canadian revenues to various media funds, prompting lawsuits from the Motion Picture Association of Canada and the Digital Media Association. It also brought protest from American lawmakers, first in 2024 with a sharp letter from the powerful Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives, then earlier this year with introduction of the Protecting American Streaming and Innovation Act, which proposes imposing tariffs against Canada in retaliation.

The Online News Act has also come under fire from south of the border, and even here at home, where it has denied emerging digital media a valuable free distribution channel because Meta has blocked news in Canada on its Facebook and Instagram social networks for the past three years rather than pay for it. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer highlighted the Act as an irritant during recent free trade negotiations, and Meta reportedly made a proposal to Ottawa earlier this year to resolve the dispute. Google negotiated a $100 million annual contribution to Canadian newsrooms in late 2023 to be exempted from the Act, which was modeled after similar legislation in Australia. Publishers lobbied hard for the Online News Act despite receiving a five-year $595-million bailout from the federal government in 2019, running blank front pages for a day in 2021 emblazoned with the message “Imagine if the news wasn’t there when we needed it.” Ottawa extended the newspaper bailout for another five years after Meta blocked news and even raised the tax credit on journalist salaries from 25% to 35%.

Canada’s largest newspaper chain Postmedia Network, whose CEO orchestrated lobbying for the 2019 bailout, has recently stepped up its campaign for even more subsidies. Postmedia, which publishes most of Canada’s largest dailies but is 98% owned by U.S. hedge funds, recently ran a column in about two dozen of its newspapers by the head of the World Association of News Publishers lauding Canada as “a leader in smart media policy.” After word emerged that Meta had made a proposal earlier this year to restore news on its platforms, Postmedia newspapers ran a column by Rod Sims, who was the minister behind the Australian legislation, under the headline “Big Tech must pay for content.” Publishers are also hoping to cash in on payments from AI companies, claiming that their news reports are protected by copyright, a notion Sims pushed in a July column. Postmedia has been particularly shameless in running opinion articles by academics pushing for AI payments.

From the looks of it, taxpayers should expect to soon fork out even more money to our media, including broadcasters, despite the fact they are owned by some of the country’s most profitable companies.

Marc Edge is a Vancouver freelance writer and media critic. His books and articles can be found at www.marcedge.com.

How on earth our press could fall into the clutches of private equity players and U.S. hedge funds while our broadcasters were captured by our country’s largest telecom companies should be the subject of intense study by Journalism and Communication scholars at universities across Canada. Instead, too many of them have served as unwitting dupes at best and corporate lackeys at worst in the roll-up of our news media over the past few decades into one of the most tightly-controlled in the Western world. More recently, they have stood by and even cheered as the vulture capitalists shamelessly leveraged their acquired propaganda machinery to mount lobbing campaigns first for a government bailout, and then for a government shakedown of Big Tech. The resulting millions in subsidies should keep well-nourished for the foreseeable future our largest media parasite, Postmedia Network, which has taken more than $500 million out of our newspaper industry over the past fifteen years. The U.S. hedge funds that somehow own 98 percent of its shares, despite a supposed 25-percent foreign ownership limit, are laughing at us all the way to the bank for not clueing in to the long con they are working. Bell and Rogers on the broadcasting side have perfected the real money-making scam, however, as they use their government-granted market power to charge us through the nose for their services while each walks away with about $10 billion in profit every year, give or take a few hundred million. Now they want to be hooked up to the same lush subsidies that newspapers get. You will hardly hear a peep of dissent from the corridors of academe, aside from the dogged blog posts of one Law professor and the occasional rantings of one Communication scholar. Most media academics have no idea how business works, much less vulture capitalism, and their eyes glaze over at this admittedly arcane subject.

Unfortunately, the already thin ranks of academic media critics in Canada have just been thinned by one, as I was recently sacked by University Canada West, along with 239 others, just after I had moved from Vancouver Island to the mainland to teach three sections of Media & Society this term. From now on, I will be a media critic only as a journalist, at least as long as I can continue to find an outlet willing to publish my columns, and their numbers are growing fewer and fewer. Thank heavens for Canadian Dimension, which is literally the last publication in Canada radical enough to carry my contrarian takes. It’s even worse now that I’m without a book publisher following the recent forced retirement of my long-time enabler at New Star Books.

But I’ve got one scholarly round left in my overheated, smoking chamber, and I’m saving it to use it on my erstwhile colleagues in the academy, because before I was rendered a “former academic,” I had a paper accepted for presentation at this week’s Canadian Communication Association conference in Windsor. Titled “The Financial Engineering of Canada’s News Media,” its intent was to school scholars on the high finance wizardry being practiced by our media overlords. I was almost finished writing it when the axe came down. By then I had already paid for my flights and conference registration, so it was too late to cancel. I won’t finish writing the paper, but I will tell all assembled what they should know about money and our media in the conference equivalent of a Last Lecture. I might even get in a parting shot or two about how some in the academy have participated so enthusiastically in the sell-out of our news media.

A quick glance at the program shows that the CCA is still fixated on the same tired identity politics that have dominated academia over the past few decades and have left it discredited in the eyes of many. The keynote speech, which I probably won’t even attend, is titled “From LiveJournal to Large Language Models: Political Economy, Illiberalism, and Technocapitalist Futures,” and will be delivered by Dr. Alice Marwick of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Two decades of platform capitalism have reshaped not only how we communicate but who gets to participate in public life, on whose terms, and to whose benefit,” reads the program description.

I am sure that many academics, especially those from UBC and Toronto Metropolitan University, will be glad to see the back of me, at least at conferences. I first threw back the curtain on corporate shenanigans at UBC in a 2004 scholarly journal article after a new school of journalism there was named after the Sing Tao newspaper chain of Hong Kong, which had built it a home on campus. Its name was unceremoniously deleted a few years later, however, after several Sing Tao executives landed in prison for fraud after inflating the chain’s circulation figures. Corporate funding was a mainstay of the Sing Tao School of Journalism, which is now part of a larger School of Journalism, Writing, and Media, including a $500,000 donation from Canwest Global Communications in 2001 to fund an Asper Visiting Professorship that continues to this day. The donation was announced shortly after the school’s director testified at Global Television’s licence renewal hearings of the joys that convergence would bring to our media after Canwest acquired the country’s largest newspaper chain, my long-time employer Southam. “One of the things that has always disturbed me about journalism in Canada is that there were too many reporters chasing so few stories,” Donna Logan told the CRTC, which was considering limits on convergence but decided against them. “Converged journalism offers an opportunity to break out of that mould by freeing up reporters to do stories that are not being done and are vital to democratic discourse.” Instead, convergence soon bankrupted Canwest, whose debt the canny hedge funds bought up on the bond market for pennies on the dollar, using some to bid for Southam at auction. They continue to hold much of the rest today and use it to milk their renamed Postmedia of tens of millions in debt payments every year. Thus Canwest, convergence and the Asper family crashed Canada’s media ruinously, yet their name lives on not just at UBC, but also at Western and Manitoba.

A half million was chump change compared to the $3.5 million Logan next helped wrangle out of CTV. As with the Asper donation, the money came from the CRTC’s “public benefits” program, which requires that 10 percent of the purchase price of any licensed broadcaster go to worthy causes. Bell had taken over CTV in 2000 for $2.3 billion, so $230 million had to go to public benefits. In this case it funded a Canadian Media Research Consortium across several universities, including TMU (then known as Ryerson) and Université Laval in Quebec, which promised to “focus on important economic, social and cultural issues” and “produce stimulating and socially important research for public debate.” My 2013 study in the Canadian Journal of Communication showed that research produced by the CMRC instead served mostly media ownership and importantly contravened the program’s prohibition on market research.

Then there’s TMU, whose numerous media programs are housed in the sprawling Rogers Communications Centre, which took the media company’s name after a $12.5 million donation from its longtime owner. You won’t hear a peep critical of our highly-concentrated and ultra-profitable media industries coming from either its School of Journalism or School of Radio and Television Arts, which were lumped together a few years ago into something called The Creative School. In fact, as my research has shown, its questionable research has actually been a pillar of poverty pleading by Canadian media in pursuit of ever greater subsidies. TMU loves corporate money so much it has posted a list of its donors online. One short-lived donor was Meta, which in 2018 funded five journalism startups to the tune of $100,000 each in a so-called Digital News Innovation Challenge in partnership with Ryerson’s School of Journalism. That was before the 2023 Online Streaming Act prompted Meta to block news in Canada and withdraw from all of its funded activities. It was also in the beforetimes for TMU, which changed its name in 2021 after the discovery of suspected graves of indigenous children at a former residential school in BC because its then-namesake, Egerton Ryerson, had been one of the primary architects of the school system.

The influx of corporate money into Canadian journalism schools starting at the millennium was noted by a 2010 study, which referred to the funding as “greenmail” endowments, with the obvious imputation of influence peddling. It’s thus no wonder that critical media scholarship, of the kind I practice, has been hard to find at Canadian universities ever since. One of the last and most critical media scholars in Canada was Bob Hackett at Simon Fraser, a mentor of mine whose books and long-running News Watch Canada project shone a light on corporate power over the news. He retired in 2018, however, and no one has picked up where he left off despite the problems only growing worse. I have done what I could as a critic of Canadian media for the past quarter century no matter where I have taught, which for the lack of an appointment in my own country (despite stellar credentials) has included Singapore (three years), Texas (five years), Fiji (two years until I was run off by its military dictatorship) and Malta, where I taught for four years before the pandemic prompted the expulsion of all foreigners.

Now I have one foot out the door, too, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone to whom I can pass this damn torch.

Marc Edge is a freelance writer who lives in Vancouver. His books and articles can be found at www.marcedge.com.

A media subsidy introduced as part of the massive 2019 newspaper industry bailout could soon be extended to broadcasters, despite the fact that they are mostly owned by our highly-profitable telecom companies, and the cost to taxpayers could be billions. A recently released Senate report that seemingly argues for the move, however, turns out on close inspection to be deeply flawed and obviously biased. The cost to extend the newspaper labour subsidy to radio and TV reporters was first estimated by Marc Miller, our Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, at an astonishing $6 billion.

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Miller says next media bailout could be $6 billion

Ottawa is preparing a massive new subsidy for Canada’s biggest legacy media companies, with Heritage Minister Marc Miller signalling that covering newsroom labour costs is “not a question of if, but how”, and it could cost taxpayers up to $6 billion…

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4 months ago · 27 likes · 49 comments · Quinn Patrick

He quickly walked that figure back, however, posting on X

that he had “conflated the projected Film & Video Tax Credits over the next 6 years with the Journalism Tax Credit for the audiovisual news sector.” Consultations on extending to broadcasters the Journalism Labour Tax Credit that newspapers have benefited from for years were announced in the government’s recent spring economic update, with details to come, but events suggest that the move may be a foregone conclusion. “Broadcast journalism in particular is a key part of our community fabric,” reasoned the update. “Supporting the important work of journalists is crucial in our democratic system, ensuring accountability and a well-informed public, especially during a period of global uncertainty.” Such wording led one expert to conclude that the extra expense may be a fait accompli. “It will mean tens of millions of dollars for Bell, Rogers, Corus and other broadcasters,” predicted University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist on his blog. “The bigger question is whether the federal government should be paying more than a third of the news payroll at the country’s largest vertically integrated communications companies.” The president of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters estimated at $100 million a year the cost of extending to radio and TV stations the tax credit that pays 35% of journalist salaries at newspapers. “The existing program is valued at far less than the figure stated by the Minister,” Kevin Desjardins told the industry publication Cartt.

The Journalism Labour Tax Credit was introduced as part of the $595-million bailout package Ottawa granted to the newspaper industry in 2019 after an intense lobbying campaign. It initially paid 25% of a journalist’s salary, to a maximum salary of $55,000, but it was raised after more lobbying to the industry’s original ask of 35% of a maximum salary of $85,000, which more than doubled the possible benefit. It handed out $71 million at last count in 2024. The bailout, which was first set to expire after five years but was later extended to a decade, came after newspapers dismissed the $50-million Local Journalism Initiative, which had been introduced the previous year to fund reporters to cover underserved communities, as a “Band-Aid solution.” Their lobbying campaign, as I chronicled in my 2023 book The Postmedia Effect, was orchestrated by the then-CEO of Postmedia Network, which is by far Canada’s largest newspaper chain but is somehow owned 98% by U.S. hedge funds. Hiring a heavyweight Liberal insider brought publishers immediate access to the corridors of power, which resulted in a reported 79 meetings with senior officials, including in the Prime Minister’s Office. Postmedia and Torstar, our second-largest newspaper chain, had already flexed their muscles in 2017 by trading 41 titles and closing 36 of them, for which they somehow escaped prosecution under the Competition Act despite smoking gun evidence. A credible basis for the bailout had been offered up in 2017 in the form of a think tank report which was criticized by academics for wildly inflating the plight of newspapers.

The lobbying campaign worked so well that publishers, broadcasters and cultural groups soon reprised it in prevailing on Ottawa to follow Australia’s lead and force digital giants like Google and Meta to also pay them for reporting the news. This time newspapers ran blank front pages for a day in 2021, asking ironically “imagine if the news wasn’t there when we needed it.” They also helped to stifle any resistance to the move by “spiking” several editorials written by academics that had been accepted for publication by editors at major dailies. That resulted in the 2023 Online News Act, which last year brought in $100 million from Google alone after Meta instead blocked news on its Facebook and Instagram social networks, which has decimated our emerging digital media. That money goes not just to newspapers but also broadcasters, including the CBC, which is capped at $7 million. Broadcasters wanted even more, however, pointing to the market share they were losing to streamers like Netflix and Spotify, which resulted in the Online Streaming Act that now requires streamers to kick back 5% of their revenues.

Now broadcasters want the same labor tax credits that publishers get, despite the fact that they are mostly making healthy profits and tend to be owned by our largest telecom companies, whose profits are scandalous. Bell, which owns CTV, made $10.6 billion in profit last year at a profit margin of 43.6%, while Rogers, which owns the Citytv network, made $9.8 billion at a profit margin of 45.3%. Their windfall profits annually exceed the GDP of many countries. They are made by charging us usurious rates for their services and by ruthlessly laying off workers to keep raising their annual dividends to shareholders. After laying off literally thousands over the past few years, thanks largely to its growing use of AI, Bell announced last week that it is slashing almost 700 more jobs, while Rogers is seeking to sever no fewer than 10,000 of its workers.

Nothing gets the government’s attention like threatened mass layoffs, which brings us to the media’s latest attempt to rake in even more subsidies. A new Senate study, titled Making News Media Sustainable: Options for the Long Term, sets out a credible basis for extending the labour tax credits to broadcasters, framing it as a matter of “platform neutrality” and fairness. “The most obvious lack of neutrality has been the federal government’s exclusion of digital news publishing owned by broadcasting companies from the [journalism labour tax credits] program.” The federal government, it adds, has “shortchanged broadcaster-owned digital news publishing through the disproportionate allocation of news licensing payments under the Online News Act.” Broadcasters, however, are granted lucrative licences by the government for free, benefit from “must carry” rules that require cable systems to pay them, and make millions through the “simultaneous substitution” of commercials carried on U.S. programming, which sparked a decade-long trade war in the previous century. This is why they were excluded from the labour tax credits in the first place. The report then makes a ridiculous argument that is obviously designed not to inform government action but to influence it. “The unspoken taboo invoked for discriminating against digital news outlets operated by broadcasting companies is that television and radio companies ought to be excluded from public aid because so many networks are owned by large telecommunications companies or conglomerates,” it notes. “If this is the reason, it is invidious and no more compelling than excluding digital news operations owned by billionaires or politically partisan media proprietors.”

The report does make some interesting proposals for improving Canada’s extensive – and expensive – media subsidies regime. They include urging that, instead of being handed out by bureaucrats and political appointees, the money should be administered by an arm’s length agency not under the direct purview of a government minister. It also usefully estimates the cost of subsidies which now cover 11,359 journalists and average $7,405 annually for those at broadcasting companies; $1,889 for those at CBC/Radio-Canada; and $16,458 for those employed by print news publishers.

The report’s most interesting, if somewhat misguided proposal would reduce or even eliminate subsidies to heavily indebted media companies in order to avoid subsidizing their debt payments. The proposal is obviously aimed at Postmedia, which at last count was $388 million in debt to its U.S. hedge fund owners. “News organizations that intend to carry excessive debt loads indefinitely could be incentivized to renegotiate debt repayment with key shareholders, or sell assets, in order to return to acceptable levels of debt repayments, failing which a mechanism to reduce or eliminate subsidies would kick in.” It justifies this measure in part by noting that “there have been many commentators who have argued that the public interest in sustaining news journalism should not be held responsible for improvident investment decisions.” This misunderstands completely the manner in which Postmedia took over the historic Southam newspaper chain in 2010, which was instead a brilliant investment strategy by the hedge funds. They simply bought up the distressed debt of Southam’s previous owner, Canwest Global Communications, for pennies on the dollar on the bond market and then traded in some of it to take over the company during bankruptcy proceedings. They kept the rest on the renamed company’s books as a source of income and have been stripping its assets and throwing its journalists overboard ever since to keep making those payments, which have now amounted to more than $500 million. Postmedia is not in the newspaper business. It is in the debt collection business, and the subsidies it has lobbied for have helped to keep it attached like a leech to our news media in what it has described as a “key pillar” of its business strategy. The best way to get rid of these vultures, as I have been arguing since 2019, would be to simply limit our subsidies to only Canadian-owned companies. The all-devouring Postmedia, which since its 2010 inception has taken over three other Canadian chains, currently qualifies because the subsidies were crafted specifically to include it under the fiction that it is somehow controlled by the 2% of its shareholders who are Canadian.

The report was co-authored by Andrew Cardozo, an independent senator from Ontario who is a former Journalism professor and appointee to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, and Howard Law. It is Cardozo’s second in a series of reports on the future of news media in Canada, which began a year ago with one titled CBC/Radio-Canada: An essential service. Law is a retired Unifor public relations person and long-time pro-subsidies blogger who authored the 2024 book Canada vs California: How Ottawa took on Netflix and the streaming giants, in which he admitted to advocating for the Online Streaming Act with politicians in Ottawa on behalf of Unifor members, many of whom work in the media. Now he somehow gets to help steer the roiling debate among politicians over media subsidies in Canada. It is a debate, however, in which only some voices are apparently allowed to be heard.

The report cites mostly government, consultant and think tank reports, news stories and curiously Law’s own blog. There is no mention of critical Canadian media economics research done by academics, such as those at the Global Media & Internet Concentration Project led by Dwayne Winseck at Carleton University, which publishes a compendious and highly opinionated annual report on the state of our media industries. I don’t write about it every year because it weighs in at about 400 pages of heavy reading, but I did last year. Winseck also has a blog he has neglected for years, but he used it recently to weigh in on the phony research reports being bankrolled by our broadcasters and thus our profit-gouging telecom companies. This one was so hot that it came with the warning “Read with Caution.” Complaints by the telecoms about their falling media division profits should be taken with a grain of salt, Winseck pointed out. “Their media divisions are flush,” he noted, referring to data in his latest report which showed that Bell’s media division enjoyed a profit margin of 24.1% in 2024. “This level of profitability is up year-over-year and would be the envy of most businesses.” Bell’s overall margin is almost double that, thanks largely to profits from providing internet access that approach 50%, prompting Winseck to note that “it has room to absorb slimmer profits at the smallest part of its corporate empire.”

And you certainly won’t find any reference in the report to my own well-reviewed books on these subjects. It even gives credit for my proposal to distribute media subsidies democratically by issuing vouchers directly to tax-paying Canadians, which I first floated in a 2024 column and expanded on in my latest book Tomorrow’s News: How to Fix Canada’s Media, to a 2023 study that mentioned vouchers not once. (Full disclosure: I have never met Law, but we crossed swords on Twitter once or twice before he blocked me. I have posted several comments on his blog entries, none of which he has ever approved for publication. Cardozo invited me to sit on a panel last year at the University of Victoria which discussed the future of the CBC. I paid my own expenses of about $100 and I was given in return a hockey puck imprinted with the logo of Parliament.)

If this report passes muster with Ottawa, it could provide a credible basis for us soon throwing even more money at some of the most profitable companies in Canada. Our politicians should rely on better informed and less biased researchers to help decide such expensive questions.

Marc Edge is a freelance writer who lives in Vancouver. His books and articles can be found online at www.marcedge.com.

 Most of all, however, I was impressed with his most recent Buzz Machine blog entry. “I am coming to a conclusion I have avoided for my last three decades working on the internet and news,” Jarvis wrote in response to recent mass layoffs at the Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, Sports Illustrated and Business Insider. “It may finally be time to give up on old journalism and its legacy industry.” Jarvis points not just to the layoffs, but also to the arrival of AI, cratering trust in journalism and turmoil at the Daily Mirror in the UK as further proof that legacy media are beyond salvation. “I wonder whether it is time to stop throwing good money and effort after bad,” he muses. “The old news industry has failed at adapting to the internet and every one of their would-be saviors — from tablets to paywalls to programmatic ads to consolidation to billionaires — has failed them.” I deal with his response to the layoffs, and that of others, in my latest column for Canadian Dimension, in which I note that I still firmly believe, as outlined in my 2014 book Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers, that print will survive in some diminished capacity. “Newspapers that have not fallen into the clutches of private equity players and U.S. hedge funds, after all, are making a steady transition to hybrid print/digital publications that rely more on reader revenues than on advertising,” I write. “By investing in quality content and a successful online subscription scheme, the Globe and Mail has led the way in my country, but it is bankrolled by the ultra-rich Thomson family, which hasn’t stopped them from charging $5 for a copy and $8 on Saturdays.”

I began to wholeheartedly agree with several other aspects of Jarvis’ remarkable analysis, but my column soon grew much too long, so I used about half of it for this blog entry, where I can ramble on at length. Jarvis is particularly on point when he identifies the need to re-invent journalism not for profit but to serve communities and to empower the next generation in media leadership when the legacy business model finally bottoms out. “Citizens will have to come together to understand their needs as a community: for information, yes, and also for understanding, collaboration, accountability, repair, and service,” he writes. “The way out of this will be to educate and empower our next generation, not in so-called media literacy, but in media leadership, in taking responsibility for the health of their communities and their public discourse.”

There are still issues on which I disagree with Jarvis, but I hope to bring him around. “I’ve been trying to convince news organizations that they are not, or should not be, in [the] content business, but that journalism is instead a service built on conversation, community, and collaboration,” he writes. “There can be life after legacy. There will be roles for journalists. But journalism schools must expand their horizon to teach more than making content.” I certainly agree that news should be considered more a service than a commodity, but what will we have left to serve communities and engage audiences with other than misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories if we abandon actual verifiable news content? It sounds like Jeff would like to combine journalism and social media. That might actually be a good idea.

My biggest bone to pick with Jarvis, however, is that he stumbles as most do in deciphering the latest bad news. Layoffs don’t necessarily mean that news media are dying but could instead mean that they are adapting and, better yet, that they are able to adapt and thus survive. As for events at the Daily Mirror, an alternative analysis proves my point. Jarvis notes that its circulation has fallen from 5 million in the mid-1960s to 250,000 today, its local papers are “sputtering,” and the company predicts that print will soon become unsustainable.” From my research, I have learned to rely less on what newspaper companies say, especially to governments seeking yet another favour, and more on what their financial statements say because they usually explain a lot better what is really going on. In researching my 2022 book Re-examining the UK Newspaper Industry, I combed through hundreds of annual reports in the rich online resource that is the Companies House database and found that, despite all the doom and gloom they were spreading, newspapers there have been doing better than they had in years. Far from killing them off, the pandemic provided them a needed boost in their transition to hybrid print/online publications because more people than ever took up online news reading.

The confusion around this was exemplified by the story I told to end Chapter 1 about how Rupert Murdoch’s News UK petitioned the government to be released from his 1981 undertaking given upon purchasing the Times and Sunday Times to keep them independent in order to preserve media diversity. News UK claimed that the expense of keeping the titles separate, including the salaries of six independent directors, was weighing on the company during the pandemic and could threaten “ultimately, the economic viability of the two titles.” It noted the declining print circulation and advertising revenue of its Times papers but made no mention of their growing online revenues, and the government granted its application. The 2021 annual report for Times Newspapers Limited was filed the following month, and showed that its profits had doubled for the second straight year to £52.5 million (US$66.7 million). Its revenues had risen by £17 million thanks to strong growth in digital advertising and subscription revenues, as well as cover price increases which more than offset declines in print circulation and advertising. A year later, its profits had risen by another 58 percent to £82.9 million (US$118 million).

Similarly with Mirror owner Reach, its 2022 revenues fell slightly to £601 million from £616 million the year before, and its earnings fell more steeply from £165 million to £126 million, for a still-healthy profit margin of 21 percent. Its dividend to shareholders, however, somehow rose from 7.21 pence to 7.34 pence. That feat may be difficult to repeat for 2023, as its half-year results showed revenues down 6 percent and its third-quarter report showed them down 13.7 percent over nine months “in particular from Facebook’s de-prioritisation of news.” Circulation revenue, however, had grown marginally and “remains a resilient and predictable revenue stream,” leading the company to “remain confident of meeting profit expectations for the full year.” Yet Reach cut 450 jobs, or about 10 percent of its workforce in November amid reports it would replace them with social media “influencers.” Desperate times, after all, call for desperate measures, and the tongue-lashing they received from laid-off workers was nothing compared to the fallout from shareholders should that annual dividend fall. Reach’s full-year results should be released in a few weeks, and they could be very interesting indeed.

Murdoch’s influence on UK media and politics was arguably more profound. After building the largest newspaper chain in Australia from the solitary Adelaide News he inherited from his father in 1952, Murdoch entered the UK market in 1969 by acquiring first the Sunday tabloid News of the World and then the Sun daily broadsheet, which he soon converted into a tabloid. It adopted Murdoch’s formula for tabloid success by focusing on sex, sensationalism and sports, including a topless Sunshine Girl on Page 3 every day. It eclipsed The Mirror in daily circulation within a decade and eventually hit 5 million, highest in the Western world. When the Toronto Telegram went out of business in 1971, its staff banded together to almost immediately turn out a similar Sun, albeit with a more modest bikini model on Page 3. The formula was so successful that it spread across the country from Ottawa to Winnipeg, Calgary, and Edmonton.

Murdoch stepped on a lot of toes in Britain, switching the Sun’s political allegiance from Labour to Conservative in order to help elect Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in 1978. She in turn looked the other way when Murdoch bought the Times and Sunday Times in 1981 from a frustrated Thomson family of Toronto, which had kept them off their presses for almost a year in a dispute with the powerful press unions. Thatcher repaid Murdoch’s continued support in 1986, when he moved his then-strikebound newspapers to new computerized non-union premises by providing massive police protection. Politically fickle, Murdoch soon switched his allegiance back to Labour and helped elect Tony Blair as prime minister in 1997. He began a brutal price war in 1993 between national newspapers in the UK by slashing the cover price of his Times from 45p to 30p in a vain attempt to overtake the market-leading Telegraph, which was then owned by Canadian media mogul Conrad Black. The surprise move devastated competitors, including the Independent, which was plunged into a cash crisis from which it never recovered.

After a phone hacking scandal in 2011 revealed that the News of the World had intercepted calls and messages from politicians, celebrities, and even members of the royal family, five Murdoch underlings were convicted in court, with three sentenced to prison for as long as 18 months. Murdoch contritely closed the historic newspaper but then cannily started a Sunday edition of his Sun. A government inquiry led to a finding by a parliamentary committee that Murdoch was “unfit” to run a major international company.

Murdoch’s duplicity in expanding his empire of influence was boundless. He promised to maintain the editorial independence of the Times and Sunday Times when he bought them, but according to former Sunday Times editor Sir Harold Evans, he “broke every one of those promises in the first years.” Murdoch also promised to keep management of the Times and Sunday Times separate, but as I documented in my 2022 book Re-examining the UK Newspaper Industry, his Times Newspapers got out of that promise during the recent pandemic by fudging the facts in a plea to government.

It noted the declining print circulation and advertising revenue of its Times papers but made no mention of their growing online revenues. The Covid-19 crisis, it claimed, had put publisher costs “under further and unprecedented pressure, which is unlikely to abate in the short to medium term” . . . The 2020-21 annual report for Times Newspapers Limited filed with Companies House the following month, however, showed that its profits had doubled again to £52.5m. Its revenues had risen by £17m, or 5%, thanks to strong growth in digital advertising and subscription revenues, as well as cover price increases which more than offset declines in print circulation and advertising.

Murdoch’s malign influence in his native country through his dominance of the media there, which also includes Sky News Australia, recently prompted calls by not one but two former prime ministers for a royal commission into what one of them called “an arrogant cancer on our democracy” who had created a “culture of fear.” Their 2020 petition gained more than a half million signatures, but instead of a Royal Commission into his influence, Murdoch used his influence to prevail upon the government he helped elect to introduce a Mandatory Bargaining Code which forced Google and Facebook to pay publishers like him.

Similar legislation was recently passed in Canada as the Online News Act, which has prompted Facebook to quit carrying links to news stories here, with Google almost sure to follow. Murdoch, however, is hopeful of such laws also being adopted in the U.S., where he owns major dailies such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, and the UK, where his Times and Sun newspapers have been actively vilifying the digital platforms.

Murdoch is being roundly lauded on his stepping down, including as “the last of the press barons” by the Washington Post. His like may never be seen again, at least hopefully not.

The recent passing of legendary editor and author Peter C. Newman prompted no similar vitriol, as he was roundly lauded as an icon of Canadian journalism. The former Toronto Star editor, after all, had transformed Maclean’s in the 1970s from a monthly general interest magazine into a must-read weekly news magazine. (Long since restored to monthly publication, it has recently been transformed again, this time into a lifestyle magazine for millennials.) Newman then embarked on a long career as an author, writing 35 books and winning a half-dozen literary awards. He turned his 1975 classic The Canadian Establishment into a trilogy over three decades, and his trilogy on the Hudson’s Bay Company (for which he received a $500,000 advance from Penguin) helped to illuminate Canada’s settler past. Newman specialized in politics and business, lionizing many of Canada’s leaders in both fields including media mogul Conrad Black in 1982’s The Establishment Man when he was only 38 and just at the start of his spectacular rise and fall. Named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1978, Newman was promoted to the rank of Companion in 1990.

Newman has had his detractors over the years, mostly academic historians who objected to the poetic licence he took as a popular historian, as well as his use of “quotations appearing in secondary works,” as one reviewer of 1985’s Company of Adventurers put it.

Nor are Newrnan’s “borrowings” limited to lifting archival quotations from secondary works. The book includes more than thirty unindented lengthy quotations, some nearly a page long, from the secondary authors’ own texts. Much of Newman's text also appears to be a paraphrase of other writers’ work, with only a minority of the references acknowledged in his endnotes.

None were as fierce as Black, however, who turned on Newman after the 2004 publication of his 733-page autobiography, Here Be Dragons, which salaciously reported that Black’s second wife, Barbara Amiel, had “introduced him to the delights of oral sex.” In a writ that was dramatically served on Newman at a gala dinner on the 100th anniversary of Maclean’s, Black sued him for $2.1 million. The alleged libel was not bedroom gossip, but Newman reporting as true the findings of a Securities and Exchange Commission report that alleged Black had operated his newspaper company Hollinger Inc. as a “corporate kleptocracy.” The report prompted a criminal investigation that would eventually see Black sent to prison for five years. (He would later be pardoned by President Trump after writing a glowing biography of him.) Newman soon apologized for repeating the then-unproven allegations.

After Newman reviewed Jean Chretien’s 2007 autobiography My Years as Prime Minister and its publisher took out a quarter-page ad that hinted he hadn't even read the book, Black went after Newman again. He mocked Newman’s books in the National Post he had founded in 1998 for fabrication, exaggeration, and a lack of footnotes. “What he wrote was not history,” Black wrote in a column headlined “A Peddler Of Gossip, Well Past His Prime” that has disappeared online, which is not surprising since much of the Post’s early content was lost with a redesign. More alarming is that it has also been expunged from the Canadian Newsstream database with the notation that “display of this document is currently not permitted.” All that comes up using the headline as search terms are a few letters to the editor and an interesting column. Luckily I downloaded the original at the time. “As a non-fiction biographer,” Black wrote, “Peter Newman does little work and is a shoddy writer.”

He interviews many people, has researchers scan the media and uses every catchy or amusing phrase, regardless of believability, and presents them in a light and sequence that makes his usually destructive case. He then quarrels with his researchers and helpers, who accuse him of lacking rigour.

Newman replied in the Post that “my operational code is to make facts dance; that's why I’ve sold more than two million books,” and added: “All my books are peppered with footnotes.” (I have one of Newman’s books, as you will learn. Its few footnotes are entirely anecdotal.)

Perhaps out of professional courtesy, Black made no mention of Newman’s worst literary sin of all, but his dirty little secret was whispered about for decades in journalism circles and sometimes even referred to vaguely in print. John R. Colombo called him a “footpad” in a 2011 review, which is Olde English slang for a type of thief. “There is something a little sneaky about Newman’s writing,” he wrote, quickly adding in parentheses: “By all accounts he is an honourable, thoughtful and positive person.” His review of Newman’s books Heroes and Mavericks detected a certain sameness to his writing over the previous 50 years. “Probably a better overall title would be People I Have Profiled in the Past and Recycled for the Present and the Future.”

Sandra Gwyn had sniffed out Newman’s tendency to recycle in a 1998 review of Titans when she read his description of Winnipeg as “the Vienna of Canada, a city-state without an empire,” which she recalled reading 17 years earlier in The Acquisitors. “Call it lazy writing. Call it self-indulgence,” she wrote. “It's one thing to recycle the occasional well-turned phrase (which writer hasn't done it, if a bit guiltily?). It's another to elevate auto-plagiarism into a modus operandi.”

But Newman was much more than just an auto-plagiarist. He was an outright thief, as I learned to my dismay in reading his 2008 book Izzy: The Passionate Life and Turbulent Times of Izzy Asper, Canada’s Media Mogul. I had recently authored Asper Nation: Canada’s Most Dangerous Media Company, so I was familiar with just about everything that had ever been written about the late founder of Canwest Global Communications. Much of Izzy rang familiar. Some, it seemed, I had even written myself. Then I began to check Newman’s book against my own. Sure enough he had imported one passage of more than 100 words almost verbatim from my book, omitting a mention of Asper’s father being an alcoholic.

Here is the passage on page 357 of Izzy:

Greenspon, later the Globe’s editor-in-chief, was enthralled by the gregarious Winnipegger, whom he described as “overloaded with energy, charm and brains.” Trevor Cole labeled him “a work of entrepreneurial art” and commented on his pitiless work ethic: “He will work until the dark and corrugated lids of his eyes leave slits to see through and his voice seems to rise from the centre of the earth.”

Here is the paragraph on page 9 of my book:

Greenspon was obviously turned on by the gregarious Winnipeger. He described him in a magazine cover story the next year as “overloaded with energy, charm and brains.” Trevor Cole labeled him “a work of entrepreneurial art” in 1991. “When Izzy fixes on a goal, he is like a four-year olds’ windup toy racer, moving relentlessly forward, bouncing off obstacles and roaring back, until he achieves it.” According to Cole, Asper was “driven by the legacy of a workaholic father…who was never satisfied with himself or his sons.” The result was a “pitiless” work ethic. “He will work until the dark and corrugated lids of his eyes leave him slits to see through and his voice seems to rise from the centre of the earth,” wrote Cole. ‘Then he’ll sleep for a day or more.”

One sentence on the same pages was even reproduced word for word.

Gordon Pitts portrayed him in his 2002 book Kings of Convergence as a man of contradiction—worldly yet firmly grounded by his Manitoba roots: ‘He is very smart but defensive, carrying a two-by-four on his shoulder about being a Westerner and, some say, a Jewish outsider.”

Newman’s book was also sprinkled with interesting anecdotes I had seen reported elsewhere, but he didn’t bother to mention the original authors while I had carefully cited them. One lengthy anecdote was lifted from a National Post profile of Asper written in 2000 by Rod McQueen. That was bad enough, but I then read the same quote in a Maclean’s article Newman wrote in 2009 as Canwest was facing bankruptcy. He claimed it was something Asper “told me when I was researching a book about him.” Another quote, Newman claimed, was something Asper had “emphasized in a later interview.” Instead, it was even older, coming from a 1995 Canadian Business feature by David Berman with the last two words simply reversed.

My old reporter instincts began to kick in and I dove down another rabbit hole when I read Newman’s mention in his Acknowledgements that he had received a “research grant” from the charitable Asper Foundation, the terms of which he declared confidential. I went to the website of the Canada Revenue Agency, where the annual reports of charitable foundations can be found. While Newman was not listed as a grant recipient in the Asper Foundation reports, since he was not a registered charity, its expenditures for “professional and consulting fees” rose from $646,472 in 2004 to $1,484,729 in 2005, when Newman said he started working on Izzy, for an increase of $838,257.

The hypocrisy was off the scale, since Newman’s agent had denied that he would ever do an authorized biography. “Let’s be really, really clear about that,” Michael Levine told the Globe and Mail in 2006. I contacted my late mentor David Spencer, who was then book review editor for J-source, the online publication of the Canadian Journalism Project created by journalism schools. He encouraged me to write up what I had found, which I did, but then we hit a roadblock. J-source editor-in-chief Ivor Shapiro would not let me use the p-word, nor allow in my review the data from the Asper Foundation. I could run the plagiarized passages side by side with my original, but I could not call it plagiarism. My review ran under the headline “Aspers got value for money in commissioned bio,” but it is no longer available on the J-source website, again likely a result of redesign. I posted on my blog of the day the parts that Shapiro wouldn’t allow in my review, but that was before social media, so nobody noticed.

It was an object lesson in Canadian journalism, where even incontrovertible evidence was not enough to indict an icon. I doubt that many journalists would be able to get away with such larceny today. But wait, the story doesn’t end there. I was again prevented from blowing the whistle on Newman and his plagiarism in 2016.

When New Star Books publisher Rolf Maurer approached me to do a book called The News We Deserve (PDF), the idea was to make it a collection of my media criticism articles over the years with a new Introduction that focused on Postmedia Network’s shenanigans in advance of the federal election the previous fall. There would also be a concluding chapter with more recent developments, such as the Heritage ministry hearings into Media and Local Communities, which I had prompted with an outraged visit to Vancouver Centre MP Hedy Fry’s constituency office in early 2016 after Postmedia merged the newsrooms of its duopoly dailies in four of Canada’s six largest cities. That chapter would also include some ideas I had for helping to improve local news provision in Canada, which would be excerpted in The Tyee, for which I had been writing about media since 2006 before falling out of favour for reasons unknown to me.

Most of the articles would be from academic journals, such as my very first in 2002, “The Press We Deserve,” from which the book took its title, my 2004 demolition of journalism education in Canada, and my 2011 takedown of convergence and the disastrous the effect it had on news media here. Also included would be my exposé in the Canadian Journal of Communication of the CRTC’s mis-named “public benefits” program and my cover story “Can Canada’s Media Be Fixed?” in the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives magazine The Monitor, where I am also persona non grata for reasons I can better grasp. (*cough* Unifor *cough*)

I also wanted to include my 2009 blog entry exposing Newman as a plagiarist, but Rolf understandably balked, not wishing to invite a legal action that might have derailed our project. I have thus had to wait until now to tell this story under the principle “dead men can’t sue.” It was almost worth the wait as a way of kicking off my new Substack in style.