They Don’t Get It: Mainstream Media’s Lack of Free Speech – Interview With Peter Menzies
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Peter Menzies shares with Barry the Canada’s struggle for freedom of speech in an environment when government pays so much money to mainstream media. “CBC,” says Menzies, “is too big a player in the Canadian media ecosystem to deal with on its own because whatever you do with the CBC one in three Canadian … mainstream journalists… works for the CBC.” With a website that is the most visited of any news website in Canada. While “its TV ratings aren’t great, its radio is still pretty popular, so it has a big impact within this system.”
Menzies says he cannot “imagine any industry being able to be healthy when the largest player in it gets a huge subsidy from the government.” When with the CRTC he remembered a CBC license renewal hearing, and Richard Stursberg, head of CBC’s English services at the time said that CBC was not really a public broadcaster but “a publicly funded commercial organization.”
Therefore, when Mark Carney promises immediately give the CBC another hundred and fifty million dollars and eventually double CBC’s funding. “Let’s call it by the time it gets there,” said Peter, “three billion dollars instead of one point four.” And, on top of that have it compete for commercial advertising. That is like taking “all the private broadcasters and newspaper publishers and put them up against the wall and just open fire.” Peter concludes that there is “no way they would be able to continue to survive in a media ecosystem that big.”
As a former newspaper publisher, he shared that “the most important relationship you had with your readers and your community was trust. They had to trust that you reported the news without fear or favor.” However, when government gives so much money it destroys the public trust.
That whole trust ecosystem is at the core of media success.
“When you get into this imagery of government funding, and during a campaign, somebody saying, I’m going to give you another hundred and fifty million. And then the other guy says, well, I’m going to do the opposite, that sort of stuff. It becomes contentious.”
“And one of the reasons Poilievre has taken the position he has is because there’s a very large constituency within the country who feels very abandoned by the CBC.”
“They feel like they’re paying their taxes to support something that doesn’t like them, that distrusts them, that portrays them as evil in some way, right? That’s the way they feel about it. I can’t speak to whether that’s the truth or not the truth, but they genuinely feel that way.
And the CBC still… doesn’t get it.”
See his recent substack on CBC ignites fresh outrage by heaping scorn on reporters who dared to ask questions of which it disapproves
Peter Menzies writes on culture, media and communications. While he now works in the cultural industry and advises tech companies, he has in the past served as vice chairman of telecommunications for the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). He was publisher and editor-in-chief of one of Canada’s major daily newspapers, the Calgary Herald.
You can follow him at:
https://petermenzies.substack.com
Please note the views expressed by the individual(s) in this video are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or principles of the First Freedoms Foundation.
