Dispatch Lite: There's no non-political way to choose who's a "real" journalist
Why so much Canadian media, "independent" or otherwise, is about as sparkly as dry whole grain toast.
Hello, free readers. We had a weird week at The Line, but all is well now that Line editor Matt Gurney has crushed the ‘rona like a bug. (Mind you, the ‘rona did the crushing for the first day or two. Get vaccinated!) Our full version of the weekly dispatch is only available to paid subscribers, which you really ought to be if you care about supporting independent Canadian journalism. At $5 a month, the cost of supporting us and our work here hasn’t even been savaged by inflation yet.
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Oh, and speaking of independent journalism. A hat tip to our frenemies at Canadaland who flagged the fact that Rebel News announced its plan to sue the Canadian government for denying it status as a Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization. This designation would potentially give the Rebel access to subsidies and tax incentives.
According to the denial letter published by the Rebel, the government denied the outlet status because it did not produce a sufficient quantity of original news content. This strikes us as more than a tad suspect as far as reasoning goes, especially — as Canadaland recently pointed out — the qualifications are actually very broad and easy to meet.
An outlet can qualify for the QCJO if it employs two or more journalists, and creates original news content, and that's about it. Publishing content the QCJO deems objectionable or inaccurate wouldn't necessarily disqualify an organization and, bluntly, that strikes us as a necessary concession for a misguided and unnecessary program. Canada already has hate speech laws on the books, along with precedents and definitions, and if an outlet is publishing that kind of dreck, the law is where such matters ought to be pursued, not a bureaucratic board meant to determine whether a media source should qualify for a tax break.
And this is the whole problem with this scheme in particular, and government bailouts for the media more generally.
There is no way to create such a system without an inherently political process to answer philosophically fraught questions like "what is news?" and "what is a journalist?" And that takes us ever closer to the perilous path of state credentialization of a profession that only operates properly when it is free of both undue government interference and of government assistance. State meddling is bad for journalism whether the intent be good, bad or indifferent.
Every outlet is beholden to the people who cut the cheque, and if your business model relies on impressing government grant gifters or corporate social responsibility committees, then your content is going to reflect the milquetoast sensibilities of your true audience.
Which, bluntly, is why so much Canadian media, "independent" or otherwise, is about as sparkly as dry toast. Whole grain. To rely on government money is not only philosophically untenable, it is almost inherently corrupting. There are public journalism enterprises in Canada, including, for instance, the CBC and TVO, and your Line editors contribute to both. You can trust us when we tell you that the people in charge of those organizations work very, very hard to avoid the impossible conflicts public funding of journalism cannot help but produce. The readers can judge the results, but no one in either outlets pretends it’s easy. It’s not.
And in case it needs to be noted here again, The Line accepts no public cash. Not a dime. We rely entirely on paid subscriptions from our reader base, and we like it that way. Our relationship with you, the reader, is what allows us to be risky, innovative, and occasionally belligerent. You're here because you like us — you really like us! — and as a result, we serve only you. That doesn't mean that you're always going to agree with us, of course, but rather that you can trust us to tell you what we really think.
We looked into the QCJO program and although we believe we would qualify for the program, we are simply too horrified by its mere existence to consider applying. This puts us at a severe competitive disadvantage, and one that can only be overcome by outperforming everyone else.
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Please enjoy this week’s dispatch planning video between Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson. Please forgive a few choppy edits — we had some connection issues so had to trim out a few periods of dead air.
There’s a rule of thumb that says things go badly in Canada when Quebec and the ROC are talking about the same thing at the same time, which is why we at The Line try to keep an eye on what’s making headlines over in La Belle Province.
This week, the excitement there comes courtesy of a bill introduced by the Legault government that is aimed at protecting academic freedom in universities in the province. The bill comes in response to the tabling before Christmas of the final report of Quebec’s committee on academic freedom; loyal Line readers will recall that the committee was established just over a year ago by the government after it heard reports that some professors in the province were self-censoring their course content because they were afraid of their students.
The CAQ bill adopts many of the recommendations of the report, including the insistence that classrooms are not “safe spaces” and professors should not put “trigger warnings” in their course outlines, nor should they offer similar alerts when presenting difficult material in class. Indeed, in introducing the bill, Higher Education minister Danielle McCann said “Classrooms are not safe spaces; they are spaces for debate.” She went on to declare that “Censorship has no place in our classrooms.”
To that end, the bill will force universities to develop an academic freedom policy, and to appoint an internal board that will hear complaints and hand out penalties for violations thereof.
As many critics pointed out, academic freedom is something that has customarily been dealt with institutionally through collective bargaining, which renders the law at best redundant. But there’s also a fairly deep contradiction in the bill. On the one hand, section 3 of the projet de loi lays out a very broad conception of academic freedom, which includes not just freedom of teaching and research, but also protects a more general freedom to critique “society, institutions, doctrines, dogmas and opinions.”
But what the bill gives in s.3 it threatens to take away in s.6, the latter of which gives the minister the ability to tell schools what should be in their policy. Hence:
It’s important to keep in mind what Quebec is and is not trying to do with this legislation. Remember, the committee on academic freedom came about not as a response to, say, the forced resignation of the former director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada over a column he wrote in Maclean’s that was critical of Quebec. Rather, it stemmed from a growing concern in the province over the right of professors to mention the n-word in class, after a spate of incidents that included a guest lecturer at Concordia university mentioning the word in the context of a discussion over how language evolves. That is, the obvious motivation of the bill is to protect the right of an academic to use the n-word, but not to criticize the state. Which is to say, the proposed legislation is a particularly Quebec-focused salvo in the woke vs. anti-woke culture wars, with the Legault government making it clear which side they are on.
Fine, you might think. Quebec is a distinct society, let them run things they way they like. Except the anti-woke inclinations of Legault’s CAQ are at clear odds with the firmly pro-woke agenda of the federal Liberals, and it is coming to a head over higher education. For a few weeks now, the francophone Quebec media has been jumpy over a job posting at Laval University that is explicitly not open to white males. The job is for a Canada Research Chair in Biology, which is funded by the federal government. And in declining to consider white males for the position, Laval is simply following the equity requirements set out by the federal CRC program. As a Laval spox said, “They [CRCs] are funded by the federal government. All universities must conform to these requirements. Université Laval is not different from other universities.” In other words, don’t blame us, blame Ottawa.
But of course, Laval is different from other universities. It is a Quebec university, in Quebec City, accepting federal dollars right under the nose of the provincial government, that dislikes Ottawa interfering in matters of provincial jurisdiction (e.g. higher education), and dislikes perhaps even more, Ottawa’s woke politics.
This is tension that does not offer an easy resolution. The two solitudes aren’t both talking about this right now, but we are guessing that it is only a matter of time.
Round Up:
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