Thread by @CailinasEirinn

#mediapetition

Thread

Here is the text of the Petition which was filed this afternoon:

Petition to the Government of Canada
Whereas:

•Federal inquiries going back 50 years warned Canadians about the dangers of growing media ownership concentration, including Reports of the Special Senate Committee on Mass Media (1970), the Royal Commission on Newspapers (1981), the Senate Committee on News Media (2006),

and the Heritage Committee on Media and Local Communities (2017);

•All these reports urged measures to check concentration and then newspaper-television “convergence,” but few were taken;

•By 2010, convergence left our news media in ruins; we are now bailing out Big Media;

•As Marc Edge noted in his recent book The News We Deserve, their pages have been stripped of local news and filled instead with corporate and political propaganda; and

•In 2015, Postmedia merged the newsrooms of its duopoly dailies in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa despite promising not to; and Federal Assistance to news media outlets of $595 million was provided in the 2019 Federal Budget.

We, the undersigned, citizens and residents of Canada, call upon the Government of Canada to use our tax dollars to foster a more pluralistic Canadian news media by providing subsidies only to Canadian-owned publications,

as a free and diverse press is essential to a healthy democracy.