When Canada was quite young, every journalistic publication, every newspaper, had a perspective. In fact, it went so far that in the campaign handbooks that the political parties provided to their supporters, there would be a list of the newspapers that were acceptable for them to read. The newspapers all came from a perspective.
Then journalism evolved a little bit. When I was in grade 2, we studied newspapers and we were told that it was all objective but that we should be careful not to believe everything we read. Then, a little bit later, they started introducing media literacy courses into schools, because you had to be able to learn to read between the lines and apply critical thinking and so on.
My point is that all these things evolve over time, and I think people have the ability to adapt to these evolutions and sort them out and find their way.
You say here in this report on page 3 in your opening stuff:
The ‘truth neutrality’ of the dominant digital platforms is incompatible with democracy.
I'd say that if somebody was writing 120 years ago, they would say the truth neutrality of all these printed publications was incompatible with democracy because they represented just one view or another, on the extremes.
It's not the technology that's at issue, in my view; it's how people choose to consume and want to consume. Wouldn't it be the case that what you're really talking about here is the public's literacy in the new medium, about how they are beginning to understand—as I think they do, and I don't think you give them credit for this—that everything has to be approached with skepticism? Increasingly, people do. I think I give them credit for that.
A lot of people who are accustomed only to the old traditional media perhaps don't have the same skeptical eye, but I put it to you that younger people do have it and are nicely adapted. Isn't it a question of adapting our media literacy as we evolve to this new technology? We're trying to put our finger in the dike and push a bunch of money through it to keep the old stuff alive. Why would it have any more impact on people than it has over the past several years when they were still fighting?
They're losing their revenue, perhaps. They're not being consumed as much. That model with those old traditional outlets is not working from a business perspective, but if people are looking for that kind of information, surely the same kind of people who seek it will begin to figure out who they want to trust and seek out that information in the new context. Aren't we just going through a dynamic transition? Isn't it the case that trying to make things the way they were and keep things the way they were through government intervention simply will never succeed?