{"id":293123,"date":"2016-02-21T13:42:25","date_gmt":"2016-02-21T18:42:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/2016\/02\/fourth-estate-the-fifth-business-of-democracy\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T15:25:41","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T19:25:41","slug":"fourth-estate-the-fifth-business-of-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2016\/02\/fourth-estate-the-fifth-business-of-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Fourth estate: The Fifth Business of democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent\u00a0column<\/a>, Andrew Coyne used the Alberta NDP’s short-lived barring of The Rebel Media’s correspondent from legislature briefings to a more general issue of state-media relationships, pivoting from a quick and justified excoriation of the Alberta government for barring a very partisan\u00a0journalist to a larger debate\u00a0about the role of the state in media, including whether the state should be funding a broadcaster such as the CBC.<\/p>\n

I want to focus on two points of disagreement with Coyne: one empirical, and one more an issue of fundamental values regarding whether the media is in fact a public good.\u00a0The empirical issue concerns the claim that the presence of a state-subsidized\u00a0broadcaster, particularly the written content it posts online, represents unfair and source of competition for newspapers in the country. Given parlous state of the industry, Coyne and others argue the additional competition for eyeballs is simply helping to dig the graves of Canada’s once great newspapers. Ergo, the CBC ought to lose its funding, along with any other pieces that fall off as a result.<\/p>\n

It is obvious to all that, newspapers in this country are in a bad way. In the context of the CBC debate however, the\u00a0question is\u00a0how much that is a function of a decline in readership (credit to Robert Hiltz for\u00a0pointing this out on twitter<\/a>).\u00a0According to figures on Wikipedia<\/a> (I can’t independently verify these results as sources are waved at but not linked to, so take the following with a grain of salt) subscriptions for the top 25 papers in the country declined about 5% a year from 2007-2011. It seems safe to assume they\u00a0have continued to do so since then. Unfortunately however, that’s not even the real problem. The real problem is the vaporization of advertising money.<\/p>\n

A Statistics Canada newspaper publisher survey from 2006 (back when newspaper revenues were growing, if you can imagine)\u00a0makes clear just how bad the situation is, and how little that decline has to do with subscribers. Table 1 (original found\u00a0here<\/a>) tells the story. Circulation accounted for just 17% of total revenues. Advertising, meanwhile, accounted for more than 75%.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

That puts the “CBC issue” in context. A 20% drop in subscriptions across the industry amounts to about 3.5% decline in revenues. In reality, any effect of CBC competition on those subscriptions is modest, constituting a marginal effect on a marginal effect. If newspapers are dying, it’s a\u00a0decline in advertising revenue,\u00a0perhaps helped along by a debt-fuelled\u00a0quest for consolidation<\/a>,\u00a0that’s killing them.<\/p>\n

One more chart makes the point clear, this time from\u00a0a Pew Center study<\/a> of US media that found a 60% drop in newspaper ad revenues from 2006-2014.\u00a0Advertising was the lifeblood of the industry, and much of it simply evaporated over the last decade.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

The instinct to blame the CBC is just that, an instinct\u2014a solution in search of a problem. (It’s a bit like, oh, say invading a third country that you have a longstanding dislike for after\u00a0suffering an\u00a0attack from\u00a0second country, to pull a totally hypothetical example out of the air.) There may be arguments for\u00a0defunding the CBC, but this isn’t a convincing\u00a0one.<\/p>\n

This brings up the second point I referred to earlier\u2014the more general idea that media is, in Coyne’s words, “not a public good.” This is a strange argument to make given the crucial role played by free media in a democratic society; on its surface it seems unsustainable. Robert Dahl, for instance, places access to alternative sources information among the definitional requirements of Polyarchy, and there is broad consensus that free and competitive media constitutes a necessary element of that access\u2014that whole fourth estate business. \u00a0It is for that reason that democratic observatories track press freedom across the world. To give it a more particularly Canadian spin,\u00a0media has\u00a0some of the\u00a0character of Fifth Business that\u00a0Davies describes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Those roles which, being neither those of hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were none the less essential to bring about the Recognition or the denouement were called the Fifth Business in drama and Opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That is, media is the Fifth Business of democracy, no less\u00a0essential to its functioning despite its lack of formal role in the political process.<\/p>\n

The claim that media are not a public good really only makes sense in that it plausible\u2014and useful, given Coyne’s\u00a0point\u2014to argue that no particular media outlet provides\u00a0a public good, that the service to the public emerges as a sort of gestalt, the product of an industry as a whole. That’s fine, but when it’s the industry as a whole that is\u00a0under sustained attack, then we are indeed talking about the loss of a public good\u2014a Cornerstone of Democracy no less\u2014and we must think seriously about the implications.<\/p>\n

Certainly, as Coyne says the state ought not and in any case cannot fund the entire media industry, but the market is no longer doing so reliably either. It’s likewise\u00a0fair to may question if the\u00a0recently struck House of Commons committee<\/a>\u00a0will produce helpful solutions, particularly in light of the external source of the problem,\u00a0but they do require thought. Canada cannot function as a democracy without citizens having access to multiple independent sources of information, and\u00a0we cannot take for granted the idea that the market will provide that access going forward.<\/p>\n

For what it’s worth, I look to the smaller providers\u2014lively locals like the North Shore News<\/a>, niche\u00a0online sites like\u00a0Canadaland<\/a>, and even smaller experiments like former Citizen comment editor James Gordon’s new startup\u00a0The Ottawa Report<\/a>\u2014as potential future models for news media, offering targeted content that larger aggregators cannot (or don’t bother to) replicate, and surviving in return on some combination of local advertising and donation. Bigger may no longer be better in the news industry. In addition, the latter two examples have\u00a0a further advantage as\u00a0new startups free of corporate debt and other baggage, and accordingly\u00a0will stand\u00a0on their own merits, independent of the fate of some larger enterprise.<\/p>\n

Regardless, in the meantime, as the committee begins its meetings and the for-profit sector continues its painful restructuring, one might even come to appreciate the presence of an island of relative stability, even one funded in part by the state, until a new\u00a0and more stable private media industry emerges.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it’s time to tweet\u00a0Mark Zuckerberg, and ask\u00a0for a billion dollar\u00a0loan<\/a>\u00a0for Canadian newspapers.\u00a0He\u00a0at least has had something to do\u00a0with their decline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a recent\u00a0column, Andrew Coyne used the Alberta NDP’s short-lived barring of The Rebel Media’s correspondent from legislature briefings to a more general issue of state-media relationships, pivoting from a quick and justified excoriation of the Alberta government for barring a very partisan\u00a0journalist to a larger debate\u00a0about the role of the state in media, including […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":913,"featured_media":293119,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[8394,9212,8413],"article-status":[],"irpp-category":[],"section":[],"irpp-tag":[],"class_list":["post-293123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-cbc-radio-canada-fr","tag-democratie","tag-journalism-fr"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFourth estate: The Fifth Business of 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