Back in 1970, the Senate of Canada called an inquiry to investigate the exorbitant profits made by Canada’s handful of media barons.
Skinflint media mogul Roy Thomson had declared that owning a radio or television station was like having a license to print money. He added that owning a newspaper was even better, because a license was not required.
The Senators hummed and hawed, and made some recommendations that were mostly ignored by the powerful media owners, who continued to make big profits.
How times have changed.
A report from the Public Policy Forum of Montreal released on January 26 says the Canadian news industry “is reaching a crisis point as the decline of traditional media, fragmentation of audiences and the rise of fake news pose a growing threat to the health of our democracy.”Whereas the 1970 report was entitled “The Uncertain Mirror”, the new appeal for support is called “The Shattered Mirror.”
Now mainstream media are unable to sell enough advertising to provide the amount and quality of news coverage that once seemed routine. So the giant corporations are humbly appealing to the federal government to provide support for various media and make adjustments to the media landscape.
The report does not provide a specific prescription to bring corporate media back to health. Nothing in the report could even begin to provide the billions of dollars that would be needed to restore newspapers to what they were say 10 years ago. That was before corporations fired more than 10,000 journalists.
