As reliably as Canadian winters bring snow, elections bring promises. And with the Canadian federal election now but a couple of weeks away, the promises are coming fast and furious.
This is ostensibly what democracy is supposed to look like: parties vying for office put forth a set of proposed policies and voters go to the polls and pick both what they want and what they think is best.
Democracy, however, has more to it that just governments and voters. There are other parts to it: the judiciary for one, and also the press. And that latter group has long been waiting for something tucked within the Liberal partys newly released platform. Now called the Australian Model, the Grits policy would require digital platforms that generate revenues from the publication of news content to share a portion of their revenues with Canadian news outlets.
It is, in short, a financial lifeline to an industry that has been decimated over the past two and a half decades since the arrival of the internet. And in that sense, the Liberal proposal should, if nothing else, elicit cries of relief; finally, someone is doing something about the sorry state of the news business. In a democratic society, saving news can only be a good thing.
Of course, there are always those who argue that when it comes to privately-run business like a news site, no one but the company in question should do anything at all; leave it to the free market and let God sort things out.
There is a certain sort of logic to that perspective. The news business is, after all, not blameless in its current situation. After being slow to react to the web, and even slower to shift to more sustainable business models like paywalls, its initially antagonistic relationship with the newness of the web has had catastrophic effects.
But the thing with news is that if there is a disaster in the industry, then there is much more than the news business that suffers. Just as governments form a core part of democracy, so too does the press. At its best it holds power to account, uncovers corruption and wrongdoing, and ideally, produces a better informed, more culturally literate populace.
But this week, as but one example, anti-vaxxer protests across the country actually blocked traffic to hospitals in some cities. The rise of those sort of flatly false conspiracy theories has happened because the information landscape has shifted in the era of the web, and the reduced capacity of the news business is one reason for it.
In short, tech giants, Facebook and Google in particular, now control about 90 per cent of the advertising business. They are also the conduits through which the publics attention is directed. That combination has shifted the locus of power from the media to tech, and far from a democratization of our public sphere, it has instead turned it into a cacophonic mess.
Hence the Australian model. What it, and the Liberal policy modelled on it, proposes is twofold: first, that the tech companies will have to pay news organizations to link to their content; and secondly, that news organizations can collectively bargain that price with the tech companies, with binding arbitration if necessary.
The proposal isnt perfect. By linking the financial future of news to Facebook and Google, the policy runs the risk of entrenching their power; it is harder to unseat large corporations once they have become the bedrock of certain parts of society. There is also some confusion about why the tech companies should pay; they do not publish news content but, rather, link to it though given that a significant portion of discussion online is based on media output, this seems more a question of clarification than a fatal flaw.
But as a solution to social ills, the proposal is a clear step in the right direction. Wherever we might lay the blame for the current state of media whether on a predatory and profit-obsessed tech sector, media itself, or a polarized and increasingly fractious political climate what is clear is that the news business is necessary.
During the pandemic, for example, the media has been a key component of informing the public of public health measures, where and why to get a vaccine, as well as being the site of vigorous debate over how to best balance political freedoms and epidemiology.
Yet that capacity of media to inform and create a culturally fluent audience is these days forever hamstrung by its massively reduced revenue. Reporters are harried, fact-checkers are expensive and increasingly rare, and new technological and business ventures become harder and harder to implement when companies are barely keeping their heads above water.
While it once seemed sure, polling suggests it is no longer certain that the Liberals will win. For the news business at least, that will be a shame, because the other two parties plans for the tech giants seem more diffuse. More importantly, for all of us, sustaining news is an idea that has been too long coming and regardless of who wins, if news isnt saved, we will all lose.
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