Peter Menzies minces few words in voicing his disdain for Ottawa’s recent wealth redistribution efforts on behalf of Canada’s news media. If he’s not railing against the Online News Act, which put bureaucrats from the Canada Revenue Agency in charge of distributing its proceeds to news media, he’s railing against the Online Streaming Act, which put bureaucrats and political appointees from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in charge of distributing its proceeds to broadcasters. As a senior fellow at the conservative Macdonald-Laurier Institute, it’s his job to get his arguments—and by extension those of the MLI—out into the media in hopes of influencing public opinion and government policy. The crusty former publisher of the Calgary Herald and vice-chair of the CRTC is a veritable Energizer Bunny of content generation and is fairly indiscriminate about where he places it, from the staid Hill Times to the right-wing C2C Journal to the Epoch Times, which is associated with the Falun Gong cult and was recently implicated in an alleged money laundering scheme in the US. Byline aggregator Muckrack can hardly keep up with him.

Menzies is a favourite of The Hub, which is published by another conservative think tank, the Centre for Civic Engagement. It collaborated with the MLI recently on a conference that issued a so-called Ottawa Declaration calling on Canadian media to renounce federal bailout money. Menzies’ latest piece for The Hub was a trenchant takedown of recent CRTC hearings that summoned foreign streamers north to decide how much they should pay under the Online Streaming Act and to whom. “No one on the panel of CRTC Commissioners seemed remotely interested in how streamers might already be investing in the domestic film and television production industry or how—without the CRTC’s involvement—Canada’s creators had just experienced the most prosperous decade in their history and how could that be sustained,” he wrote. “No one cared to inquire into how YouTube and TikTok had allowed for more genuine expression of the nation’s culture by people of all backgrounds than had decades of CRTC hectoring and coddling.” Only when a reader reaches the end of Menzies’ article is it revealed that it was sponsored by the Digital Media Association of foreign streamers, which represents the likes of Amazon, Apple, Spotify and YouTube. The DMA has launched a “Scrap the Streaming Tax” campaign protesting the act, mention of which is made in Menzies’ column and a banner ad for which appears partway through it.

Few who read Menzies regularly would doubt that these are his own thoughts. It is no doubt serendipity that they align almost perfectly with the DMA’s position. Most journalists, however, would be loath to have their writing so closely associated with an advertiser or sponsor. Some readers might arrive at the sponsorship disclosure and immediately discount the preceding analysis as bought and paid for. When sponsored content—also known as branded content or native advertising—began to infect news media a decade ago as a lucrative but ethically fraught practice, the Globe and Mail tried to get its journalists to write it, only to find that a strict non-starter. The US Federal Trade Commission held hearings on the topic and warned of possible regulatory action over deceptive advertising practices. American media critic Bob Garfield predicted that sponsored content would “in a matter of years, destroy the media industry: one boatload of shit at a time.” John Oliver called it out as bullshit on his popular HBO program Last Week Tonight, or as “recycled bovine waste” in PR-speak. Jill Abramson’s opposition to sponsored content appearing in the New York Times cost her the newspaper’s top job in 2014, and she called it “the industry’s new digital Frankenstein” in her 2019 book Merchants of Truth. Sponsored content still appears online and even in major newspapers, but it is usually labeled as advertising and produced by separate staff working in so-called content studios.

Postmedia Network, which owns most of Canada’s largest newspapers but is 98 percent owned by US hedge funds, is notorious for publishing paid content. A 2018 study of native advertising published in 15 Canadian news outlets found “serious ethical problems” with it, including “the erosion of the impenetrable wall that, in the news media, must separate editorial from advertising content.” The study found that while some media outlets clearly marked the content as advertising, “we found the practices of most analyzed to be reprehensible.” Any disclosure that sponsored content published in Postmedia’s National Post had been produced by its commercial content division on behalf of a client, the study noted, was often “camouflaged.” Postmedia’s partnership with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers to produce sponsored content touting oil and gas was exposed a decade ago, but the resulting scandal has done little to slow it. The newspaper chain, which now enjoys monopolies in both Western Canada and the Maritimes, will apparently sell space on its news pages to almost anyone, as demonstrated by revelations about its 2020 agreement with the University of British Columbia. Even the federal government has gotten in on the game, buying Postmedia coverage in 2017 that whitewashed the CRA’s sorry record on offshore tax evasion.

This fraught history seems to have been lost on The Hub, which was founded in 2022 by two faculty members in the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and has proved popular with policy wonks and right-thinking Canadians. I profiled it in May as an example of so-called “think tank journalism” under which, as The Economist magazine noted, “the divide between having ideas and reporting on them is dissolving.” Full disclosure: I wrote a column last year at The Hub’s request for its Future of News series, which was sponsored in part by Meta, and I have since written several more articles for it. The Hub also published an excerpt last month from my new book Tomorrow’s News.

The Hub began running sponsored content in September on behalf of carbon removal company Deep Sky, first with an explainer of the company’s technology that was unusually long for an online publication at more than 3,000 words. It then ran eight more articles on the company in the next month. The Hub also launched a series on climate policy in September sponsored by think tank Clean Prosperity that by last week had produced no fewer than 15 columns. Hub co-founder Sean Speer kicked off the campaign with a commentary headlined “Canadian conservatives are well placed to lead on climate change,” which one observer saw as “self-serving flattery” and even gaslighting.

In October, Speer wrote a column headlined “Imposing artificial competition in the telecoms sector has been a cross-party failure” that was sponsored by Telus. It was soon followed by a deep dive headlined “Why Canada doesn’t need another broadband provider,” which was also sponsored by Telus.

The volume of sponsored content published by The Hub seems to be increasing. Just last week, it published a column by Monette Pasher, president of the Canadian Airports Council, headlined “The travel winds are shifting, and airports are taking note” that was sponsored by Toronto’s Pearson Airport. Last week also saw Hub podcasts posted on how the Online Streaming Act is making Canada-US trade relations worse, which was sponsored by the DMA, and on the economic impact of airports, which was sponsored by Pearson. Then to cap it all off on Friday, it ran a piece under the banner “Latest News” headlined “Canadian creators don’t need it and consumers don’t want it—the Online Streaming Act is an expensive fix to a non-existent problem,” that was sponsored by—you guessed it—the DMA.

While The Hub’s journalism has always been pro-free markets and decidedly conservative, it has at least been discernable so far as journalism and no more partisan than some other right-wing news outlets, such as Postmedia’s. The proliferation of sponsored content on its pages is a worrying development, however, especially since it fails to conform to even the most basic ethical requirements, such as being clearly labelled as advertising. The Hub’s statement of its Journalistic Standards and Practices promises that its journalism “will not be influenced or favour partisan political parties, businesses, special interest groups, donors, or advertisers,” but its advertising services include not only custom content but also “advocacy campaigns.”

Also troubling is The Hub’s refusal to address the issue, as I requested comment from its three top editors not once but twice over the space of a week, only to have them unusually ghost me. Given its recent commercial turn, it is hard to resist the conclusion that The Hub is evolving into something a bit more sinister as an influence operation. Part of the problem might be that its founders are not trained journalists imbued in the craft’s ethics, history and methods. The way it is headed, The Hub risks being seen as a sort of fast buck journalistic prostitution ring, which would in turn taint its otherwise earnest analyses and create the perception that its content is for sale to anyone. Then there is the academic aspect, as one wonders what administrators at the august University of Toronto might think of all this.

Even worse, it’s one thing for 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. It makes you wonder how a journalism purist like Menzies might feel about writing sponsored content.

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.