Most think tanks are inherently conservative because they are funded by rich people who don’t like paying taxes and instead donate that money to foundations which in turn fund a range of favoured charities. Think tanks that churn out pseudo-scholarly research designed to influence government policy and regulation, or lack thereof, are a favourite recipient.

Postmedia has largely replaced local news coverage with paid content, including a long-running campaign for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, and under new CEO Andrew Macleod ordered its editors to hew even harder to the right politically. We are thus in effect paying foreign-owned media to feed us propaganda, an irony perhaps not lost on Justice Hogue.

Meta’s move to stop fact checking is widely seen as the company trying to get out of Trump’s doghouse amid worldwide efforts to regulate it. Meta banned Trump from Facebook in 2020 after he fomented that year’s January 6 insurrection, but announced in 2022 that it would stop fact-checking his speeches ahead of his third presidential bid.

With our federal Liberal government teetering and an election imminent, the Online News Act under which Google promised to subsidize news media here could be in jeopardy, since Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has threatened that a Conservative government would repeal it if elected.

A new form of convergence is roiling Canada’s media. Our media were ravaged at the millennium by the convergence of ownership between newspapers and television which has left both on life support. A quarter century later, a new form of media convergence sees Canada’s big telecom companies engaged in a turf war with global tech firms.

Canada’s hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed even in Israel itself. Nevertheless, activists in Canada have been labelled antisemitic by university administrations, media outlets, and politicians for saying what Mordechai, a Jewish historian in Israel, documents clearly: that Israel is committing genocide, and Canada is complicit.

It’s one thing for outlets like The Hub to sell editorial space to corporations or even paid propagandists, but involving real journalists in the process puts them in an unenviable situation. As Marc Edge writes, it makes you wonder how a journalism purist like Peter Menzies might feel about writing sponsored content.

Writing about all of the problems with the ownership of Canada’s news media, as I have done for the past quarter century, has become frustrating. From sky-high concentration of corporate ownership to our hare-brained millennium experiment with the “convergence” of newspaper and television ownership to massive foreign ownership by faceless hedge funds, the problems only keep getting worse.

The musings of billionaires, the pronouncements of leading politicians and the version of events that we get from the corporate media all reveal how the rich and powerful view the world and their own place in it. We need to be alert to the common ways in which they misrepresent and distort reality for their own advantage, writes John Clarke.

After almost a decade in power, Trudeau the Younger is certainly following the same path as his father. The blissful honeymoon is long over and after almost a decade in power he is now facing defeat in the next election because charm and charisma can only take you so far. But it would be foolish to count him out so soon, writes Marc Edge, given his family legacy.