David Eby has lashed out at “venture fund vultures” who he says have “destroyed a good portion of the news coverage that British Columbians depend on.”
The premier, interviewed by NowMedia on Friday, spoke of his “frustration” with the “captains of business, the MBAs” who are “assembling local media producers that are profitable … and turning them into securities and borrowing against them.”
Those conglomerates are then handed over to “venture fund vultures that increase interest rates and feed on them until they're dead,” the BC NDP leader said.
“The federal government has a really important role to play to stop allowing the consolidation of all these media outlets because that pattern has repeated itself again and again and again,” Eby added.
The premier was asked by NowMedia what he thought of Bill C-18, which has been blamed for precipitating Facebook’s ban on news in Canada. That ban has resulted in a crushing loss of revenue at news outlets across the country.
Eby, however, did not directly answer the question – stressing his desire not to wander “right into Ottawa's lane” – but did say Facebook’s news ban “really does impair” the online news model.
Premier @Dave_Eby discusses media in #BC:
— KelownaNow (@KelownaNow) September 18, 2024
▪️ 'Venture fund vultures' are getting hold of outlets and feeding on them 'until they're dead'
▪️ @facebook's ban on news 'really does impair' online model
▪️ Ottawa should 'stop allowing the consolidation' of media#bcpoli pic.twitter.com/HE5u7950GD
Last year, Eby expressed his fury at the ban, warning it endangered the lives of people in BC. But since signing a deal with Mark Zuckerberg’s company in May (despite saying he’d only do so if Facebook unblocked news), the premier has mostly gone quiet on the issue.
When repeatedly asked by NowMedia earlier this year for an interview with Eby on the subject, the BC government eventually refused and sent two statements instead. One of them said Eby’s government still thinks “access to news should not be blocked.”
When announcing the deal with Meta, which Eby said concerned child safety online, the provincial government also said Meta had agreed to “amplify official information” during the likes of wildfires, prompting questions about BC’s commitment to a strong and independent press.
Separately, Eby, speaking on Friday, was also reluctant to discuss the Liberal government’s attempts to prop up a selection of news companies in Canada.
Ottawa has spent hundreds of millions of dollars, most notably in the form of a tax credit, to help struggling outlets survive amid turmoil in the industry over recent years. In an interview with NowMedia earlier this year, Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said she’d rather the government didn’t fund media, but said it was necessary because she wanted Canada to have “as many professional journalists” as possible.
NowMedia, an entirely independent BC platform, does not receive the subsidies, however, because the government-appointed panel of people who refer to themselves as “experts” in journalism determined that NowMedia is not a news outlet.
That peculiar state of affairs, which affects other news outlets as well as NowMedia, is part of the reason Holly Doan, the publisher of Blacklock’s Reporter, told NowMedia earlier this month that the Trudeau government has a “fetish for media control.”
She referred to the subsidy system as “corporate welfare” and scoffed at the notion that any self-described “experts” were fit to determine whether she and her platform's employees are legitimate journalists.
Eby, meanwhile, said he thinks the federal government – and his own provincial government – should support the media through advertising “to make sure we get the message out to people.”
“But it's quite another [thing] to fail to address those structural issues that are undermining media right across Canada,” he said.
“The fact [is] that Ottawa allowed the assembly of all these profitable responsive local media outlets, and by these business guys who said, Oh, well, we only need one reporter now for these four local papers,” he added.
“And then all of a sudden local people realize that coverage isn't about their community anymore. It's what they can get online anywhere else. Destroyed the business model, securitized it, borrowed against it, saddled these companies with massive debts and with rising interest rates and now collapsed companies like Black Press, and who pays the price? It's the local communities, the people who just want a newspaper with what's happening in our town, what's the sale at the local store, that's who pays the price.”
See the full interview with Eby here.
To read more articles by, and about, NowMedia on this subject, see below:
