The Media

CBS News is facing a civil war over presenter Tony Dokoupil’s interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Accusations are coming from within the network that Dokoupil, who pushed back on Coates’s more dramatic claims, was overly aggressive. The interview earlier this week, centred on Coates’s latest book about the Israel-Palestine conflict, has triggered some tortured internal debate about what the role of a journalist is — and if there’s a double standard at work when subjects such as Coates, a darling of the social justice movement, are involved.

People have more access to information than any time in human history and it’s literally at their fingertips. They are also being exposed to more misinformation than ever as well.

The role of sifting through a constant barrage of breaking events to provide citizens with a concise and accurate summation of it should fall to media outlets. However, many media sources have been failing in that task and people are losing trust. This is a dangerous trend in tumultuous times as citizens try to make informed decisions in polarized elections.

Rogers Communications Inc. is calling on federal lawmakers to extend newsroom subsidies to include TV and radio employees, arguing that current tax credits unfairly exclude broadcast journalists.

Blacklock’s Reporter says the telecommunications giant emphasized that broadcast journalism plays a crucial role in delivering the country’s most sought-after news content.

Conventional television in Canada continues to struggle, with revenues and viewership both on a downward trajectory, according to recent data from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

Blacklock’s Reporter says last year, English-language TV revenues fell by 7%, from $1.2 billion to $1.1 billion.

The sudden silence heard all across Hamilton on Wednesday morning was deafening.

It’s not every day a historic radio station goes off the air before it tells its listeners. They, and staff, found out when beloved AM station CMHL 900 just suddenly went dark. Just like that, an almost 100-year marriage ended without any notice or chance to say so long or thanks for the memories.

h/t DS

What had been obvious “to the rest of us” for years, is finally official: late last night, shares of Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent of CNN and TNT, crashed 10% to the lowest level on record after it reported dire results, which missed across the board and plunged across every income statement category…

H/T DS

It has been five years since the temporary, one-time federal bailout of the newspaper industry was supposed to have put us on track to recovery. It has been a year since the Online News Act was supposed to have dragooned Facebook and Google into assuring our survival in the longer term. How is that working out?

Well, it isn’t, of course. Industry revenues continue to plummet – at roughly $2-billion annually and falling, they are less than half what they were a decade ago. Paid circulation is likewise in freefall. As late as 2008, daily paid (print) circulation at the country’s 10 largest newspapers averaged more than 200,000. By 2015, it had fallen to a little over 120,000. And today?

Given how smoothly the knife went in and out, it’s hard to blame the casual reader for failing to notice the most recent assault on the concept of media independence in Canada.