Is Canada’s news media in trouble?
That’s a subject for discussion according to B.C. scholar and author Marc Edge.
Edge has written seven books and has been a university teacher in five different countries. He studied for a doctorate and taught journalism at Ohio State University. is the recipient of an annual dissertation award from the American Journalism Historians Association, has worked at the Vancouver Province, the Calgary Herald and has been media columnist for Canadian Dimension.
Now a resident of Ladysmith on Vancouver Island, Edge said he “retired, at the age of 38, and then started sailing in the South Pacific in my 40-foot ketch called Markenurh.”
He is on the verge of launching his new book, titled Tomorrow’s News; How to fix Canada’s media, which will be his latest of seven publications delving in the media, not just in Canada but in countries abroad.
“The title comes from a cover article I wrote for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives magazine called Monitor. The title of that was called Can Canada’s Media Be Fixed.”
Edge said he’s written a half dozen books about Canadian media and all its problems, since 2001.
“I’ve gotten kinda tired about writing about those problems the media is saying it’s having, so this new book is kinda like my prescription for improving, if not fixing Canada’s media,” he said. “It’s like the local credit union being the community equivalent of the corporate bank structure. The Ladysmith hronicle is like being the community owned equivalent of the corporate owned mass media.”
“What we need to do is rebuild our media from the community level up. We seemed to lose the community aspect of media with the advent of the big chain ownership of the media. We need to move away from the profit motive towards the more non-profit media. More importantly in the digital arena, which is somewhat the way of the future, although I still believe that newspaper is still important and has a place in towns such as Ladysmith. The success depends hugely on the advertising dollar which is up against sites such as Google, Facebook, etc.,” Edge said.
“I have some suggestions, which I am putting forward in this book. One avenue is to go non-profit, which takes some pressure but looking at instances in the U.S. it’s not always the way. A lot of the non-profits are funded by foundations and foundations are funded by rich people. They fund them as a means of avoiding taxes and they decide where they would like to see that money go.”
“Fake news, or propaganda, is sometimes what the donors want you to see,” Edge said. “Referred to as ‘pink slime’, it’s often used to describe the political propaganda they want to see out there. I don’t think that is what the Canadian public wants to see and we don’t have the same magnitude of foundations here as they do in the States.”
Edge mentioned that good news media, such as employee-owned CHEK television and the Prince Albert Herald, are feasible and are profitable.
Edge feels that Canada, through Canada Revenue needs to loosen the rules on news media achieving charitable status. In the States there are some, but as Edge said “their rules are far stricter when it comes to political partisanship and objective reporting.”
Edge is proposing that a portion of the funds the federal government is now collecting from the various digital taxes, like the Online Streaming Act, be directed to non-profit news media. It would make a difference.
“Even with just 10 per cent of those revenues,” Edge said, “it would fund a very functional news media. We also need the people, who are making windfall profits from the internet to fund community improvements on the internet.”
“The companies making the highest profits on the internet, in Canada, are not Google or Facebook or such,” Edge said, “but wholly owned Canadian corporations like Rogers or Bell or Telus, the telecom companies. They’re making about 50 per cent profit margins on internet access.”
That would amount to about $750 million a year, according to Edge.
This fund would not just fund newspapers but would fund various different media.
“The CBC should be bolstered, the Canadian Press should be bolstered amongst others. I’ve been looking at news sharing efforts such as they have in the U.K. and New Zealand and what they’ve done. They hire a local democracy reporter, it’s a position where the reporter is strictly to cover local government and events. Their stories go on the wire service and any media can pick it up.”
“It would have to be determined but it should basically cover the local, important news, nothing that is interpreted but the what is happening news. It’s called the iron core of news and that would be the stuff posted and printed for the public.”
It would take political will, according to Edge, to set up this kind of funding and with an upcoming election Edge said, “I’m tailoring my proposal to a very fiscally conscious mind. This could actually not become a cost. It could actually save money, because investigative journalism uncovers waste and governments have been known to waste public funds. It could be a way to reduce, or even eliminate this, and that could be a huge taxpayer savings.”
He sees it as something that would be outside of political interference.
“It’s pretty hard to keep politics out of it, but, by creating an arms length, or even two arms length relationship between the funding agency and the supervisory which is independently appointed it would have an independence and that the journalists wouldn’t have to know where the money was coming from. They could count on it from year to year and no matter who is in government they would be securely funded. This is a method that has been set up in other countries and similarly would have to be set up here.”
He sees the audience for his books and columns about big media as being small, but important.
“But I think I am making a dent with the elite, but the outcome remains to be seen,” he said.
Tomorrow’s News will be available starting Nov. 21. It can also be ordered from the publisher New Star Books at https://newstarbooks.com/book.php?book_id=1554202140