Freedom of the press means that anyone, through any media, has the right to gather and distribute—on any platform—information and opinion without prior restraint or significant censorship by the government. It means that if you want to publish material that is primarily designed to favour conservative perspectives, you are free to do so without fear of government censure or punishment. Ditto if you wish to favour liberal, communist, eco-warrior, or any other perspective.
There are, of course, restraints. Some of those involve civil laws concerning defamation, while criminal laws forbid hate speech and incitement for physical harm to be inflicted on others. The latter are evolving, controversially, to include emotional harm, but one of the greatest traditional restraints was something known as “market forces.” Back in the day, the need for solid readership numbers to support advertising revenue meant that publishers, while free to lean in whatever direction they preferred, were forever conscious of the need for inclusion of voices from all points on the spectrum in order to maximize market penetration.
Now that most Canadian media are subsidized heavily by the government, market forces are a less significant factor, which is bad news for balance, but they still have a role to play.
Following a century or more of barefaced political advocacy by publishers, the news business’s embrace of objectivity was fuelled by the discovery in the early 20th century that far more revenue was possible through advertising than subscriptions. And that meant that the broader and bigger the audience served and fairly treated—market forces—the more profitable the venture.
Today, that process appears to be moving in reverse. With advertisers largely abandoning the news business for social media, many startups are seeking cause-related audiences and subscription-based business models. Some of them are more broad-based than others, but most involve some sort of “ism.”
The Dhanraj dilemma
Which brings us to the inscrutable Travis Dhanraj, who, whatever his sins (we all have them), appears so far to be good to his word that he merely wants to practice journalism in the 20th-century sense of the word. His broadcast career with the CBC came a cropper this year in extremely noisy fashion and his criticism of his former employer and choice of legal counsel (a conservative married to Conservative campaign manager) led to him becoming a cause celebre among conservatives, many of whom remain in a mood to “defund the CBC” for what they see as its outrageous hostility towards them.
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“Bruce Hart” ???