The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - December 02, 2023


Government Subsides Ruined Canadian Media

Topics
CBC subsidies and media quality
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
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Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

174.74

Word count

749

Sentence count

30


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the massive amount of government subsidies given to the legacy media in Canada, and why we need to get rid of them. I also talk about why the government should stop subsidizing the media and focus on other things.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 One of the best examples of why the government should financially stay out of the vast majority of industries in Canada is the ongoing subsidization of the legacy media in this country.
00:00:09.620 It's quite ridiculous how the media literally just got another $129 million subsidy top up, and somehow the reporting quality has only gotten worse in all of these media outlets.
00:00:23.200 The CBC gets $1.2 billion a year, and even just this year, I think they just lowered their expected audience capture from like 5.8% of the overall market in Canada down to 4.4%.
00:00:36.560 They keep estimating their ability to reach Canadians lower and lower every single year, despite the fact that they always have more and more money.
00:00:44.600 And it's because once the government gets involved in something, all the incentives do not point towards doing good work.
00:00:50.800 It points towards satisfying those who are giving you the taxpayer dollars.
00:00:55.700 The CBC and all the other subsidized media outlets in Canada obviously have been pushing their coverage to more reflect the views of those in the Liberal Party of Canada so that they can keep getting money.
00:01:08.240 Even though there's a chance of the Conservatives winning, they always push their coverage more towards parties that will top up their spending even higher.
00:01:16.840 Now, they finally actually ran into a problem because the Conservative Party has caught on to the problem of just letting the media keep getting government subsidies and then pushing everyone towards the Liberal Party, hoping that those subsidies will go up over time.
00:01:30.840 They've gotten to the point where almost every single channel on television in Canada pushes voters away from them using taxpayer money.
00:01:40.120 The CBC, even though they're supposedly quote-unquote neutral, well, yes, 90% of everything that they see in a media report is accurate.
00:01:48.200 It's the 10% of subtle narrative spin that's hurting the ability for the Conservatives to reach new voters.
00:01:54.760 It's actually the subtlety of the bias in the media in Canada that's so insidious because if the CBC came out and it was obvious Liberal propaganda, most people would turn it off.
00:02:05.180 It being more subtle makes Canadians think that the anti-Conservatives' conclusions that they come to must have been arrived at by their own intellect and not the fact that the story was very clearly, subtly angling them towards taking an anti-Conservative stance.
00:02:19.040 Now, this is exactly why the CBC and all these other subsidized media outlets need to be defunded, not just because of the bias, but because the overall quality of journalism in Canada has been going down over the past few decades because of the reliance on subsidies.
00:02:37.640 If we actually got rid of the subsidies, I guarantee we would have more original coverage, more investigative journalism, our entertainment quality would be better, just as it is in the USA.
00:02:47.020 Everyone always points to the US and it's like, well, if we cut our subsidies, somehow the Americans will take over our media market, we'll have no Canadian content.
00:02:56.020 I can tell you, some of the best Canadian content is not government subsidized.
00:03:01.280 Most good Canadian actors, writers, and directors go to the US to make their content because it's easier there.
00:03:08.580 If Canada cut this media subsidies and we had a market that wasn't bloated and oversaturated by taxpayer dollars, we would actually have way more creativity and way more people creating new, like unique content and better media coverage that would actually be marketable, not just in Canada, but around the world.
00:03:28.340 Anyways, I just wanted to talk on that because that's kind of the dumb narrative that goes around that somehow we're going to lose an independent press unless if we stop subsidizing the media.
00:03:37.680 I work in independent media.
00:03:39.360 I know tons of people in independent media who have basically zero budget and they do a better job than the CBC.
00:03:45.800 Half the CBC's budget is paying people to write up fluff reports who are just sitting at home writing up about random town council meetings in their small town, which is probably being covered by a smaller outlet anyways.
00:03:57.040 There's almost no independent, like unique reporting coming out of the CBC.
00:04:01.460 Half the time it's wire stories and we're basically, we're giving the CBC like $1.2 billion a year to buy wire stories.
00:04:09.300 It's ridiculous.
00:04:10.820 Anyways, that's it for me today.
00:04:12.780 Sorry for the rant.
00:04:13.600 I just noticed something about the new bailouts and it ticked me off.