Some questions and concerns about the Canadian media bailout

Yesterday’s federal budget included some long-expected provisions for helping the struggling newspaper business, on the grounds that  “A strong and independent news media is crucial to a well-functioning democracy.” The three main provisions are a refundable tax credit for journalistic labour (i.e. reporters), a tax rebate for up to 15 percent of a digital subscription, and allowing non-profit news orgs to become charities and issue tax receipts for donations.

I should say I'm generally opposed, in principle, to giving public money to the media. But if they're going to do it, I hope they do as little damage as possible. And so instead of just complaining about the whole enterprise, I’d like to try to be constructive, or at least offer some constructive complaints.

 In particular, I’d like to take issue with this strange claim, from the Toronto Star’s report on the budget:

Contrary to criticism that government assistance would compromise the independence of news outlets, the criteria makes almost no demands on content — save that the organization primarily focus on original news content such as current events or general interest.

So first, to qualify for any of these three measures, an organisation has to be a Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization, or QCJO (they should have put a bit more time into the acronym). Anyway, the budget lays out the criteria for what sort of organisations will count, based on corporate structure and ownership rules (must be Canadian); what sort of content it covers (print news for a consumer audience, not industry magazines and newsletters); and its size (two or more employees at minimum).

But the budget also sets out a plan for an independent panel that will be tasked with making a number of key decisions. Which raises the question: Are the above qualifying criteria to be a QCJO exhaustive -- that is, are they the sufficient conditions to qualify? Or are they just necessary conditions, with further conditions to be decided by the panel? That is, could the panel decide that even if an organisation met the formal criteria outlined in the budget, for some reason or another they wouldn't qualify it for QCJO status? This is an important point that I have not seen a proper answer to.

 Second: The labour tax credit provides for a 25% rebate on an employee’s salary, up to $55k per employee, so the rebate is capped at $13750 per employee. The obvious question is: Who counts as an eligible newsroom employee?  It seems they want to limit this to "news" reporters, and the budget goes so far as to list the sorts of activities that would count, and even hazards a guess that it should be someone who spends at least 75 per cent of their time on "news content".

No one who had spent more than a day working in a newsroom could endorse that sort of time slicing definition of a news reporter, but leave that aside (since the budget itself does, handing the ultimate decision off to the panel.) And the panel has a heck of a job here. What sort of news would count? The Ottawa Citizen still employs a rock music reporter and a bunch of sports guys and a science journalist. Ok, rock music maybe doesn't qualify. But does sports? The Citizen's sports reporters have been covering the Senators, which is owned by Eugene Melnyk, who is part of the gong-show redevelopment of LeBreton flats, which is a heavily political issue. And Tom Spears writes science journalism, including covering the Canada Space Agency and federal institutions like the museum of science and technology. Should he count?

Again I know the answer is "the panel will decide", but you can easily see: a) how the panel membership’s built-in biases will be a problem, and b) how newsroom managers will be forced to play games with reporters' assignments and job descriptions to get the maximum number of qualifiers.  At the very least, this will have the effect of pushing newsrooms into certain kinds of coverage and away from others, not because the audience wants it, but because the tax man demands it. And the Star thinks this budget makes no demands on content? Please.

 Third, the CAJ in a statement says “the $55,000 cap will incentivize news outlets not to pay employees more than that. For unionized outlets, some of which have a starting salary in excess of $55,000, this structure could encourage the breaking of unions.” I don’t know if that’s the case but it raises important questions. I would love to see an economist weigh in to help explain what this sort of tax credit does to wages, and how it might affect union bargaining.

Fourth: The government has allocated $360 million over 5 years for the labour tax rebate, which works out to $72 million a year. At a full rebate of $13750 per employee that would subsidize benefits just under 5500 journalists, or somewhere just under half of the total number of employed in the country according to last year's census. So ok they all aren't news reporters, and they don't all make $55k, but what if the rebate hits the $72 million cap, which my napkin scribblings suggest it could? Presumably then the panel will have to decide how the limited money gets parsed out, and to whom, and according to what principles. I'd love to be in the room when the formula for that disbursement gets negotiated.

Fifth: The focus for this is on print content. Why, apart from the fact that the Toronto Star and Postmedia have been the ones whining the loudest? Shouldn’t saving democracy be neutral with respect to media delivery? If a newsroom thinks it can succeed by pivoting to video or podcasts, don't we want them to do this? This plan will dissuade them from doing so, and hence will hinder innovation and experimentation, by giving the big news organisations every incentive in the world to stick to what they’ve done for 100 years or more.

So what do we make of this? Right now, the only thing I think we can say for certain is that the independent panel is going to have enormous influence over Canadian media -- how it is structured, who it employs, and what it covers. And so it will matter enormously who is on the panel. But it will also matter enormously how much discretion they have. And it will matter enormously what sort of decision procedure the panel will use in exercising that discretion? Is it a majority vote? Unanimous?  The horse trading and bargaining and special pleading that will go on will not be pretty, to put it mildly. How transparent will the panel’s decisions be? Who will decide that? Do we trust the media to report fairly on all this? 

If anyone could provide me with model for where something like this works anywhere on Earth I’d like to see it. In the meantime, I’ll just leave you with this tweet, from a journalist whose work I respect very much:

Who is Ezra you ask, and why should we be worried? If you don't know the answer to that, then that's part of the problem. 

Book Review: Hitchens' *Mortality*

This is a review I wrote for the Ottawa Citizen of Christopher Hitchens' postumous book about dying of cancer. I loved the Hitch, but I didn't love this book. It's worth reading, like everything of his. But I thought he blinked, a bit. 

**

Mortality

Christopher Hitchens, McClelland & Stewart $22.99 Hardcover, 107 pp

Christopher Hitchens' 2010 memoir Hitch-22 is packed with gossip, jokes, confessions, and arguments, with the tenor and tone shifting wildly from ironic to sentimental, crude to sophisticated, learned to juvenile, frequently within the same page or paragraph. But for all the clever turns of phrase, the stiletto reasoning, the unfair erudition, you don't actually discover much about what made the Hitch tick.

In fact, it is only on page 330, well over three fourths of the way through the book, that Hitchens condescends to reveal something of himself. The moment comes in his answers to "The Proust Questionnaire," a form of self-interrogation (and a popular feature from Hitchens' employer, Vanity Fair magazine) that asks you to answer questions like "What is your idea of earthly happiness?" and "what is the quality you most admire in a woman?"

The key moment of self-disclosure comes in the second question, "Where would you like to live?". Hitchens' fully-armed answer: "In a state of conflict or a conflicted state."

From his earliest days as a Trotskyite university radical, Christopher Hitchens was a man who lived to argue, to debate, to fight. The problem is, for an ideological combatant like Hitchens, the end-of-history '90s presented something less than a target-rich environment. As a result, he seem destined to spend his life as a bit of a fringe figure, picking odd little fights with Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa, where the viciousness of the attack seemed completely out of proportion to the alleged crimes.

The attacks of 9/11 changed everything, as the world was launched once again into a state of high-level polarized conflict. The novelist Martin Amis wrote that if 9/11 had to happen, he was glad he was alive to see it, but it was his boyhood chum Christopher Hitchens who immediately signed up as one of the most enthusiastic combatants.

It was the post-9/11 intellectual climate that motivated Hitchens' two big intellectual shifts: the one that made him infamous was his Slurpee-sucker cheerleading of the neocons as they bullied George W. Bush into invading Iraq; the one that made him famous was his relentless assault on all forms of religion that began with his 2008 book God Is Not Great.

And there things might have stayed for a long while, with Hitchens settling comfortably into a highly public role as the scourge of believers everywhere, leavening his anti-jihad jihads with more of the fun little assignments his editor at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, would send him on: get your back waxed, Hitch. Have yourself waterboarded. Write about blowjobs or how women aren't funny.

But suddenly he got metastatic cancer of the esophagus, diagnosed on a book tour, the very day Hitch-22 hit the best-seller list. Suddenly, but surely not unexpectedly, since Hitchens liked to drink and smoke as much as he liked to argue. As he writes in the first essay in this short little book, Mortality: "I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me."

Equally predictable was the way Hitchens set about giving his disease the complete writerly treatment. He begins with a sneer at what he calls "one of the most appealing clichés in our language," namely, that people don't have cancer, they battle it. He then sets about informing the reader that for a cancer patient, "the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water."

Given what follows, this is enormously disingenuous. Mortality consists of seven short chapters about Hitchens' "year of living dyingly," beginning with an essay that tracks his forced march from what he calls the country of the well to the land of malady, and ending with a scattered collection of thoughts, epigrams and quotations that he continued to jot down right up till the end.

Together they might as well be called "Christopher Hitchens versus Cancer," with the increasingly sick Hitch taking on one set of enemies after another. Whether it is the false hope of new therapies, the curse of losing his voice, the thin line between torture and treatment, or the idiotic thesis that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, the tone of the book is relentlessly combative. And because it is Hitchens doing the fighting, it is always smart, insightful and entertaining, with one or two gorgeous turns of phrase on every page.

There is a problem, though, which is that while you learn a lot about what it is like to have terminal cancer, there is very little about deeper theme that is promised in the book's title. Hitchens has little comment on the perverted irony of dying of the same disease that killed his father. There is virtually nothing here about his wife and kids, what his illness means to them and what they mean to him.

He doesn't appear interested in exploring what it is like to face the psychological - and not just intellectual - consequences of his atheism, which is guaranteed extinction. On the questions of his legacy, what people will think of him in a decade, or a century, Hitchens seems unconcerned.

In fact, the reader has to wait until the very end for any trace of mortality as a theme to creep into the book, and in all three examples it is a matter of Hitchens cribbing from other writers. There's a flick at Larkin's poem, Aubade. There is a beautiful quotation from Alan Lightman on how death is the enabler of freedom. And a line from Saul Bellow: "Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything." All three of these references trump anything Hitchens is able to conjure on the subject. Why this is the case is unclear, but Mortality is ultimately defeated by the writer's reluctance to say much at all on the subject at hand. Perhaps it is because Hitchens, the ultimate combatant, could not, right to the last, accept that he had finally found himself in a fight he could not win.

This is too bad, because as big a loss as his death has been for so many of his admirers, there is more to dying than cancer. What came to the Hitch will come to us all, in one form or another.

And for those of us who are less courageous, less stoic, less resolute, in the face of what Larkin devastatingly called "the anaesthetic from which none come round," it would have been nice to have had Hitchens to lead the way, as he did so often when he was alive.

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