I am writing this letter in response to the COLUMN: Internet giants should pay their share which was advocating for more government funding for the print media.
The main reason stipulated was that it was due to revenue loss caused by the big internet tech giants, Google, Facebook, and others monopolizing most of the ad revenue for themselves, leaving very little for traditional print media.
There may be some merit to this claim, but perhaps it is not the actual cause of the problem.
Is it perhaps the business model of these print media publications that are to blame, which is not giving their supposed customers the product that they want or require?
To elaborate, is it perhaps that instead of actually reporting the news, with all the actual facts, they are instead pushing an agenda, have a preconceived bias in the reporting of the facts, and want to tell or push a biased narrative instead?
The media in a free country has a duty to report on all the facts of a story, not just those which appeal to the political or ideological leanings of the reporter or newspaper owner.
The reporter or journalist is supposed to present the news or story, not be the story. When they become the story, by introducing their biases into the facts presented, they are undermining one of the key foundations of a free and unfettered press.
Any trust that the public may have in ‘free press’ is destroyed when the politicization of the facts in a story is condoned.
Any media that tolerates this behaviour is no better than the Pravda publication of the former USSR. This media arm was so biased and compromised, that the regular Soviet citizen knew that the ‘real news was what was not reported in the story’.
And I am afraid that this same Soviet method of ‘critical review’ of the facts or stories is needed not just in print media today, but with all forms of Canadian media at the moment.
Perhaps if the owners of the media started to report accurately all the facts of a story, instead of politicizing the news, they might regain that fifty per cent of the population they have pushed away with their biased narrative.
Then they would not need a ‘bailout’, and would regain some of their lost trust with the public.
As a long time taxpayer, I would welcome that ‘sea change’ in thinking, as government spending is wildly out of control, and getting worse each day.
So perhaps modifying the business model of the media to win back the large number of former customers they have neglected would be a better move.
And it would also go a long way to re-establishing the concept of a free and independent press (and media) that is not beholden to a government, but that could again be trusted by the public at large. Just some food for thought.
Paul Nielsen,
Carstairs
