Western Standard - May 05, 2023


Ottawa plan to regulate ‘newsroom ethics’...


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

161.7905

Word count

953

Sentence count

54


Summary

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

Bill C-18 is a bill that would give the CRTC the power to determine if a news organization is a credible news organization, and require them to adhere to a code of ethics. What does this mean for the future of journalism in Canada?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 So we'll turn our attention a little further afield here. So we have the Online News Act coming on now, and the Canadian Radio Television Commission, the CRTC, one of the most evil, evil conceptions ever to be brewed out of Ottawa, has now said that they've met with publishers, and they've decided that under this new act,
00:00:30.000 the CRTC, which is an arm of the federal government, gets to determine if a newsroom can show it's a credible news organization that would benefit from all the new round of free money coming.
00:00:42.520 So we have Bill C-18. I'm actually flying out to Ottawa early next week to testify at the Senate to do my best to not kill the bill, at least try to minimize how terrible it will be for independent publishers like the Western Standard.
00:00:55.980 But this, you know, this bill is supposed to take money, confiscate money from Google and Facebook and give it to publishers, because Google and Facebook helped us get our content in front of people.
00:01:05.980 I still can barely wrap my mind around the bizarre reasoning of the bill. But to determine who gets to have any of this money.
00:01:13.980 For example, who's eligible for all the so called free money? Well, they're going to have to again, get into further defense deeper into the business of determining who's a newsroom. And that means also dictating a journalism code of ethics that has to be met by otherwise independent news organizations. Nigel, you've been around the news business for a long time, Calgary Herald, a number of other regional local publications in the West.
00:01:31.980 It goes back nearly 50 years, actually, I was trying not to date you. But what's your react? Just as a journalist to the idea that the CRTC gets to define who's a credible newsroom and what your code of ethics is going to be?
00:01:55.980 Well, look, the basic thing is, does anybody have the right to report and comment? If you go downtown, you go to and you see something, do you as a Canadian citizen, whether you work for a newspaper or not, do you have the right to tell somebody else what just happened? The answer is yes, of course you do. So
00:02:18.980 So the issue is now, yes, but because now it's money. This is the federal government handing out dollars. Exactly. And so the feds aren't going to say, well, Joe Blow with a blog or a Twitter account, we're not stopping him from saying something. But if he wants to get free money from Ottawa taken from Google and Facebook, well, he's going to have to do these certain things. And that means we get to decide who's credible news organization. And you have to comply with the code of ethics.
00:02:46.700 Well, I kind of doubt that the CRTC is actually relishing doing this. But the law is going to be that in order to be eligible for the money, you have to have a code of journalism standards and practices and ethics.
00:03:01.200 And I suppose the CRTC feels the need to make sure that everybody has the same set of rules. As long as the National Post isn't supposed to have the same set of rules as the Toronto Star, you know, but that's actually the kind of dilemmas that they are going to face.
00:03:20.120 And in the absence of a national organization setting those standards, the CRTC will, by default, come up with them.
00:03:27.700 My problem with this, apart from the, apart from just the whole principle of it, is that this is about another, the government has been trying to get into the news media and regulate it.
00:03:42.300 You said I've been in the business a long time.
00:03:43.880 I've been in before even the Kent Commission was called, and that was 1980.
00:03:47.460 That was about newspaper concentration of ownership.
00:03:50.220 But somehow they made it about content as well and trying to set standards.
00:03:53.920 And that's why we have press councils, different subject.
00:03:57.020 But, you know, it's government control of the press.
00:04:00.200 They tried it then.
00:04:01.380 They keep coming back, trying to find different ways.
00:04:04.020 And their goal ultimately will be to say, you are a journalist and you are not.
00:04:09.800 You can have a public voice.
00:04:12.060 You can't.
00:04:12.740 That sounds like a certain person running for the premier of Alberta.
00:04:16.580 Well, since you mentioned it.
00:04:18.940 Yeah.
00:04:20.520 Okay, Corey.
00:04:21.220 So, I mean, it's an inescapable fact that journalism is now a highly regulated industry.
00:04:32.280 When I decided to refound the Western Standard back in the summer of 2019, one of the biggest reasons I picked journalism was that
00:04:41.540 it was a virtually unregulated industry, there was virtually nothing, three and a half years later, and we're almost dairy farmers.
00:04:51.780 Like, we are, this is clearly, they're cartelizing the industry.
00:04:57.240 It is being hyper-regulated.
00:04:59.140 And soon they'll have us doing the equivalent of dumping out milk, surplus milk here.
00:05:03.360 But it keeps on going further and further, and it's all about attaching dollars to things.
00:05:10.200 For the most part, it's all about attaching dollars.
00:05:12.700 And why do they attach dollars?
00:05:14.400 It's for the sake of control.
00:05:15.940 Yeah.
00:05:16.140 It's because if you don't follow the line, you don't get the money.
00:05:20.060 Because, you know, they can't outright come out and just ban inconvenient media that is critical of the government.
00:05:27.580 And, you know, perhaps outside of the Laurentian mainstream, they can't ban it constitutionally.
00:05:33.220 But what they can do is try to manipulate, have the government manipulate algorithms.
00:05:37.460 Bill C-11 to promote government-friendly content, downgrade government-not-friendly content, and even more powerfully fund and make economically prosperous pro-government media and try to bankrupt anti-government media.