Trust Tim Bousquet to blow the whistle on native advertising. The publisher of the online-only Halifax Examiner loathes the faux news that has infected our media since publishers discovered it was such a lucrative revenue stream. Bousquet quit the Coast alt-weekly in 2014 after seven years as its news editor when it asked him to write native advertising articles, or what were once called “advertorials.” He put his life’s savings into founding the Examiner, which has since grown into one of Canada’s most successful online news outlets. “Advertorial goes against everything I stand for as a reporter,” Bousquet explained on his blog. “The editorial side of the news business—that is, the news reporting—should be separate from the advertising side of the paper because readers need to trust that reporters are not influenced by commercial concerns.”

Bousquet’s ire rose recently when he noticed in Maclean’s another example of the journalism perversion also known as content marketing or branded content under the heading Forestry for the Future. “Once-respected Maclean’s magazine is now unapologetically shilling for the extractive forest industry, uncritically publishing industry propaganda,” he protested. “The pieces are not journalism. There is no fact-checking, no contrary view from industry critics.” Forestry for the Future, he pointed out, is a creation of the Forest Products Association of Canada, which represents Canada’s largest forestry firms. “All media outlets are struggling financially,” he added. “I know the Halifax Examiner is. But publishing propaganda is not the route to success. It only serves to undermine trust and credibility.”

The Examiner takes the opposite approach to covering forestry, as exemplified by its series “Deforestation Inc.” authored earlier this year by its reporter Joan Baxter in association with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. It revealed, among other things, how Canada is a “world laggard” in sustainable forest practices and how the Northern Pulp Mill in Pictou County is owned by Asia-based Paper Excellence, which has “a checkered (to put it mildly) relationship” with Indigenous people in Nova Scotia and elsewhere. Bousquet notes that St. Joseph Communications, which bought Maclean’s, Chatelaine, Canadian Business and other magazines from Rogers in 2019, does not disclose who or what Forestry for the Future is in the four-part series published across several of its magazines. “Perhaps most troublesome is the propaganda piece published in Maclean’s, ‘How Indigenous participation in forest management is changing resource development in Canada.’”

The FPAC campaign was actually launched pre-pandemic and has previously appeared in The Walrus, which at least labelled it “A special supplement from the Forest Products Association of Canada,” and the Globe and Mail, which carried a disclaimer that its editorial department was not involved in its production.

A 2018 study by Montréal-based Union des Consommateurs found “serious ethical problems” with native advertising in Canada, including “the erosion of the impenetrable wall that, in the news media, must separate editorial from advertising content.” It examined native advertising produced by 15 Canadian media outlets and found that, although some clearly marked the content as advertising, the practices of most were “reprehensible.” Any disclosure that three National Post articles it analyzed had been produced by Postmedia’s commercial content division on behalf of a client, for example, was often “camouflaged.”

One 2017 Postmedia campaign on behalf of the Canada Revenue Agency even caused a stir in the Senate after Charlottetown Senator Percy Downe noticed as part of his work on overseas tax evasion that a number of “very positive articles” suddenly began appearing in its newspapers and on their websites. Downe noted that Postmedia’s glowing coverage of the CRA’s “proven track record” of collecting taxes from Canadians hiding their money overseas ran counter to its “terrible” record and demanded to know how such disinformation could be spread. He soon learned that the CRA had paid Postmedia $288,497.36 to spread it, so he issued a press release denouncing the “shameless self-promotion,” which was oddly not reported on by any Canadian news media.

Native advertising, which is so-called for being designed to look like news, first began to surface in the United States about a decade ago on websites like Vice and Buzzfeed. It was so lucrative that soon even newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times were offering native ads. Jill Abramson called it “the industry’s new digital Frankenstein” in her memoir Merchants of Truth, which also told how her opposition to it cost her the Times’s top job as executive editor. It quickly spread to Canada, with both the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail setting up branded content studios in 2014.

Postmedia had already jumped aboard the gravy train, as outraged environmentalists learned after advertorials under the heading “A Joint Venture with CAPP” began appearing in Postmedia newspapers across the country in 2013. A leaked Postmedia presentation showed that its campaign for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers had proposed a dozen full-page “joint ventures” on topics of CAPP’s choosing to be written by Postmedia. “With images of pipelines in the background,” noted the Vancouver Observer, “the presentation went on to explain how it would link Postmedia’s sponsored energy content with CAPP’s ‘thought leadership’ and stimulate conversations on social media.”

Retired Vancouver talk show host Rafe Mair, an ardent environmentalist, charged that Postmedia had “sold its soul to oil and gas” and claimed in his posthumous 2017 book Politically Incorrect that the CAPP revelations showed media reform was needed to save democracy in Canada. “How the hell can a newspaper justify becoming partners with part of the industrial community when it is their duty to report fairly, independently, fearlessly, and accurately on that industry to the public at large?” He also pointed to an agreement that Postmedia’s Vancouver Province had with Woodfibre LNG to promote its controversial liquefied natural gas refinery in the nearby coastal community of Squamish.

Postmedia now sells not just native ads but even news coverage and space on its opinion pages for those willing to pay, as a Canadaland investigation revealed in 2020. Its business model, as my recent book The Postmedia Effect shows, is simply to rake in as much cash as possible from all available sources in order to keep sending tens of millions of dollars a year in payments on its massive debt south to its US hedge fund owners/bondholders. Much of the cash has come from Canadian taxpayers for the past five years under the $595 million media bailout which ends next spring and some will apparently soon come from Google under the new Online News Act, as industry association News Media Canada recently agreed to its terms for surrender on the bill’s provisions.

This latest example of journalism’s decline in Canada shows that the pillaging of our news media simply must stop for the sake of Canadian democracy.

Marc Edge is a journalism researcher and author who lives in Ladysmith, BC. His books and articles can be found online at www.marcedge.com.