{"id":56850,"date":"2023-09-15T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-15T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/?p=56850"},"modified":"2023-09-14T16:17:02","modified_gmt":"2023-09-14T20:17:02","slug":"peter-menzies-the-media-is-boycotting-meta-and-nobody-cares","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/2023-09-15\/peter-menzies-the-media-is-boycotting-meta-and-nobody-cares\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Menzies: The media is boycotting Meta and nobody cares"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Meta\u2019s bluffing, they said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Facebook will never survive without news, they insisted. Users will demand it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The web giants will cave in just like they did in Australia, they said. Just wait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These statements tell you everything you need to know about how badly so many within the world of journalism, overwhelmed by bluster, misunderstand the economics of the online world and their business\u2019s 21st-century reality. So far, the most vociferous backers of the Online News Act<\/em> (Bill C-18) haven\u2019t just been wrong about predicting its consequences, they have misjudged public sentiment in extravagant style. One wonders what they teach in journalism schools that so many could be so spectacularly and predictably wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, they will continue that tradition with a cringeworthy call for the nation to rise in solidarity with them and mark Sept.15 as a #DayWithoutMeta. The date was chosen because it correlates to International Democracy Day. And, as we all know from reading the public prints and watching TV news, the foundations of society crumble without well-paid journos. Or so they say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you have come late to this story, Bill C-18 was based on the unproven allegation that Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads) and Google \u201csteal\u201d content produced by news organizations and refuse to share the allegedly large profits their mischief generates. The bill was designed to force those Big Tech companies to go beyond the tens of millions they were already spending to support journalism in Canada and cough up hundreds of millions more through contrived new \u201ccommercial\u201d agreements. Most legacy news organizations\u2014newspapers in particular \u2014have struggled to compete with the web giants\u2019 superior advertising models and, as a result, thousands of jobs have disappeared and the \u201cfree press\u201d has embraced an apparently permanent<\/a> role as a ward of the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The response from the big companies, notwithstanding agreements they made Down Under when faced with a Rupert Murdoch-led shakedown there, has been that this premise is nonsense. Bill C-18 leaves them no rational business choice, they insist, other than to no longer link to news in Canada and, it appears, elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Google has yet to pull the plug and is still attempting to talk the government off the ledge upon which it has placed itself and an industry that depends upon the audiences Meta, Google, and others drive to its sites without charge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n