The Media

In a recent tweet critiquing the legacy of Jon Stewart, I summarized that for my generation, who were coming of age during 9/11 and the war in Iraq, we were desperately in search of anyone who could cut through the corporate media partisanship. We craved an everyman to tell it like it was. We were given Jon Stewart. And just like he taught us, we became smug, disingenuous, and lazy thinkers.

The post went viral with Elon Musk weighing in, stating, “I rather liked the old Daily Show and Colbert Report. But now they’ve gone off in a direction that is…” Thousands agreed.

CBC/Radio-Canada has joined other news publishers and broadcasters in requesting that Canada’s Competition Bureau investigate Meta’s decision to block news content on its digital platforms in Canada, describing the social media giant’s decision as “anticompetitive.”

Meta, which owns platforms like Facebook and Instagram, announced recently that it is permanently ending news availability for users in Canada in response to the country’s Online News Act, or Bill C-18, a law that requires tech companies like Google and Meta to pay media outlets for news content they share or otherwise repurpose on their platforms.

In a political environment where global firms are increasingly willing to withhold key services, a principled stand today will protect our sovereignty tomorrow

This week, the technology firm Meta began blocking Canadian news on its Facebook and Instagram platforms, with Google anticipated to follow suit shortly, in response to the government’s recently introduced news media funding law, previously known as Bill C-18.

We are not alone. Read the comments, few seem to give a crap about Trudeau’s bill and the effect on media. It’s not that anyone has a favourite it’s just that everyone hates Trudeau more than Big Tech.

The formerly unprofitable media was briefly boosted by Trumpmania. The Washington Post, the New York Times and a few national outlets and digital hangers on boosted subscription numbers and minted money.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former White House adviser Neil Patel are seeking to raise funds to start a new media company that would potentially use Twitter as its backbone, according to people familiar with the matter.

The new company would be anchored by longer versions of the free videos that Carlson has been posting regularly on Twitter since shortly after his departure from Fox News, but would ultimately be driven by subscriptions, some of the people said.

Ep. 9 The Andrew Tate interview pic.twitter.com/0KKMzSVmMO

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) July 11, 2023

It was announced this week that advanced negotiations are underway for an effective merger between Nordstar Capital, the publisher of the Toronto Star and the Metroland suburban newspapers, and Postmedia, which publishes this newspaper as well as the Sun newspapers and the principal English-language daily newspapers in Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. This is not surprising, as both companies have been losing money, which is a process that even our governments in all their profligacy will eventually discover cannot continue indefinitely. The commercial advantage of such an arrangement would be to merge the business aspects of the two companies, while maintaining editorial separation: the savings would be considerable, at no cost to editorial quality.