this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
18 points (84.6% liked)

Canada

7575 readers
953 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Related Communities

🍁 Meta

🗺️ Provinces / Territories

🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.

🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.

💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales

🗣️ Politics

🍁 Social / Culture

Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
otter
mp3
18
OpenMedia on Bill C-18 and how it only supports corporate media in Canada (action.openmedia.org)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/canada
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

This was OpenMedia’s fix Bill C-18 campaign. It’s unclear if any of this was fixed when it got passed.

Right now, most of the funding goes straight into the pockets of large broadcast media like Corus, Rogers and the CBC. Newspapers? Minority players. Local news that’s already disappeared? Zero help. Startup outlets? Not included. Effective news support should be concentrated on where news is fast disappearing, not on broadcast outlets that don’t need the help.2,3

What about press independence? As written, Bill C-18 hands enormous power to Big Tech and to the CRTC to secretly shape the type of news that gets made in Canada. News organizations enter into secret deals with platforms to get funding; there's no public reporting on who receives funds, how much they’re receiving, or why some groups wind up approved while others are rejected.4 That’s not good enough. Transparency about who’s funding the news and how they reached their deal is vital for the public to maintain trust in the news industry.5 Any legislation must ensure that eligibility decisions are made publicly, transparently, and without government or platform pressure.

top 11 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Grant_M 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

A strong Fourth Estate is essential in preserving democracy. This bill reduces the power of authoritarian supporting anti-democracy billionaires like Zuckerberg and empowers the free press. #BoycottMETA

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

But it's OK for independent media in Canada to not get paid?

[–] Grant_M 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I pay for truth based independent media by donation. Propaganda garbage such as Rebel and the like I refuse to support. The model needs to change -- good independent media have already figured it out. Also, I don't see where I suggested independent media should not get paid. I've never suggested such a thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Just because the majority goes to major news corps doesn't mean smaller media receives nothing. That's like complaining that Bell media makes more profit than a Coop owned journal... Get more prints/links, get a bigger piece of the pie because your work is more profitable.

[–] SpaceCowboy 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't want Ezra Levant getting a dime from this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Is he involved with openmedia.org?

[–] Grant_M 1 points 2 years ago

Yikes, I hope not.

[–] SpaceCowboy 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Probably not, but I don't think it's possible to make legislation that sends money to something like openmedia without also Ezra Levant (far right grifter asshole) also getting money.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm very confused about what openmedia.org is saying vs what I've been reading elsewhere about C-18.

[–] SpaceCowboy 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Basically sites facebook have been demanding news media sites to put more and more of their news stories into the summary preview. This is the internet, you know most people generally don't bother reading the articles. If there's a summary, it's even more unlikely they'll click to read the article. But if no one clicks through to the news site, they don't load the ads there so the news site gets no money. They are loading ads on facebook, which is where they're reading the article.

The news sites can't refuse facebook because facebook controls so much internet traffic.

So the government steps in and requires facebook to share some ad revenue with the news sites. Facebook gets made and takes their ball home and isn't displaying news at all now.

openmedia is upset because the news sites they represent aren't also going to get facebook ad revenue like other news sites. So basically "we want money too! sign this petition because government bad, big media bad!"

My concern is I don't want news sites (like the ones Ezra Levant runs) that exist solely to spread disinformation with a political agenda to profit off of this.

Obviously it's more complex than that, but that's the gist of it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Got it! Thanks for the clarification!