Paying for journalism

Traditional media, especially print,  are in trouble everywhere.  Newspapers have relied on advertising revenues for years, but that revenue source is drying up as advertisers move online.  More and more people are relying on aggregators like Facebook as their principal source of news, even though Facebook's ability to filter out fake stories is almost entirely non-existent.

Here in Canada there have been suggestions that the government should provide financial help to the media, in order to stem a tsunami of newspaper closings and keep independent journalism alive.  The government appears reluctant to put money into what it regards as a failing business model, but has proposed no alternatives of its own.

Last month the Chairman of the country's largest newspaper group, Torstar, took to the pages of the Toronto Star to call out the Trudeau government for its perceived neglect of the problem.  It was quite a rant: self-serving, as you'd expect, but also shamelessly hypocritical in parts.  Let's take a look. 

We can begin with the second sentence, where Honderich bemoans the fact that "many smaller communities are now news deserts, with no local newspapers".  Honderich would certainly know about that, because at the end of November Torstar closed down about twenty local papers in Ontario.  The interesting twist is that the day before they were closed, all of those papers were owned by Torstar's competitor, Postmedia Group.  The two companies arranged a swap of about forty papers in all, then promptly shuttered all but a handful of them.

If you were just going to close the papers, why go to the trouble of trading them with another company first?  Surprisingly, there hasn't been any attention paid to this, but the only plausible explanation is that there was some tax or other financial advantage to Torstar and Postmedia in doing it this way.  Torstar has been very vocal about tax avoidance in recent months, yet what we appear to have here is a transaction structured for maximum tax benefit -- and one that results in the closure of a raft of newspapers that Honderich then has the gall to editorialize about!

The specific recommendations that Honderich lists all amount to asking the government to direct more money towards the press, either directly or in the form of tax breaks.  It is apparently self-evident to Honderich that the type of journalism practiced by the Toronto Star and its competitors deserves this largesse, but in truth, the case is far from ironclad.

The Star as it exists today is not so much a newspaper as a viewspaper.  Hard news coverage fills an ever shrinking proportion of its pages,  and much of that comes from wire services like CP or Bloomberg rather than the paper's own newsroom.  Instead there is a growing amount of "gotcha" journalism, under bylines such as "Star investigation" and "Star gets action".

Then there are the columnists, who seem to be multiplying in numbers even as real reporters are mercilessly winnowed out.  The Star is unashamedly left-of-centre, as is its perfect right: in most respects it is the house organ of the Liberal Party of Canada. The columnists are all cut from the same cloth: pro-diversity, pro-feminism, anti-austerity.  I have no problem with those views -- they're the same as mine, more or less -- but I seriously question the notion that they should be subsidized by the taxpayer, as Honderich would like.

To be clear, this is not an anti-Star rant. The tabloid Toronto Sun, owned by the aforementioned Postmedia, embraces a right-wing populist stance; the National Post, once owned by "Lord" Conrad Black, is more old-style conservative; and so on across the country.  It's fine for the proprietors of these papers to disseminate their views as long as they are doing it with their own money. If they want public money to support them, on the basis that their work constitutes "quality journalism", then I do indeed have a big fat problem with that.  And it seems it's not just me.