Excerpt: The bailout campaign

It was perhaps fitting that Edward Greenspon would head the Public Policy Forum think tank. After all, he had won its Hyman Solomon Award for Excellence in Public Policy Journalism in 2002, following which he was immediately appointed editor of the Globe and Mail. The PPF had been founded “to develop ideas for making government work better” by former career public servant Arthur Kroeger, who retired in 1992 after having run six government departments during a 34-year career in Ottawa. 

National Post columnist Terence Corcoran attended its 30^th annual awards dinner in 2017, which he calculated produced “at least $1 million in new funds the PPF can use to generate endless papers and reports providing ideological backing for Trudeau-style economic interventionism.” That year’s gala was the first presided over by Greenspon, who quickly passed the baton to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who served as master of ceremonies. “In others words,” noted Corcoran, “welcome to Canada's undrained national policy swamp.” The kicker came when Trudeau presented an award to Canadian-born but London-based Dominic Barton, a managing partner at McKinsey & Company. The global management consulting firm was notorious for the tactics it counselled companies on, most notably downsizing and offshoring. According to a 2013 history of the secretive firm, it may have been “the single greatest legitimizer of mass layoffs than anyone, anywhere, at any time in modern history.”

Greenspon‘s first major project for the PPF began in mid-2016, shortly after he assumed its leadership. The Heritage committee then holding hearings into media and local communities was supposed to tour Canada that fall to hear from Canadians first-hand about the state of local news provision, but sufficient funds were not available in its budget. That function was instead farmed out to the PPF. “We’re not, if you will, hired by the government,” said Greenspon. “But we’re doing this in co-operation with the government.” 

The PPF’s review, according to the Canadian Press, revolved around three questions: “Does the deteriorating state of traditional media put at risk the civic function of journalism and thus the health of democracy? If so, are new digitally based news media filling the gap? If not, is there a role for public policy to help maintain a healthy flow of news and information, and how could it be done least intrusively?” A half-dozen roundtables with “invited experts” were planned, as was polling designed to determine “how Canadians view the news media and its role in democratic society.” A concluding symposium was scheduled for the fall.

The PPF’s report The Shattered Mirror was thus eagerly anticipated when it was released in early 2017. Its dozen recommendations for improving news provision included extending to digital media the tax rules that favoured other Canadian media when it came to advertising, and taxing foreign ad sales to Canadians. It urged that Canada’s charitable giving laws be changed to allow news media to become non-profit entities and thus receive tax deductible donations. It proposed federal funding of $100 million to start a Future of Journalism and Democracy Fund, with continuing funding of $300 to $400 million a year coming from a sales tax on foreign media selling digital subscriptions in Canada and from removing tax deductions on foreign digital advertising. 

The Shattered Mirror warned that with bad news for the industry piling up, the news media’s “march to the precipice appears to be picking up speed. This slide may not produce the kind of crisis point that stops policymakers in their tracks, as the implosion of the auto industry in 2008-09 did, but the pace is unrelenting and the downward slope ever steeper.” Newspaper industry association News Media Canada “quickly distanced itself from the report,” noted the Globe and Mail, stating that its recommendations would not do much to help build sustainable new business models. “What I don’t see is the money going to news outlets that are currently covering their communities, building out digital platforms and adapting to the new business realities,” said NMC chair Bob Cox, publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press, who had been night editor at the Globe and Mail under Greenspon. 

Reaction to The Shattered Mirror was otherwise mixed, noted iPolitics, with the Canadian Association of Journalists supporting several of its proposals but taking “no immediate position” on the rest. The media union CWA Canada similarly welcomed the report’s call for non-profit news media to qualify for charitable status “in order to encourage local, non-profit ownership of newspapers rather than the destructive, predatory hedge fund disaster that is Postmedia.” 

Out on the west coast, however, retired talk show host and provincial cabinet minister Rafe Mair smelled horse manure. “It’s clear that The Shattered Mirror has nothing to do with democracy and good journalism and everything to do with bailing out an industry that’s facing obsolescence,” he wrote in his book Politically Incorrect, which was published shortly after his 2017 death. National Post columnist Andrew Coyne called the report “irreproachably responsible, admirably high-minded, and profoundly wrong” in arguing for nature to instead take its course. “This is not a case of market failure, but of industry failure,” he wrote. “Most of the industry’s problems are self-inflicted, a series of bad choices in response to admittedly massive changes. But even if that were not the case, there is nothing whatever to prevent readers from paying for what we produce, if they so chose. They are simply choosing not to do so.” 

Scholars who studied media economics in Canada found that The Shattered Mirror exaggerated the plight of newspapers and the threat of foreign Internet giants with selective data, exaggeration, and glaring omissions. It also glossed over some fundamental problems afflicting the newspaper industry, they pointed out, preferring to blame its woes instead on Google and Facebook. One critic called it “the funhouse mirror” for its exaggerations and found the report notable for what it didn’t include. “The PPF report is silent on the problem of U.S. hedge funds owning Canada’s largest newspaper company,” he wrote, and promoted “the Big Lie that has surrounded newspapers for years – that they are losing money and thus dying.” 

Dwayne Winseck of Carleton University was another scholar who took issue with data presented in The Shattered Mirror. He called it “badly flawed,” because it “cherry-picks evidence and gooses the numbers” to make its case. “The case that the authors of The Shattered Mirror make about the severity of the crisis of journalism is impressive at first blush,” wrote Winseck in an 11,000-word blog entry. “Ultimately, however, it is neither convincing nor credible.” The Shattered Mirror’s claim that between 12,000 and 14,000 journalism jobs had been lost since the 1990s, noted Winseck, was flawed because it relied on headlines and union data that “do a great job chronicling jobs lost but a poor one at keeping track of those gained.” Statistics Canada data, he pointed out, “depicts a wholly different picture,” showing that the number of full-time journalists in Canada actually increased from 10,000 in 1987 to 11,631 in 2015. “Once again consistent with a pattern, the authors ignore this data completely.” 

Winseck saw in The Shattered Mirror a “willful refusal” to deal with media industry structures, which were “wholly ignored” in the report. “These examples are not innocent,” he charged. “They are part of a process of ‘threat inflation’ with the aim of buttressing the case for the policy recommendations on offer.” While exaggerating some threats, such as the online advertising dominance of digital giants Facebook and Google, the report downplayed one major problem, noted Winseck. “The Shattered Mirror also gives short shrift to the idea that media concentration and the structure of the communication and media industries might be a significant factor giving rise to the woes besetting the news media.” 

The Shattered Mirror at least earned Greenspon a new client, one with more media clout than he could have ever dreamed of. He was soon part of the newspaper lobby, which hoped to reap a government bailout. A draft version of NMC’s $1.375-billion bailout proposal that went out to stakeholders for comment in 2017 was printed on PPF letterhead and carried its logo at the top alongside that of NMC, but the final version oddly made no mention of Greenspon’s group. Perhaps it wouldn’t have looked good if the PPF were seen to be promoting an issue on which it had so recently produced a government-funded and supposedly independent report. 

NMC was careful, however, to acknowledge in the press release announcing its proposed Canadian Journalism Fund that the PPF had “brought together the industry, unions and digital only publications in both French and English to forge this proposal.” The bailout proposal’s rejection by the federal government a few months later wasn’t the end of the matter. It only meant more work for Greenspon. 

The coalition was hardly a secret, having been noted on the website iPolitics in mid-2017 by Carleton University journalism professor Paul Adams, a former CBC and Globe and Mail journalist. “Since the report came out, PPF has maintained a working group, including representatives from big media chains, media unions and luminaries like former CBC vice-president Richard Stursberg.” The newspaper lobby even announced itself in a Globe and Mail op-ed published that September. “The Public Policy Forum brought together about 40 news organizations and unions to propose solutions that would support employment of reporters and investment in innovation without sacrificing media independence or shutting out new competitors.” 

Soon the pages of Canada’s largest dailies, and even some of its smallest weeklies, would be filled with columns and editorials urging government assistance for the press, many of them authored by the newspaper lobby’s founding members.

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