Trudeau Is Buying And The Media Seems Only Too Willing To Sell Out

"Someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me.” This is Don Corleone explaining to one of his constituents how the world of favours works when dealing with a Mafia. 

This subtle invocation of the quid pro quo came to mind as the government of Justin Trudeau announced the panelists who would decide how to divvy up the $660 million his government is planning to deliver to struggling media in this country. Many of the panelists are likely to be direct recipients of the graft.

The fact that the PM of this country would suggest bribing his most persistent critics using public funds is about as subtle as Vito Corleone banking a favour from the local mortician on the Don’s daughters wedding day. In a time of cynicism, such blatant tactics surprise few people.

What should surprise people is the fact that most of the press corps seem only too willing to accept lucre from Trudeau in the hopes of staving off inevitable extinction brought on by technological change and their own utter ineptitude. More, some of them— under the guise of their union Unifor— want to be part of a government panel on the division of spoils. (Unifor being the union that states it will actively try to defeat the Conservatives in the fall election.)

Here’s how coercive and venal this bailout fund is: while the government throws money at consumers to buy electric cars because those vehicles arguably represent the future, they are simultaneously larding money on a media model that is already DOA, replaced by digital and social media alternatives. (The equivalency here is Trudeau investing in current automobile technology when he knows that cars will autonomously driven in 10 years.)

It goes without saying that previous generations of journalists such as Norman DePoe, Bruce Hutchison and Blair Fraser would rather swear off Scotch than take bribes from government. And many of those guys liked Scotch very, very much. The liberty and independence of the fourth estate has often been under siege in Canada. Many have staked careers and lives on the independence of the people who cover elected officials. 

Yet it appears that its own neutering will be done in the broad daylight with the enthusiastic approval of newspaper owners, television chains and digital operators who— having botched their own business model— want to live on as vassals of the cosa nostra in Ottawa. They think that, unlike the Don, the government will never knock on their door to collect the bill.

You may say that portraying government as Mafia is a tad harsh. If you believe this you have never had the joy of a CRA audit or been visited by a 20 percent hike in your property taxes without commensurate new services. As the galloping public pension obligations to its own unionized employees begin eating up larger and larger segments of the budgets politicians like Trudeau will be no less zealous than the Don in collecting to keep Government Inc.® flourishing.

Trudeau saw how this coercion could be a boon to him in the previous federal election when he held out a $1.5 B cookie to CBC should he get elected. That incentive to the public broadcaster passed with so little worry— and such powderpuff CBC coverage— that he clearly was convinced: Hey, let’s bribe everyone and see how that goes?

That this plan is going forward seems to be confirmed by Trudeau’s potential successor, Tory leader Andrew Scheer, who is complaining, not about the sheer corruption represented by the bailout, but about the composition of the advisory panel. In typical Scheer fashion, he thinks this is a bold take.

Of course, it was always going to be a close call whether bribing the media or its own self-censorship was going to end the business as we know it. Coming generations emerging from J Schools have no institutional memory of the fights to hold government accountable. As Jonathan Kay tweeted, their self obsession with virtue posturing is already a fatal blow to the public’s need to know.

“The people I see coming out of all liberal arts programs, but especially anything connected to creative writing, poetry, etc, are so soaked in social-justice cults that they're incapable of writing anything interesting.”

In the war between bribery and self obsession place your bets on the Liberals. That’s what Trudeau is doing now. And it’s an extinction event for media in this nation.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also a best-selling author whose new book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports And Why The Free Market Could Save Them. His website brucedowbigginbooks.ca is now available.