The hard work of separating fact from fiction in Canada’s marketplace of ideas and information is about to get much harder.
Big Tech’s increasing consumption of the advertising revenue lifeblood of the country’s print and other independent media, which provide much of the information of substance that feeds Big Tech news vampires, continues apace. The resources available to independent media needed to continue to separate fact from fiction are consequently evaporating.
Meanwhile, rumour, innuendo, misinformation, propaganda and conspiracy paranoia have become the coin of the realm in the world of social media. That bodes ill for the process of pursuing the truth in Canada.
A health report on that process can be found in the 10th edition of Media and Internet Concentration in Canada, 1984-2020. The prognosis is not good.
Released by Carleton University’s Dwayne Winseck, the report covers everything from media revenue and market share to mobile wireless concentration and the impact of Facebook and Google on the media advertising market.
The numbers are sobering.
For example, Google’s revenue alone from online advertising in Canada hit $4.8 billion in 2020. Overall, the big five American-based internet giants racked up a combined revenue total of $10.8 billion in Canada.
Little wonder then that, according to the report, the country’s once robust independent free press “is in crisis, with revenue plunging 60 per cent over the last decade.”
The crisis is more than a problem for newspaper owners. It threatens the country’s ability to collectively separate fact from fiction and propaganda from truth and opens the door to the architects of divisiveness and the demise of institutional structures and democratic fundamentals.
Government subsidies are not the prescription for recovery here.
New federal legislation to allow the country’s news publishers to collectively bargain with tech giants to extract payment for the news content Facebook and others have been pirating would be a good start.
