Good morning.
I want to thank everyone on this committee for inviting us to speak today. I think it's an important factor that we all face and are challenged with. I look back on my 35 years of working in and consulting with media. I am quite concerned with where we sit today but, more importantly, with the public perception of media. What was once a respected and fact-based pillar of our past generations is now not much more than a punchline in pop culture. To illustrate that point, I'll speak to a comment that I heard yesterday, which was, “I'm now old enough to remember when the only fake news around was the National Enquirer.”
I'm here today, with respect, in an effort to try to appeal to the common sense of this committee's members with respect to my desire to stop this slide into a more out-of-control media sphere. My talk today is really about the lack and loss of local journalism. We have seen the decline and erosion of this over the years, and that has been escalated obviously in the last 12 months because of COVID. We've seen many newspapers, broadcasters and radio stations alike disappear in recent years. That's concerning and it's creating areas of news deserts. There are vast and growing areas in which local news is no longer represented, and we are losing the ability to communicate to our communities. It is essential, I believe, that we have a functioning broadcast act and CRTC, with controls over what is replacing what we once knew as the news.
We sit in a shifting media landscape in which the function of local news production has been narrowed, as I mentioned, by the erosion of advertising dollars. We look at the impacts of the tech giants and how they siphon off local and national advertising. You don't need to look any further than at what the federal governments used to spend on newspapers, TV and radio stations. Those dollars are now spent largely on digital and media campaigns that are Internet-based.
The problem with that is that the Internet giants, the tech giants, are all U.S.-based. That money leaves the country. It doesn't get reinvested. It doesn't employ local people or Canadians, and the tax dollars themselves go away.
This loss of fact-based communication and reporting began with the disappearance of all of our local stations and written newspapers. I think one of the things we need to understand is that the majority of local journalism is produced by community sources, not the national media. We owe our nation and citizens better. The communities across Canada and your constituents want assurances that Canadian content will be available and that the digital players will be as responsible for their contribution to the creation of homegrown content.
We've seen recent decisions in France and Australia that began the process of holding tech giants accountable by regulating them and putting in place penalties and costs for them to do business. It's important that we as a newspaper industry feel that the Broadcasting Act is holding social media and the Internet giants accountable for what they produce, what they distribute and what they disseminate. I know that the act is looking to make more inroads with respect to the Internet but I also realize and agree that it is not taking on any proactive statement with respect to social media. Social media is becoming a greater player in terms of information, particularly. That is, in my opinion, a very big, severe concern with respect to where people get what they want to call news from. The fact that social media is really unpoliced is my biggest and strongest concern.
I have provided attachments for the members to read, and that ends my time.