Corporate propaganda is one of the most powerful forces in society today, matched only by the power of government propaganda. Their ascendency is the end result of public relations operatives vastly out-numbering journalists now. But journalism itself is largely a corporate endeavour nowadays. Most of the largest newspapers in Canada are now owned by US hedge funds (also known as vulture capitalists) whose only concern is for the bottom line, forget the truth. Even the social justice bastion Toronto Star, Canada’s largest daily, was taken over by private equity players a couple of years ago. The corporate wizards linked arms recently in a propaganda campaign designed to line their own pockets by weaponizing their power over public perception and thus politics. It is a perversion of journalism.

Newspapers have found it hard to sell advertising in recent years. Most ads now go to Google and Facebook, which have perfected targeted marketing online. Most used to go to newspapers, which have for years been casting a covetous eye on the roaring revenue stream now flowing to the digital giants. They came up with a scheme to recapture some of their lost revenues by persuading the government to force Google and Facebook to redistribute part of their profits back to them. In Canada, the scheme is currently before Parliament in the form of Bill C-18, the Online News Act. It is crony capitalism at its worst.

Key to the scheme is promoting twin fictions, and their success in doing so is a testament to the power of corporate and government propaganda today. The first is that Google and Facebook are “stealing” or now “re-using” news stories from newspapers by carrying links to them, a notion that would be laughable if it hadn’t been swallowed whole by many in power. Newspapers post their articles online in the fervent hope that readers will discover them and thus be exposed to their attendant advertising, for which newspapers get paid by the click. They also hope to sell subscriptions to readers impressed enough with their articles to pay for unlimited access to them. Newspapers should be paying Google and Facebook for promoting their product. Sometimes they do. Instead they now want government to force Google and Facebook to pay them.

The second fiction is that this unfair competition is killing off newspapers. The financial health of newspapers has been the main subject of my research for more than a decade. My 2014 book Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers showed that newspapers in the US and Canada were not losing money as widely believed. My new book, which will be published next month, shows that UK newspapers are more profitable than they have been in many years. They have simply re-arranged their business model to rely less on advertising and more on reader revenues by hiking cover prices and charging for online access, at least after a few free articles. Instead of killing them off, as some predicted, the pandemic accelerated their transition to digital publications, and their online advertising and circulation revenues have soared accordingly. Newspaper profits in Canada have risen for a much different reason. All of the government subsidies they have been receiving, however, have made them dependent on the public purse instead of forcing them to compete and innovate.

The fiction that newspapers are dying is demonstrably untrue. It is demonstrated by the fact that they are almost all still here. Sure, a few small-town weeklies have folded or been merged. A few more small-town dailies have been converted to weeklies or twice-weeklies. Commuter tabloids have certainly bit the dust with the downturn in print advertising. They littered the streets a few years ago but are now found only in a few French editions. This is no huge loss for democracy. Newspaper publishers love to complain that they are dying and need financial assistance. Take this doozy from a few years ago. The late head of Torstar listed 137 community and local newspapers that had folded in the previous decade, but didn’t mention that three dozen of them had just been folded by his chain and Postmedia, which first traded the competing titles like properties on a Monopoly board. They were investigated on criminal charges of conspiracy and monopoly before the somnambulant Competition Bureau quietly dropped the matter despite apparently damning whistleblower evidence.

The funny thing is that the number of community newspapers actually went up from 1,032 to 1,046 that year, according to the annual inventory kept by industry association News Media Canada. That data, which is usually posted promptly on the NMC website, didn’t see the light of day until well after the organization’s five-year, $595 million federal bailout was secured, however. Since 2011, which is when NMC began taking a complete inventory of community newspapers, their number had actually gone up.

The numbers thrown around are as wild as they are unsubstantiated. The think tank Public Policy Forum, which worked closely with NMC in promoting the bailout, picked a number of 225 weekly newspapers lost to closure or merger since 2010, apparently out of the air, for its influential 2016 report The Shattered Mirror. It is all part of a grand deception I unraveled last year in an article published in the peer-reviewed Canadian Journal of Communication, a version of which was also published in Canadian Dimension.

In announcing Bill C-18, the federal Department of Canadian Heritage apparently took the PPF’s number and simply doubled it, stating that “more than 450 news outlets have closed since 2008.” At least I got the Literary Review of Canada to look at the facts and run a correction.

As for daily newspapers, which form the backbone of our nation’s press, the majors are all still here, as far as I can tell. The problem is that NMC quit publishing its list of dailies by circulation a few years ago, and the Audit Bureau of Circulations long since gave up counting. I compiled a list in 2016 that would thus be impossible to make now. But I’m pretty sure the top-50 or so on that list are still here. We would have certainly heard about it had any folded. You might recall the caterwauling in early 2016 when the Guelph Mercury closed, and it was about 50th. Its owner, Torstar, also published the twice-weekly Guelph Tribune and simply decided to quit competing against itself. The Nanaimo Daily News where I live was closed later that month by Black Press, which had just bought it from Glacier Media to add to its twice-weekly News Bulletin. Black and Glacier traded about three dozen BC titles from 2010-15, eventually closing about two dozen of them. The Competition Bureau didn’t utter a peep.

Newspapers aren’t dying. Newspaper competition sure is. Ottawa wouldn’t step in to stop the carnage. Why should it now reward the chains for their treachery? There’s only one possible reason, and it is propaganda.

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.