Keeping government and media at arm’s length
It was heartening and not a little ironic to see members of the Media Party, as he delights in calling us, rising as one to defend Ezra Levant and his fellow agitators on The Rebel website against the Alberta government’s ill- fated attempt to ban them from press briefings.
The issue here is not whether Levant is a journalist — so far as he is, suffice to say he is a stain on the trade — but, as more than one commentator rightly put it, that it is no business for the government to decide. Whatever Levant’s failings, it cannot be doubted the Notley government would have been far less interested in the journalistic credentials of a source who was not so relentlessly critical of its performance.
While denying access to news conferences may not count as outright censorship ( and while governments have always selectively leaked information to friendly outlets), the precedent of a government awarding and withholding access in this way — in effect, licensing journalists — could not be allowed to stand. It was to my colleagues’ credit that they could put aside their evident disgust at being associated with Levant long enough to defend his rights. And it was to the government’s credit that it quickly backed off and admitted its mistake.
Perhaps the lesson of this episode will not be lost on certain other of my colleagues who have been floating the idea of government subsidies to news organizations as a response to the industry’s heavily self- publicized woes. Because unless you’re prepared to subsidize Ezra — unless, indeed, you’re prepared to subsidize everybody — you’re still giving government the power to decide who’s a journalist, or at least who’s an ac- ceptable journalist.
How they respond to the Ezra Test will be fascinating to see. It’s one thing to say you don’t want the government interfering in his right to peddle his bile, but it’s quite another to defend forcing others to pay for it with their taxes: the strange personal vendettas, the recklessness with the facts, the blatant propagandizing, the frequent lawsuits, whether as plaintiff or defendant. It’s inconceivable.
To deny a subsidy to Levant, on the other hand, while doling it out to others, would invite charges of political bias — unavoidably, if not justifiably. As it is, Levant is quick to decry any criticism of his own bias as evidence of it in others, as if the reason he is so widely despised were not his habitual disregard for basic journalistic standards, not to mention common decency, but mere disagreement with his politics. That distinction would disappear altogether the moment governments started handing out funds.
Yet it is equally i mpossible the government could subsidize everyone. Perhaps its advocates imagine we still live in a media world made up of a handful of large newspapers, or a few dozen radio and television stations. But that world is gone. Never mind The Rebel: the business of journalism cannot now be meaningfully defined without reference to hundreds, no thousands of online outlets, from news and comment sites employing hundreds to individual bloggers. If governments are not to be in the business of deciding who’s a journalist, or discriminating between them, you’d have to subsidize them all. That way lies madness.
If the government can’t subsidize everyone, it shouldn’t subsidize anyone. We already have evidence of the problems caused by selective subsidization, in the form of the CBC. Once, this might have been defended with regard to the particular problems of financing television, in the days before pay-TV and video on demand. But as that case has dissolved, so has the distinction between television and newspapers.
The CBC is in the publishing business now, via its website, as much as any newspaper — only, unlike the others, with the help of a billion- dollar annual subsidy, courtesy of the taxpayer. I don’t blame the CBC for the industry’s problems, but neither can this disparate treatment be tolerated longer. To the list of reasons the CBC should be defunded, many advanced in this space (against my own self-interest, given my regular appearances on the network), add another.
But of course there is another reason to oppose subsidizing newspapers. It isn’t just unnecessary — news, contrary to some arguments I have seen, is not a public good: the benefits of a scoop are most often appropriable to the paper that breaks it, and in any case breaking stories is only a fraction of what we do — it’s harmful.
The minute we started taking the public dime, we would do as every other recipient does: we would come to feel entitled to it. We would forget that anyone had ever written a word without forcing others to pay for it. Overt political influence would not be the danger, so much as a general inclination to look with favour on the state, and on state sponsorship, rather than self- reliance, as the natural order of things.
We would see our own beneficiary relationship, not as confirmation of our failure to persuade readers we offered them value equal to the money we were asking of them, but as evidence of our superior worth. And we would come to regard ourselves, not as humble hacks trying to earn a few minutes of the readers’ time — the only basis of good writing — but as a public service, with a sacred duty to bore the pants off them.
We would, in short, become like every other of the wards of the state that make up our cultural industries: not only television, but film, music, or — God help us — the magazine business: an industry so committed to excellence it hands out literally hundreds of awards for it every year.
I’ve no idea whether the newspaper industry will survive. But I know in my bones what would kill it, forever. If we must go, let us at least go out with a little dignity, and not succumb to the permanent humiliation of grantsmanship.