No News Is Bad News. Ian Gill

contends that print media are “not the only casualty of this ongoing meltdown. Mainstream commercial networks are struggling to adapt to digital viewing habits of their audience—leaving less money to devote to their news coverage. After decades of budget cuts, Radio-Canada and the CBC are shadows of their former selves. So far, the reaction of Canada’s political class has mostly ranged from indifference to public hand-wringing. On Twitter. . . the mayors of the cities involved in the Post-media announcement expressed regrets at the news. So did Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But there must be a point when the steady disintegration of our fifth estate’s news-gathering and news-getting functions becomes a public policy issue.”⁴³

       The government goes AWOL

      THAT POINT HAS surely been reached. It is worth remembering that, in a different age, “Much of the impetus for the creation of the [Kent] commission was the virtually simultaneous closure, on August 26–27, 1980, of two major daily newspapers: the Ottawa Journal (owned by the Thomson Corporation) and the Winnipeg Tribune (owned by Southam Inc.). These closures gave each chain a monopoly in the two markets, Southam with the Ottawa Citizen and Thomson with the Winnipeg Free Press.”⁴⁴ It seems almost quaint, given what has happened since, to think that the closure of two newspapers in two markets could give rise to a national inquiry into the state of the rest of them.

      True, Clifford Lincoln has since chaired a two-year House of Commons study of Canadian broadcasting whose 872-page report sank with barely a trace upon its release in 2003.⁴⁵ There was also a 2006 Senate inquiry into Canada’s media landscape by a committee led by Lise Bacon, which, writes Hébert,

      warned that Canada was tolerating a concentration of media ownership that most other countries would find worrisome. And it noted that the consistent depletion of these resources of the country’s public broadcaster compounded the problem.

      Some take solace in the notion that Trudeau’s government is committed to reinvesting in the CBC. But a news environment dominated by one media organization—even the public broadcaster—does not amount to a healthy one.

      In any event, what followed the Senate report was a decade of laissez-faire that often saw owners sympathetic to the government of the day given free rein over larger media empires, combined with ever-closer-to-the-bone cuts to the CBC.

      What we have today is a weaker public broadcaster in a field of journalistic ruins and Canada’s national fabric is the poorer for it.⁴⁶

      In early 2016, Liberal MP Hedy Fry declared that she would try her hand at heading a Commons committee to study “how Canadians, and especially local communities, are informed about local and regional experiences through news, broadcasting, digital and print media . . . The thing about politics is that the time comes one day when stuff is facing you so hard that you have to do something about it. That time has come.”⁴⁷ Of course, for successive Canadian government media inquiries spanning more than 35 years now, “doing something about it” has meant studying it. The record of action resulting from those studies brings to mind Kitty Muggeridge’s famously delaminating comment about British media star David Frost, whom she dismissed 50 years ago as having “risen without a trace.”⁴⁸ So too our governments’ interest in the state of our media, and our newspapers in particular.

      In a follow-up column to her New York Times lament for the future of investigative journalism, Margaret Sullivan wrote that while “digital-era economics have devastated newspaper staffs,”⁴⁹ digital platforms like ProPublica have come to fill some of the space vacated by local media. She interviewed Richard Tofel, president of ProPublica, which has emerged as the early gold standard for how a loss of ink doesn’t have to mean a lack of stink (as in creating one, like any good news organization should). While understandably bullish about his own organization, Tofel told Sullivan that investigative journalism’s transition online won’t be a smooth one. With newspapers still dominant in many cities, he said there’s not enough of a gap to create great need for new players, funded in new ways, including through philanthropy. “Mr. Tofel told [Sullivan], ‘There’s still an irrational amount of print advertising’ supporting newspaper economics. ‘But the next recession will be very unkind to newspapers.’ By the time it’s over [Tofel said], ‘seven-day-a-week newspapers will be the exception, not the rule.’”