And having said we’ve arrived at the worst of all worlds, all this presents an obvious chance for things to get much worse indeed. The Liberal government provides robust taxpayer subsidies to the media — some more directly, as with newspaper publishers like Postmedia (which owns National Post), and some of it more indirectly to broadcasters like CTV, through program funding, licences, and market protection.
A bare minimum for supporting those subsidies is that your government shouldn’t play favourites with the media according to ideological leanings. (Or at least you should cloak such decisions in the language of not meeting “journalistic standards.”) And yet, Noorhamed in particular — who, remember, is parliamentary secretary to the minister responsible for these handouts — is always eager to criticize Postmedia for criticizing the Liberal government … because Postmedia collects government subsidy.
“Your paper wouldn’t be in business were it not for the subsidies that the government that you hate put in place — the same subsidies your Trump-adjacent foreign hedge fund owners gladly take to pay your salary,”
Noormohamed chided National Post columnist Terry Newman earlier this month —
not for the first time.
Noorhamed and other Liberals often sound like they absolutely hate their own media-subsidy programs, precisely because they contribute to what they consider “bad” journalism — i.e., journalism that criticizes them, focuses on their idea of “the wrong things,” spreads their idea of “misinformation.” It’s not hard to imagine the Liberals altering the “standards” for subsidies in the future to more shamelessly suit their purposes (or it wouldn’t be hard to imagine that, if political oblivion weren’t stalking the Liberals like a leopard does a particularly succulent antelope).
