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TechDirt: As Canada Passes Corrupt Link Tax, Meta Says No More News Links In Canada
(www.techdirt.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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I don't think they should.
Most independent media is just worthless opinion columns, political activism made to look like news, and on some occasions just straight up disinformation.
Sure some of it may be ok, but if you try to write legislation that comes out as "all left leaning independent media gets money, all the right wing independent media can go pound sand" it's just the government trying to use legislation to promote their party. That's a really bad precedent.
So as much as I'd like to see the good independent journalism funded by this, it doesn't seem feasible to do that without also funding disinformation.
My opinion on the corporate media that is the only one funded by this is the same as what you've just said. Just in a rich get richer approach to media in Canada. That's (one of) the big issues I have with this bill.
Yes I understand a lot of people feel this way. But the fact is the News media is being starved out by social media.
What you're terming as "corporate media" is actually media that has journalistic standards. with independent media, that's not always the case.
And facts are facts. If a newspaper owned by the Thomson group, Bell media, Rogers, or the CBC quotes Justin Trudeau, or says that someone has been arrested on a charge or reports on legislation that has passed parliament, those are things that happened. What I'm seeing is a lot of people spending a lot of time reading opinions and thinking they're informed on the news while being completely ignorant of the basic facts.
We can't even agree on reality anymore because many people aren't aware of even the most basic facts around a story. If everyone in the country took even five minutes to get the facts from what you term "corporate media" we'd be way better off then we are now. We'd at least be able to have discussions about actual facts.
The problem I see is that much of the new is heavily slanted with inflammatory language. And I'm sure that's nothing new - that's how newspapers work. They have a story they want to tell.
But when reading comprehension is on the decline, then these stories aren't understood, regardless of whether they're basic reporting on the facts or a straight up opinion columnist. It's great to say that if we could all understand the basic facts then we'd be fine, but the basic fact of it is that we can get the same basic facts, but disagree about the why and how of those facts.
Easy example: for decades, we've had proof that the climate has been changing. That fact, most people are aware of and agree with. But a surprisingly large number of people will disagree with the why, and claim its because of natural temperature swings and humans aren't really impacting it. I am pretty firmly the other way, but I've had these arguments with people, and even after showing them data like this XKCD, they refuse to understand or change their minds/actions.
Yeah they certainly have a gap in terms of science reporting. They reported on global warming as a debate, because the newsroom was dominated by arts majors, poli sci types.
But it has improved somewhat.
In recent times it's been the independent media that reported the pandemic as a debate while most of mainstream media didn't. There were still significant gaps, to be sure, but most of mainstream media reported on the pandemic much better than most of independent media did.