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BIGGER THAN ME PODCAST
179. Holly Doan: Are Government Subsidies Destroying Trust in Media?
Aaron Pete sits down with Holly Doan, publisher of Blacklock's Reporter, to explore media bias, government subsidies, True North Media, defunding the CBC, Joe Rogan's Trump interview, and the critical role of independent journalism in Canada.
Welcome back to another episode of the Bigger Than Me podcast.
Aaron Pete:Here is your host, aaron Peet.
Aaron Pete:What is the role of journalists? My personal belief is that they are there to hold power accountable, but many don't feel that legacy media does this anymore and there are more and more calls to defund the CBC. Are they right, or is independent media going to help balance the scales? I'm speaking with the publisher of Black Locks Reporter. We discuss media bias, the CBC, true North Media, government accountability and the future of news. My guest today is Holly Doan. Holly, thank you so much for coming on. It was an honour to speak with you on the Lean Out podcast with Tara Henley and I was super excited to sit down with you to dive more deeply into some of these topics. But first would you mind introducing yourself to people who might not be acquainted with your work?
Holly Doan:My name is Holly Doan. I am a 42-year career journalist with a background in mainstream media, and in 2012, we launched Black Locks Reporter, an online news agency on Parliament Hill that covers government affairs, and I am the publisher, and it's great to see you again.
Aaron Pete:Fantastic. Would we be able to start with what is state-funded media from your perspective?
Holly Doan:You know that word state-funded media drives some people over the cliff. You know that right, I did not know that word state-funded media drives some people over the cliff, you know that right.
Aaron Pete:I did not know that.
Holly Doan:Well, I heard a debate about defunding the CBC recently where one of the people who objected to CBC called them state-funded media, and I think we're rightfully corrected that they are and their mission was to be publicly funded media.
Holly Doan:State-funded media suggests that you are a mouthpiece for the state. Now you're going to talk to lots of people who say that's what CBC has become. But what is the function for publicly funded media? I think it's changed. When Arby Bennett, a very conservative prime minister, established the CBC in 1935, first as a radio network, the idea was to stitch together this disparate country with all its regions and to give us a voice that was distinctly not the Americans, and for many years it really did serve that purpose, I would say right through the era of my childhood and up, even through the time that I worked there, which was for five years in 1998 to 93,. I think the CBC has lost its way and it really needs to have its mandate and tell Parliament, tell it again, what its mandate should be, that is, if it can manage that before it is defunded by any future administration, which is doubtful.
Aaron Pete:How do these government subsidies actually work?
Holly Doan:Well, there's a palette of subsidies. There's the ones that have been around forever that maybe you've heard of, like the Periodical Fund, which was always set up to assist magazines. Periodicals like, say, maclean's Magazine has received around a million and a half from the periodical fund for as long as I can remember, but in 2018, the government introduced an order, after a call from the news media publishers of the main legacy press, to introduce income supports to publishers. That's what people generally think of when they hear media subsidies, or media bailout is a derogatory term, and what it does is it subsidizes newsrooms per head. So if you have 30 newsroom employees, you are subsidized up to a maximum of $29,000, depending on how much they earn, of course, and so what that has done for many news organizations it is now the staple, the lifeblood, the mainstream of its funding.
Holly Doan:For many not all, but I think we're headed in this way comes from media subsidies. There have been others, of course. There was a fund for local journalism still exists, which is exists, which fully covers a reporter doing local journalism in smaller, local newsrooms. There has also been emergency support to publishers during the pandemic, when their advertising, which was already crashing, was decimated. That has now run out, and the publishers themselves have now renewed their call for subsidies to be extended or made permanent.
Aaron Pete:Interesting and do you think that these subsidies are helpful? Do you think we should review this process? What are your perspectives on them?
Holly Doan:I think, which is something we thought in 2018, when we at BlackLux decided we would never take the subsidies. I don't think they've been helpful. I'm going to express a controversial view here, but welfare never really makes you retool, rethink or become better, because you are not working under necessity. And so if you look at the newspapers now, compared to what they promised in 2018, there's not much difference in the product. So, for instance, in 2019, the chair of News Media Canada, a fellow by the name of Bob Cox, went to the finance committee.
Holly Doan:I was there and promised that this was not a bailout, that this was not permanent, that this was temporary. He said quote media has we have to save ourselves. And so the government of the day accepted that, accepted that message they got from the lobbyists that this was temporary until they could sort out the problem. Your paper hasn't changed. It's probably laid off people. It's gotten worse. The business model is exactly the same, only now they are more reliant on subsidies and they no longer accept that they have to adapt to the new medium. They have instead suggested that subsidies should be permanent and that Google and Facebook, et cetera, are to blame and that they must pay journalists to carry their content.
Aaron Pete:Should we defund the CBC from your perspective?
Holly Doan:Oh, gosh, I hate this question, you know. I mean, if you'd asked me, say last week, I might have said well, wow, that's 10,000 employees. I started at the CBC. I'm CBC trained. They taught me in those days the basics of how to cover a hotel fire. Without those opportunities I might never have become a national reporter for CTV, I might never have become a bureau chief. I might never have learned how to do access to information. I've relied on all those things that really started with the CBC, but there were other local news outlets doing the same thing.
Holly Doan:The problem is that they have drifted so far from their mandate that they're not really training people like me anymore. In fact, people like me that focus on government accountability and edgy content are not particularly welcome at the CBC anymore. So while I have pangs of discomfort over, say, the Conservatives' hashtag, defund the CBC campaign, I then see the president of CBC, catherine Tate, come to testify at Commons or Senate committee and, by the way, black Lux covers CBC annual reports, advertising revenues, staff bonuses, all that. And I see the president not really accepting that they have to change, that their mandate has to be different, that any of the blame lies with CBC. She blames everybody else She'll blame misinformation, she'll blame bad political actors, she'll blame Google and Facebook. I think that this argument now is a little tired. Yes, the internet disrupted our business model in a way that has disrupted almost no other business maybe book publishing but it's not going to change. We can't really put the genie back in the bottle. So the CBC.
Holly Doan:One of its proposals which I guarantee you're going to see when the Heritage Ministers Committee reports back very soon on the future of the CBC what to do with the CBC. One of the things they're going to recommend is that the CBC get out of advertising. One of the things they're going to recommend is that the cbc get out of advertising, which private broadcasters have called for for many years. Problem there's no money in advertising now. So cbc is being a little bit disingenuous when it says hey, we'll get out of advertising, we'll leave that to the, to the, to the private broadcasters when they can't sell any ads anyway, and and the.
Holly Doan:The quid pro quo with that is going to be see, we've got enough advertising, we'll leave it to you, but you have to up our annual fund to compensate for advertising. In other words, we'll be completely funded. That's not innovative. That isn't responding to what the public is asking for. That isn't even preparing yourself to an existential threat, which is a guy named Pierre Polyev who, by the way, cbcd funding and the new government would act within the first 100 days. The severity and the extent of that we don't know, but I think they've blown it. They blew their good 10 years after they lost hockey, which is why this has happened. They blew the opportunity to do something different, which is why this has happened.
Aaron Pete:They blew the opportunity to do something different. What do you think the impact of these subsidies are on independent journalists, independent media willing to create innovative solutions? I've spoken to Farhan Mohamed, who's one of the leaders of the Overstory Media Group. They've created e-newsletters that kind of collate and put together newsletters that summarize basically the news of the day from across different news organizations, including their own, and then they do more in-depth reporting on local journalism. But they're relying highly on subscriptions and it feels like their business model is being discouraged. Because CBC is free, these other news organizations are offering a free product. So when you're asking for a higher quality product that actually costs money or that you can do a subscription service for, it seems like they're fighting up against something that's free, even though it's being paid for the taxpayers themselves. So what are your thoughts on the impact of these, these subsidies, on independent journalists?
Holly Doan:well, if we're talking about the business model and it sounds like you are um the, the, the organization you cite I assume, when they you say they're providing news from other outlets, that these are other free products that they're aggregating or distributing yes, uh like black press and stuff, and they just put like a link to that news article so you can go.
Holly Doan:OK, and those links are generally to articles that are not paywalled Correct Right, ok, so they are able to in some ways profit off somebody else's content. That's what aggregators have always done. Which aggregators were the enemy?
Aaron Pete:because they were like middlemen.
Holly Doan:They were the ones that were scooping up the labor, labor intensive, expensive journalism and then repurposing it. However, if they're also producing some content themselves, it sounds like they're trying to figure out what the model is to provide as much content to people at as low a cost as possible, because this is something we hear that, oh, your product is great at Black Locks Reporter, but it's so expensive. Well, we don't take subsidies, and investigative or document journalism is expensive, so I guess we're only targeting people who want to pay. That money Sounds elitist. But if you're a small business, we're not going to give it away for free just so that we can go out of business. That's not doable. But what you're seeing in the organization you cite, or ours or others and this is the difference in the actions of legacy media and small independent upstarts is that, like any small business, independents are fighting for their lives all the time. They have to be innovative, they have to modify what they're doing, they have to make corrections all the time. You know, for instance, ours we focus on content. Our business model a hard paywall with an allegedly expensive subscription at $300 a year has never changed in 12 years. What has changed is what any small business would do. Oh, the stories about this subject aren't as interesting to people who are going to put up money as the stories about these other subjects. Now, it doesn't mean we drop the dogs, it just means that we might cover them in a different way. So Blacklock's focus is it's all about your money. So if we're going to do, for instance, an Indigenous story, we're not going to compete with all of the reconciliation stories that you see on CBC and elsewhere. We're going to talk about the dual department of Government of Canada Indigenous Services and Crown Indigenous and how much bureaucracy they've created and whether they've changed the definition of boil water, of safe drinking water, so that they can meet their targets. That's how Black Locks would cover the Indigenous story.
Holly Doan:So why are we doing this? Isn't journalism supposed to be about profound things and just helping to shape society that matter? No, no. That's the problem with many journalists now is they somehow see it a mission to make a better Canada. I'm not here to make a better Canada. I am just here to tell you things that the government is doing, that the government would rather you don't know. And then, if that affects your family's pocketbook, that's maybe useful to you. If it affects your organization's members. If you're a union or an industry association and you really need to know about that, then that's valuable to you. But you know we don't pretend to try to remake Canada in the image of progressives or right-wing or anything. That's never going to be possible to do.
Holly Doan:Unfortunately, a lot of journalists in the last generation or so, as the as the industry has become more, shall I say, professionalized that journalists now don't graduate with a hunger to find information. They graduate with an idea of a better Canada and so they want to be as they are, professionalized with associations and awards and all these sojourns in other countries to study journalism. They become like other professions and they wish to join the country's elite in offering advice for how government should operate. What they've failed to recognize is that your public doesn't want that. Because if you're busy making a better Canada, who's telling me about what happened at Fisheries Committee? Or who's telling me about public accounts and the line item in public accounts which was not what they promised in the budget speech, right, who's telling you about that if journalism has taken on some other kind of mission?
Holly Doan:We always like to say that in the first half of the 20th century journalists were not very well paid. They were ink-stained scribes that ran around calling in their tidbits the old cliche of the fat little man with a press card in his hat and as they became professional but they hustled. And as they became professionalized they changed into people who go to seminars and give speeches at universities. So what we have now is we have a profession that used to be the brightest of the working class, is now the dullest of the upper class, and they are failing Canadians. Just learn how to read a budget. That's all you have to do.
Aaron Pete:This is really interesting. One of my favorite shows is the Newsroom. I watch it almost every year to refresh myself in what makes a good interview, but sort of the important pieces of the philosophy that a journalist should have, if you're going to trust them.
Holly Doan:What do you learn?
Aaron Pete:there. So the newsroom. I think it's one of the best shows because they didn't try and go seven seasons and a movie. They didn't try and go big. They just tried to deliver to you that the great goal of people in media is to deliver the information, not dumb down the content for their viewers. Try and educate them, embrace the complexity of topics, expect higher of their audience and push them to understand things in a deeper way. And it's those philosophies I try and pull into this.
Aaron Pete:I don't think the working class or people in poverty are stupid and need to have them spoon-fed information. I believe that when you explain things and walk through a process or a system to people, they understand it and they want to see changes, and I believe that's how most people feel. I think that's why podcasts are taking off is because people can sit down and listen to three hours of a neuroscientist named Andrew Huberman, break down how your body functions, and I don't think a lot of the media understands that it's still four minute segments on a topic, got to move on, got to switch to commercial or something like that, and we're ready for a more complex dialogue than that and I think we underestimate the Canadian populace or people in general, at our own detriment. And that's one of the biggest lessons that I love about independent journalists is they kind of embrace their niche or their area and expect higher of their audience to start to follow along their journey with them. Is this, are we on?
Holly Doan:the same wavelength in regards to this Remember I was saying earlier about independent media has to be really attached to their listeners or readers to know what they want, to know if we're giving the right product or not. I'll tell you one little fun fact I've noticed about our readers is that the people least likely to pay for a $300 subscription of all the professions, of all the professions, take a guess, can I guess? Truckers, ha, academics, wow, they get it all free through the university and they're not opening their wallet with their tenured income to pay for media. And those people that this this is generalizing, but it has been 12 years. I noticed the subscribers, I noticed who's subscribing, I talked to them. The group most likely to subscribe to a $300 product is who? Take a guess.
Aaron Pete:The first question I thought it was who's least likely that you wouldn't expect that does I would have guessed truckers oh okay, yeah, so the least likely to subscribe in other words, they don't is academics.
Holly Doan:The most likely to subscribe is small business. Wow, they don't have the highest incomes. They're often overlooked in government policymaking. They work 12 hours a day. Who would think they have an extra 300 bucks to spend on media? That sounds like a luxury, but what they need is information. The information has value to them and that's a clue, that's a real clue to rebuilding the business model. So you know, in terms of extracting government information, I also like to say to people look, we don't cover what government, what politicians say.
Holly Doan:We don't go to news conferences or watch Question Period. Really, we don't cover what politicians say. We keep an eye on what they're saying. We cover what government does. What government does you know if you don't know about it? It's like the dog that didn't bark. That's the dog that can hurt you if you don't know what he did. Yes, of course, then we'll cover what politicians say, but only after we know what government did will we ask them. So I mean this kind of information that you talk about in podcasts. Yeah, I agree with you, but there are a lot of, you must admit. There are a lot of podcasts too, which are really just hot takes on today's news cycle, which is the worst because the public's already not too happy with the news cycle and a lot of the podcasters grasp around and say, ok, this happened this week. We're just going to have some hot takes on this, I don't.
Holly Doan:I mean, you might make enough subscribers to make a living and then all the power to you, but I don't really think that's the future of journalism.
Aaron Pete:I would agree. I think that the discussions can get more complex and nuanced in spaces like this, but it'll be interesting to see because the medium is so new. I wanted to get your perspective on this. Interview between Joe Rogan and Donald Trump has to me, really reflects the changing landscape that we're seeing and gives a lot of hope to independent creators, because it was the same opportunity that I got here in British Columbia when I got to interview all three political leaders of different parties and they actually saw it worth their time to come on a podcast and sit down for an hour and have a conversation. That's very different than what I would have expected in like a 2013 election, when podcasts really weren't a thing, and so the movement that I'm seeing is that these are becoming spaces. We can have more complicated conversations than the traditional legacy media, where you get seven minutes and the questions are really, really quick and you don't get a chance to kind of fully flesh out your thoughts.
Holly Doan:Well, there's two ways of looking at that. I mean, I didn't watch the Joe Rogan interview, but I know what you're talking about. And the point is Donald Trump did that because he could talk for an hour and a half instead of going to do an interview with NBC and he would say I know where that's going, right. But so I mean, there's a power, a possibility to manipulate too. But if a podcaster or interviewer is fair, I think that they will attract, they'll attract great guests and you're proof of that. Obviously, they think you're fair and you trust them and you can get away with all sorts of questions, quite frankly, if you back it up with some facts and say it with a pleasant smile on your face. So there's that way of looking at it. But I also think that there's a danger in podcasts becoming I have trouble listening to all the ones I want to listen to. We are saturated right now and people always tell us, oh, blacklock should do a podcast, he'd be like, so popular. And we say, yeah, but like if we stopped to do that, you wouldn't have a Blacklock, you wouldn't, wouldn't have like, we all have our own role. In Ottawa, two or three weeks back he went to the Sioux, to St Marie, and did a podcast with a local podcaster about whatever they want to talk about and reaffirmed his intention to run there. So that's interesting. That never would have happened.
Holly Doan:Back when I was covering, I was a scrum monkey in Ottawa in 1993. I mean the the. They always went. They always got right out of the house of commons and walk straight onto the CBC set or CTV or somebody. But they're now looking at those places and seeing that they don't have the reach that they used to and even if they have the reach, they don't have audience trust because a number of reasons and also they maybe don't target the people they want to speak to. Mr Polyev, for example, has been very successful with his TikTok and Twitter and social media bites talking about drugs on our streets or about the housing crisis and, coincidentally, the number of young people under the age of 25 who are going to vote conservative has increased. What a shocker. When I was that age, like all young people, would have voted NDP. There wasn't any question about that. How in hell, how in the hell, did that switch? It's a fascinating phenomenon.
Holly Doan:He's reaching them in different ways and I can tell you I don't know how old you are, but I have two sons aged 20 and 23. They're smart kids. They're in a business program in law school. They don't. I don't think they've ever watched a CBC newscast or bought a national post. Yet they don't seem totally clueless. When they come home from school, they seem to notice what's going on. I mean, they sure know about the crisis in student housing, because isn't it true with young people, when it hits them, then they're facing this housing crisis and competition for expensive schools. They see they're not left-wing anymore, but maybe they're not right-wing. But they say the system has failed us and so we're looking to a different way and so they're being reached a different way too. Maybe they're watching your podcast, I don't know.
Aaron Pete:I'm wondering if you can describe to us and walk us through starting Blacklocks and like how that process worked and what some of your philosophical perspectives were when you started this.
Holly Doan:Well, both the editor and I are, as I mentioned, career mainstream journalists. My background I used to start it off as a local reporter and an anchor at local stations in Brandon, saskatoon, edmonton, and then I worked for CBC for a while in Alberta and then I was a CTV national reporter in Ottawa. And then China I was a bureau chief and then I did together, the editor and I did historical documentaries which we sold to CPAC political history, which are now in the archives. So we kind of had this broad sweep. We were very fortunate. We really my era of journalists really were like the last flight out of Saigon. We had the industry when it had money and it was good and we had viewers or readers, and I know it's much harder now. Well, we're living it now too, but by 2012, when all those other things had run their course, we looked at each other and said, well, we're too young to retire. What should we do? Oh well, news is going online. I mean, it was really that simplistic. I guess we could do that. Look, we don't need to buy a printing press, we don't need to hire a ton of staff. We have the reporting experience. We don't have to go canvassing at Carleton. We can do this, and so we started a website with the idea of doing government accountability, because we saw that media didn't cover committees, that they didn't read public accounts, and so we thought maybe there'd be a niche for that of people who wanted information.
Holly Doan:But with you know, with all small businesses, you know what's the statistic Something like 83% fail in the first year, and if you survive five years, it's like surviving cancer. Then you might make it. So that's our story. We didn't earn a lot of money in the beginning. We never lost money, but we just kept going. And then something happened While we were in business. The rest of the media seemed to collapse around us. Audience trust collapsed, subsidies didn't help. We decided we weren't going to take those that sounded frightening. You know we were trying to hang on to readers, not lose them.
Holly Doan:Then the pandemic happened. It was the election of 2019 and then the pandemic and suddenly everybody needed information. What was the public health agency doing? What did Health Minister Patty Hajdu know about Wuhan and when? And? And so your small business, your family, all your things are, all those things are depending on information, and the media at that time seemed to buckle down even harder with government messages. So we went the opposite way. We focused on documents and testimony and what happened? And subscriptions took off. The more we got away from government messages and the more we tried to find real information about the public health agency throwing out masks and closing a warehouse, the more people seem to want our product.
Holly Doan:And I would say that since the pandemic is over let's say 2022, subscriptions have remained steady and we keep on the same path. There's always a new scandal, there's always going to be green slush fund or there's going to be, you know, minister Boissoneau and the pretendians Like there's always something. So to some people who are skeptical and think we should have positive reports on the things that government tries to do, they will say that's gotcha journalism. And I will say the government of Canada has six or seven thousand media spokesmen. We don't need any more people shaping the government message or engaging in the term the government loves, which, when media uses, I hate storytelling. We just need facts.
Holly Doan:And so since that time since the end of pandemic to now 2024, the greatest value, once you establish yourself and I'm not saying it's easy, it's bloody hard Once you establish yourself, the greatest value are the resubscriptions. So we are to the point now we have about a 73, 75% resubscription rate. So it's kind of like in a way it's like a pyramid, right. If you can hang on to a larger and slightly larger and slightly larger base, then if you have a bad year like people are really struggling with their finances right now We've noticed new subscriptions are down a little bit and also we also noticed, by the way, that new subscriptions don't happen during tax time.
Holly Doan:Forget March. March is death. We might as well shutter the outfit and go, because it's about people's money. Imagine them trying to find the money to spend on you at a time when they're just trying to make ends meet. So we can sustain the business now. We don't actually need their subsidies. We would like to expand, but maybe we've had enough trouble coming through this wormhole that has been media since 2012. We're quite happy where we are, and what's wrong with that? Why can't we just have a niche that makes a good living and hold government to account?
Aaron Pete:I have to ask, just because it continues to be on my mind, if you had to have a pie chart on, when did the industry change in this regard? Like it used to be, journalists were fighting for the people. They were holding government to account, making sure that they answered the questions, and I know that's maybe like picturesque of like the actual circumstances day to day, but like that's what people think of is that, like journalists were there to act for the people and ask the tough questions, and it was not always a popular job. Politicians weren't always happy with the, the coverage they were getting, and like that was the reality. Now it feels like so much of what we see is the story being retold to us, reshaped and reiterated and recycled, rather than having individuals like yourself who go.
Aaron Pete:I'm not listening to any of this. Of course you're going to tell me that the sky is blue and beautiful. The reality is people have these tough circumstances and I think that's why people are gravitating towards Pierre is because they're like this guy's saying, what I'm seeing on the road right now, like things are not getting better from what I'm experientially seeing, except I would caution you, like, what politicians say is not really what you want to think about.
Holly Doan:It's what they do. So we don't really cover any of Mr Polyev's statement announcements either, any more than we would cover one from the Treasury Board president. So you don't really know. But having said that, you don't really know, you don't really know what kind of government you're going to get. He could be the worst, he could be the best. We don't know until we see, because people are human. How is he going to govern? What circumstances are going to face him? So all I can say is that media has to stick to the same guns. So what was your question? Again, I'm sorry I interrupted.
Aaron Pete:So if you had a pie chart, is media subsidies the main piece of that that's contributing to the journalists moving in this direction? Is it just political narratives or people wanting to fit in in universities then going into these elite places? What is causing this dramatic shift away from holding politicians accountable and questioning them every chance we get?
Holly Doan:Part of it is. What I was referring to earlier is that journalism has become professionalized and journalists want to become part of the ruling elite and help shape society, and they've forgotten what the job is Now. Where do they get that idea? And they've forgotten what the job is Now. Where do they get that idea? Well, making more money and wearing a nice suit, I guess, is more pleasant than being that ink-stained scribe shuttling around, you know, in dark alleys. But also, I think that this is not popular and perhaps some of my friends aren't going to like this. But the journalism programs at the universities aren't really helping. But the journalism programs at the universities aren't really helping. They have seminars where they talk about, for instance, political journalism, reimagining political journalism, which was one that was held recently at Carleton.
Holly Doan:Who needs to reimagine political journalism? What does that mean? Political journalism means holding somebody to account. That's what it's always meant. You don't need to reimagine it. And if you're reimagining it, what the heck are you imagining? It is that you know whether the carbon tax has lowered emissions. This is covering how many executives profited in their personal companies in awarding contracts to green tech funds. Like that's what we're supposed to be doing. We don't need to reimagine that that's as old as Methuselah. That's what people expect. So you know my editor always says who's somewhat more crusty than I am, but humorous, if any of your listeners have heard him on the radio podcasts he always says if he had to hire another journalist right tomorrow, he'd hire an immigrant with fast food experience and skip the university grads.
Holly Doan:Another friend who's now retired was known as the king of access to information in Ottawa for many years. He told me once that he was invited to Carleton our premier program one afternoon a week once not a week once to talk about how to do access to information. So all right. So if you don't want to now, I know that I'm looking at all this through the lens of government covering government, but you had me on. You didn't choose an environmental beat or climate change beat reporter. So I think that not only one journalists.
Holly Doan:To sum up, journalists have wanted to join the elite class, join their government masters I would say tormentors in shaping society, and they've also no longer been taught what journalism is, that diversity is more important than knowing how to file an access to information request and they would say no, no, no, that's right, no, it's not right, it's both. But I don't see Carleton or Toronto Metropolitan University holding weekend think tanks on how to demand more government accountability. And I'm telling you, it doesn't come from holding the guy to account at the microphone while he's eating an apple and then feeling hurt because he doesn't like you. That's not how you hold government to account. You have to get into the documents, you have to. You know, if they won't talk to you, it shouldn't really matter, not really. But if you're fair, they might talk to you anyway.
Holly Doan:So how did we get here? What piece of the pie is journalism? And then, of course, underpinning that is subsidies. We've just asked we've just begged the public not to trust us, because nobody thinks that SNC-Lavalin gets subsidies and doesn't do favors for the government. Who thinks that Bombardier? Nobody thinks that.
Holly Doan:Why would anybody be expected to believe that media subsidies haven't influenced coverage? And again, it's not even what media reports, which you may object to. It's what they're not telling you. And why are they not telling you? Because some of it's too controversial and you want to keep your subsidies. And also you don't know how to get that information because you've been busy, you know, remaking Canada, so those things have contributed. How have subsidies influenced that? Publishers used to be these fearsome people and managing editors were like. If you ever remember the old Mary Tyler Moore show, they were like Lou Grant, like grumpy, armpit, sweaty guys in a corner office who told you your story was crap, holly, that lead sucks. We did that. We did that story six months ago. Go back and get something else. That's who. That's what they used to demand of their staff. Now they have diversity to worry about and inclusive hiring and they're in their office filling out a grant application. How can it not affect subsidies? At the very least, it's made us tired and dull and unreadable.
Aaron Pete:I'm interested in the dynamic between the two worlds legacy media and independent media. How has your work been impacted or viewed by your peers? Been impacted or?
Holly Doan:viewed by your peers Hard to say. Very few of them subscribe. You know, in media when somebody else breaks a story and then your boss makes you go and do what we call a matcher, that's a bad day at work, like you never want to match somebody else's story. So I think you know Blacklocks is a conveyor belt of information. I'm not going to call it all sco information. I'm not going to call it all scoops. I'm not going to be so presumptuous. I hate that word, by the way. We're just a conveyor belt of information and the reaction to that sometimes is from the public. Why doesn't mainstream media do this? And I don't want to go there, but so that doesn't make us popular and neither does our position on subsidies.
Holly Doan:We have said that they are not being honest with readers. We have said that it influences coverage. We have said that the press gallery, which is the parliamentary press gallery that represents reporters in Ottawa, in excluding others from membership because they won't tell us who's funding them, that they themselves should declare how much money they get their organizations get from the government. Why is a subsidy from Imperial Oil any different from a subsidy from the Canada Revenue Agency and the Employment Department? What's the difference? I don't see the difference. So I mean, you know, those things don't make you popular because they're afraid. Essentially, people are afraid and they want to have a scoop, but you don't want to rock the boat because there's layoffs every day and you could be one of them. That's not a great environment to work under either.
Aaron Pete:Do you feel like the information that you provide is utilized by any of these other news organizations? Are you able to help form the public narrative? Are people afraid to touch your stories, to go against the public Like what is the response that you see?
Holly Doan:Well, one of the things that we were warned about when we started that old crusty types of the business say hey, you watch, like others will try to steal your stories and they won't give you credit and they'll just pretend you don't exist. So the remedy for that for us was to sell licenses. So the minute we see another news organization or any kind of website that's using our content because they purchased a single subscription, we tell them you're getting a license or you're never reading Black Locks again and you have to be prepared to walk away from money. And that's worked. So we have a number of licenses with other organizations like the Sun has one, epic Times has one, western Standard has one. But none of these, by the way, are huge. It's not huge money. No single license that we have represents more than 1% of our total revenues. These are just a way of forcing others to recognize the work of other media and upstart media themselves. Respect that.
Holly Doan:Now, those I just named to you sound like all right-wing outlets. Okay, so that? Well, she must be a right-wing. No, ask Stephen Harper. He would not have called us a right-wing friendly outfit. Remember, we started up in 2012. We do government accountability. So when the government happens to be liberal. The people who are going to.
Holly Doan:This is one of the problems with the world now, aaron, is that political partisanship. They can't. They can't tell the difference anymore. Like, if you do a bad story about Mr Trudeau's government, well then you're a right wing hack. Bad story about Mr Trudeau's government, well then you're a right-wing hack. If you don't do enough critical stories of his government, well then you're a liberal. That's too bad.
Holly Doan:Anyway, we just, you know la la la, we just sort of block that out. So you know other media following our stories yeah, so there's those I mentioned, and those are mostly not paywalled. So what happens is they rock it all around. That's not a bad thing. I call that free advertising. And also what it does when the stories resonate. In that way it holds the government to account. They know that black locks is going to do what we're going to do and we don't write media lines. That media lines for your audiences, the piece things that communications people write to make the government look good, lines like a news release, uh, so they don't bother trying to give us a hard time, but they give all our licensees a hard time. Government departments phone up all our licensees and try to bully them to drop the stories. What do you think of that?
Aaron Pete:That's shocking information.
Holly Doan:Yeah, every single one of them. The Post Media and Rebel. Yeah, rebel subscribes too, but they don't bother them much because they're in another place. But Western Standard has had the same problem, so you know. In other words, the government is trying to shut down this kind of journalism, and so they're going to make it really hard for you. Not only are they Well, you're not taking their subsidies, so they already think that you're in trouble, and now they're going to try to bully your licensees into dropping the copy.
Holly Doan:And the government, the ministers of heritage who have professed to want to save democracy by saving media, they don't ring very true to me when they give some independent media such a hard time. And I understand that not all new media is how the government wants to be or looks like the legacy media. There are some that are partisan and there are some whose journalism I'm not too sure about either, but you know what this is called internet disruption. This is what it looks like, and it's all free speech. And anyway, you're never going to be able to censor them all anyhow. I mean, they've been trying for 10 years to censor us and it hasn't worked. We've just gotten stronger the more the government bullies us and the more we say we don't take subsidies, the more likely people are to give us a go and shell out some money to subscribe.
Holly Doan:The government's word for something, the government's say-so that this is a good thing, is a very antiquated idea. The disrespect for public institutions and I'm not making any comment on all that, just that it exists. The government testimony that this is a good paper. We should supplement their you know staff that doesn't work anymore. People aren't like they're likely to think that government subsidies are a bad thing and it's really now. The government never really has understood media, not really. Media is kind of like this weird magic voodoo and they hire communication staff to tell us the world of media and how it works. Right, you and I both know it's really doesn't. It's not that much magic and it's mostly chaos. But I think the government efforts. The government has a control fetish At least this administration does and the bureaucracy a control fetish At least this administration does and the bureaucracy. And so they have been trying their best through subsidies to control media. And what's happened? What has happened? I think they've caused independent media that is agitating to succeed, at least I would say, with us. That's the case.
Aaron Pete:Agreed. Sorry, I just want to linger just for another second on your, on your comments about the fact that the government doesn't want these stories told and that they actively discourage this, like I like. To me that's a huge revelation that just deserves a minute of time to digest and process. Because because I think we are all skeptical of government at some level when you hear new taxes coming in, you're kind, kind of like, but when you hear that, it's just so strange because it feels like and and I try and be as middle grounded as I can be it feels like there's a moral superiority today to the liberal government or the NDP government, like there it's almost like automatic that when they say something that people go like well, they're the good people, you know, they're the good guys. And so when you hear something like that, it's just it's a lot to digest that there's stories they don't want out there and that there's not like, correct me if I'm wrong.
Aaron Pete:There's not many out there looking for the stories that they don't want told.
Holly Doan:Right, there's not many anyway, so why would you worry about the ones that are? It's the control fetish. But you know this is government communications job is to tell government stories in the best light. Or my, my, the minister's office might hear about this Like what if? What if the minister's office gets a question in question period from you know, somebody on the other side of the house and it embarrasses him. Well, it's my job to control that story, shut it down, get a correction and they measure their successes.
Holly Doan:By the way, government communication staff and whether they got media to change the copy, that's how they measure it. Now they would say, well, it was wrong. But most often it's not wrong, it's just they didn't like the lead you chose. It wasn't what they would have put in the press conference, in the press release. You know there's an old thing in the CP style guide, canadian Press style guide. I don't know if it still is in there, but it says this is for editors Don't rewrite the story just because it's not the way you would write it Right. And so government is for government's mission is to rewrite the story the way they would write it. And if you're a small news agency that doesn't have much clout. You know they might sort of look. It's well, not many people, and we've seen these internal emails. Well, not many people saw it, so who cares? But if they think it's resonating, if the stories are getting out there and they have legs, then they're terrified. They're terrified of what their masters will do and they must correct or have that kind of copy pulled. In our case it was even worse. They had to read the copy, so they bought single subscriptions online and then shotgunned the passwords and the content to hundreds and hundreds of readers across the public service without payment or permission, a little bit like if you got Microsoft and you office and you copied it like 20 times and gave it out. That is the way that government chose to try to limit.
Holly Doan:Blacklocks was to make sure that we didn't get paid by government, that we didn't get any government contracts Because, by the way, government contracts are a huge part of media funding. So, for instance, the Toronto Star gets 1.7 million for research by a program called Media Copyright Clearance. That's so all the government public servants can read the content. Another smaller organizations like, say, indies, like the Logic logic, gets about a quarter million. The Hill times it's a weekly, a daily weekly paper here in Ottawa gets $800,000 over a multi-year term contract. So these contracts too? Yes, of course public servants should pay, but these contracts traditionally have been used not just because public servants should read, but as a way of controlling media. If we didn't like your content too much, well, maybe you won't get your subscription renewed this year. That's how are you shocked? That's how Ottawa works.
Aaron Pete:I think I am. I think I'm a little naive. I'm all the way in British Columbia, so when I hear about these things or the rumors that go on in Ottawa, it's always surprising.
Holly Doan:I should send you some more carrier pigeons over the mountains to let you know what's happening.
Aaron Pete:That would be fantastic. There's an old adage that great journalists are able to hold power accountable, and then governments don't do bad things because they're afraid to get caught not really because they're afraid of doing bad things. Is that old adage true? And when you're doing this work, is it somewhat lonely to be the people kind of doing the actual digging that needs to take place?
Holly Doan:Once you can ignore all the people who would see you done harm, once you can ignore those and you know you get to a certain age you don't really give a damn. Your kids are happy and you enjoy your work. You don't really care what people say about you anymore. You're not building a career, you're just here because you're doing what you love. But I think that old adage I myself even after, say 35 years, something to do with waste or mediocrity or cronyism or God forbid corruption. You would a few years back about how the public health agency was working with telecom companies to monitor the movement of cell phones so they could tell whether people who had been vaccinated were traveling or staying home, this sort of thing which a lot of people thought was kind of shifty, which a lot of people thought was kind of shifty. So we did a few stories on it. And then I think the New York Post did a story about Canada's monitoring people. You know big state and I can tell you that'll never happen again. We've done stories, little stories about. Oh, our first one where we realized this is the case was several years ago.
Holly Doan:The government had a budget cover. You know the cover on the book of the budget. It showed a happy family and it was shot in a park or something. It looked really nice and glossy. So we filed access to information to find out what they, how they produced and what they spent on that budget cover. Turns out they spent over a quarter million on the budget cover and it had been produced like a movie. They had hired ad agencies and actors. They hired actors to pose in the in the in the budget cover, and we've we filed access every single year since, since 2017. They never did that again. That's a small example, but they do respond. Uh, let's look. Parks Canada changing Johnny McDonald's home in Bellevue into a kind of a struggle session to examine his legacy, as opposed to say this is his house, this is where he lived. There was a lot of talk about that. There was a lot of stories. A son picked it up. I don't think you're going to see many Johnny McDonald rewrites from here on in. I think that you know, I think that's kind of past.
Holly Doan:The Human Rights Commission drafted a report on how Christmas was racist because it had colonial origins, and that story ricocheted around and to this day, they won't even tell us who wrote that report, just that it was signed off on by 30, 40 people and in fact you may find this amusing in filing an access to information to find the name of the person who wrote the report. The exemption that the Human Rights Commission used to say why they didn't have to release it was safety, personal safety. They were afraid of the public response if they knew the name of the person who dissed Christmas. Well, it seems kind of goofy, I know, but what you asked me like, how did they respond? Government correction and government. You don't see they're not going to run a press release saying Christmas is great, everybody celebrate, all the nominations Great.
Holly Doan:These changes are incremental and there's so much waste and mediocrity in government and cronyism that one little bite at a time. But the thing I always say is like we love our work and we don't care if they don't love it. But imagine if you had 10 black locks in Ottawa. We'd have the best damn government in the G7. Like government wouldn't move without making sure that they had not repeated any lessons learned from the past, because there's no consequences in government when they get it wrong, whether they throw out all the masks in the warehouse. They have a program called Lessons Learned where they do an internal audit and decide you didn't do that right, you didn't do this right, and they call it Lessons Learned, but no one's fired.
Holly Doan:Somebody might be transferred, but there's never really any accountability. Accountability happens when it makes its way into media, and there's very little of that kind of media now. Most of the media is about explainers on government programs or you know there might be somebody reporting about it. Let's say, recently we've had the housing program this is the Liberals Housing Accelerator Fund versus the removal of GST, which is what the opposition wants to do. So media will try to examine that a little bit. But this is reporting only on programs that are still underway or not realized yet. There are lots of programs that happened that rarely we ever hear what happened with that program, now this more recent one.
Holly Doan:The reason why Parliament is at a stalemate right now is because the opposition is demanding the government release documents in connection with the Sustainable Economic Development Canada, which was a group set up to fund green programs, and there were something like 18 conflicts of interest that the ethics commissioner found. In other words, they were funneling money to their own companies. They were handing out government money without much oversight. So that's when you're watching in real time but because in that case we did stories on that before the opposition took it up. But now that the opposition has taken it up, people think it's a conservative issue. Now that the opposition has taken it up, people think it's a conservative issue. Right, we're so down that partisan rabbit hole we can't even tell anymore what's what's partisan and what's not. You're willing to look the other way on corruption let's call it what it is in order to say I'm a liberal or those conservatives are bad, and the same thing will happen when the conservatives are elected. A liberal or those conservatives are bad, and the same thing will happen when the conservatives are elected, maybe.
Holly Doan:So I think that media can and should hold government to account. Doesn't mean it's easy, but if I could say, the thing that I would admire most in any journalist you asked me about that earlier would have to be, of course, research and writing, and that's great would be fearlessness. Because it's hard, because they will bully you, and mainstream media are frightened and on the edge of bankruptcy some of them, and they don't have the capacity to help, nor do they want you around. So I think you have to. Really, any independent journalist. You know, not only are they struggling financially, but they have to stare down all that crap and boo-hoo. I'm not doing boo-hoo journalists, because I don't like that, I don't like the boo-hoo thing, but I'm just telling you that's the reality. So I admire people who are able to barrel through it without letting it beat them.
Aaron Pete:May I ask why did you name your publication after Tom Blacklock?
Holly Doan:Thomas Highland Blacklock was one of the first presidents of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery. His picture was up on the wall with all the other guys with high collars high wing collars, you know and we had always seen that photo and wondered about that guy. And it turns out we used to do political history documentaries and when we were buried in the library and archives we in looking at documents we saw some reference to letters between Thomas Highland Blacklock, the president of the press gallery, and he had worked for Montreal Gazette, winnipeg Free Press, one of the Toronto papers. He had one of these been all around guys. He was a First World War correspondent and there were letters between him and Borden, who was prime minister during the First World War, and very vigorous letters between Thomas Blacklock and Arthur Meehan arguing about conscription and this sort of thing. Thomas Blacklock and Arthur Meehan arguing about conscription and this sort of thing.
Holly Doan:And we thought, ok, here's a guy who was doing old timey journalism. He was doing journalism the way we imagine in the movies. When we're watching Spotlight. We imagine how journalists should be pushing back against authority. That was the Catholic Church. This is government. Authority that was the Catholic Church, this is government. And so our mind being in Canada's history. At that moment in our lives we thought we'd call it Black Locks Reporter. Also, he had no heirs, so we weren't stealing anybody's name. We researched that too, because you don't want to discredit him. Anyway, he's buried in Campbellford, ontario, I think, which is down south. He was a real guy and he had a famous quote in one of the letters when he was talking to somebody, where he said well, that ain't the way I heard it, and so this. We thought, okay, yeah, this is it, this is us. So there's that news conference and that story about the Green Fund, but that's not how we heard it, that's not what we saw when we did government, so that's kind of our slogan.
Aaron Pete:I love that. A few quick questions for you, just because I'm learning so much from your understanding of the media landscape. Is True North Media a legitimate news outlet?
Holly Doan:First, let me say that I believe uh passionately in free speech and I think like we shouldn't try to censor. Just let have it, just let them out there. I mean, if they do something that hurts people or they're. You know there are. We have libel and defamation laws and those have worked for generations.
Holly Doan:Um, I'm old, tiny, so I kind of think that a journalist is somebody the highway near Trois-Rivières and or beyond, the fish beat if you're at CBC Halifax. I mean to me that's how journalism started and that's how I came up. You didn't get a crack at Ottawa, the hardest beat in the country. For me it was 11 years in doing all those other stuff before I came to Ottawa. Now I know that those jobs don't exist anymore. This is a problem, but we hope independent media. Will you know we are going through this transition time and we hope independent media eventually. Can you know there are local outlets now that are trying to cover Calgary or, you know, metro Vancouver, right, they're trying. So I hope that will rebuild itself. But the others, that people who come into journalism having never been a journalist, I think they have every right to be there. It makes me uncomfortable and I mean no disrespect, but if you were a party, a political party operative, or you were an activist for an environmental group, or you were a right-wing columnist, maybe, and you had never covered school board or city council or legislature anywhere, part of me says the elite. Part of me says where do you get off trying to cover Ottawa with your opinion pieces when you don't even know how a bill becomes a law? And so I would say to people we are in these silos where, yeah, you like to subscribe to things that support your own view, but even the things that you like and I do the same thing with the publications I subscribe I look at them and say, well, you know why are you saying that? Most of them, unfortunately, are opinion, so they get away with it. But they're getting the moniker journalism. How did they get that? Where did they get off taking that moniker that some of us worked really hard, just by coming up through the apprenticeship system to learn how to do that? So, which doesn't mean they can't, because, after all, if I'm going to say that journalism doesn't need an elite degree from Columbia or Carleton, then I have to accept that citizen journalists will come at it from a different way. You have a law degree right.
Holly Doan:I always said that if I was going to do journalism over again, I would get a law degree, and not now. I went to journalism college but so I didn't invest too much time. But I think that even those things are useful. You will always, I'm sure, whether you ever practiced, or practiced or not, you will always look through, look at our laws through the lens of what you learned. So I say come one, come all what you learned. So I say come one, come all. But try a little harder to not just be a zealot for the cause, whether it's climate change or the conservatives. Just try a little harder, because that way everyone will love us more.
Aaron Pete:Fantastic. The last one on this note is Keenan Bexta from Countersignal Went all the way out to Tofino. My understanding is that he took a plane all the way over. Justin Trudeau was there spending time with his family and I thought it was one of the best interviews Justin Trudeau has ever done, because it really gets to the heart of some really interesting questions. His argument was I'm on vacation with my family, can I just not have a day with my kid being left alone? And then Keenan's counterpoint was like you would never let me interview you, you would never give me the opportunity, I am not on the press gallery, I will never be on the press gallery. This is my one shot as an independent journalist to get an interview with you to discuss kind of key issues that you would never accept an interview with me. So this is my shot and I'm taking it. And I just thought it spoke to something really profound about the state of independent kind of media or journalism and how the two aren't reconciling. Yet what are your thoughts on?
Holly Doan:that there was a lot of debate about that wasn't there. You know whether you were bothering the prime minister on holidays or whether you know he had a right. I don't know how would you feel about it if it was. I don't know Bob Fyfe from the Globe or Jean-Paul Tasker from CBC, who are out on the beach chasing him, so because they are members of the press gallery. So therefore, what they have more of a right to chase him. There must be a reason to chase him. Whatever the subject was right. I mean, global news caught him on the beach on the first reconciliation day. Did anybody say they shouldn't bother the guy on holidays? No, why? Because they're part of legacy media.
Holly Doan:Okay, that's one way to look at it. The other way is Mr Bext is not one of those journalists that I describe, that I respect the most. He did not come up with a desire to cover school board and find information and with any sort of standards applied to what he does, and a lot of it come on whether you like it or not and I watched it too is voyeurism, people. You know, even if you don't like, even people who don't like the guy, and he did the same thing with Dominic LeBlanc at a cabinet retreat a couple of years back. Don't you watch it because it's kind of voyeuristic. So is that good journalism? No Well, but what's the big deal? Even if it isn't journalism, why is it so harmful? He's not out to hurt anybody. He's not out to hurt the prime minister, and so I guess I go back to whether I'm entirely comfortable with it or not.
Holly Doan:It's what free speech looks like, I guess. Come one, come all, and people need to get off their high horse and accept that the media is in transition. And again, this is what I said before. This is what it's going to look like. There's going to be some things you don't like, and how are we going to add some things you do? And how are we going to manage that everybody's desk? We're gonna subsidize them, so they have to, uh, meet our criteria. Uh, the remedy to kean bext is not more government. I guess that's what I would say. And and you know what? Anyway, it's up to people viewing it to decide whether this is bad or not, because you know, it's not up to me, or you, aaron, or even, maybe even Justin Trudeau.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, how can people keep up with your work? How can they subscribe? What's the best way to connect?
Holly Doan:Well, we're at wwwblacklocksca. There's a subscribe page, but if you want to have a look first, you can scroll down and go back and back and back and see the headline and the cut line of all the stories. You see, the cut line is like another line or two with a bit of information that gives you the gist more of a gist of the story, and then you can subscribe online. It costs $314. And I'm, you know, tired of apologizing for that, because we have plenty of subscribers and we always say if it's not for you, you can get lots of free news at the CBC and post media. You don't have to subscribe to Blacklocks, but if you do, I promise you'll be one of the 73% that comes back every year for 10 years.
Aaron Pete:One of my favorite comparisons is always like you care about the quality of food that you put in your body.
Aaron Pete:Comparisons is always like you care about the quality of food that you put in your body, and so you should care about the quality Of media that you consume and be very mindful of the information that you're consuming, because it impacts your worldview, your hope, your optimism, your understanding of where the world is, and I think you do an incredible job of that.
Aaron Pete:I find one of the biggest takeaways for me from being able to speak with you is you bring a maturity to the conversation that I me from being able to speak with you is you bring a maturity to the conversation that I don't often see to your point. I see a lot of people kind of jump left or jump right whenever a question comes up yes, and and, not taking that nuance of like, okay, we disagree, or or this is the case, but it doesn't make me a right-wing person for being able to observe that this is actually what happened. Doesn't make me a right-wing person for being able to observe that this is actually what happened. It doesn't make me a left-wing person for saying that, like I don't agree that Pierre isn't taking it, but you know what they'll say.
Holly Doan:Then they'll say it's the stories you choose. Make you a right-wing or left.
Holly Doan:There's no winning that argument, by the way, and anybody who says that about us, we challenge them to read the copy. Yeah, there's a sexy headline. Go to Fleet Street if you want to talk about sexy headlines. But then if you read the story, it reads like a search warrant, information, information, citation, name of report, name of legislation, clip from opposition, clip from government background piece, background information. It reads like that. And so if we're going to call that partisan now, then I think you consider the source. You consider the source of the people who are saying it and people who call me partisan. I know right away. You just told me you're partisan.
Aaron Pete:Yeah yeah, you are an incredibly rare individual and I really appreciate the work you're doing. I hope we can continue to have more discussions because I am constantly asking guests about like, like, are we becoming a less mature society? Because we hear something and then we just react. We don't want to do a reading of five different articles and kind of see different perspectives, we just kind of want it spoon fed to us. But I think people like yourself give us the space to have a more mature conversation and I really appreciate you for that.
Holly Doan:The reality is that it's going to be a multiple sources, I guess. I guess to get a very clear picture, you know we don't have Eaton's department store anymore to buy both our pantyhose and our mixing bowls, and we're just not going to have legacy press to tell us everything either. And so you know, I congratulate you on your podcast and trying to contribute your little piece. That's all we're doing is we're just trying to contribute our little piece and trying to be fair. And just because you're not a member of the press gallery doesn't mean that you don't have a brain or you don't have experience and you can't contribute Like that. This is, this is that's what democracy is. We all just try to contribute.
Aaron Pete:I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much, Holly, for doing this. I find your work absolutely admirable. Thanks for your work.
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