VOL 11, ISSUE 1 Spring 2017

The Last Front Page The future of journalism and democracy in the post-print world The last front page 2C Journal is primarily growing impressively in recent years, and of money that pays for much of the Can online magazine, we were on track for another big increase investigative reporting we all rely on to although we always print in readers for 2016 – until we published know what’s going on. Populist politicians a few copies of each the 8,000-word transcript of Jason Tucker are adding insult to injury by making quarterly edition for and Jason Vandenbeukel’s interview with journalistic bias their whipping boy. Left marketing and archiving Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto wing governments are marshalling for purposes. This has been our modus operandi psychology professor and a prominent intervention. The implications for civil ever since the magazine was founded in voice in the global pushback against the society, and democracy, are ominous and 2007. In 2015, after the Journal became part progressive extremists’ war on reason and uncertain. of the Manning Centre, we began printing freedom of expression. In spite of all this, the preponderance a thousand copies of the spring edition for In a single week, that feature alone of our stories are hopeful and optimistic distribution at the annual Manning Centre attracted almost as many page views as the that journalism will survive this wrenching Conference in Ottawa. rest of the year. It ignited reader interest transition, and based on our recent The Spring 2017 quarterly edition is like nothing we’ve ever published before, successes and the changes we’re making at titled The Last Front Page for two reasons. fueled by reposts and comments on social C2C Journal, there is every reason to believe First, it proclaims the main theme of the media, even attracting reprint requests that this publication, at least, will flourish. edition, which is about the social and from online journals in Holland and political impacts arising from the collapse Portugal. Vandenbeukel’s accompanying To ensure that will happen, two things of print journalism as audiences and story about Peterson also did very well, as need to happen. First, we need a steady advertisers flock to online news. Second, did Peter Shawn Taylor’s ground-breaking stream of lively, interesting, ground- it announces that this will be the last analysis of the regional cost of carbon breaking content from established and quarterly edition of C2C Journal. taxes in Canada (“The Coming National emerging writers across Canada. One silver Now, before our friends start mourning Carbon Tax Gap”), which we published in lining in the ruin of print journalism is and our critics start celebrating, let me November. Not only was it one of our best- that a wealth of talent is now out of work hasten to add that this does not mean the read pieces of the year, it also became part and available to publications like ours. We end of the Journal. On the contrary, it marks of the policy debate at the subsequent invite you to pitch us on anything, anytime, a new beginning, and part of our own First Ministers’ Climate Summit. by emailing [email protected]. response to the irreversible transition of The lesson we took from these Second, like everyone else in online journalism from print to digital. successes was that C2C Journal has a journalism, we’re trying to figure out a Henceforth, instead of the quarterly great future in online journalism if we sustainable business model, and in the themed editions, we will publish news are nimble enough to spot stories that mean time we need the voluntary financial stories, essays, commentaries, investigative excite reader interest, and provide them support of readers who enjoy and learn articles and reviews on a more regular basis, with fresh information and insight about from our work, and who understand how aiming for an overall increase in content, those stories. That means letting go of the important journalism is to the health of our diversity of topics and perspectives, and themed quarterly editions, and making our democracy. You can make a donation by timeliness. This is basically what we content as timely and topical as possible. visiting www.c2cjournal.ca/donate. currently do between quarterly editions, The stories in the Spring 2017 edition As Alexandra Pope concludes in her expanded to year round. As we transition certainly fit the bill. The carnage in print excellent essay about fake news in this to a more purely digital product, we plan to and the explosion of online journalism, edition of C2C: “You get what you pay for, as experiment with other mediums to explore disseminated through social media and the axiom goes, and if we keep expecting and express “Ideas That Lead”. accompanied by robot editors, fake news, journalists to produce good journalism on We’ve been considering this for over and mega-data harvesting, is having demand, for free, eventually all we will be a year, but the decision was clinched by profound cultural, political and economic left with is the spectre of our own worst the tremendous online response to our impacts. fears.” penultimate quarterly edition, the Winter Nowhere is the impact more painful, 2016 magazine titled The New Campus and distressing, than in journalism itself. Rebels. C2C’s online audience has been The death of print is draining the industry Paul Bunner is the editor of C2C Journal.

C2C Journal’s editorial advisory board: Media Inquiries Ian Brodie, Peter McCaffrey, Andrea Mrozek and Kathleen Paul Bunner Email: [email protected] Welsch © Copyright 2017. Canadian Journal of Ideas Inc. All Rights Reserved. For permission to reproduce an article, please contact the editors. The views expressed in C2C C2C, the editors, or the advisory board members. Canadian Journal of Ideas Inc. do not necessarily reflect those of Website: www.c2cjournal.ca Editor: Paul Bunner Associate Editor: Kathleen Welsch Email: [email protected] Designer: Dean Smith

2 Volume 11, Issue 1 Contents _ Spring 2017

Yesterday’s news...... 4 them. It’s hammering national newspapers and broadcast networks too, but there is something more immediate by Paul Stanway and ominous about the eclipse of local news. Jeff Hodgson Paul Stanway’s long career in journalism wonders what happens to community without it, and looks for has been almost entirely in the newspaper ways to bring it back. business. He was there in 1980, when the first Trudeau government sought to rescue the industry from “concentration The real truth about fake news...... 17 of ownership,” even though it was actually the start of a golden age of competition, innovation and money-making in by Alexandra Pope the print media. With newspapers now in irreversible decline This article does not contain the real due to the proliferation of online media, the second Trudeau story about what happened on 9/11 or government has launched a new rescue mission for Canadian Barack Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate or journalism. It will be no more successful than the first, Stanway writes, and journalism will survive the transition from paper to proof that the Democrats operated a child digital because of the innate human desire for knowledge and sex ring in a Washington pizza joint. Instead it is Alexandra understanding, not government intervention. Pope’s rueful exploration of the fake news phenomenon and its explosive growth on social media. There’s a lie and a sucker who believes it born every millisecond on the Internet, and it’s All the news that’s fit to post...... 8 getting harder and harder to separate fact from fiction. But by John Robson Pope says there’s one sure way to get real news on the web – Even as the thud that announces the arrival pay for it. of the morning newspaper on his doorstep grows ever fainter, John Robson’s coffee cup is more than half full. Good riddance The revolution will be digitized.....21 to the boring liberal pablum that has dominated Canadian print by Ryan Rados media for over a century, he writes. The Internet, for all its faults, All the fearmongering in the mainstream heralds the imminent return of healthy journalistic anarchy, with salutary implications for democracy, as editorial creators and media about Brexit, Donald Trump, fake distributors re-learn that content is king and advertising is a news, Islamophobia, climate change, and secondary to commercial success. the imminent end of civilization isn’t really about any of those things. It’s actually the death rattle of the MSM. The digitization of the news media is breaking up the corporate The Canadian Internet News and ideological cartels that have dominated journalism for Corporation...... 11 decades, writes Ryan Rados. They are about to be supplanted by by Dale Eisler hordes of citizen journalists who will diversify and democratize If you believe that democracy needs the news via the Internet. None of them will get rich but really, journalism like humans need oxygen, who should you trust to tell you the truth, a million-dollar-a-year then you should at least consider the network news anchor or a gumshoe reporter earning fractions of argument that Canada needs more CBC. Until the private sector a cent per click? figures out how to make news profitable again, writes Dale Eisler, Mothercorp is our best bet for ensuring that Canadian journalism survives the transition from print and cable to the Can democracy survive Twitter?.....25 internet. Already the country’s largest news-gathering operation, by Patrick Keeney it should quit sports and entertainment, go all news all the time, be resolutely fair and objective, and erect an impenetrable Patrick Keeney is as smartphone-enslaved firewall between itself and the State. as the rest of us, but he’s more worried about it than most. Not for himself, but for civil society and democracy. Keeney sees A world of information and none of it local...... 14 modern digital communications technologies as exacerbating many of the most pernicious social trends of our time: mistrust by Jeff Hodgson of elites, rejection of family and community, and “hyper- Town criers once delivered local news. individualism”. The messages conveyed by new digital mediums Then came community newspapers, then are mostly post-modern and progressive, which is not how radio, then local TV stations. Then came anyone would describe New England Patriots’ coach and Super the Internet, which is crushing those local news gathering Bowl champion Bill Belichick. So it gave Keeney hope when he and delivery systems and the financial models that sustained heard Belichick growl: “I’m not on SnapFace".

Volume 11, Issue 1 3 Yesterday’s news

by Paul Stanway Really? When a lifelong champion of free-enterprise and s somebody who spent all my working life in and media independence pleads for government help – he called around newspapers, it set my heart aflutter when I saw it a “big ray of sunshine” – that tells you all you need to know a recent headline in the print edition of the Financial about the parlous state of the newspaper industry in Canada. A Godfrey is pinning his hopes on the Trudeau government’s Post: “Postmedia rings up first-quarter profit”. A money- making newspaper company! Now there’s a man-bites-dog “Canadian Content in a Digital World Consultation” – or DigiCanCon. Headed by Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly, a story for the 21st century. massive public consultation effort was completed last year Not really. Further reading cooled my hopes that the and policy responses are expected this year. So far, it displays owner of the majority of Canada’s newspapers (about 150 all the hallmarks of previous efforts by Liberal governments titles) had finally discovered the secret of profitability in the to shield Canada’s “cultural industries” from the evils of digital age. The surplus was due to a one-time “gain on debt- competition and particularly that old bugbear, “American restructuring”, rather than a dramatic reversal of fortune. cultural imperialism”. Ad revenue was down, circulation revenue was down, there was an operating loss of $46 million, and veteran Ottawa to the rescue Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey conceded the company “must The last such attempt to protect the newspaper industry remain concentrated on the reduction of operating costs, was the 1980 Royal Commission on Newspapers, launched divesting of non-core assets… and as we announced last under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and chaired by Tom quarter, salary cost reductions.” Kent, a former newspaper editor and Pearson-era bureaucrat. So more layoffs, less content, and selling off the bricks and The alleged emergency that prompted that inquiry was the mortar, which after two decades of the same bitter medicine sudden closure of the Ottawa Journal and Winnipeg Tribune across the entire newspaper industry has failed to reverse and the merging of the Times and Colonist dailies in Victoria, its rapid decline. Yet there was something new in Godfrey’s turning all three cities into one-newspaper towns. remarks: his “hope that the federal government will come to Actually, the corporate pruning of daily newspapers had the assistance of Canada’s media industry.” been going on for decades across North America, but the

4 Volume 11, Issue 1 same-day shuttering of the Journal and Tribune smacked of to regulate the industry (reporting to the federal Justice collusion between the old Southam and Thomson media Minister, no less), and mandatory contracts for editors to conglomerates. The optics of reining in greedy corporations ensure their independence from the evil press barons who in the name of protecting press freedom and diversity was employed them. irresistible for the Trudeau government. Within a week we Oh yes, and tax breaks for publishers who promised to had the Kent Commission. play by the new rules. With hearings across the country, it examined the Thankfully, the timing was bad. Trudeau senior was too newspaper industry in excruciating detail, looking at busy battling Quebec separatist Premier Rene Levesque, everything from the economics of the business to the patriating the constitution, and fighting an energy war structure of newsrooms and even the perceived “quality” (or with Alberta to take on the newspaper industry. So Kent’s lack thereof) of various publications. This investigation of a recommendations went on the back burner (and were supposedly shrinking industry was necessary, according to eventually buried by the Mulroney Conservatives). the Commission, because the concentration of newspaper ownership was “clearly and directly contrary to the public The last print news boom interest”. Which was just as well, because as it turned out the ‘80s At the time I was a senior editor at the Edmonton Sun and early ‘90s were something of a renaissance for Canadian and obviously interested newspapers. New technology in the health of the revolutionized production industry. Yet there was and content. Circulation and something odd about After 141 years, the profits boomed. To their credit, the Commission’s Nanaimo Daily News newspapers invested much closed its doors in 2016. deliberations. For a probe of the bonanza on expanded into the lack of vitality news coverage. For a time and competition within you couldn’t cover a big Canada’s newspaper international story anywhere business, it was curiously in the world without tripping blind to what was going over half a dozen Canadian on in the real world. correspondents (myself Because rather than among them). floundering, the industry Competition made actually was undergoing newspapers more diverse a renaissance. New and more interesting, while production methods had increased advertising lowered costs, and surging provided acres of additional consumerism had created “news space” to cover more a demand for types things in more detail. The of advertising (autos, press galleries in Ottawa and real estate, electronics) the provincial legislatures that newspapers were were bursting with new well suited to deliver. reporters, a small army of Newspapers were also sports scribes were covering becoming more colourful, the new Canadian NHL teams, both literally and and it seemed hardly a month figuratively. went by without some new Yes, some newspapers feature section appearing in had closed, but beginning your local daily. in the late ‘60s new daily Diversity of opinion also papers had appeared in flourished. After decades Montreal, Quebec City, of lib-left domination of Halifax, Toronto, and Edmonton. As the Kent Commission public commentary we suddenly had a national posse of began its deliberations a new Sun daily launched in Calgary, conservative Sun columnists demanding fiscal responsibility, and by the fall of 1980 the Winnipeg Sun had arrived in the lower taxes, and even questioning the infallibility of social- Manitoba capital. democratic government! This was also the heyday of the The Commission appeared not to notice any of this. In feisty right-wing newsmagazine Alberta Report, which its 1981 report it painted a bleak picture of an moribund midwifed the birth of the Reform Party. The boom eventually industry crying out for government intervention – which, produced a second national newspaper – the National Post of course, it was happy to suggest: controls on ownership, – which on the front page of its very first edition printed the break-up of existing companies, a Press Rights Panel stories bashing Liberal malfeasance and urging unification

Volume 11, Issue 1 5 of the federal conservative movement. (Within a decade, The response to declining circulation and advertising, not the united Conservative Party of Canada would defeat the illogically, was to cut the biggest expense – staff. So over scandal-plagued Liberals.) the past two decades newsrooms across Canada have been culled, culled, and culled again. Many of the people hired Sadly it didn’t last and trained in the ‘80s and ‘90s have fled to government or On the surface, the newspaper industry could hardly have corporate communications. Journalists in their 50s and 60s been in better shape to take on the are now routinely offered “packages” to digital age. It was flush with talent and get them off the books. money, and who better than professional Given the speed and scope of the communicators to take advantage of }When Postmedia’s digital upheaval, perhaps there was no a revolution in communication? What real alternative – we’ll be arguing that was needed was a steady, thoughtfully- Godfrey pleads for for a long time – but there’s no arguing planned migration of newspaper government help that the hollowing out of the industry content to the Internet, which readers has been catastrophic for the quality and advertisers would surely follow. All that tells you all of coverage of events and issues of would be well. importance to every citizen. Compared Or not. Canada’s newspaper you need to know to 1980, Canada’s daily newspapers companies were slow to understand about the state of the today are mostly predictable and dull, they faced not just another technical lacking in content and character, unable innovation (of which they’d seen many) newspaper industry in to attract readers and consequently but a complete change in the way advertisers. people access and consume information. Canada~ Of course bailing out failing Huge amounts were spent on digitizing enterprises is a time-honoured content and creating newspaper compulsion among Canadian websites, but readers – particularly the young – seemed governments, so clearly it’s time for Ottawa to ride to the unimpressed. They set out to explore a vast new multimedia rescue again. The good news, if there is any, is that this time world, and advertisers followed. we may not need a multi-million-dollar Royal Commission

6 Volume 11, Issue 1 to lead the way: before DigiCanCon had even had time to If anything, The Shattered Mirror understates the problem fully digest its public consultation, a dramatic call-to-action by assuming there’s a pool of discarded journalistic talent was issued last month in the form of a suitably alarmist and out there that can be quickly summoned to reinvigorate the interventionist report from the Ottawa-based Public Policy nation’s news reporting and commentary. In reality most Forum think-tank. have discovered new jobs that pay better for less effort or Titled The Shattered Mirror, the report was authored are comfortably retired. by Ed Greenspon, the 21st century equivalent of Tom Ottawa could certainly take a look at tax laws that Kent. Greenspon is the Forum’s president and CEO, a discriminate against Canadian media. Extending the GST to former editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail, and a noted online ads purchased on foreign sites, for example; but if commentator on public policy. The Forum board he works that creates additional revenue for Canadian companies, why for is comprised of a host of luminaries including Serge Dupont, the number two guy in the federal civil service, not let them decide how to spend it? and Steve Orsini, the number one guy in the Ontario public I think we have to assume there will be further service. Justin Trudeau and his cabinet will already have contraction in the Canadian news business – and soon. The these folks on speed-dial. National Post is transitioning out of print and it makes little Greenspon’s report makes a dozen recommendations, economic sense for Postmedia to continue printing two including tax changes to claw back some money-losing newspapers in the same city. of the 70 percent of Canadian digital So, outside Toronto, the Sun newspapers advertising revenue that currently flows seemed doomed. In the near term at least, to Google and Facebook – about $3 billion }This is Conservatives should brace themselves annually between them, none of which is for a national news agenda increasingly ploughed back into Canadian news content not a case of dominated by the CBC, Toronto Star and or commentary. (In contrast, Postmedia’s Globe and Mail. 150 titles made less than $100 million market failure, All of this has a depressing Back To from online advertising last year.) That would create a “revenue stream” but of industry The Future 1970s feel to it: a Trudeau in of $300-$400 million, which government failure~ the prime-minister’s office and a national could use to subsidize domestic digital media dominated by a lib-left worldview. news innovations it deems worthy. The But it’s surely worth remembering that report suggests using part of the money to the 1970s also ushered in a renaissance fund a research institute to combat “fake news”, and loosening in Canadian news coverage as new owners, new technology, the non-profit and charity rules to allow “philanthropists” new ideas, transformed the media landscape. As news and (activists) to get into the news business. There would also commentary continues its migration to the digital world, the be $8 to $10 million to boost local coverage of courts, same thing will eventually happen again. legislatures and city halls. Like everyone else, the media has been overwhelmed by Finally, the CBC would be barred from competing for the speed of 21st century communications and the tyranny online advertising (a good idea), and its news content would of the 24-hour news cycle, and generally made quite a hash be free for not-for-profit use “as an important antidote to of things. Yet as National Post columnist Andrew Coyne fake news”. This would be the same CBC which recently sent out an actor to sell T-shirts emblazoned with the phrases pointed out in a thoughtful critique of The Shattered Mirror, “White Power” and “Make Canada Great Again” as a “social “this is not a case of market failure, but of industry failure.” experiment” to measure the “Trump effect” in Canada. He’s right of course. Just because existing newspaper Without the slightest trace of irony the Greenspon report corporations have failed to find a profitable digital business notes “there is nothing new or novel about Canada looking model doesn’t mean nobody ever will. Unless Canadians to public policy to ensure there is journalism by Canadians suddenly decide they are no longer interested in being for Canadians.” Perhaps that’s why this looks like a rewriting surprised, shocked and occasionally delighted by the antics of the Kent recommendations for the digital age. Because of their neighbors and their betters – which seems unlikely – the bottom line is the same: government regulation of the a new crop of news publishers and producers will emerge to news business, with tax breaks and subsidies for those who feed our natural desire to know about us. agree to play by the new rules. It may be noisy, chaotic and at times even ugly – Tom A crisis government can’t solve Kent would surely hate it – but it won’t require government The sad thing here is that the crisis outlined by Greenspon regulation and subsidy. in his report is real. As he rightly says: “We are crossing into uncharted territory of public institutions and elected officials Paul Stanway is a Calgary-based author and communications con- going inadequately reported; courthouses with no journalists sultant who spent 35 years in the newspaper industry in Canada to see that justice is being done; communities losing the and the United Kingdom, and would not have missed a moment of social glue of local news.” it.

Volume 11, Issue 1 7 by John Robson and year out, was by selling the audience to the advertisers. hat’s the model for I am not calling a successful online this strategy cynical or news service? Even W underhanded. Far from tougher, what’s the model for a it. It was remarkable successful conservative online entrepreneurship that built news service? Conservatives All the an industry in which editors and have long struggled for space in the reporters might come and go, and media but today media of all sorts individual ventures fail, but local are struggling to survive. I believe the newspapers became dependable only path forward is back to the future, mainstays of life in small towns using 21st century tools to reconstitute and big cities alike. Everybody the intellectually partisan newspapers read them, and they had and journals of the news such a presence in the 1800s. By which I don’t community and the just mean producing culture that the hard- editorial products that boiled newsman are lively, opinionated, became an archetypal informed, intelligent and, character in books, um, profitable. I mean we radio and film. And need to sell those products that’s fit because everybody read to the audience. them, advertisers were Well duh, some may say. happy to pay for them to How else would anybody reach customers. make money? Actually there To be sure, advertising are alternatives, one of which has an evil reputation and has never worked and the it’s not entirely undeserved. other of which, once a licence to post On those rare occasions when to print money in the news my kids encounter something so business, cannot work in the prehistoric it is interrupted by world of the Internet. ads they instinctively ask how The first alternative is this to fast-forward and are amazed weird plan where we get rich and offended at the expectation quick by giving things away that they should sit through online. Far too much of what this blaring manipulative insult passes for cutting-edge digital to their intelligence. But much entrepreneurship really is just modern and indeed “golden the old huckster’s joke about age of TV” content is as idiotic losing money on every sale but as the worst commercial ever, making it up in volume. The other while successful ads did convey alternative is less zany though information because otherwise in the end no more sustainable: they were just wasted money. somehow to do online what Legendary ad man David we used to do on paper. And to Ogilvy wrote in his 1963 understand what is wrong with memoir Confessions of an journalism today economically, you Advertising Man, “The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your need to know what worked so well for so long before failing wife.” In any case there is no free lunch, and we the audience so suddenly and drastically. did get essentially free newspapers and radio and TV news Essentially from the 1890s onward newspapers, followed and “entertainment” for decades in return for a bit of our time later by radio and television, did not sell an editorial product and IQ. to an audience. They sold an audience to advertisers. And it We also got it for technical reasons. The invention of worked spectacularly. They actually did get rich giving the high-speed rotary presses, cheap wood-pulp paper and half- product away, more or less, with a token subscription and tone images made newspapers into ideal mass-distribution newsstand fee to stop people from grabbing newspapers for vehicles for advertisements just as the invention of mass fishwrap or firestarter and to prove to prospective advertisers production more generally was making manufacturers and that the audience actually wanted the thing enough to pay retailers hungry for ways to reach a mass audience with that small fee. But where they made their money, year in news of their products. Hence the United States went from

8 Volume 11, Issue 1 under 600 daily papers in 1870 to over 2,500 by 1910, with a 3.5 billion potential readers circulation in the tens of millions. One legitimate concern about revitalized online media is that fake news, clickbait, inflammatory abuse Stopping the presses and mindless videos seem to draw huge audiences while Everybody won from this arrangement, which therefore sound commentary bores people. (Doonesbury memorably went on so long we thought it would never stop. And indeed illustrated this in a cartoon where Jeff Redfern sends his we’d still be printing money out in big suburban buildings father’s dry story about Congressional procedure viral by full of sweaty journalists and smelly presses like the one tagging it “Boehner drops bombshell as Scar-Jo rocks epic where I first worked for the Ottawa Citizen way back in 1997 sideboob”.) if Al Gore or somebody hadn’t invented the gol-durn Internet. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg predicts most news When they did, it kicked out the foundations. Who today will be consumed as video within five years. But 30 second looks for a new car or mattress in the front section of a clips won’t satisfy everyone. And one great thing about the newspaper, or a used drum set in the classifieds? Hoo hah. Internet is you don’t need a mass audience, just a small We Google. We kijiji. It works better. It reduces “transaction discerning fraction of the roughly 3.5 billion people now costs” including time enduring ads for things we don’t want. online. And it’s much easier and cheaper to specialize than You can no longer get rich bundling and selling an audience. it once was. There’s the core problem. But it has not been understood Still, it is hard to charge for anything online including by too many news publishing executives who are busy laying news because people are used to getting things free. But off content creators in the belief that watering the soup can it’s not impossible, and I think it will get easier. Free news is save a failing restaurant, and trying to apply the old model worth what you pay for it. (With the exception of C2C Journal online with digital ads as though the Internet were not online! – ed.) A surprising number of hugely successful the whole reason that model no longer worked. They still digital platforms actually rely to an unhealthy extent on regard content as wasted space, the “news hole” between all the old advertising model including YouTube, Google and those lovely ads. And they still think they can give away the Facebook. Soon enough they will run into the same trouble content to attract an audience they then sell to advertisers. as newspapers, which is probably why they’re trying to They can’t. We absolutely, positively, must get back to commercialize data-mining, which I find creepy but selling content to the audience. As long ago as March 2009, an Internet eternity, I wrote about this in the Citizen, including the “back to the future” scenario, saying Thomas Jefferson would be baffled by a modern newspaper, both the mildness of its political invective and the “ads”. And the two are related. Mass media tended to have a soothing liberal slant in a liberal era to avoid upsetting the mass of readers who might buy mattresses, and advertisers didn’t like controversy (hence no ads on the opinion pages). But journalism that appeals to readers not advertisers must be more vigorous. By vigorous I don’t mean obnoxious, belligerent and stupid. I mean content so intrinsically interesting, entertaining, and insightful that publishers can charge micropayments for individual pieces, and attract a substantial base of monthly supporters. Easier said than done, you say? Well, columnists couldn’t fix everything in one go back in 1953 either. So let me deal with a few of the major problems that might persist even after I hit “send” rather than shouting “Copyboy!”

Volume 11, Issue 1 9 boxes or physical delivery of the paper to your doorstep or snowbank. Second, relevance. One peculiar danger of the Internet is precisely the vaunted capacity to fine-tune our digital news feeds to tell us what we want to hear about things we already know we care about. Unfortunately we are then ill- prepared for a world that does not always conform to our wishes and expectations. In their glory days newspapers, ideally, gave people news they weren’t expecting about subjects they hadn’t realized mattered, along with opinions that challenged rather than flattering or insulting their existing views. That service, too, is one a discerning audience will pay for online. Finally, there is the absolute necessity of rationing. A great The National Post debuted advantage of 20th-century Oct. 27, 1998. newspapers and newscasts was that once you gave them half an hour or so you were allowed to stop because, in theory at least, might at least be sustainably creepy. you were sufficiently informed for one day. Today’s news It may also be objected that people increasingly scorn feeds, to say nothing of Facebook and Twitter, produce an newspapers, including in their digital incarnation, because endless flood of stories 24-7 that nobody can cope with. they can get all the information they need from news Hence the news judgement of discriminating editors grows aggregators. But aggregators can only share what somebody more valuable by the day. first creates, and without traditional or mainstream or Moving down the list of potential problems, it’s especially lamestream media there will eventually be nothing left to hard to charge for online news content in Canada when aggregate. competing against the public debt-financed CBC. But a Another more fundamental problem with news conservative online news service can turn this particular aggregators, free or not and sustainable or not, is that they lemon into digital lemonade, expressly pitching information overwhelm you with the proverbial drink from a fire hydrant. and opinion that is reliable, relevant, rationed – and not And news consumers are looking to be intellectually from the CBC! hydrated, not drowned in a sea of information and rumour. There is one final, major concern. For years I have watched the decay of the print media with dismay not only What people will pay for because it casts a pall over my bank account but because Thus the salvation of media generally, and of conservative I miss the civic conversations that papers inspired among news and commentary in particular, lies in offering people people gathered around the water cooler or kitchen table. something they need that is worth paying for. And my three The ink stains on our fingers marked us as informed citizens “Rs” here are reliability, relevance and rationing. whether we liked what we’d read or not. First, reliability. Discerning readers want to know that Conservatives often didn’t. When I worked at the Fraser what they are reading is accurate, that someone has checked Institute, my last pre-email job, many of the staff vigorously it. Not everybody is in that category, of course. Five minutes despised the daily papers. Which we all read at lunch then online will persuade and dismay you with proof of a vast denounced. The print journalism of the 20th century, despite market for free idiocy, apocrypha and abuse. But it’s OK its preponderant liberal bias, gave even conservatives a because we don’t need to sell to everyone. shared frame of reference. But before these bland mass Internet distribution also improves reliability of delivery, circulation papers arrived in the late 19th century we had and makes the production of “newspapers” far cheaper plenty of lively, community-wide debate, so there’s good because we no longer have to print news or distribute it on reason to believe we can enjoy reinvigorated democratic paper. No more ink, newsprint, machinery, trucks, sidewalk diversity after they’re gone.

10 Volume 11, Issue 1 People will pay for facts they trust, covering areas that print to digital. The model is already working for Britain’s matter, in quantities they can handle, from a viewpoint they leftist Guardian, among others. broadly share. The conservative model for this is already So take heart news readers, especially conservative ones. working for Breitbart and, here in Canada, Rebel Media. It In due course the Internet can make journalism great again. might have saved Sun News Network if Quebecor had dared Or rather, we can, online. grasp the opportunity. And it’s certainly not too late for Postmedia to consider it as the National Post transitions from John Robson is a columnist with the National Post. The Canadian Internet News whether the myriad that exists online, or through other electronic media. Corporation A snapshot of the newspaper carnage between 2000 and 2014 tells the story. During that period, according to by Dale Eisler Newspapers Canada data, the Edmonton Journal’s average ere’s a thought. Canada needs more CBC. daily paid circulation fell by more than 55 per cent, from Now wait, before your heads explode, let me 140,601 to 62,714. The story is similar for the Calgary Hexplain. What we need is not more of the same, Herald, with its circulation dropping from 121,646 to old Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but a new-and- 62,974. The Toronto Star, which once strode over metro improved CBC, one focused exclusively on good, quality Toronto and southwestern Ontario like a colossus, is journalism, analysis and opinion, expanded local coverage a shadow of its former self. Its average weekday paid with increasing resources dedicated to a more robust circulation has collapsed from 495,608 to 237,141. The online presence. In other words, it’s time for a serious value of Torstar shares have plummeted, and today the rethink of public broadcasting in this country, one that Star is so financially precarious that its very survival, at reflects the reality of today’s rapidly changing media least in its current form, is in serious doubt. The Globe landscape. and Mail, “Canada’s National Newspaper”, has also been My starting premise is that journalism matters in a bleeding circulation. Its average weekday circulation democracy. As Thomas Jefferson famously noted almost fell from 333,989 in 2000 to 244,021 over the same 14- two-and-half centuries ago, if the choice were between year period. As bad as things are at the Globe, they are government without newspapers or newspapers without even worse at the National Post, which is set to become government, he would choose the latter. He might have Canada’s first major “digital only” newspaper. been engaging in hyperbole, but Jefferson’s point was Canadian newspapers have invested heavily online well taken. A public square that includes not just free in hope of attracting readers who have abandoned their speech and a multitude of voices, but serious, professional print products, but they have struggled to generate digital journalism that engages diverse opinions, challenges ideas and informs citizens with facts, is crucial to democracy. And, a well-functioning democracy is the foundation of good governance. As we watch the gruesome demise of newspapers in Canada, taking with them the journalism they produce, it’s time to ask a fundamental question. Should we simply allow the market to determine what form and type of journalism emerges in a digital world, or is the need for quality, professional journalism too important to democratic society, as Jefferson noted, to watch it simply disappear? In other words, is there a greater good that requires a public policy intervention? I’m not suggesting market intervention to save newspapers. It makes no policy sense for government, either financially or journalistically, because it has become painfully obvious that traditional, printed newspapers are part of a dying industry. Readership and paid circulation numbers have been in virtual free fall. Like it or not, people are choosing to get their news from other media sources,

Volume 11, Issue 1 11 revenue. With so much news and opinion available free “boots on the ground”, changes to the Income Tax Act to online, people are far less willing to pay for it. As Ken Whyte, support “civic-function journalism”, and to modernize the founding editor of the National Post and former editor of CBC’s role that would strengthen its “civic-function mandate both Saturday Night and Maclean’s magazines, noted in a of informing Canadians.” recent blog post, “one of the principle reasons print outlets So if there is a public interest – and a public policy need fail to transition to digital is the weight of legacy operations.” – to ensure good journalism, you might ask what has this What needs to happen, argues Whyte, now an executive at got to do with the CBC? After all, there is no shortage of Rogers Communications, is for newspapers to crash and burn critics of the CBC as a bloated, wasteful organization, with and transform completely into more nimble, purely digital an obvious ideological bias and inflated journalistic egos. products. That advice also applies to the CBC. True as that might be, the CBC, both television and radio – There is simply no going back to the glory days of and Radio Canada in Quebec – also does exceptional news newspapers, when press barons made fortunes and legions coverage domestic and internationally. The question is how of reporters and editors produced publications that informed can it be made better? and even framed the public debate. It’s time to look beyond Last year, the federal Liberal government signalled its the sunset of the industry to the question of what happens support for CBC with an increase of $675 million in funding to democracy if newspaper journalism disappears? If over five years as part of what it called a move “to modernize good journalism simply transitions to a new, accessible, and revitalize CBC/Radio Canada in a digital era.” More digital form and provides citizens with the accurate news, initiatives are expected following last year’s completion of information, analysis and perspective that a functioning, the public online consultations labelled “Canadian Content healthy democracy needs, then there is no issue. But the in a Digital World.” But if the Trudeau government is serious evidence of that happening, so far, is decidedly meagre. about modernizing the CBC, it needs to address some fundamental issues. Clearly, good, independent and fact-based journalism is being produced online. But so too is an avalanche of A new and improved CBC biased, ideological websites that pass themselves off as The first step is to narrow its mandate to news, analysis credible, when in fact they’re promoting a specific agenda and public affairs. In other words, get rid of the main CBC and, in some cases, disseminate false news to shape and TV English-language network. The idea there is a need for distort public opinion. The role of quality journalism is to a national English network, and the hundreds of millions of sort fact from fabrication, to provide proper context and the dollars annually to run it, as a mechanism to disseminate examination of various points of view. A public that is well- Canadian culture programming to Canadians, is frankly informed by good journalism is then equipped to exercise its absurd. That might have been true in 1962 when there were democratic choice. only two networks, programming didn’t start until 4 pm and Recently, the Ottawa-based Public Policy Forum released ended with God Save the Queen at 11 pm. In other words, its report into the state of the newspaper industry in an back when things like fibre optics and the Internet were era of new media. Entitled “The Shattered Mirror: News, beyond even the bounds of science fiction. Democracy and Trust in the Digital Age”, the report was Today there are hundreds of TV channels and infinite commissioned by the federal government to determine what, Internet-based delivery vehicles for every kind of if any, policy options exist to ensure quality journalism as programming taste and interest imaginable. Is it any wonder newspapers decline. Its 12 recommendations include a new that the CBC TV main network has only five percent of the “local mandate” for The Canadian Press to ensure journalistic audience? And after losing the rights to NHL hockey two

12 Volume 11, Issue 1 years ago to Rogers (though it CBC should be modelled after still carries some games as part the Bank of Canada, a federal of a four-year sub-licensing institution truly independent agreement), the network has lost of political pressure. It should its single biggest audience and include an independent advertising revenue generator. journalistic advisory body that Two dots need to get helps ensure the regional and connected. One is the simple diverse opinions that make market reality that has turned up all segments of Canadian the CBC main network into society are fairly and accurately an anachronism. The other is reflected by the CBC. the public interest need to ensure good, quality journalism No doubt there will be exists in what has become an those who will argue that if unregulated Internet free-for-all. the public policy objective is to If there is agreement that ensure good, quality journalism, solid journalism is a public then public funding should be good that cannot completely directed to journalists, not an be left to the market in today’s institution that employs them. digital jungle, the question The equivalent argument is that becomes how best to ensure it happens. Clearly, the CBC if you want good art, you don’t build art galleries, you fund is an instrument that could be an important part of the artists. The problem with that position is that journalism, solution. But it requires a different public broadcaster, one unlike art, doesn’t exist in some abstract world of individual with a new mandate focused on news and public affairs only. tastes and personal expressions and preferences. Good The current programming format of CBC radio, which is the journalism has objective standards based in discernible facts, only truly national radio network, would remain, but with historical context, and the clash of ideas. In other words, good added resources for local and online journalism. What would journalism must rise to a certain legal and moral level that emerge is a single, enhanced CBC TV all-news channel. an institution with specific criteria, like the CBC, can impose. Other networks, whether CTV, Global, City, or countless Thus, the institution itself becomes critical to ensuring the other cable channels like Bravo, Showcase, Discovery and journalistic standards required in a digital world where “fake” many more, can and often are required to deliver Canadian news parades as truth. content as part of the terms of their Canadian Radio- Television and Telecommunications licence. At the same An inevitable question is how to reconcile a CBC mandate, time, a new-and-improved CBC must no longer compete with geared exclusively to news and public affairs, with the role private broadcasters for advertising revenue. It needs to be of the French-language Radio Canada network. Clearly, in completely publicly funded. a national media landscape dominated by English, there But suggesting that CBC should be entirely funded by is a much stronger case for the French language network’s government doesn’t mean it need be a bigger burden on the continuing cultural role in Quebec, and for francophone public purse. In fact, a CBC liberated from its main network Canadians in other provinces. Given that reality, Radio drama and culture obligations could redeploy resources to Canada would not be abandoned as part of a new and narrow strengthened and expanded news and public affairs at the mandate on news and public affairs network for the English- local and national level, while continuing to build a stronger language CBC. and more robust online presence. Strengthened local news Clearly, the CBC is not, and should not be, immune gathering would feed into the all-news TV network and CBC from the irreversible changes that have radically altered radio. news consumption in Canada. The media world and news More crucially, the CBC needs to be a television, radio environment Canadians live in today is unrecognizable from and online source that fairly reflects and represents all the what it was even 15 or 20 years ago. Just as other media diverse views within Canada as part of its delivery of news, institutions either die or adapt to that reality, it’s time for the public affairs and commentary. A core challenge is to ensure CBC to rethink fundamentally its public policy role at a time the publicly funded broadcaster’s journalistic integrity is when the public need for quality journalism has never been unassailable. Admittedly, as a state-funded broadcaster, that is no easy task. But nor is it impossible. The new CBC must greater. be shielded from political pressure and influence by the government of the day, or Parliament. The moment the CBC Dale Eisler worked in Canadian print journalism for many years and is perceived as partisan or ideologically driven, the state- later served as Assistant Secretary to Cabinet in the Privy Council owned Canadian equivalent of Russia Today or the People’s Office during the Martin and Harper administrations. He is now Daily, its journalistic value evaporates. So rather than a Crown Senior Policy Fellow, Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public corporation, with government-appointed board members, the Policy at the University of Regina.

Volume 11, Issue 1 13 A world of information — and none of it local by Jeff Hodgson bout ten years ago I was working in Calgary for City ATV as a cameraman alongside veteran reporter Mike McCourt. One day we left City Hall after a press conference and I was thinking about the pointlessness of having so many media outlets attending the same event and reporting the same news to the same disinterested public. As Mike took a cigarette break in the truck I told him that in the future reporters and cameramen won’t be needed because “City Hall can just make their own video and release it straight onto the Internet.” Mike laughed and replied, “We’ll always need reporters, because people will always need to be provided with context!” A few years later he retired, and today the station has no reporters, just a couple of cameramen who get footage to illustrate stories read by an anchor in although in those days the main worry was concentration the studio. There’s been a lot of angst about the accelerating decline of media ownership – too much control of news and and fall of local newspapers in Canada, including some information in the hands of too few. Today we have the venerable titles like the Guelph Mercury and Nanaimo Daily exact opposite problem. Thanks to the Internet, a tornado of News, and even the weekday version of Montreal’s La Presse. global information and communication is tearing across the But local television news is shrinking too. A report from the Canadian landscape, leaving much of the traditional media Friends of Canadian Broadcasting last year warned that half infrastructure in ruins. This is creating an ironic problem, of all local television stations could be off the air by 2020. in that never before have so many people had so much Industry-wide revenues have dropped 25 percent since information available at their fingertips, yet the lack of local 2010 and ratings have been in a tailspin. For example, CTV- news is becoming epidemic. owned CFCN in Calgary, opened in 1960 as Canada’s first private television station, has dominated local news ratings Local news in freefall for generations. In the early 1990s it routinely attracted as April Lindgren, founding director of the Ryerson Journalism many as 200,000 viewers to its evening newcasts. But in the Research Centre, recently launched the Local News Research first week of January this year, according to national ratings Project website. It includes an interactive crowd-sourced tracker Numeris, the CFCN six-o’clock news garnered about map to track local media developments across Canada. Most 72,000 viewers. Where will the decline stop? Will the decline of the updates these days are about budget cuts, staff layoffs stop? and closures. “We’re seeing some disturbing trends,” Lindgren These kind of questions are among the reasons federal says. “The last time we updated the map was January 3rd, and Minister of Canadian Heritage Mélanie Joly launched there were 305 markers on the map and of those, 171 were national consultations last year about “Canadian Content in a related to closures.” Digital World”. It’s not the first time Ottawa has fretted about According to the research, local media closures are a “crisis” in the Canadian news media. The Davey and Kent outpacing new start-ups by a 3 to 1 ratio. More and more Commissions ploughed that ground in the 1970s and 1980s, communities are finding themselves without a television or

14 Volume 11, Issue 1 radio station or newspaper. Brampton, to get their news, including some Ontario for example is a city of 500,000 local news, from social media people, the ninth largest in Canada. platforms like Facebook or Reddit, It has no local TV or radio station and she says. But local news barely only one community newspaper that registers on Twitter, an important publishes just three times a week. journalistic tool where Justin This sort of local news poverty has Trudeau posts selfies and Donald ominous implications for Canadian Trump announces executive orders. culture and democracy. The Burkean “We are seeing quite a few local concept of a healthy society built on journalists on Twitter,” Hodson strong local community foundations says. “But none of their messages is undermined if people who live in are going very far. National the community are disengaged from news outlets seem to have more and uninformed about local matters. impact, but local outlets don’t get When knowledge of current events is mentioned or retweeted at all.” dominated by national or international Canadians are already heavy news, people will be less likely to users of social media and know or care about civic issues. They according to the American Press may come to identify less with their Institute, a majority of Americans geographic community, more with their now get their news primarily ethnic or religious community. Lindgren from social media platforms. The studied the amount of news coverage trend will probably continue that local candidates received during the in both countries, judging from 2015 federal election and found that many scarcely made studies such as the Digital News Report from the Reuters news at all. Thus, news poverty not only has many causes, Institute for the Study of Journalism. Its data shows that the but also many effects, including on our democracy. One younger someone is, the less they follow traditional media need only look at pathetic voter turnouts for most municipal consumption patterns, which suggests the demand for legacy elections to see where further weakening of local news media, and especially local legacy media, has nowhere to go could lead. but down. In theory, social media could be an effective platform for Maybe their demise will create opportunities for new the transmission of local news. Many local journalists and digital news start-ups to tap underserved local markets. activists certainly try to promote their stories and causes on There’s some international evidence that new models of Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. But they’re not getting a lot media financing, such as crowdfunding, are spawning new of traction, according to Dr. Jaigris Hodson, a professor and forms of journalism. But there’s not much indication of that researcher at Royal Roads University. Hodson worked with happening in Canada so far, Lindgren reports. “Placing all our Lindgren on the Local News Research Project and is analyzing hopes on online digital-first news sites to step in and pick up the social media aspect of local news. Younger people tend the slack from the loss of traditional news organizations is a bit of a mug’s game, because the map only highlights the launch of 18 digital news sites. They’re not springing up like wildflowers to fill in the gaps.” Indeed, the gaps are only getting bigger. Another big threat to television news, both local and national, are the cable cutters. Over the Christmas holidays the chatter at a family dinner alighted on Netflix shows and cable costs. I mentioned a digital box I’d heard of called Raspberry Pi that gets you everything for free. Without missing a beat, a relative opened his wallet and handed me a card of a guy he knows that can sell me one. Avoiding cable bills and pirating content is becoming as de rigueur for hipster scofflaws as soon-to-be- legalized marijuana used to be. In 2013, according to the CRTC, Canadian (Image: NeimanLab) Volume 11, Issue 1 15 cable television subscriptions fell such they have a role to play in the by 13,000. In 2014, the numbers of stories that make up our national cutters breached 100,000. In 2015, identities. The hand of the market that number hit 157,000. Last year’s won’t guide this, but I’m hopeful total is expected to be near 200,000. that the right policy will allow If cable goes, some national and social media and journalism to international news producers will be work together.” big enough to manage the transition No News is Bad News: to the Internet. But where does that Canada’s Media Collapse, and leave your local TV station, other What Comes Next, by former than holding a worthless CRTC Canadian newspaper and licence? What replaces the six o’clock television journalist Ian Gill, is news? a 2016 book about the tectonic forces shaking up the Canadian The new virtual coffee shop media landscape. It includes Rebecca Tomasir is a real estate examples and recommendations agent in Chestermere, Alberta, a fast- for new business models and growing bedroom community of policy that could make a new about 20,000 just outside Calgary. In media/traditional media hybrid response to the barrage of enquries financially sustainable. Paywalls, she gets about the community from crowd-funding, micro-payments, prospective outside home buyers, native advertising, co-operatives, she created a Facebook group called “I Love charity: so far none of these have proven Chestermere”. It currently has an astonishing themselves as templates for the digital 12,659 members, which is half again as equivalent of the New York Times or many subscribers as the local weekly }A tornado of CNN, much less the online successor newspaper has, and it functions as a premier information is to your local newspaper or TV station. source for local news and information. It’s Still, Gill has unearthed some promising user-supplied content includes information tearing across models. about upcoming events, complaints about the Canadian De Correspondent is cited as a Dutch roads, news about civic politics and amateur example of successful crowdfunding. It sports, photographs from around the local landscape, leaving appeals to subscribers as an online deep- area, classified ads, weather, and some much of the journalism hub, free of advertising and commercial advertising. And it’s interactive, its inhibitions. With 40,000 subscribers which allows for real-time information traditional media paying around $100 Canadian a year, sharing. “I Love Chestermere” has evolved this model offers promise for local news. from a community bulletin board into a infrastructure in If just 40,000 “news poor” citizens in, say, full fledged local news provider. “A couple ruins~ Brampton, were willing to pay just $10 a of years ago during the Chestermere floods year, that could buy them a lot of quality the mayor contacted us with emergency info local journalism, delivered via cheap, that she asked us to share, because she knew existing social media infrastructure. I Love Chestermere was the best way to get the word out,” There’s no reason a YouTube channel couldn’t function as a Tomasir recalls. “We’re kind of turning into news by accident. local video news station. This might be the new trend. It’s less biased, because it’s by ProPublica is an American online journalism site that the people and for the people. We’ve got 13,000 different utilizes a philanthropic model for funding. Registered as a viewpoints.” non-profit, ProPublica does impressive investigative and It’s too early to tell and perhaps too much to hope that advocacy work and has a long list of awards to its name. “I Love Chestermere” is the prototype for the digital local Canadian web publications that aspire to this kind of news channel of the future. Maybe this is where Minister journalism and success include British Columbia’s leftist Joly and the CRTC and the machinery of government can Tyee Solutions Society and The Walrus (which also sells print play a role. Dr. Hodson believes it must if Canadians are to subscriptions). get the information they need rather than the information Among the policy recommendations now percolating that’s simply most popular. Algorithms designed to optimize in Canada are more generous tax credits for donors to Facebook’s commercial objectives can be just as much of a publications, and looser content rules for those publications censor or gatekeeper as the closed-minded or tight-fisted that would allow them to be more partisan and political publishers and broadcasters of yore. “These (social media than is allowed under current charitable regulations. The platforms) aren’t just technology companies,” she stated. objection, of course, is that taxpayers should not have to “They are now functioning like media companies and as directly or indirectly subsidize journalism they don’t like.

16 Volume 11, Issue 1 Still, if the playing field were level, and the alternative is the is not especially friendly to local news, issues and events. end of Canadians telling their local and national stories to Successfully marketing the journalistic context that Mike each other, the political will might be found to tweak the McCourt declared essential all those years back will only rules. come with more journalistic enterprise and imagination than Funding high-quality journalism for local communities Canadians have been provided by their traditional media in is going to require much more dynamic and varied funding quite some time. models than those which prevailed in the 20th century. The flexibility, utility, immediacy and engagement of social media Jeff Hodgson is a freelance writer specializing in politics and public trumps all other traditional competitors, but the medium policy. His columns are published monthly at the website Poletical.

The real truth about fake news by Alexandra Pope five minutes later, after allowing employees and diners to month after the presidential election in the United leave the building unharmed and firing at least one shot States, a 28-year-old man drove nearly 600 kilometres into the floor, Edgar Welch surrendered peacefully to police. Afrom his hometown in North Carolina to Washington, Upon his arrest, he stated that his intention had been only D.C., walked into a popular eatery armed with a semi- to investigate claims circulating on the Internet that the automatic assault rifle and headed for the kitchen. Forty- restaurant, a family-friendly pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong,

Volume 11, Issue 1 17 was the headquarters for a child sex ring with links to the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign. }Pizzagate only needed the The bizarre incident drew worldwide attention to an incipient crisis for Western civilization and gave it a catchy credulity of a public drowning in name: “fake news.” The Democrat pedophilia ring conspiracy theory, dubbed information and grasping for truth~ ‘Pizzagate’ by amateur Internet sleuths, had its origins in emails from the hacked account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, leaked eight months earlier, in which Podesta of thousands of people in a matter of days. That no victims and Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis discussed had come forward and no official investigation was opened possible fundraisers and a shared love of pizza. Seemingly was beside the point; to succeed, Pizzagate only needed the from thin air — Alefantis, though a generous donor to the Democratic Party, had never met Hillary Clinton — the credulity of a public drowning in information and grasping meme- and mayhem-loving denizens of the message board for truth. 4Chan produced a narrative that implicated the highest Ten years ago, something like Pizzagate could not have echelons of the Democratic Party in a horrific crime. In exploded into the public consciousness the way it did, the final days of the presidential campaign, the conspiracy leading newscasts and warranting lengthy examinations by theory was cross-posted to a pro-Donald Trump thread on the likes of the BBC and The New York Times. Conspiracist the more mainstream forum Reddit; from there, boosted thinking has always existed, of course, but prior to the advent by the instantaneous mass communication power of social of social media, it was largely contained to tabloids barking networks like Twitter and Facebook, it spread to hundreds at shoppers in supermarket check-out lines, the occasional

18 Volume 11, Issue 1 chain email, and the comment sections of to share information with any number obscure websites, and most people didn’t Twitter of people at any time. This included believe it. } those in power, who could now bypass users react the traditional media gatekeepers and Alternatives to facts communicate directly with constituents. Today, when Donald Trump fires off a tweet with ferocious Concurrently, publishing on social blasting mainstream media outlets for biased intensity, only media destroyed any notion of a news reporting, or Kellyanne Conway appears on a cycle limited by time or geography. political talk show to defend the president’s to disperse like And as their numbers of active users “alternative facts,” they are speaking directly piranhas after grew, Facebook and Twitter in particular to a growing proportion of Americans — and enabled the commercial success of a new others — who feel they are being manipulated the carcass has and different kind of publisher, whose and lied to by their democratic institutions, singular motivation was to attract as and that most, if not all, aspects of their lives been picked many viewers as possible, which they are controlled by “elites” who desire nothing clean~ did by pushing out massive amounts of less than their enslavement and destruction. content. The content didn’t have to be This conviction transcends political particularly well written or relevant; it ideology; a CNN/ORC International poll just had to be there, and it had to get conducted in 2015 found that 23 percent of Americans clicks. The more daily visitors a site could boast, the more believed Barack Obama was Muslim in spite of the former they could charge advertisers. Unsurprisingly, what got clicks president’s repeated avowals of his Christian faith. A 2016 wasn’t the straight, objective, factual reporting once thought survey by California’s Chapman University found more so necessary for the selling of news and the maintenance of a than half of Americans doubt the official narrative about healthy democracy, but controversial opinions, trivial human 9/11. Fully a third of respondents to the Chapman study interest stories and gossip about the lives of celebrities, said they believed the government was hiding information delivered in such a way as to promise the reader a revelatory about the ‘North Dakota crash’ — a fiction invented by the experience in exchange for their click. (‘You won’t believe researchers. what happens next!’) Thanks to the Internet, today’s news consumer is spoiled Some of the pioneers of clickbait, like Buzzfeed and for choice when it comes to reliable sources of reporting and Upworthy, have recognized their influence and matured; information on these and other contentious issues ranging Buzzfeed in particular has tried to establish itself as a from vaccines to climate change, much of it accessible for source for hard news and offbeat original journalism free. And yet, according to a Gallup poll released last fall, in addition to its quizzes and video recipes, with mixed public trust in the news media has never been lower. results. But another generation of upstart publishers has What’s going on? Why does it seem as though the come of age and discovered that in a world seemingly democratization of knowledge is making us less enlightened unhinged by things like the near meltdown of the global and more frightened? financial system, proliferating terrorism and refugee crises, The Internet democratized the production of news and and a much-heralded imminent climate catastrophe, the information by eliminating the need for huge, expensive public does not crave objectivity so much as confirmation printing presses or elaborate broadcasting studios. But for a time, traditional media retained its lucrative monopoly on the distribution of information. Newspapers still landed on doorsteps at 6 a.m., cable news networks enjoyed the security of mandatory carriage regulations, and people still accessed online news from homepages arranged to reflect an editor’s judgment. News on steroids Social networks, emerging in tandem with mobile technology, disrupted this monopoly on distribution by making it possible for anyone

Volume 11, Issue 1 19 of their suspicions that some nefarious global game is posted every second, continuity is a foreign concept. News afoot. breaks, is amplified, discussed and forgotten at breakneck These publications have no physical product, so their speed. Topics trend seemingly at random, and users react overhead costs are next to nothing. Their writers often have with ferocious intensity, only to disperse like piranhas after little formal education or training. Most of what they publish the carcass has been picked clean or a juicier chunk of meat is aggregated from other sources and passed through an has entered the waters. extreme left- or right-wing filter. They have SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly names with just a whiff of In this manic parody of democracy, even seasoned legitimacy: World Tribune, Christian Times Newspaper, Truth reporters fall for hoaxes or share inaccurate or unverified Examiner, U.S. Uncut, Counter-Current News. Armed with information in their rush to be the first to develop a story passable graphic design skills and a breathtaking disregard or post a witty take, blurring the lines between fake news for journalistic ethics, they regurgitate conspiracy theories and news that supports a particular narrative. In the time or craft elaborate fallacies that mirror it takes to verify facts and issue corrections political talking points, then unleash their in the analog world, spurious tweets have creations into the bland homogeneity of already been shared dozens of times, or read the social newsfeed, where one source and absorbed to be parroted in real life by a is as good as another and you’re only as }In this user who only logged on for a minute while influential as your most recent post. manic parody With an estimated 1.8 billion monthly waiting in line at the grocery store. active users, Facebook is now the single of democracy, Twitter has done more than any other largest publishing entity in the world, yet even seasoned platform to break down journalism’s it employs no human editors. Everything pretensions of objectivity, to the great that appears on the platform, from the reporters fall detriment of our civil discourse. Writers stories that show up in users’ newsfeeds for hoaxes or and reporters on Twitter are expected to to the ‘trending topics’ displayed beside be authentic and engaging while remaining the feed, is generated algorithmically share inaccurate spotlessly impartial, but they are constantly based on the demographic profile and drawn into pointless and vitriolic debate online activity of each user. The company or unverified with disillusioned readers who challenge has repeatedly come under fire for its information inconsistent enforcement of its own their interpretation of the facts and conflate guidelines, and has until recently resisted in their rush bias with a lack of ethics. It eventually calls for more vetting of the trending to be the first gets to be too much for some, but leaving topics, which occasionally end up Twitter means turning their backs on one of featuring fake stories simply because lots to develop a the last captive audiences for their work. of people are discussing them. story~ The diminishing influence of legacy In Zuckerberg we trust media and the attendant rise of fake news lacks an obvious solution, although it’s In a post published after the U.S. election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg certainly not increased government funding defended the platform, insisting “99 percent” of what appears and regulation, as it increasingly appears the Trudeau on Facebook is authentic and that therefore it was highly administration is preparing to do. Instead, it may be unlikely that exposure to heavily biased or fake news on prudent to allow the hand of the market to guide us back Facebook had had an impact on how people voted. But into charted waters. When Donald Trump attacked the Facebook is built on real-world relationships, and various “failing” New York Times (on Twitter, naturally) for doing recent studies of news consumption habits have found that its job and fact-checking the various claims the president information is more likely to be perceived as trustworthy made in his first week in office to justify his executive when it’s shared by a friend. So even if Zuckerberg is correct, actions, many news consumers bit the bullet and did and only a tiny percentage of the content users are exposed to what they’ve been putting off for years now: actually paid is technically “fake,” the impact of that content is amplified by the fact that it comes via a trusted source. for a digital subscription. The Times picked up 276,000 However, it follows that the inverse is also probably new digital subscribers in the three months following true: someone who is motivated to share fake news out of a Trump’s election – more than in all of 2015. You get what sincere belief in its accuracy is more likely to be receptive you pay for, as the axiom goes, and if we keep expecting to a debunking that comes from a loved one. In this regard, journalists to produce good journalism on demand, for Facebook can at least credibly claim the continuity of our free, eventually all we will be left with is the spectre of real-life associations in its own defense. On Twitter, where our own worst fears. ideas are expressed 140 characters at a time and according to recent estimates, an average of 6,000 new messages are Alexandra Pope is a writer and editor based in Ottawa.

20 Volume 11, Issue 1 The revolution will be digitized by Ryan Rados media. Today, their creation, Fox News, demolishes CNN and MSNBC in viewership on a regular basis. A lot has changed rinted news is near dead. There has been some talk of journalism going to the grave with it, but the truth is since 1996, but the idea that most mainstream media that journalism has been dying for years. By journalism is liberally biased has not. With the rise of social media, P everyone has a voice and a means to create and promote I mean unbiased, unfettered and honest reporting. All of that their own platforms. Eventually, the news business will once died a long time ago, but it has nothing to do with the rise of again be the diverse and competitive market it used to be. click-bait Internet media. The decline started well before the The decline in network news ratings and the collapse Internet revolutionized news delivery and started crippling of print media can be attributed to public rejection of the mainstream media. In 1996, Roger Ailes joined forces liberal bias as much as it can be attributed to the rise of with Rupert Murdoch to create an alternative to what he the Internet. Especially since the election of Donald Trump, viewed as a monolithic and partisan liberal, Democrat news the mainstream media’s death knells have been growing

Volume 11, Issue 1 21 with a set of “alternative facts”? To be sure, the balkanization of news media and audiences into right and left factions is making it harder to carry on civil conversations. Absent substantial agreement about what is accurate and true, those conversations increasingly devolve into shouting matches over who’s right and who’s wrong. The declining credibility of mainstream news sources is being matched by a rise in disinformation and misinformation. It’s not pleasant, but it’s a part of a much needed revolution. Tune out, turn off and drop the MSM Skepticism towards mainstream media is a good thing. In Canada, especially, there has long been too much public trust in a small, centralized media establishment dominated by the CBC, a giant state- owned news gathering and distribution bureaucracy. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook are diversifying and democratizing the news by giving us more choices about the information we consume. Now, perhaps more than ever before, people are relying on their own judgment to filter out disinformation. This is good, up to a point, although choosing to totally block certain pathways of louder. Journalists and the mainstream commentariat information is as dumb as choosing to believe everything blamed everyone from James Comey to Vladimir Putin for you hear. Trump’s unexpected triumph, failing to engage in any self- There is no real way to slap sense, good judgment or reflection whatsoever. They began calling everything that critical thinking into everyone. However, there is one way to wasn’t mainstream news “fake news”, which only rang as achieve relevance, trust and success in this polarized world ironic and hypocritical to millions who have dismissed most of disinformation and political opportunism. There is also a mainstream news as lopsided, disingenuous and fake for way for small, alternative media enterprises to report news, years. Decades of misreporting, over-reporting and selective break substantial stories and make money in the same way reporting have compelled these millions to seek their news well oiled, wealthy mainstream organizations do. We’re not elsewhere. In many cases, they have walled themselves off there yet, but we will be soon enough. from the primary sources of mainstream news. They can’t In the information industry, it takes money to make escape it entirely, though, because most reporting and fact- money. There’s no way around that fact, but there are ways finding is still done by mainstream sources, which is then to financially sustain a network of independent fact-finders. picked up, spun, and criticized by overtly right and left wing The old model sent aspiring young journalists to university, alternative media. where along with basic reporting skills they learned the While a few alternative digital media organizations basics of mainstream, liberal bias. Depending how well they occasionally break substantial stories, most shoe-leather learned both, they could hope for a nice, long, lucrative career reporting is still done by relatively wealthy mainstream in industrial-scale journalism. But journalism, at its best, has news organizations. One casualty of all this news always been more of a trade. It’s an elitist conceit to portray cannibalizing and arguing over what’s accurate or bogus is a job that involves wheedling information out of people and the wider public trust in journalism. Unquestioning belief organizations that don’t want to part with it as a profession. in news still exists out on the fringes of the left and right, And as newspapers and networks cull their staff, going to but everyone else increasingly doubts what they read, see school to acquire an expensive degree is less likely to be and hear. Who can blame them, when the media reports a ticket to a career. More and more certified journalists will one set of “facts” about the size of the crowd at Trump’s find themselves unemployed, broke and struggling to pay inauguration, and the President’s spokeswoman responds back their student loans in the coming years. And they’ll be

22 Volume 11, Issue 1 competing with a rising army of citizen more dependable market for truth. And journalists, social media savvy multi- }Unquestioning in it’s immediacy and universality, the taskers armed with curiosity, passion and digital news environment is conducive creativity. Already, YouTube and other belief in news to the discovery and propagation of platforms are increasingly populated by truth. If one organization attempts to citizen journalists and commentators who still exists out ignore facts and truth, it will be shamed are successfully monetizing their on the fringes of by another that doesn’t. If a liberal material. network refuses to report something It takes effort and resources to the left and right, substantial based on their political investigate, travel and break a news story but everyone views, conservatives will fill in the gaps. that matters. As PostMedia and most This will produce an unprecedented mainstream news networks continue to else increasingly level of truth-seeking. To survive, the dying mainstream networks will need to lose audiences and revenue, they will doubts what they downsize and rely more on independent, invest less and less in reporting. Their localized citizen journalists. Unionized staff will have to do more with less, and read, see and newsrooms will disappear, along with readers and viewers will see a decline heard~ journalists’ pensions and job security. in the value of their news products. The spiral of cutbacks and downsizing seems End of the media-industrial complex unstoppable. Pay walls have proven We’ve seen this movie before. In the unpopular, making ad revenue from link clicks and views the early days of print journalism, and later radio and television, most feasible alternative. YouTube advertising is currently media ownership was diverse and fluid, and journalists the most effective way to make money in digital media, mostly learned how to report and write by the seat of but the platform takes a big cut of the revenue. Charging their pants. Now the industry has consolidated into media membership fees for exclusive content will become less conglomerates that won’t hire anybody without a degree in commercially viable as the digital world fills up with more journalism, preferably including a minor in women’s studies competition. So, crowd funding and philanthropy will grow, or deconstructionist theory. While it’s true the Internet has mostly to the benefit of small news producers. The near moved with disconcerting speed to produce a handful of future holds an intensely competitive market with countless domineering global information distribution platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Google, the content they independent news gatherers providing content from a wide disseminate is coming from a rapidly expanding cornucopia range of perspectives, and it is likely to be a long time before of content producers. In the 1930s, radio emerged as a major market consolidation and monopolization takes hold in the competitor to news print, but unlike the Internet, radio digital news sector. required expensive licensing and physical infrastructure. In News media is becoming a market of niches. People 2017, anyone can purchase server space and a domain name won’t easily change their habit of rejecting information that for less than $200 a year. Breaking news stories to attract doesn’t fit their worldviews, so media will be forced to adapt. Many will pander. The commercialization of click-bait and fake news will probably increase, but there is a far bigger and

Volume 11, Issue 1 23 an audience is not just a corporate they’ll dry up like the rest of the objective, it’s a Darwinian struggle for mainstream media. As their viewership survival. }The shrinks, so will their sponsorship and The days of large corporations commercialization ad revenue. Taxpayers will eventually controlling the flow of information find fewer reasons to justify their in an non-competitive marketplace of click bait and existence and their public funding are ending. The end won’t come will go next. It will be a slow process, quickly and it won’t be pretty. Media fake news will but movements to privatize or abolish magnates and their bought politicians probably increase. public broadcasters have already and bureaucrats will try to regulate started to grow in Canada and the UK. the Internet news market, but they’ll But there is a far If such public broadcasters downsize fail because the web is notoriously bigger and more to the level of most alternative media difficult to control, as authoritarian organizations, taxpayers would see governments in countries like dependable market smaller price tags and maybe consider China are discovering. With millions for truth~ keeping their funding intact. However, of servers around the world, it’s the inevitable transition to full digital impossible to filter and monopolize all Internet media is nigh. The inevitable of the world’s information. Countries paycuts for journalists and news that over-regulate will operate at a competitive anchors are waiting on the doorstep. Citizen journalists in disadvantage to those that allow the information free hundreds of countries, looking to make a few bucks off market to flourish. This kind of international autonomy videos and ad revenue, are waiting to become the new is already on display, enabling countries like Iceland mainstream Muckrakers and commentators are waiting to host and protect Wikileaks while Julian Assange to break the next story on their own blogs and networks publishes new leaks from his hideout in London. No doubt before their rivals. Canadians are eagerly waiting to monopolists and their defenders will invent regulatory read their stories and watch their videos while Peter rationalizations in the name of international security, social Mansbridge’s voice fades to silence. harmony and maybe even journalistic ethics, but they won’t be able to enforce them. Ryan Rados is the founder and editor of Poletical.com, a journal of As for state run news empires like the CBC and BBC, polemics and political commentary for conservatives.

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24 Volume 11, Issue 1 Can democracy survive Twitter?

by Patrick Keeney the Internet provides access to all the worlds’ knowledge at he introduction of new media has always been met the click of a mouse. with two very different, if predictable, responses. These are very real advantages which we justly celebrate. TThe first is an uncritical enthusiasm and excitement, But nothing comes without a price. And the price of these with cheerleaders heralding the new technology as an technologies, as measured by two critical socio-cultural unmitigated gain for humanity and civilization. The second metrics, appears to be very high indeed. response is its mirror opposite, a hyper-critical moral panic, It seems clear, first of all, that we are witnessing an with critics bemoaning the forces unleashed by the new erosion of disciplined thought, a dumbing-down of public technology as a harbinger of cultural mayhem and political discourse, a flattening of amateur and expert opinion, disorder. which cannot help but erode the quality of public discourse. We are, it seems, caught in a perpetual battle between The second worrisome trend is the rise of a sort of moral technophilia and technophobia, and it is easy to exaggerate narcissism which turns individuals permanently inward, both. Our new digital technology has brought wonderful and which is corrosive of civil society, manifested in (and wondrous) benefits, and only a latter-day luddite could what Burke called the “little platoons” essential to the deny it. We can communicate easily, cheaply and instantly health of democracy. Both these phenomena have serious around the world via email, text, Skype or social media; and consequences for the democratic state.

Volume 11, Issue 1 25 The perils of info-affluence our passive consumption of information via old media Citizens of the advanced democracies can sometimes gives way to the new interactive media? It deluges us be complacent about their good fortune. It is easy to lose with instant messaging, endless advertising, and countless sight of the fact that the liberal state is a fairly recent other diversions and distractions, all demanding responses. historical development and far from a universal norm. (By Inevitably, thoughtful gives way to thoughtless, even as all liberalism I simply mean any state committed to upholding are invited to share their thoughts with the world. On the freedom and equality using fair and impartial procedures). face of it, there is an inherent democratic appeal in giving The establishment of the democratic, liberal state and the everyone their own electronic platform on which they can maintenance of its institutions has to be counted among the blog and Tweet, but if their contribution is ill-informed great achievements of the modern era. and hastily composed, all we’ve created is an electronic Yet democracy depends on public discourse, so the vanity press, where a cacophony of voices joins together kind and quality of public discourse is foundational. Any in a disharmonious chorus that drowns out civilized public study of democracy recognizes that widespread education discourse. – which is to say intelligent and disciplined thought – is a On most topics, most of us are non-experts, so we crucial prerequisite for the maintenance of the democratic must rely on the expertise of others. Yet the inherent state. Citizens must learn how to winnow fact from fiction, egalitarianism of the Internet is destructive of certain vital the important from the trivial, truth from propaganda. The hierarchies and elites. Look no further than the recent defeat democratic state thus values educating its citizens, as of elites in the United States by a master of the Twitterverse. opposed to simply training them, for it understands that the Radical egalitarians, once known as Communists, might see maintenance of the democratic polity depends crucially on this as progress, but their philosophy has invariably led to the quality of education it imbues in its citizens. despotism. This is why elites are vital to democracy. They Sadly, across western civilization education systems act as cultural and political gate-keepers, a vital sub-group have been crippled by post-modern pedagogy, which is the which are essential in helping the non-expert citizen sort antithesis of disciplined thought. Social media, it turns out, is the good from the bad, the true from the false, the authentic the perfect medium for communicating what we’ve learned. from the insincere. As the great English social critic Theodore Dalrymple The flattening of hierarchy and elites has a superficial notes, the phenomenal success of Facebook highlights democratizing appeal, particularly for the young, but it the shallowness of our new social contract: “I pretend to invariably trivializes and corrupts serious debate, at the be interested in your trivia, if you pretend to be interested expense of educated and considered judgement. The in mine. By this means, one expresses oneself, or at least flattening of the distinction between the opinion of the communicates something without the painful necessity to expert and the amateur distorts and corrupts the national think or reflect on anything.” conversation. Andrew Keen, author of The Internet is not the What happens to the quality of our public conversations Answer, says it leads to digital Darwinism: “the survival of the when the capacity for reflection and analysis afforded by loudest and most opinionated.” In sum, the ubiquitous voice of “everyman”, far from being liberating and empowering, has deleterious effects throughout our culture. While traditional print and broadcast media historically imbued citizens with common understandings, the rise of the new media, with its flattening of hierarchies, may be destroying those necessary and serious conversations essential for the health of the democratic state. Absent these, as American historian Lewis Mumford once wrote, we may be left in “a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance.” I text, therefore I am The age of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and whatever sharing platform comes next, encourages a sort of hyper-individualism. We post selfies obsessively. We share news compulsively. We offer opinions egotistically. And we do it on unimaginably powerful hand-held computers that have become virtual extensions of our bodies and ourselves. They are indispensable to our work,

26 Volume 11, Issue 1 travel and social life, and we despise them for it, alternately worried because we haven’t received any calls or messages, or annoyed by the relentless demand for attention and reaction that arrives with every new ping. My wife recently witnessed a scene at a roadside diner that begs a painting from a 21st century Rockwell. For the better part of an hour, a man and what appeared to be his pre-teen grandson sat silently across from one another in their booth. Barely acknowledging the presence of the other, let alone speaking, both were totally engrossed in their phones, to the exclusion of all else. Such occurrences symbolize the isolation, if not the outright social solipsism, of the violence. In Phillip Rieff’s memorable phrase, we live in a digital ether. Being physically in the presence of others, “zoo of separate cages.” yet isolated from one’s companions by technology, is a What happens when technology exacerbates this new phenomenon. Television took us part way there, but estrangement from a shared vision of the common good? smartphones have transported us to a whole new level of What happens to the political world – the most significant self-absorption. In this they are both a cause and symbol of manifestation of the local – when a fractured, digital media the dominant liberal-individualist philosophy of our time. becomes wholly preoccupied with satisfying individual egos, If there’s a link between the evolution of philosophy further loosening the threads of common meanings and and technology, the smartphone and the Internet are purposes? inevitable by-products of the triumph of individualism and The cultural trajectory of any society is set by many the diminution of family and community. The erosion of civil factors, and as I stated at the outset it would be foolish society – of what Burke called the “little platoons”, which is to lay everything at the feet of new communications to say the social glue which binds – was an abiding concern technologies. Nevertheless, a prerequisite for a healthy for both Burke and Tocqueville, and greatly troubles a host democratic society is the quality of public discourse, a of contemporary thinkers such as Christopher Lasch, Robert quality which is eroded by the ubiquity of uninformed Bellah, and Charles Taylor. bloggers and tweeters, and it is worrisome that technology What these critics find problematic about post-modern is so amplifying their voices. ideology is that freedom is not perceived as something The competition between progressivism and conservatism achieved, defended and advanced through the public world of politics, civic involvement, and communal activities; is fundamentally a contest between revolutionary and rather, freedom is conceived as the personal achievement of evolutionary change. The breathtaking speed of technological individuals, brought about chiefly through their personal efforts transformation, in the socially and politically crucial realm of to wrest it from family, community and society. Fundamentally information, naturally favours the former over the latter. But narcissistic, individuals become perennial students of the self – humans are profoundly social creatures, and perhaps when a self whose purposes, aims and goals are defined in opposition the novelty of instant messaging and information sharing to those of the broader community. wears off, we’ll look up from our screens and rediscover eye The legions of protestors who band together to demand contact. In this, I am heartened by a quote from Bill Belichick, the overthrow of social norms, or presidents, are obviously coach of the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots. engaged in communal and political action. But the central Asked by reporters to comment on some silly sports story ideal that fuels their marches and makes their tweets go that was trending on social media, he gruffly replied: “I’m not viral is radical individualism and reflexive rejection of on SnapFace.” any and all constraints historically defined by community, tradition or, god forbid, faith. It’s no accident that leftist Patrick Keeney is currently a visiting professor at Chiang Mai Uni- street demonstrations are prone to descend into anarchic versity in Chiang Mai Thailand.

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