The federal government is spending cash on subscriptions to “friendly media” in exchange for “good coverage,” according to the publisher of Blacklock’s Reporter.
Holly Doan, a veteran journalist who once headed up CTV’s Beijing bureau, said “everybody” in Ottawa knows the subscriptions are “discretionary” and “frequently awarded” to news platforms that go soft on those in power.
The subscription fees – over which her company has sued the government, arguing that federal departments are sharing Blacklock’s passwords rather than paying for separate logins – can sometimes amount to millions of dollars a year for certain outlets.
“I would suggest to you, my two cents, [the federal government] don't care about independent media,” Doan, speaking to NowMedia video host Jim Csek, said. “The government sees independent media as an unknown and maybe dangerous.”
She added: “They see the ability to deliver the message to Canadians … it's slipping away. It's slipping into the hands of entities that … I mean, you can't golf with the publisher at BlackLock’s Reporter as in the old days. There’re too many new voices and it, the government, has had trouble controlling them.”
Subscriptions are one way for Ottawa to win friends among media platforms, she said, but another way is through the direct subsidies that began in earnest in 2019.
The federal government has now spent hundreds of millions of dollars on various schemes designed to prop up the country’s media in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Neither Blacklock’s nor NowMedia have received a single cent from Ottawa, however. The government’s system for selecting the beneficiaries of the funds has attracted much criticism.
“What the aim of the subsidies is [is] to prop up the legacy media,” Doan said. “But whether those entities are subsidized or not, [they] are going to decay and eventually disappear because we can't put our finger in the dike forever and hold back what's happening in media.”
Doan said she and her team are “career journalists” who are dedicated to “serious reporting” – that is, holding power to account.
She said if Canada had another 10 outlets “doing accountability journalism,” then “Canadians would have the best government they've ever had.”
Instead, the federal government – and particularly the Trudeau Liberal government, she said – has developed a “media control fetish.”
“The government … can't control what it doesn't understand,” she said. “And so they want to suggest that any outlet that is not the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, is like Breitbart.”
The Liberals have repeatedly claimed that their policy decisions related to the media have been motivated by a desire to protect journalism and journalists.
Speaking to NowMedia last spring, Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said she has been saddened by job losses in the sector and added: “I don’t think you're a great supporter of democracy if you don’t support journalism.”
But she also said that “so many journalists lose their jobs” because advertising cash goes to “a platform like Meta.”
We asked @JustinTrudeau whether he'd compromise with @Meta so Canadians could once again post news on Facebook.
— KelownaNow (@KelownaNow) May 10, 2024
He told us Meta was failing to 'support the work of maintaining democracies' and stressed that governments must 'stand up for journalism and the profession.'… pic.twitter.com/M04NaIwxeV
Last week, NowMedia revealed that the federal government has unlocked about $300,000 in cash to spend with Meta on advertising, despite having boycotted the US firm and denounced it as a threat to democracy for blocking news links on Facebook and Instagram.
NowMedia asked St-Onge last Thursday for her perspective on her government’s about-face, and again today. She has not responded.
Doan, meanwhile, said it’s “just not true” that the Liberal government supports independent journalism, no matter how often its representatives make that claim.
“If they supported independent journalism, they would find some kind of remedy to this Facebook crisis,” she said. “And they would get out of court with Blacklock’s.”
In a comprehensive interview, Doan and Csek also discussed:
The Trump Administration’s focus on defunding government media subscriptions in the US
How Blacklock’s paywall is “everything” to the firm and that the government’s password-sharing represents “stealing”
That media is in a “tailspin” in Canada amid disruption from the internet
That her team has “no interest in retiring,” adding: “If you keep fighting, you win”
How government subsidies have “perpetuated mediocrity” in the media
Jordan Peterson’s recent interview of Pierre Poilievre
The Liberal leadership race and impending federal election
The Blacklock's Reporter website can be found here.
To read more articles by, and about, NowMedia on this and similar subjects, see below:
