Who's Actually Paying for the News

This is an updated version of an op-ed I published at allNovaScotia.com in April 2025.

There's a persistent argument in Canadian media commentary that journalism should sink or swim on market demand alone, and that intervention, whether direct government funding or requiring tech platforms to pay for the news content they profit from, has failed and should be abandoned. It's an argument that keeps coming back, and it deserves a real answer.

That argument usually points to outlets that have shuttered under difficult market conditions as proof funding didn't work, and concludes that media should be forced to find a path to sustainability without support, on market demand alone.

This argument lives in a silo. It ignores what has actually happened, and more importantly, why it happened. Readers did not stop consuming news — they changed where they were reading it. Simultaneously, those same digital spaces became overwhelmed with opinion (both informed and uninformed), conspiratorial nonsense, and misinformation driven by political motives.

One version of this argument comes from The Hub, whose 2024 polling found most Canadians believe government funding compromises journalistic objectivity. That's a real, measured perception, not a strawman. But perception isn't the same as cause. In my view, and I would argue in reality, the erosion of trust has been fueled not by funding mechanisms themselves, but by a concerted, unscrupulous campaign by right-wing voices against credible journalism. This campaign has sought to discredit reputable outlets not because of any principled concern about bias, but because misinformation and emotional manipulation are politically useful tools. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy: attack journalism, erode trust, and then point to that erosion as proof of corruption.

Let us be honest: Fox News and, to a lesser extent, publications like the PostMedia Sun papers and columnists like Brian Lilley, are no fifth estate. They rail against CBC, CTV, and other "biased" institutions while serving as outright partisan mouthpieces, offering nothing but one-sided vitriol with no regard for balance, facts, or public good.

Today's ecosystem of "opinion journalism" serves only to weaken public trust, undermine critical thinking, and destabilize the vital role that ethically edited, fact-based reporting plays in protecting our democracy and ensuring that public institutions are held accountable.

We need journalism. The public's loss of faith in it is not due to government support. It is due to the financial collapse of journalism itself over the past two decades, which created a vacuum for bad actors to exploit.

Once, I might have agreed that media outlets simply failed to adapt to a 24-hour digital world. But the evidence shows otherwise. The root of the collapse is economic, not technological.

Readers did not leave journalism — advertisers did. Advertising dollars, once the financial backbone of newsrooms, have been siphoned off to tech giants like Google, Facebook, and X. These platforms offer advertisers a far more targeted, data-driven model than a full-page ad in the Herald ever could. But crucially, Facebook and the like do not create news content. They aggregate it — using, exploiting, and monetizing the work of others without paying for it. Journalism became a product tech companies could monetize without any investment in its creation. The Online News Act that eventually forced some payment only applies to platforms clearing a specific bar: $1 billion in global revenue and 20 million monthly Canadian users. Google notified regulators it cleared that bar and now pays $100 million a year into a journalism fund, a start, but a fraction of what's been drained from Canadian newsrooms over two decades. Meta cleared the same bar and chose differently: rather than pay anything, it simply blocked Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram entirely and kept every bit of the attention. It hasn't cost them. A NewsGuard analysis for Reuters found engagement with unreliable sources on Canadian Facebook and Instagram more than tripled in the months after the ban, and researchers tracking the 2023 wildfires found conspiracy theories filling the vacuum where emergency updates used to be. It's the same pattern playing out across every part of the Canadian digital economy that I wrote about in "Those Who Benefit Must Pay Their Fair Share": extract the value, avoid the bill whenever the rules allow it.

Expecting news outlets to compete with this model is absurd. The journalism ecosystem was gutted financially while its products, trustworthy news, were consumed alongside opinion, disinformation, and clickbait, all on the same infinite-scroll platforms designed to keep users endlessly distracted.

Online, subscriber-based publications like allNovaScotia have been held up as examples of success, and it's a fair example: allNovaScotia has thrived. But it serves a niche audience of business and government leaders who can afford a premium product. It's a success worth celebrating, but it's not a model that can broadly sustain local journalism across Canada, nor is it accessible to the wider public who need quality news just as much as executives do.

That argument makes way for campaigns like the federal Conservative Party's under Pierre Poilievre, who has pledged to defund English-language CBC programming while preserving Radio-Canada's French services. In 2023, Poilievre asked Twitter to label the CBC's account as "government-funded media," the same tag the platform uses for state propaganda outlets, a framing built to delegitimize rather than inform. Trust in public broadcasters hasn't eroded because of their long-established public funding; it's eroded because of disinformation-driven campaigns from the likes of Poilievre, or PeePee, as he's known to plenty of Canadians who've had enough of him. Every serious western democracy maintains a strong, well-funded public broadcaster. In fact, many invest more per capita in their public broadcasters than Canada does. In countries where public broadcasting is weak or defunded, we also find the deepest societal divisions, the most toxic media ecosystems, and the greatest susceptibility to political manipulation and conspiracy theory. The United States stands as a cautionary tale, not a model.

The world is a mess — fractured, chaotic, and vulnerable to misinformation on an unprecedented scale. In this environment, defunding trusted news sources and leaving "the market" to decide what survives is not a solution. It is a recipe for further collapse.

We must protect and invest in journalism if we hope to protect democracy itself.