Canada monitoring the media

iyraste1313 wrote:

...from the Canadian Constitution Foundation

Should Canadians receive medical care based on ability to pay rather than need?

That’s what’s looming on the horizon as a group of right-wing activists launched a constitutional challenge against Canada’s health care system this week in the BC Supreme Court – and observers warn the outcome “could transform the Canadian health system from coast to coast.”

Dr. Brian Day, who is leading the case with help from a right-wing advocacy group named the Canadian Constitution Foundation that is bankrolling Day’s legal team, portrays himself as a champion of “freedom.”

https://pressprogress.ca/13_things_you_need_to_know_about_the_people_trying_to_end_canadian_health_care_as_we_know_it/

RE: VOTD post 2, I believe media aggregation and media sharing undertakings means websites who report/comment on news or MSM generally and do not produce their own original reporting.    Also search results from google etc are to prioritize the "accurate, trusted" media sources.

I agree the Canadian Constitution Foundation is a bag of rightwing shitballs, but I am curious what you and others babblers think about the CRTC report, and other moves towards prioritizing and subsidizing certain "trusted" media organizations that have been floated in the past few years.    

I don't this issue should be left to right wing media to discuss.   Karl took a good shot at it on rabble, though I disagree with a fair bit of what he said:

https://rabble.ca/news/2020/01/trudeau-must-not-ignore-bold-report-media-internet-age

"When it comes for the need to regulate broadcasting activity that has migrated to the internet, the panel is pretty specific, and its main recommendations have already attracted some fire. 

The panel recommends the licenses now awarded to broadcasters be mirrored by what it calls a "registration regime" for the folks who broadcast media content via the internet. 

A new body that the panel recommends should replace the CRTC would regulate both broadcasting licenses and the new registrations for the online world.

There is an important caveat -- which is that registration would only be for the big guys, the true online broadcasters, not the many little guys, such as rabble. But there are already howls of protest from some of the little guys. At the news conference one gruff questioner even raised the spectre of North Korean-style control.

That was over-the-top. However, in determining what it will implement from the report -- and how -- the government will need to do a better job of explaining and justifying such touchy issues as a new registration regime for internet players than the panel has done so far."

Mobo:   Personally, I do not support any attempt to make Canadian content "more discoverable" on the internet, I'm not a big fan of public subsidies to any media company, especially those producing entertainment rather than news.   

And I don't think concerns about such "touchy issues as a new registration regime" should be dismissed as easily as Karl does above, or left as an issue to right wingers or right wing media.    I do not see an existing problem these registrations will solve, and the authoritarian impulse behind them should be resisted.

I think that the government of Canada is caught in a problem here: it cannot without a lot of criticism engage directly with a wholesale support of the media as that is the stuff of fascism. On the other hand in a globalized internet it is increasinglt difficult for Canadian voices to be long term viable. 

IT is noteworthy that the government in the 1980-90s put the entire book publishing industry on a form of welfare while removing their market (the GST was not nearly as significatn as the ending of the book rate) and then allowing one single bookstore to become the decider for what is published in Canada. What is being said about this here now should have been said then. The difference is that the "bookstore" in the cse of the media will not even be located in Canada.

Yes it is disturbing but we have to do something - it should be much better than this though.

Mobo2000 wrote:

Sean:   I'm curious about the analogy to the publishing industry, can you give more details?   Some of the discussion/criticism of the CRTC report I have seen centres on this idea that putting "stuff" on the internet should be considered publishing rather than broadcasting.   

Also, when you say "it is disturbing but we have to do something", do you mean the canadian broadcasting has to promote Canadian voices?  Or we have to do something to fight misinformation and untrustworthy news outlets?

Putting my cards on the table - I don't think misinformation and untrustworthy news outlets are a problem, and especially not a problem the CRTC can or should fix.   Not a big believer in regulating media to promote canadian voices either, but that's a much smaller issue to me.

The publishing details do not include the internet as this all predates that. At the end of the 1980s books could be shipped with a preferential rate. It was very cheap. Books have a very dense weight so by weight they take up less space meaning that they are less expensive to ship than many other things by weight. The government used to consider the value of reading, learnign and culture and had this rate for a very long time with minor inflationary increases. The US still has a book rate and a printed paper rate (last I checked) although it is not as cheap it is much less.

So at that time it would cost about $0.40 to ship a book in Canada. This was a central part of support to publishers. It meant that the govenrment did not judge publishers, did not decide which subjects were worthy. It did not have a minimum to participate. The barrier to entry into the field was very low with the advent of desktop publishing in the 1980s.

Then the government on a few weeks notice told publishers that the price for shipping was going up by about 1000% Yes, no reason to kick people in the shins when you can boot them in the head. The government took the money they saved and gave it to the big publishers that they juried to see if they apporved of their programs. They would deicde which type of publishing was valuable: eg poetry good; fiction good; non-fiction less valuable and small timely infomration books on current issues for example not valuable at all.

The big publishers divided up the money. This was really cool. Now they could publish a book, throw it in a basement and make more money than if they actually sent it to a bookstore. Meanwhile authors are paid based on sales: sucks for them. Of course they did not do this entirely. Instead the publishers getting grants could give 60% to a distributor and use the remainder of the income plus a government subsidy to make money. A non supported publisher could sell the book if they wanted for less money than it cost to print. Fun times. The government of Canada decided who could publish and who could not. 

Then they allowed the near complete takeover of the book industry by one company. This allowed for one book buyer to decide what Canadian content people would read in Canada. Damn good thing the internet came on strong after that with only one person deciding what books could be printed in Canada and a distributor taking the profit and the government of Canada funding the publishers it liked that did the kinds of books it liked.

Sound good?

when this was happenign I attneded a meeting of the ACP and there I divided the membership by size and predicted that the bottom 1/3 of the publishers too small to get block grants would go out of business in five years. I was too optimistic. After just three I was the only one on that list still in business. I was stupid and continued to bleed money and waste my life trying to publish for several more years before I threw in the towel with the help of Chapters which had decided that they would no longer deal with small publishers that did not go through large distributors (that would take 60% of the proceeds and return books, often damaged, for credit up to a decade later. I actually had a return policy of one year but that did not stop the big chains from sending me returns up to 10 years after they were purchased.)

The shipping rate story resulted in a meeting at Canada post where Canada post told me that they did not care if they were shipping books or screwdrivers (actual quote) -- the fact that government had an interest in learning, national unity, Canadian culture and an economc interest in books did not matter. It also did not matter tha tthe public owned Canada post. It becamse cheaper to ship a box of books from Ottawa to Hawaii than to Toronto. 

But then again, the book industry then did not have a universal program. So the government gave us one: the GST. When I started publishing the program we all qualified for was a book rate and by the time I stopped it was a tax. The public focused on the tax which was shitty but manageable. Nobody noticed the book rate which put by the numbers 1/3 of the publishers out of business in a short time a strengthened the hand of government in dedciding who got to be a publisher and what you could publish.

To give you an idea: I wanted to do inexpensive books in order to make them affordable. So I used inexpensive paper and priced some books in the early 90s between $2 and $5. The government was not into the values of equity and sharing informaiton and told me that I would never get any funding unless I used much more expensive materials that forced book prices up to $20 each. I was publishign on social issues so high prices was a problem for me but I did have to stop. as the shipping rate also meant that you could no longer sell books at prices that were affordable to get ideas across.

So in this way -- you can see that without taking editorial stances the government still managed to go in and decide what you could publish using other standards. BTW I got a lot of attention in the late 80s and early 90s as my books were affordable best sellers that really pissed off the government. For example I sold 52,000 copies of an anti-free trade book that people lined up around the block for and I got front page of the NY Times in the process. Government really did not like that kind of publishing. Just a stroke of luck that they got rid of it 3 years later.

Does that help?

Maybe we could start by having the CBC tell stories from a Canadian perspective. I am so tired of hearing about American issues presented as if we live in the same society. The US propaganda mill presents itself as a global product with Disney etc presenting an idealized US society as the norm. The CBC accepts that whole world view that says what happens in New York is more important to a person in Kelowna than what is happening in Halifax. Resistance is futile we will be assimilated.

Sean - re: post #9, thanks very much that's fascinating.   I'm going to poke around more on that.

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

kropotkin1951 wrote:

Maybe we could start by having the CBC tell stories from a Canadian perspective. I am so tired of hearing about American issues presented as if we live in the same society. The US propaganda mill presents itself as a global product with Disney etc presenting an idealized US society as the norm. The CBC accepts that whole world view that says what happens in New York is more important to a person in Kelowna than what is happening in Halifax. Resistance is futile we will be assimilated.

Certainly a Canadian perspective  -- but also a local one as you suggest. The first cuts to media outlets were local programming and local news. Canada as seen from Bay Street Toronto is not a whole lot better than as seen form NY NY.

Here in Ottawa we get local stories in our local media. Much of the time this means Toronto.

I'm also not convinced that the greater prominence of New York vs. Halifax in the Canadian mindset is due to the "American propaganda mill", rather than just New York being the kind of place to which a lot of influential people, from businessmen to artists, have graviated, and hence there have been more books, films, newscasts, etc about it.

You could say the same thing for London or Paris. I'm pretty sure more Canadians could identify the Tower Bridge than could identify Edmonton City Hall. And, as an Edmontonian, I don't really care. I get why London is more important to the world than Edmonton.

And, FWIW, my personal two favorite New York films are probably Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver: hardly the idealized Disney view of American life.  

Karl's weighed in on this again:

https://rabble.ca/news/2020/02/trudeau-and-guilbeault-must-counter-lies-about-orwellian-media-control

"In this space last week, we predicted that the report of the federal government's Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel would attract fire for its recommendation that the government institute a registration regime for online broadcasters such as Netflix, to mirror the licensing regime for traditional broadcasters.

That prediction has come true, and then some.

Writing in the Globe and Mail, columnist Andrew Coyne called the recommendation "a regulatory power grab without precedent." 

On the floor of the House of Commons, Conservative MP and former broadcaster Peter Kent inveighed that the panel's recommendation was "an Orwellian tool used by ruthless authoritarian governments."

For good measure he posed the (purely rhetorical) question: "Are the Liberals so desperate to cling to power they would emulate dystopian societies in Russia, China, North Korea and Iran?"

Kent's Conservative colleague Michael Chong, perhaps the last of the Red Tories, was equally apocalyptic: "The recommendations propose that the government regulate all commercial content on the internet, both domestic and foreign. If adopted, these recommendations could lead to the largest regulation and restriction of free speech in Canadian history." ...

RE previous broadcasting regulations -- "Nonetheless, imperfect though it might have been, the regulatory regime did achieve some success.  It helped create a Canadian music industry through Canadian content rules; it assured that private broadcasters provided at least a minimum quota of local and national news; and it fostered the development of some Canadian drama, variety and entertainment programs. Some of those programs have even been of excellent quality -- and highly popular.

Successive governments have all had concerns with the prospect of Canada being swamped by broadcasting content from the huge and powerful entertainment and media industry south of the border. To a greater or lesser extent, all Canadian governments have perceived the U.S. media and cultural behemoth as a threat to Canada's cultural sovereignty and basic sense of identity.

The question confronting governments and regulators has always been: If the media we consume no longer reflect Canada back to Canadians, and if we cannot have anything resembling a national conversation via the media, can we continue to exist as a country?"

Mobo:   I disagree strongly with Karl here.   I resent at a basic level public money subsidizing entertainment, Corner Gas, the Canadian music industry, etc should survive on their own merits or not at all, but that's of secondary importance to me.   I don't agree with the premise or the threat to national soveriegnty from US media he describes above.   It think it could be fairly described as apocalyptic, as much so as Michael Chong's comments.   When media was broadcast on airwaves, there was some sense to a regulatory system to divide the available bandwidth.   There is no such concern now, broadcasting is something even individuals can do, and that's a good thing.   I would rather a mass of voices and oceans of misinformation than a new system to protect us from ourselves, or to protect "canadian culture" from foreign invasion.

All European countries have layers of support for their cultural industries. I would rather subsidize a local film industry like the one in Vancouver than a pipeline for foreign oil companies. It is all about priorities. I am like the majority of Canadians in that my cable is long gone and I stream everything over the internet. I don't need a license to add content to that medium so why should Netflix.

BTW - I was speaking about this with a person who happens to be from Iran. Iran still has a very good book rate. they can afford it but Canada cannot???

The trouble with a book rate to governments is that they do not get to decide what is a worthy book. This was too much of an obstacle for Canada but in Iran -- if it is a book and can get published -- it can ship for a reduced rate.

Iran, as you may know is a country proud to be one of poets and literature.

Mobo2000 wrote:

Sean said:  "The fact that government supports Canadian business in all types of sectors also suggests that cultural sectors ought not to be exempt. "

Yes, it sticks in my craw a bit, but I accept that this is the way things are.   I get the positive economic value government support of cultural industries can bring.    But I'm a little jaded -- seen too much shitty Cancon, and known too many people in the industry living off grants and inflated self-importance.   I hate Corner Gas with the fury of a thousand suns.   

I probably just need a nap.   I'm sure I'll feel better in the morning.    

I think there is a lot more to cancon than corner-kiss-my-ass -- :-)

Mobo2000 wrote:

Aside - RE: Iranian poetry, a former workmate turned me on to Hafez:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez

“I have a thousand brilliant lies for the question: How are you?  I have a thousand brilliant lies for the question: What is God?  If you think that the Truth can be known from words   If you think that the Sun and the Ocean  can pass through that tiny opening called the mouth, someone should start laughing! Someone should start wildly Laughing Now!”

Yes, Rumi  is great too - even in translation must be absolutely wonderful in Persian

[quote=Sean in Ottawa]

Iran, as you may know is a country proud to be one of poets and literature.

[quote=NDPP]

And Canada, as you may know, is a country proud to be one of neither.

Kropotkin wrote:

The largest studio space in North America is in Burnaby and was set up with government backing in 1987. The Vancouver film community produces some of the best entertainment in the world. Unfortunately we have such a small market locally that any production has to be appeal to US audiences.  If you want to know whether a show is filmed on Vancouver a frequent tip off is a shot of the Seattle space tower and a Pacific Northwest setting.

I love sci-fi and am of the opinion that the Stargate series are the best in the genre. The tongue in check style that was developed with MacGyver has continued and is a trademark of Vancouver studios. They have been eligible for all kinds of government subsidies and that is one of the big reasons that the studios like Bridge have flourished but the productions have pumped far more money into the local economy than grants given out.

Yes, but the usual defense of CanCon(which is what Mobo was discussing) is that we need to be "telling our own stories". I've seen a number of the films on your "made in Vancouver" list, and I'm really not seeing how stuff like First Blood(about a Vietnam vet adjusting to life back in the USA), Carrie(re-make of a De Palma film of a Stephen King novel, set in Maine), Reign Of Fire(dragons take over modern London, UK), The Crush(horny teenaged girl stalks young teacher, with visual quotes of Kubrick's Lolita), Alive(Disney thing with a strong US evangelical vibe about a South American soccer team stranded in the Andes after a plane crash) etc etc qualify as "Canadian stories" in any meaningful way. 

And don't get my wrong. Some of those films were pretty good, and it's great that government financing went to provide jobs for actors and other people in the local film industry. But as proof that support for Canadian content is doing what it has purported to be doing, the list falls somewhat short.  

Support for the arts and film industry is in the context of the global market. Canada has too small a population in the overall English speaking world to be able to make big budget films about our own stories. It is like the music industry, having a hit in Canada is great but having a hit in the US might actually pay the bills. We live beside the most dominate entertainment industry in the world so it is not surprising our own film industry is essentially a branch plant operation, like making Fords and GM's in Canada, Canadian made but still Fords and GM's. Lets not forget all the subsidies that have been pumped into those companies when considering the government funds spent in the film industry in various provinces.

Giving the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission​ the power to classify "trusted" news sources, funding them through special levies on online platforms, and forcing online platforms to prioritize them. There is little detail on how trusted platforms would be defined or how online platforms would have to promote them, but ultimately having a government agency determine which news sources can be trusted erodes the power of the media as an institution that holds that same government accountable.

(End quote)

I basically agree that it's a bad idea, but just to play Devil's Advocate, doesn't the CRTC already require cable companies to give mandatory carriage to some TV networks, and not others? I seem to recall that the two networks mandated are CBC and CTV, and if you're some other network, you're basically expected just to go suck eggs.

IOW, right now, we seem to accept that the government can designate certain media outlets as just so important, private companies can be forced to market them, even if some people might think CBC and CTV are full of crap. How different would that be from pointing to, say, Facebook, and saying "You MUST include links to the Globe and Mail and the National Post"?

Yeah, it was actually the Sun debacle that made me aware of the mandatory-carriage issue. You're probably right that it might be harder to enforce on the internet.

One thing's for sure...

While that may be something Netflix can easily do by investing in Canadian film and adding a Canadian content section on the front page, it's unclear how it will affect companies that rely on user-generated content like YouTube, Reddit or Tumblr, let alone smaller startups that may not have the resources to invest in Canadian-specific content.  

Yeah, I don't see how you could even BEGIN to enforce CanCon on YouTube. I'd be very surprised if even YouTube itself were able to tell you how many Canadian videos were up on any given day. And the user-generated aspect of it would end up as a standing joke. "Congratulations, Canada, another video of the hot chick in Halifax drinking beer and belching!!"

voice of the damned wrote:

Here's something...

As an example, there is a YouTube channel hosting an extensive collection of old episodes of the conservative US talk-show Firing Line, with interviews of everyone from Jack Kerouac to Ronald Reagan. Would there be anything stopping the CBC from posting up old installments of Front Page Challenge or The Journal(the Barabra Frum thing) etc, rather than demand that all the user-generated stuff by whatever percent Canadian?

Or would those shows mostly all have been binned by now? I believe that Firing Line stuff is from a private collection, not from ABC or PBS.  

Good point -- in an age where everything is available volume is meaningless.

A sign of the times. ALL Canadian msm, including CBC  continue to demonstrate this steady march rightwards....

You Must Be This Conservative To Ride: The Inside Story of Postmedia's Right Turn

https://www.canadalandshow.com/the-conservative-transformation-of-postme...

"What has happened according to interviews with over 30 current employees and more than a dozen former employees - ranging from reporters to editors to corporate staff - is that Postmedia has given a directive for all its papers to shift to the political right in an unprecedented, centralized fashion. Many said the changes have thus far been poorly executed and communicated inside the company, resulting in a cloud of uncertainty and confusion among reporters and editors across the chain.

Not one staffer would speak on the record, almost universally due to fear of reprisal from management. 'Write that in your story', said a former employee. 'That says it all, everyone is afraid to talk."

The Canadian 'free press'...Stay tuned for more Russia/China xenophobia, no critical reporting of Israel, US imperialism, the WikiLeaks show-trial etc.  And why does Rabble.ca no longer publish Yves Engler, Roger Annis or Eva Bartlett?

I think the article is correct about Postmedia pushing endorsements on their erstwhile Southam papers, and that might be something of a new turn, I'm not sure. However...

Jordan Peterson, the controversial Canadian academic who has achieved rockstar success (and even considered running for the Ontario PC leadership in 2018), is a potential entry point to new business for the company.

Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, the Post was publishing Steve Sailer, who argues that blacks are genetically inferior to other races. So, no, Peterson would not be an unprecedented move to the right for the Post.