And we’re seeing it in real time in Canada.
In August 2021, in an EconLog post about Canada, I wrote:
Government can’t subsidize newspapers without putting its thumb on the scale.
The post was titled “Canada’s Decline in Press Freedom.” In that post, I discussed the Canadian government’s system of subsidies to newspapers. I followed up with a further post in December 2021 in which I quoted a critic of the subsidies, Peter Menzies, who quoted a critic named Tom Korski who put the problem succinctly: “You only need one customer and that’s the [federal] Minister of Heritage.”
To his credit, Menzies has been tracking this issue. In a post on “The Line,” a Canadian Substack that follows Canadian politics closely, Menzies quoted a Member of Parliament who is part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government. Menzies wrote:
“Your paper wouldn’t be in business were it not for the subsidies that the government that you hate put in place — the same subsidies your Trump-adjacent foreign hedge fund owners gladly take to pay your salary,” he wrote.
The “he” who tweeted this was Taleeb Noormohamed, the Liberal MP for Vancouver Granville. He was replying to a post on X “by Terry Newman, National Post’s new senior editor of its Comment section, promoting a column she had written outlining the incredible damage ‘a party and a minister can do to a country in nine years.'”
Menzies wrote:
Nothing Noormohamed said was untrue. He and I are in perfect alignment in the view that were it not for the patronage of the Justin Trudeau government, Postmedia (and likely the Toronto Star) would by now have ceased to exist. Some of its titles may have sold for parts, but most of its zombie products would have been dispatched long ago with a bankruptcy bullet to the brain, allowing new media to spring forth from decay.
About that, he was not wrong, even though what he did was very inappropriate, even more so because Noormohamed is not just some schmuck MP making up the numbers in a minority Parliament. He’s Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Heritage, Pascal St-Onge, in whose office most of the decisions regarding the plethora of funding arrangements for Canadian news media are made. (bold added)
The title of Menzies’s Substack post was on target: “The Liberals Say the Quiet Part Out Loud.”
Freedom of the press in Canada is dying. And, as Noormohamed’s threatening tweet points out, silencing critics of the government is one of the main purposes of government subsidies.
UPDATE: When I posted this on Facebook, someone in Canada pointed out the obvious evidence that government subsidies hurt freedom of the press. The entity he mentioned has been around so long–set up well before I was born–that I got used to it and didn’t think to mention it: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a government-funded media giant.
READER COMMENTS
David Seltzer
Sep 12 2024 at 3:37pm
David: I see an irony here. The subsidies come from taxpayers. In effect, the taxpayers are forced to endanger their free speech with their own money.
Craig
Sep 12 2024 at 4:00pm
I am led to believe that 501c3 status in the US was enacted to get churches out of politics since politiking would endanger their status and the people making contributions wouldn’t get to deduct them from their taxes.
Larger churches, think something like the Catholic Church, could afford separating the activities such that politics was out of mass but they would have a 501c4 organization politiking and it’d be a non-profit and you coukd contribute to it but you wouldn’t be able to deduct those contributions.
BC
Sep 13 2024 at 4:31am
David’s Aug 2021 post links to a description of the subsidy program [https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local-journalism-initiative]: “In some parts of Canada, residents do not have access to journalistic information about community issues and institutions through local newspapers, community radio, television or other news media.”
One way to address this purported problem without govt putting its “thumb on the scale” would be to subsidize the *residents*, say with vouchers that could be used to subscribe to any news media of the residents’ choice. Instead, an “independent panel…decides funding allocations”. Independent of what? Not govt, since the panel is part of govt. The panel might be independent of elected officials, which is to say independent of voters. Most of all, the panel appears to be independent of the residents that the subsidy is purported to help…
Craig
Sep 13 2024 at 8:23am
I happen to reside in TN’s least populated county. Any number of facebook groups, etc. Everybody seems to know everybody’s business, seems to be a small town hobby!
nobody.really
Sep 13 2024 at 11:48am
As oxymorons go, I guess “median giant” is not quite bad as “jumbo shrimp.”
Max Molden
Sep 14 2024 at 11:49am
For the dangers of subsidies to the press, look no further than Austria! We’ve had some shady stuff going on here. In Austria, the government massively funds the press. And, as it seems, politicians used this power to influence the media.
You will find some information in English here, see also the two articles mentioned right at the beginning.