this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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TechDirt’s Mike Masnick gets it exactly right in covering Canada’s C-18 bill:

If you believe in the open web, if you believe that you should never have to pay to link to something, if you believe that no one should have to pay to provide you a benefit, then you should support Meta’s stance here. Yes, it’s self-serving for Meta. Of course it is. But, even if it’s by accident, or a side-effect, it’s helping to defend the open web, against a ridiculous attack from an astoundingly ignorant and foolish set of Canadian politicians.

And just generally points out the huge holes in Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez understanding from the Power & Politics Interview.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I don't think they should.

Most independent media is just worthless opinion columns, political activism made to look like news, and on some occasions just straight up disinformation.

Sure some of it may be ok, but if you try to write legislation that comes out as "all left leaning independent media gets money, all the right wing independent media can go pound sand" it's just the government trying to use legislation to promote their party. That's a really bad precedent.

So as much as I'd like to see the good independent journalism funded by this, it doesn't seem feasible to do that without also funding disinformation.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (5 children)

My opinion on the corporate media that is the only one funded by this is the same as what you've just said. Just in a rich get richer approach to media in Canada. That's (one of) the big issues I have with this bill.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Yes I understand a lot of people feel this way. But the fact is the News media is being starved out by social media.

What you're terming as "corporate media" is actually media that has journalistic standards. with independent media, that's not always the case.

And facts are facts. If a newspaper owned by the Thomson group, Bell media, Rogers, or the CBC quotes Justin Trudeau, or says that someone has been arrested on a charge or reports on legislation that has passed parliament, those are things that happened. What I'm seeing is a lot of people spending a lot of time reading opinions and thinking they're informed on the news while being completely ignorant of the basic facts.

We can't even agree on reality anymore because many people aren't aware of even the most basic facts around a story. If everyone in the country took even five minutes to get the facts from what you term "corporate media" we'd be way better off then we are now. We'd at least be able to have discussions about actual facts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have seen worse behaviour and bias from corporate media than independent. I think we perhaps have very different pictures of what this means.

My 20 years of seeing people denigrated as “bloggers” while opinion columnists are platformed and not held accountable hasn’t made me feel good about the information coming from corporate media.

And yeah we’re in a tough spot. We need much better discussion tools. I don’t think the CRTC is the right entity to do a good job here.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The CRTC is never the right entity. But since there's no other entity that can do this kind of thing, they end up with the job.

Yeah the prominence of opinion is a problem everywhere. But just filter out that stuff. But I find when I do that there's some articles left on mainstream sites. When I do the same for indy sites, there's basically nothing there.

Journalism costs money. There's only enough money there for there to be just a few businesses to have actual journalism. Those sites will inevitably be labelled as mainstream an biased by alternative sites.

I've yet to see any alternative to mainstream media that isn't just political activism that's making on like it's news.

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