this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Bill C-18 is remarkably bad legislation. Figuring out this was the inevitable outcome of the legislation wasn't 4D chess. I don't care enough to track down the discussions on Reddit, but people were saying this right from the beginning: social media won't pay for links it doesn't need, so they'll block them; news media revenues will decline; this will lead to government bailouts for journalists.
I'm not sure I agree the government bailouts are a problem, though... We need journalists for a stable democracy, but citizens aren't willing to pay for news in large enough numbers to fund it. Like all things with public benefit that can't be funded privately, it then should be paid for by government spending.
Because there hasn't been a domestic high quality news source for decades, it's all clickbait and opinions. Even the CBC's homepage is at least 1/3 clickbait titles and misleading thumbnails, CTV's homepage is worse, why would anyone want to pay to be so blatantly manipulated?
For Canadian news I will frequently use foreign news sources like the BBC, they have crappy clickbait articles as well but they have less skin in the game here and seem to put less of a bias on their Canadian reporting.
I don't follow. The bill worked in a sense, that it motivated a payout deal.
Here we are, Google is paying $100MM for them, no? The difference is that they're doing lump sum instead?
Government funded news are not inherently unbiased. But hypothetically let's say it is unbiased. The whole reason why a bailout is needed in the first place is because not enough people voluntarily watches these news. Is the next step to ban all other sources of news and make government news the only source of information? That doesn't sound like a great path to venture down to.
No, that's not a great path, but that's also not what's happening here.
The other side of that equation, given that the consumers of news aren't willing or able to fund it, is advertiser supported news, which is also not unbiased, and which has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.
The public funding a public good, and private, international media companies not benefiting from it, is exactly where this needs to go.
Well you still haven't addressed the most important problem that I've mentioned which is the fact currently no one seems to want to watch these news and that's why they are asking for government funding in the first place. Consumers clearly wants corporate news for whatever reason. What's the point in funding something that no one wants? This is a chicken and egg problem, if most people in the country actually wants unbiased source of news then they will seek for such sources over the biased ones. As a result advertisers would change their behaviour to favour news that's more unbiased. Unfortunately people has voted with their viewership that they don't actually want unbiased news, but ones that are scary, outrageous, or tells them exactly what they want to hear. I can't see how adding more government funding to the equation is gonna change people's behaviour.