Thank you very much for having me at this committee. I'm a bit of a problematic creature and one of those persnickety digital first creators Sue was referencing.
Just to follow up on Sue's comments, I agree with what she said, and I think people who are trying to fix these problems and regulate in the space are often conflating the difference between the business of journalism and the act of journalism. They're related problems, but they're not the same problems. If you can't fundamentally understand why the businesses failed, you're going to fall into the trap of trying to throw more money into a failing industry or problem as opposed to thinking from the public interest perspective: How can we improve the acts of journalism to ensure the public interest is being served here? It's a very different framing of the problems we're facing, and I think it requires a very different mindset.
Further to what we're here to discuss, I feel like I'm at a bit of a disadvantage, because when we talk about a national forum on media, I'm not strictly sure what's being proposed. I find myself, as a result, in a very rare position of not having a strongly held opinion on it. That's very unusual for me, so you're going to have to forgive me.
I think that, in principle, having a national forum to discuss the issues facing news media and the democratic deficit that's going to come from that crisis and is coming from that crisis could be a really great thing. I'm not sure why this committee needs to approve that if what we're proposing here is that the news industry itself forwards such an idea, which members of the government would be a part of, or who should be putting it together. That strikes me as a fairly logistical challenge to solve. My ideal for that kind of forum would be that it has a really wide diversity of opinions, brings a lot of different ideas to the table from a public interest perspective and is open to a lot of different potential solutions for which the government could be helpful.
My fear is that a national forum wouldn't really be used as a forum to discuss these things in an open way, but would be used as a PR exercise to drum up public support for a foregone conclusion. If you're going to create a national forum to create support or to manufacture the concept of support for writing legacy media organizations ever-bigger cheques, that would be a waste of time. If that is the conclusion everybody is working toward, then why are we wasting our time here? Just write the cheque. That's my concern with where this is going to go.
That being said, I think it's about having a really open discussion about the problems facing media. Talk about those business issues and where the public interest factors are. If you want to have a discussion about further public funding for media or turning the private media into the public media—which is essentially the path we're on right now—then let's have a really candid, open conversation about what that's going to cost the taxpayer and over what time frame. A forum could be a great opportunity to do all that, provided it's being done with a really open spirit and in a good-faith way.
I don't have anything else to add there.