The recent revelation that data offered up by a Toronto Metropolitan University research centre had for years systematically inflated the number of newspaper closures in Canada points up the weakness in Canadian media research. It’s a problem that academics have noted for decades and something I have been harping on for more than 20 years. Peter Desbarats, who was then head of the University of Western Ontario’s journalism school, wrote in 1989 that “public debate about journalism in Canada suffers from a constant shortage of historical perspective and reliable data.” A Senate committee report on news media in 2006 noted that “Canada does not have a permanent centre with stable funding for research on the media similar, for example, to the Pew Institute in the United States,” and suggested that Canada develop its own independent media research centre. The federal government has “supported a number of networks of centres of excellence in medicine, engineering, and the social sciences,” it argued. “There is no reason why a similar network could not be created to fund research on the news media in Canada, building on the admirable strengths that already exist in universities across the country.” Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin put it succinctly in 2022. “Despite its exponential growth in importance the media industry gets only a small fraction of the scrutiny that other powerful institutions do,” he pointed out. “Big issues go largely unexamined in Canadian media… There are precious few media columnists in this country. There is no overarching media institute to address the problems.”

Our federal broadcasting regulator is charged in part with monitoring the communications landscape, but the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission’s annual reports have proved less than timely and forthcoming. “Release of the CRTC’s annual flagship Communications Monitoring Report has been occurring later and even spilt over into the beginning of this year, 2021, for its review of conditions in 2019,” complained Carleton University researcher Dwayne Winseck a few years ago in his annual report on Canada’s media industries, which is one of the few worthwhile media research projects in Canada. “The problem with this laggardly approach is glaring given that while there are three regulatory reviews of the proposed Rogers-Shaw deal… discussions of these issues are flying blind, or if not blind, then with visions of what is at stake hazy by having to rely on official data that is now at least two years old.” The Competition Bureau is worse, he added, since “it neither discloses the record upon which it makes decisions nor conducts public proceedings in its review of ownership transactions.” This failure reached a height of absurdity when the Bureau approved Postmedia Network’s 2015 takeover of its largest rival newspaper chain using questionable logic, creating monopolies in Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa, then refused my request to see its research on privacy grounds. Researchers seeking hard facts must turn to Statistics Canada, noted Carleton’s Ira Wagman in a 2011 study, but find there only undifferentiated figures lacking specifics. The dearth of data has led to what he described as “a state of malaise Canadian academics and their students feel working in a research terrain with so many potholes.”

Even the media industry associations that once published voluminous data in order to attract advertisers have begun to cut down on the statistics. “Obtaining consistent and comprehensive data is becoming more difficult as companies and their affiliated trade groups like the Canadian Telecommunications Association and News Media Canada become more guarded in their financial reporting,” noted Winseck in his latest report. “Tellingly, News Media Canada has discontinued several annual reports on newspaper ownership, revenue, and circulation. Major news publishers such as the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and La Presse, are privately held and thus do not have to publish much data about their operations. This is especially galling because these same news media groups have been benefitting recently from public funding.” The withdrawal of data by media is likely not innocent, as it helps to obscure the true state of their industry and makes politicians easier to bamboozle and extract subsidies from. These have recently included the $50 million Local Journalism Initiative (2018), the $595 million media bailout (2019) and the Online News Act (2023), which requires Google and Meta to pay publishers for running links to their news stories. The inability of bureaucrats to provide timely data, or often any data at all, plays right into the hands of media lobbyists, as media researcher Monica Auer noted. “The CRTC’s failure to publish complete information about its ownership policies and their effects leaves the general public at a clear disadvantage relative to… Canada’s privately owned broadcast media, whose long-established lobbyist, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB), likely has ample empirical information through its members.”

A dubious Canadian Media Research Consortium was set up by TMU, UBC and Université Laval in 2001 with $3.5 million in funding from Bell’s $230 million takeover of CTV under the CRTC’s so-called “public benefits” program that requires 10 percent of the purchase price of any licensed broadcaster go to worthy projects, typically Canadian content. This money began finding its way into the country’s few schools of journalism at the millennium from a spate of takeovers that reshaped the industry, and academics lined up as a result to testify to the joys that convergence of newspaper and television ownership would bring. Convergence instead crashed as a business model within a decade and has left our media in ruins ever since. The National Post sniffed out the scam from the start, describing the CMRC in 2001 as “a hitherto unknown group founded for the sole purpose of skimming a graft off the CTV takeover.” The CMRC’s funding, it noted, essentially recycled public benefits payments back to the benefit of private interests. “If the major corporations… want research into the media, then surely they can spend their own money up front rather than cash extorted… via a regulator.” The CMRC promised to “focus on important economic, social and cultural issues” and “produce stimulating and socially important research for public debate” but instead produced mostly market research, which is prohibited under the public benefits program. It published an annual Report Card on the Canadian Media starting in 2004 based on polling into news consumption habits and credibility. Its “disturbing” findings on credibility were attributed by CMRC head Donna Logan to reporters rather than media owners even after heavy-handed editorial intervention at the Southam newspaper chain by its owning Asper family prompted the Senate inquiry. “Canadians… feel that reporters are influenced by government officials, by bureaucrats, by powerful groups and people with money,” said Logan in launching the report. When the Senate hearings visited her school in 2005, Logan again blamed reporter bias instead of ownership. “Almost 80 per cent of Canadians think that reporter’s bias influences news often or sometimes,” she told them. “The finding of reporter bias is very similar to results in the United States.” Except that it wasn’t, as the Pew’s annual State of the News Media report instead asked Americans whether they thought “news organizations” were politically biased. Rather than producing socially important research, the CMRC’s research was loaded from the outset to absolve media ownership, laying any possible bias at the feet of individual journalists with survey questions like “How often do you think reporters let their own political preferences influence the way they report the news?” After I noted in my 2007 book Asper Nation that the CMRC’s reports “would be valuable most of all to media outlets, their owners, and marketers,” its seven-year funding grant was not renewed by CTV.

Bias is almost impossible to eliminate in media research, but is important to minimize. That is hard to do when it is bred in the bone, as at the Media Ecosystem Observatory launched in 2023 by the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The former was founded with a donation from the right-wing Max Bell Foundation named after a Calgary oil baron who turned his Albertan newspaper into the largest chain in Canada and is known for promoting school choice programs and funding the notorious Fraser Institute. The Munk School was endowed by Barrick Gold founder Peter Munk, an ardent promoter of right-wing policies, as chronicled in my last column. So far the MEO’s most notable study has found that national news outlets lost 64 percent of their engagement on Facebook and local news outlets lost 85 percent after Meta blocked news in order to comply with the Online News Act.

The lack of reliable, independent research is one of the biggest problems plaguing our media. Addressing it would go a long way to cutting through the self-serving propaganda offered up by media owners seeking endless federal favours.

Marc Edge teaches Media & Communication at University Canada West in Vancouver. His books and research on Canadian media can be found online at www.marcedge.com.