Andrew MacDougall: The PM's pissed off, eh? That's nice.

Maybe he should actually aim some of his energy and effort at what the real problem is, though?

By: Andrew MacDougall

Given the rather garbage state of the world, it’s good to see that Justin Trudeau is finally “pissed off” about something. Too bad he’s pissed off at the wrong thing or, at least, not enough of the right thing.

And what has raised our prime minister’s hackles? That would be Bell Canada, one of Canada’s biggest and most profitable corporations. And why? Well, the telco has decided to stop loss-leading (to the tune of $40 million per year) certain segments of the news, announcing another round of cuts last week, including, potentially, hundreds of journalists in its Bell Media division. 

Gone are programs like W5, the world’s second-longest running investigative journalism program after the BBC’s flagship Panorama. Also gone are a host of radio stations, sold to the highest bidder, some noon and supper-hour broadcasts, along with journalists in CTV bureaus from coast to coast. It was (another) dark day for journalism and the accountability that dies with it.

The Bell layoffs were a “garbage decision” according to an animated prime minister, one he was “pretty pissed off” about, arguing Bell “should know better” than to cut journalists at a time when communities “need local voices.” Welcome to the boiling pot, prime minister; the frogs have been bobbing here for a while. 

Not to imply the prime minister or his government have been blind to the media’s challenges. Or inactive. Far from it. The past few years have featured a number of legislative “fixes” meant to give the press a fighting chance in the age of the algorithm. There have been enhanced media funds, various tax credits, and the attempted ransoming of Big Tech in the search for pocket change to keep the lights on in newsrooms across the country.

And it’s all wasted breath. All of it. 

None of what the government is doing addresses the fact that fewer people trust the news, or are willing to pay for it. Nor can the government plug the revenue hole left by the virtually wholesale kidnapping of the advertising industry by the major tech platforms. Even worse, every time the government tries to make the news industry whole — whether directly in the form of subsidy, or indirectly by trying to shame big tech — it gives more people more reasons to distrust what the news and what it is trying to tell them. 

Subsidizing the news is sending money down the drain. To wit, the CBC gets somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1.4 billion per year from the government and viewership for its flagship news programs are in the toilet (even if the website is snarffling a fair amount of traffic). More money isn’t the answer.

The prime minister needs to realize that he is facing three big — and inter-related — problems when it comes to the media, namely: volume; concentration; and attention. It might surprise the prime minister to find out that Bell has very little to do with any of these problems.

When it comes to volume, the prime minister needs to grasp the downstream impacts of everyone suddenly becoming content creators in an environment where clicks are the route to your revenue. Content levels have exploded. We are now drowning in content, much of it designed to win a race to the bottom of our brain stem (in order to get the cash). It’s hard for anything of true value to stick out in this crowd, where what does attract attention is often skewed to the sensational and/or emotional. Straight news not only has to compete with fake news (e.g. Pope endorses Trump), it has to compete with the output of every two-bit influencer, rage-farmer, and/or actual bona fide genuine goddamn expert under the sun. Think what you will of Peter Mansbridge, he never had to outcompete Kylie Jenner in the content wars. 

Then the prime minister needs to grasp that the mountains of content actually reside on very few platforms controlled by very few people, none of whom care about the news media. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew are not newsmen. They are technologists committed to designing the best platform environment for advertisers so they can make shedloads of cash. We are their product. They keep us glued to our screens, we click their ads, they get rich. This concentration forces the new armies of content creators to cater to the imperatives of the algorithms that govern these platforms. More importantly, there isn’t really anywhere left to go for people who don’t want to march to tech’s beat.

And then there’s attention. As in, we only have so much of it. As in, the major players now fight tooth and nail to keep us nailed to their platforms, and not the competition’s. The TikTok algorithm is only the latest attention-sucking wonder technology. There will be more, and none of them will give a fig about the merits of the content itself either, only that we love watching it. We have created a panopticon that sees all and feeds it back to us like ducks in the foie gras factory.

Not only that, we now consume virtually all of our media on one device: our mobile phones. We watch our movies there. We play our games there. We message friends and family. We access our social media. Instead of sitting down at set times to watch a news program or to read a paper, we now doomscroll on a device that is constantly interrupting us and tempting us with other, often more fun, ways to spend our time. We are all ADHD now.

Who has given everyone the ability to create and distribute content? The major tech companies. Who has concentrated most media activity onto a handful of content platforms? The major tech companies. Who is fighting like hell to monopolize our attention? The major tech companies. So yeah, fuck getting fucking pissed off at Bell Media, a relative minnow. 

Yes, Bell is shooting its media hostages in the hopes of getting favourable regulatory outcomes elsewhere. Big business is gonna big business. But it isn’t the reason the media is fucked. If the prime minister wants to get pissed off, he needs to start looking Silicon Valley’s way. 

Of course, the Liberals will argue they’ve already done their bit to tax tech and come off second best, with only $100 million from Google to show for it; the industry as a whole is now probably worse off than it was prior to C-18. And skimming some of the cream from tech’s massive balance sheets will only prolong the already slow death of the news. It’s time to nibble at the ways these platforms operate; only a change in operation will produce a change in outcome. 

Trudeau and his Liberals could look to the European Union and United States for some examples of legislative acts geared toward changing the ways in which the big tech platforms move information about. In Europe, the new Digital Services Act (DSA) forces platforms into transparency over their algorithms, giving users a window into how their feeds are constructed, with hefty fines for non-compliance. It builds on the EU’s earlier GDPR initiative, legislation that, while imperfect, struck a first blow for consumers’ rights in a data-led world and created the room for the subsequent DSA to be born. 

In the United States, senators and members of the House of Representatives are moving forward with legislation that incorporates some of these European elements, while also taking a fresh look at Section 230d, the working end of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that absolved the then-nascent internet of much of the responsibilities of being a publisher. As Stanford academic Renee DiResta likes to say: “free speech is not free reach.” A government that is serious about giving space for the news to flourish must limit the ability of obscure algorithms to boost content and jam our feeds with stuff we never asked for. 

Yes, the tech companies will complain. But we don’t owe them a living. We can either try to fix the problems we have, or be pissed off about a past that will never come back. 

Andrew MacDougall is a director at Trafalgar Strategy and former head of communications to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

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