It’s hard times in the journalism industry, and the government wants to help.
The first part of that sentence isn’t really arguable. News outlets that haven’t shut down completely have significantly downsized, and though there are new sources of news these days, they don’t have anywhere near the kinds of resources that newspapers, magazines and television and radio stations used to have. As a result, many stories go unreported or underreported, and society is poorer for it.
Governments are aware of this and have put forward ways to help. Some make sense and are fairly uncontroversial, like tax credits for news subscriptions or allowing news outlets to receive charitable donations. Others have been spectacular failures, like Bill C-18. Most have been somewhere in between, consisting of direct or indirect funding to those organizations who qualify based on criteria set by bureaucrats at (hopefully) an arm’s length from the political machine.
Deciding who is and isn’t a journalist, and deciding how much money they should get, creates a lot of problems. It could lead to a slippery slope where some CRTC-like body starts micromanaging journalism and infringing (in fact or in practice) on our rights to free expression.
But handing out money isn’t the only thing that could help the news industry these days. Here are 10 suggestions from me on things the government can do that would make things better that don’t include direct handouts.
1. Fix the access to information system
We will make government information more accessible. Government data and information should be open by default, in formats that are modern and easy to use. We will update the Access to Information Act to meet this standard.
— Liberal Party platform, 2015
You’ve heard it before, no doubt. A party in opposition says it’s outraged at how ineffective the access to information system is, and promises to reform it. Then it gets into power and if any changes are made, they’re the kind that look good on paper but horrible in practice.
The law isn’t the problem. In theory it works quite well. A small fee or no fee to make a request, a short deadline to receive a response, an appeals process when a request is denied. All good things.
But the reality is that journalists often have to wait years for responses, and those responses might be heavily redacted, in an unusable format (an Excel spreadsheet exported to PDF, for example), or on an outdated medium like a CD.
If governments, their departments and agencies stopped treating (reasonable) access to information requests as enemies to vanquish, not only could more information get into the hands of journalists, but those journalists could spend more time searching for stories instead of fighting the system.
It would also be extremely helpful if it was codified into law a procedure for people to waive their right to privacy of their personal information so it can be released to a third party. So often journalists will ask a government agency about a particular person’s situation because that person came to the journalist to complain about the bureaucracy, only for the bureaucracy to cite privacy reasons for refusing to confirm information or answer any questions. If a reliably secure method could be found to allow people to consent to sharing of personal information with a journalist, that excuse could be nullified.
2. Have more data available by default
Even better than a better access-to-information system would be a system where you wouldn’t have to file a formal request in the first place because the data are already public.
There was a wave of support for this idea and governments created “open data portals” or even sponsored “hackathons” to show their commitment to the cause. But while a lot of that open data is quite useful (and not just to journalists, but to scientists, app developers and all sorts of other people), it too often ends up being out of date or distracting from much more useful data that could be made open but isn’t. The next point is a prime example of that.
3. Fully digitize and open up the courts
Have you ever looked up a court case at the Palais de Justice in Montreal? You walk in, past airport-style security, and walk up to a computer that looks like it belongs in a 1980s library. Then if you know how to use the ridiculously complicated system, you can find a case number, which you then use to walk up to a counter, wait for someone to come to you, and borrow a physical file folder stuffed with papers.
Or, if you have the money, you can subscribe to a system that will give you access to some of the documents online.
There is no reason the court system has to be this way. These documents were all drafted on computers, why can’t they just be put online for free in the first place?
The pandemic led to journalists being able to access some court proceedings virtually. In an ideal world (with careful consideration for things like publication bans), everything would be open.
4. Make ministries answer journalists’ questions in a reasonable time
Hey, can I get this super-simple question answered? It’s 10am and I’ve just been assigned this story, the journalist says in an email to a minister’s PR flak. No problem, the flak responds, what’s your deadline? Well, it’s whenever you get me an answer, the journalist says, but to get it in the next day’s paper or on tonight’s newscast I’ll need to file by 5pm. OK, the flak says. Finally, at 4:59pm, a response: the minister will not be commenting, but here’s a bunch of boilerplate PR speak about how much the government cares about the overall issue.
It should go without saying that this isn’t helpful. Now I know ministers are busy and don’t have all day to just wait by a phone and compose well-crafted responses to every inquiry. But the flip side is that a journalist asking a question isn’t always looking for the PR answer. Sometimes they just want a fact checked or an issue looked into, or to talk to an expert. The PR machine that has been built up around governments is too concerned with sanitizing to avoid controversy, obfuscating to cover up bad news or just being bureaucratic for its own sake. (We know from access-to-information requests that a lot of these inquiries require way too many approvals from way too many people before they’re answered.)
If PR professionals were allowed to just be helpful, the work of journalists would be a lot easier and make for much better stories. Even better would be if the PR people could be removed from the process entirely, and journalists could talk to actual policy experts, scientists, engineers or decision-makers to find out why things happen the way they do.
5. Fix the online advertising loophole
Before C-18 drew all the media lobbyists’ attention, they pushed for a change to Canadian tax law that would have pushed the scales away from Google and Meta and toward Canadian media companies.
Under Canadian tax law, businesses can deduct advertising expenses from their taxes when those ads are placed in Canadian print publications or broadcast media, but can’t deduct those expenses if they’re placed in foreign print publications or broadcast media if they primarily target Canadians.
The exclusion of foreign-owned media from deductibility does not apply to online media. Meaning that advertising through Google or Facebook is fully tax deductible.
A Senate report in 2018 recommended changing the Income Tax act to close this loophole. But it has sat on a shelf since then.
We can debate whether it makes sense to limit the deductibility of foreign advertising. But it’s hard to make the case that advertising in foreign-owned print publications, television and radio shouldn’t be deductible but advertising on foreign-owned websites should be.
6. Crack down on online ad fraud
Online advertising is much more efficient than legacy media. Rather than taking out a page in a newspaper for thousands of dollars, or a 30-second ad on a broadcast station for hundreds, being exposed to their entire audience regardless of demographic, you can tell an ad network to serve your ad only to those people who tick the right boxes that might get you the best return on investment. On top of that, you can see, in real-time if necessary, how many people are interacting with your ad and going to your website and making purchases.
That sounds great. But the flip side is often you have little realistic control over where your ads appear, and often a lot of the traffic you get on your ad and pay for is fraudulent. Either the ads are placed on sketchy websites that get their traffic from bots, or the ad networks themselves mislead advertisers about what happens to their ads and how they’re displayed. (Even the biggest and most respected companies like Google have been credibly accused of this.)
When faceless people online have a way to get money from you, they’re going to find ways to game the system. And because the ad networks make more money when you pay for more ads, they don’t have much incentive to shut that down.
Governments could do more to regulate online advertising, police it, and prosecute those who engage in ad fraud. Doing so would level the playing field a bit and benefit those legacy businesses where human beings handle advertising. Making online ad networks liable for fraudulent ads would go a long way toward making the marketplace better for both advertisers and media companies.
7. Prosecute those who profit off misinformation
In a perfect world, we could snap our fingers and make all those ad-filled low-quality clickbait farm websites disappear.
But in the actual world, they have a right to exist. We can’t prosecute people for saying things we don’t like or having a website that doesn’t meet our editorial standards.
What we can do, however, is put the screws to those who use outright lies to enrich themselves. Those who say things they know are false to get our attention and then trick people into sending money directly or doing things that earn commissions for the liars.
The government should ensure resources are put into prosecuting misinformation for profit.
8. Make CBC content open
For many private news outlets, their main or even only competition is Canada’s national broadcaster. That has led some news barons to call for CBC to be ordered to stop competing with them. I think that’s a step a bit too far, though I do believe the CBC should focus its energies more on where the for-profit news industry can’t serve.
But I will endorse another idea that has been brought up by a few people: Make CBC’s journalism open. Put it under a Creative Commons licence, something similar or even in the public domain. Let private news outlets, community media, or random bloggers reuse and expand on CBC’s reporting without having to ask permission. Instead of competing with the national broadcaster, it could be used as a resource, like a free wire service, freeing up journalists to focus on other stories that aren’t being covered.
9. Impose stronger local news requirements for radio stations
Most commercial radio stations in Canada are required to have some form of local news, but the CRTC doesn’t specify how much. As a result, it’s very hard to ensure compliance.
The CRTC should set some minimum standard so that radio stations, in particular music stations that still earn a lot of money without having to spend much, are required to spend some of those profits on news content.
10. Provide basic media education to the population
Separating quality news from partisan hackery and organized misinformation is fairly easy for people who know what they’re looking for, but it can be difficult for the general population who don’t know how professional journalism works and haven’t been taught critical thinking skills.
We need to change that, preferably at the high school level. Classes in media law and ethics could help people understand why they should seek out quality journalism and help them judge the sources of information they’re exposed to.
Besides, in a world where everyone is their own media outlet, it’s important for people to understand the legal limits of what they can do when they post on social media.
Bonus: Actually subscribe
Blacklock’s Reporter, a media outlet most Canadians probably don’t know about but that covers the federal government, has been involved in legal battles with the federal government over internal sharing of its content among the federal public service.
You don’t need to be a fan of the news outlet’s tactics (suing so much it seems like that’s a key part of their business model) but if information is worth sharing like this, it’s worth paying for. The federal government should reach a deal with Blacklock’s and other media outlets for group subscriptions that properly compensate news outlets for the content they create and that public employees make available to each other (you know, the stuff the government created a law to force Facebook and Google to do).
It could even include non-news content creators whose works are shared within the government. They, too, deserve compensation for their work if it is of use.
It might be a bit complex to set up (you want to ensure the amount of compensation reflect the amount of useful news being produced and not just give away money to anyone who wants it), but I think it’s worth the effort, both for fairness reasons and as an incentive to produce more useful journalism.
Did I miss anything? Do you have ideas to add to this list? Put them in the comments below.
To point 9, why stop at radio stations? What about television as well? Cases in point are the now Bell Media owned Montreal English properties. What BM did to the once stellar CJAD news department is tragic, if not downright criminal. Similarly, the former CFCF TV, now CTV Montreal, is loaded with “local content” that has nothing to do with the market the outlet serves. Yes, it’s local..to Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and the like. But there is only a smattering of actual Montreal centric news and Quebec issues on the “local” CTV outlet. Then again, we’re talking about Bell Media. It seems to be one of the Golden Children of the CRTC that Ottawa prefers to shelter rather than sanction.
Local television stations already have quotas for local programming and spending on local news.
Fail. Ownership concentration means that local programming is done as nationally as possible. CTV “affiliates” cannot even put anything on the air without Toronto pushing the buttons. It’s not local. Local should be that, locally gathered, locally created, and locally distributed. CTV Montreal cannot go live to air without Toronto. How local is any of that?
The big players have manipulated the system and twisted the CRTC’s arms until whatever they want to call local is local. If a station cannot product and broadcast it’s own content, it isn’t local.
Having the same one news talking head provide news for multiple radio stations doesn’t mean that these stations have met the true concept of local news.
Meeting poorly worded mandates and ignoring the reality on the ground is a real problem.
I may be a bit late to the party but opening the skies up, especially in smaller markets, surely wouldn’t be a bad thing. Opening the skies means to allow more electronic media out lets, be they radio or TV. Look, if I found an open TV frequency in Rouyn, not a hard thing to do, I would be so bogged down with paper work and interventions from whomever is on air there that it would be pointless. This is not going to happen but I think it is worth speculating about. In a lot of, especially smaller, communites, no one is there if a tree falls in the forest. Just saying.
The CRTC exists mostly with two jobs: to assure that there is a constant flow of funds from broadcasters and such to CanCon projects, and to protect large incumbent players to assure that nobody mows their grass.
Want to start a TV station? You have to prove that there are enough profits to go around, that nobody who is currently operating will suffer losses as a result. You will be filing paper until the cows come home, and the others will file things, and the CRTC will likely say “you can’t have a station because Mr Bell says they will lose money”.
Competition is essentially outlawed.
The first part of that is arguably true. The CRTC is generally not going to licence a new station when the market can’t sustain the ones already in place. The second part is not true. If the market is healthy, the CRTC will generally agree to a licence even if it means more competition for incumbent stations that might result in them losing some revenue.
When you say healthy market, it means that there is enough profit to go around. Of course, the big players will say “Local TV doesn’t make money” and there is the response.
In a competitive marketplace, nobody should be guaranteed a profit. If I open a restaurant, I am not assured by the government that I will make money. I compete in the market place. The government issues a license for the place, and good luck.
TV and radio should be no different. As long as there is a available frequency / channel they should be able to come on the air and do what they do. it should be on in the incumbents to provide a good enough service that people don’t go somewhere else for entertainment.
It’s a bit more complicated when considering, say, community radio stations, but revenues are a big part of it. And the big players are correct, local TV doesn’t make money. That’s why no one applies for licences for new TV stations anymore.
That is correct, though you are not occupying a public resource when you open a restaurant. Also, if you’re opening a restaurant in a chain, or taking out a loan to open a restaurant, someone will definitely take a look at the market before deciding whether to support you.
How do you explain the fact that Burlington, a market
A fraction of of the size of Anglo MTL, has 25 over the air
Stations (wcax has multiplexes to 7 and so forth) there are 7 PBS signals and a bazillion local ads sold on cable stations like espn and no one is crying?
The Burlington-Plattsburgh market is about 360,000 people, which is about half the size of the English Montreal market. It has seven TV stations (WCAX/CBS, WPTZ/NBC, WFFF/FOX, WVNY/ABC, WETK/VPBS, WCFE/MLPBS and WNNE/CW), most of which run multiple channels, the non-main ones consisting mainly of cheap rerun programming. The five private stations are operated by three companies (Hearst for WPTZ/WNNE, Gray for WCAX, Nexstar for WVNY/WFFF). And perhaps most importantly, U.S. local TV stations receive monetary compensation from cable TV distributors, something that isn’t allowed in Canada.
I haven’t studied whether Burlington/Plattsburgh stations have more local advertising than Montreal stations do. Local advertising is generally not permitted on Canadian cable channels, to protect local stations.
You don’t have to study Plattsburg/Burlington TV to see if they have local advertising. They do. Watch their non sim subbed shows, like the five am news. Rife with local small businesses hawking their wares.
Secondly, you are correct when you posit that the CRTC doesn’t allow local ads on cable. Well intentioned it may be but what it does is drive up the cot of local ads which puts them out of reach of small businesses. Cable provides a narrow target. At a cheap rate. For example if one is promoting a Black comedy show, Live at the Apollo is a great buy because there is little waste in the audience. 10 dollars for a 30 second spot reaching that demographic is a deal and a steal. Buying a 30 during reg chans programming is both expensive and wasteful.
Harold Cummings would have loved cable; he couldn’t afford CTV today.
Dan Shields
Nobody applies for local TV licenses for a number of reasons. Let us consider:
As the “cable” companies (distributors) are also the owners of the major networks and most of the local stations, they have done nothing to support local channels. They have not worked to correct the unbalance of local stations not getting benefits of income from cable distribution.
In an honest marketplace where the owners of the stations and the owners of the distribution were different, this would have been resolved ages ago. CRTC made the mistake of allowing media concentration instead.
As the network owners also own most of the local stations, they have little or no reason to consider signing anyone as an affiliate station. So there is no potential for a new station to come into the market and disrupt the landscape. Big players aren’t going to affiliate and harm their own local station even if it is losing money. Why? they aren’t really losing money on aggregate, only on the narrow focus.
Your arguments would hold more water if we were short of the public resource (frequencies / channels) but really we are not even close in the TV band. There is space for significant more channels in every Canadian market.
Given that there is little chance to enter into the market on an equal basis, of course nobody wants in. Since the late 80s the CRTC has been systematically tilting the entire broadcast and distribution world to heavily favor an extremely limited number of incumbent players and has allowed them to amass fortress level holdings in most markets and most verticals. Bell still makes billions. It’s no unprofitable. Things have been structured to make certain areas unprofitable, which creates that high barrier to entry you allude to.
Local stations *do* benefit from cable distribution, through the CRTC’s rules on distributors funding local programming as well as the Independent Local News Fund. Direct payment to local stations from distributors was tried but overturned after a court challenge. I suppose the broadcasters could have pushed for changes in the Copyright Act and Broadcasting Act to bring back direct compensation, but I’m not sure it would have worked.
And yet CTV, Global, Citytv, TVA and Noovo all have privately owned affiliates. Not many, but they exist. The only networks that dropped their affiliates in recent years were CBC and Radio-Canada.
If you mean having an affiliate station in the same market as an owned-and-operated station, then yes, they would not add an affiliate there.
Things have gotten tighter a bit since the shrinking of the TV broadcast band, so it might be difficult in somewhere like Toronto, but generally speaking you are correct, finding an available channel is not a significant obstacle to starting a new TV station in Canada.
It’s definitely a structural issue. But pointing to large vertically integrated media companies and suggesting everything would be fixed if we broke them up is pretending that structural issue doesn’t exist.
One more thing, and the article is brilliant Mr. Steve. Cameras in the court room. Streaming live.
Wow, so many ideas, so many of them not practical:
1: Freedom of information is always a balance between information and the nature of the information. Privacy, national security, and many other things come into play when you make such an inquiry. Simply put, there are never going to be enough lawyers and enough clerks, and enough staff to answer lame fishing expeditions quickly enough to make you happy.
2: You cannot make data just plain open when it may touch people’s lives, privacy, or national security. Can you imagine all of your email dumped in public without context?
3: digitize the courts: Non starter for now, likely for the next many years to come. At the end of the day, the signed document, ink on paper, is the only thing that matters in law. Everything else is fluff. The system exists to make sure things are right, not that things are easy for reporters. Sorry!
4: how about “make journalists only ask meaningful questions and not the general nonsense that goes on these days”? A simple response to an inquiry can take a while, with research, information, verification, legal, and so on. There are no simple on the record answers. (see point 1)
5: Advertising is bought from Google Canada and Facebook Canada. Would you deny a tax credit for the National Post because they put some copies on airplanes that travel to the US? Or that their websites may be visited from outside of Canada? Stop blaming Google and Facebook for doing a better job at attracting a crowd. Be thankful they send you millions of visitors a month.
6: Online ad fraud is a joke. Yes, it exists, yes it happens. Reality though is paying a newspaper for an ad, for a printed paper that ends up unopened in a car dealership or sitting in a closet of an airplane unread, and saying that the newspaper has X readers because of that distribution is also pretty misleading. We all know that traditional ad response rates were something well under 1%. Scale, you know? Plus if the fraud was that bad, the advertisers would be flooding back to traditional marketers. Since they are not, well… ;)
7: Fraud is fraud and should be prosecuted. But misinformation is most often intentional omission, and not outright fraud. By what you are saying here, all political parties would be in serious legal trouble, because they all play with misinformation and misrepresentation of facts to shade to their benefits. Even two different newspapers will tell the story in a different way – which one goes to jail?
8: You can cite the CBC as a source already. You just have to do some of your own leg work. Don’t be lazy.
9: Will never happen under the current system. Oligopoly players control too much now, and they have found the route to profits is in cutting staff, especially around news. Canadian broadcasting (radio and TV) is in a death spiral because just like newspapers, they continue to try to shrink to profitability. The current ownership issues will not allow this to change. So you have to go back and change the basis of ownership and the economics of broadcasting in Canada. That is not simple, the big companies hold the politicians by the short and curlies.
10: We have a hard enough time giving kids a basic education right now. Teaching is still working in a 1960s mentality with few exceptions, and the kids are just no longer there. It is another case of something so fundamentally broken that nothing short of a clean slate will fix it. Even then, the politicians will get involved, the language cops will get their day, and the whole thing will still be broken.
1. Journalists’ expectations when it comes to freedom of information is literally just that the government complies with its own law. I don’t think that’s too high a bar.
2. I am not asking for personal information to be included in this. I don’t think it’s that difficult to tell which databases contain confidential personal information and which don’t.
3. This is a ridiculous argument since the documents are already digitized.
4. My argument isn’t about the kinds of questions asked during scrums you see on TV. These are mainly requests for information. And what takes “a while” isn’t verification or research, it’s bureaucratic and political approval. If journalists had direct access to policy experts, scientists and other public servants, things would operate a lot more efficiently.
5.
No, and I don’t see how that is an argument for anything.
6.
This is why newspaper audience is measured not just by circulation but by reader surveys from independent agencies.
The problem is that they don’t know how much of their traffic is fraudulent. It’s an opaque system that doesn’t give the information necessary to make informed choices. And many advertisers are, indeed, turning to other sources.
7.
We can start with the actual lies first. I’m not arguing for regulating spin or even exaggerated clickbait.
8. Citing a source is different from using a source. News outlets can cite The Canadian Press, but they still subscribe to it for a reason.
9. “It’s hopeless, give up” is not a good argument against doing something.
10. See #9.
1: To respect the law, you have to respect all parties involved. There are many government documents that are NOT for open public viewing. From state secrets to personal information, there are many reasons things are not specifically public. Before they had you a folder of data, they need (obliged by law) to make sure they aren’t handing you that sort of information.
2: See 1… it isn’t just databased that have name and address in it, but documents that may make reference to a person or entity. It often happens that people read 3 or 4 “unrelated” documents that each have a small piece of personal information, which when combined, reveals personal information and connects things in ways you don’t consider. Again, see 1.
3: Again, see 1. Some court cases are under seal, may have MANY documents that are not public, things that happened in a closed court, contain personal information, etc. Gatekeeper types are there to try to keep error rates down.
4: See 1 again. Request for information need to be checked to make sure that various forms of invalid data are not spread. Further, do you think the ministers etc have nothing better to do all day than answer your endless requests? They have a budget for staff, and they work with that. So unless you want to give them a whole lot more money to hire more people to do your bidding well…
6: Ahh, sore spot? Online advertising goes through the same process, and then some. With millions of SPEFICIC and measurable datapoints, it is much easier to know if your advertising is effective. You aren’t depending on surveys and people’s memories. You get to know exactly where each sale or successful transaction came from. Fraud exists. As you have said before, it is about results. Print and broadcast media perhaps aren’t delivering the results.
7: Ad networks do demonetize sites all the time. If the sites don’t perform, over time, they tend to get removed or shipped only such low quality ads that there is no money in it. If the government stop worrying about trying to CanCon the internet and worked harder on outright fraud…
8: Using a source is called “too lazy to do it ourselves”. Cite them and do your own background work. It’s how we avoid getting the exact same story pushed in our faces by different media outlets.
9: It isn’t that it is hopeless. The old adage is if you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. Concentration of media ownership has been a one way ticket to hell for news and information in Canada. You work for a newspaper that use to have a building full of staff, and now you would have a hard time filling a short bus. CFCF use to be a massive building and tons of staff at 405 Ogilvy ave., now it’s basically a floor on a small footprint office tower.
It isn’t hopeless, but you have to break eggs to make an omelet. The current situation in broadcast and print media is absolutely deck chairs on the Titanic. Trying to sucker Facebook and Google into handing over money for having the horrible luck of sending millions of free visitors to media sites is an act of desperation to preserve what should have already failed.
Knowing all of this, change needs to happen. it’s not hopeless, but it’s going to be a little bit sad as the artificial props are removed and failures are allowed to happen so new things can grow.
10: See 8. First step is admitting the problem, and dealing not with some vaguely relevant nearby issue but to address the actual issues. Schools are not going the job we need them to do, and given the current trajectory, it gets worse. So rather than waiting to watch the destruction of generation over generation, perhaps working to change would be the idea?
I don’t think THAT many government or court documents have personal confidential information in them that they need to be made unavailable in such a blanket way. I think it would not be that difficult to make more documents available by default where the risk of confidential information becoming public is negligible. When it comes to the courts, this separation is already done, so that isn’t what’s stopping these documents from being made available online.
Does number 7 mean no more religious liars ripping off people?
Maybe? It depends what they say. I don’t want to start a war over religious freedom, but some of the more extreme ripoffs could definitely be looked at.
I was referring to cons like Joel Osteen and the others.
A large part of the problem is that what journalists think is a very simple question and what is answerable simply are two very different things. For example, consider the question (which I have seen) “How much did Dept X spend of flat-screen TVs in year Y?” Super easy, right?
No. Nobody collects that sort of granular information at a department level. Purchasing authority is delegated downwards, so anyone with any hardware purchasing authority could have bought those TVs. Which means the department has to gather information from all those cost centres and combine it. Time is money, friend.
Next, it’s extremely unlikely that everyone bought the TVs and coded them as “TV”s. Maybe if there was a mass kit-out, but they might also have been bought under a general maintenance fund to replace broken equipment, so we can tell you we spent $X on hardware replacement. Or bought as part of a per-meeting room package i.e. We spent $Z kitting out meeting rooms, and it included TVs.
There’s also accounting ambiguities e.g. We contracted $X for TVs in FY 20xx-20xy, but didn’t finish paying until they year after. How do you want to account for that?
This is a good point, but it’s not quite what I’m talking about. Access to information requests usually don’t result in day-of responses for this reason. Sometimes the information is hard to compile. Explaining that to journalists will usually result in them being understanding about it.
What I’m talking about is more like a journalist asking a minister for a simple fact or reaction, the PR people sending a bunch of emails to each other wondering how to respond (knowing full well what the actual answer is), and then sending a carefully-crafted non-response at 4:59pm.
Don’t confuse fact and opinion. Reactions are NOT freedom of information items, ministers may choose to say nothing. They may choose to wait for their party, their leader, the government of the day to take a stand and react in a similar manner. You cannot oblige them to give you opinion.
Facts? Well, even those aren’t so simple, especially when they involve what people have said, what someone says they saw, and so on. Again, they may not want to “confirm” a fact that isn’t actually a fact.
Their carefully crafted non-response is for any numbers of reasons. There is no freedom of information act type thing that forces them to answer to you at YOUR convenience.
Right, I’m not talking about these things. I’m talking about cases where they absolutely do know the answer, and that answer is not an opinion, but they’re consulting internally to determine how to spin that answer to make it seem like the fact does not make them look bad.
And if PR people explain that a minister doesn’t want to comment, or a fact needs to be checked, journalists are generally pretty accommodating about that.
You are correct. However, when you ask a minister to “confirm a fact” you are essentially asking them to stake their reputation and the government’s position at the same time. By asking them to confirm something, you are marrying them to it.
What you really want is “Facts Canada”, a non-political office that confirms ‘facts’. Then you don’t have to bother the minister unless you also want their take on it.
If the issue is that they need more time to confirm a fact, then that’s understandable. I’m talking about delays created solely for the purposes of (a) crafting a statement that obscures the truth or saying things irrelevant to the question being asked, and (b) manipulating the journalist so they don’t have time to file a proper story by their deadline.
I’ll settle for government bureaucrats who know facts being allowed to speak to the media.