Illustration by Valerie Thai

Now that my son is seven, our weekend mornings have gelled into a proper routine. He wakes up at some ungodly hour—earlier, by the way, than he gets up on weekdays—and plays for a while in his room. When he’s tired of that, he’ll grab a couple of granola bars from the kitchen and then find the family iPad. By the time I’m (finally) awake, he can usually be found sitting on his bedroom floor, his face creased into a frown of concentration as he swipes his way through whatever Netflix Kids is currently offering. His current favourites include a cartoon called Masha’s Spooky Stories and Teen Titans Go!, the latter of which made him think it was the height of hilarity to exclaim, “Look at those juicy thighs!” every time I wore shorts this summer.

I can remember the weekend mornings of my own childhood in the 1990s very clearly: the hush of our suburban neighbourhood, the ugly grey carpet scrunched beneath my bare feet and matched the colour of the pre-dawn sky, the impenetrable barrier of my parents’ bedroom door, which I was not allowed to breach until they were up for the day. Like my son, I would help myself to whatever food was available— usually Alpha-Bits, the plain kind, although I coveted the ones that had marshmallows. Then I would head down to our barely finished basement, where I would spend the next few hours watching cartoons. On the surface, this doesn’t seem so different from my son’s routine. But when I try to explain the details of it to him—the boxy old television, the five flickering channels we had to pick between, the fact that I had to wait a whole week between watching one episode of the Ninja Turtles and the next—I feel like I’m describing something so foreign that it’s hard to figure out the words to properly convey what it was like.

Where do I even start when some baseline words hold such different meanings today than they did three decades ago? When I’m telling a story about my child-self making a phone call, I picture myself talking on the big white rotary dial telephone that we had until I was 12; my son, by contrast, imagines me pressing the little green icon on an iPhone. For me, making calls is the raison d’être for the telephone; for my son, calling people is just one app among many. I blew his mind a few years ago when I told him that when I was a kid, phones didn’t have cameras. “But how did you take pictures back then?” he asked. And then: “What about walls? Did you have those? Were they even invented yet?” I can see his point: if this one thing that he considers to be a dependable and fixed part of the universe has not always been that way, then how can he know what to trust? The idea of a universe where phones can only do one thing—and not a very interesting thing, at that—both astonishes and disturbs him.

There is a part near the end of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1932 novel Little House in the Big Woods where she describes lying in bed in her family’s log cabin and listening to her father play “Auld Lang Syne” on the fiddle. When he finishes, she asks him what the days of auld lang syne are, and he replies that they are the days of long ago. As she considers this, she tells herself that the “now” she lives in will always be now; it could never be a long time ago. I remember reading this passage as a kid and trying to figure out the paradox it offered. The time that Laura lived in, with its calico print dresses and wood stoves and lack of indoor plumbing, had inarguably happened a long time before I was born. But even though it was obvious to me that Laura’s present had eventually become the past, I was just as certain that the clothing, culture, and technology of the ’90s would never feel old. Even when I became a parent, by which point the decade of my childhood felt like the ancient past, I didn’t consider the cultural gap that would exist between my son and me.

It’s hardest for me to understand how the way we view information has changed. I don’t mean the ways in which we consume it and relay it, although those things are obviously different now than when I was younger; I mean the qualities we attach to it. By the time I was a tween, every bit of media felt so precious. If I wanted to watch an X-Files episode more than once, I had to make sure to record it on my VCR (and then make sure that no one else in my family taped over it). I kept a shoebox full of interviews with Tori Amos, each of which I had painstakingly cut out of newspapers and magazines. If I wanted to read up on the Black Death (I was a weirdly morbid kid), I had to go to the library, find the right keyword in their computer system, and then sift through the chapters of various books until I found what I was looking for. I would often photocopy things or write down quotes that seemed especially important; I remember feeling this urgent need to hold onto everything, because nothing seemed permanent. Once an article or a book or an episode of a favourite show was lost, there was a good chance that I would never find it again.

It’s not like that for my son, though. If he wants to know more about outer space, everything he needs is at his fingertips—YouTube videos, podcasts, articles written by actual NASA astrophysicists. And none of it is in danger of disappearing; after all, once something goes on the internet, it’s usually there forever in some capacity.

This might sound like some kind of value judgment about kids these days, but I promise that it’s not. Greater access to information is never a bad thing. Consider this: my great grandmother grew up in a house with two books (one of which was the Bible) and she probably treated them with a devotion that I wouldn’t be able to muster for any individual volume in my library. Books were, for her, a nearly irreplaceable treasure, whereas if I lose one of mine, I can usually find another copy quickly and cheaply. Would anyone argue that owning literally hundreds of times the number of books that my great grandmother did somehow means that I am somehow living a less wholesome or engaged life?

Like any parent, I have some anxieties about what changing technologies will mean for my kid, but most of them centre around how he will use them to interact with his peers. Will I know what to do if he’s being bullied on social media? What limits will be fair to set on devices that he uses for learning, entertainment and socializing? How can I know if I’m making the right choices, not just making it up as I go along?

Sometimes it can feel like these are questions unique to the past decade or two, but I suspect that every generation of parents has wrestled with them in some way or another. It’s tempting to try to find someone or something to blame for the ways in which the world is changing—over-indulged kids, lazy parents, the technology itself—but to look for a scapegoat is a way of refusing to deal with a fundamental truth about life, namely that change is not good or bad, it just is.

I feel the same way about social media and smartphones and streaming services; they’re a part of our world now, whether we like it or not. There’s no going back to how things were before. Our only choice is to learn to adapt as best we can and accept that the day will come sooner rather than later when our kids’ understanding of how to navigate technology and media outstrips our own.

It’s tempting to dread what you don’t know, and I certainly don’t know what the world will be like when my kid is a teenager or a young adult. But instead of giving into that fear, I’m trying to be excited about the brave new world he’s growing up in. My parents must have faced similar challenges, and someday my son will live through his own season of realizing that the phones, tablets, and computers he grew up with are clunky and obsolete. By then, maybe our respective childhood weekend mornings won’t feel so different from each other; just two more links in the chain of ever-advancing cartoon consuming technology. Until that day, I reserve the right to feel like an old crank every time he asks me to explain the exotic functions of the VCR.

Illustration by Valerie Thai

In the 1980s, Dan Hubbard and Richard Catinus were two brainy young guys trying to sell Apple computers when I was working in a government office that used IBMs. While outlining the advantages of using a Mac for my work, Dan mentioned in passing that, after reading Jerry Mander’s book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, he and his wife had decided to raise their children without a TV.

They wanted to give their kids a more enriched life, he told me, one that wasn’t influenced by a diet of bland television programming. About 15 years later, I heard that a young girl with the same last name won a prestigious science award and wondered if the parent’s no-TV decision was a factor in their daughter’s early success.

Dan was a smart fellow so I paid attention to his book recommendation. I headed to the library and borrowed what would prove to be a life-changing read. Mander argues brilliantly that TV is dangerous to viewers, the environment, and—the factor that worried me most—our democracy. He proposes that the medium discourages vigorous thinking and discussion, instead confining human understanding to a rigid channel. After the compelling read, I tossed my little Hitachi, smack in the heyday of M*A*S*H, Three’s Company, and Happy Days. I was in my early 20s, living on my own, and had been spending most evenings sitting on the couch watching sitcoms for three or four hours after working all day. It wasn’t a very different routine from the one I’d had growing up. The novelty of an alternative lifestyle seemed like a perfect challenge, and I went at it with the usual righteous determination of someone that age. I didn’t want a co-dependent relationship with a television.

So, I spent most of the next three and a half decades without one.

***

I grew up as one of six kids in a small flat in Montreal and had never been a huge reader or had much quiet time. Now, I figured, was my chance to change that. A typical weeknight in those years without TV consisted of wolfing down a large bowl of Kraft dinner with a glass of red and retiring to a dilapidated chaise lounger to spend an evening reading. Every so often I’d lean back, look out the window, and ponder an especially enjoyable chapter.

The tranquility of evening reading in my very own rented bachelor suite on Vancouver Island was thrilling. After a few satisfying book hours, I’d listen to some Spirit of the West or Madonna or Fleetwood Mac, maybe write a letter to family or friends back east, and putter around, getting ready for work the next day. I really came to know myself in those years.

I read a library tome, an introduction to 500 great books, and jotted down the titles that looked interesting to me. I gave the list to my sister in case anyone in our large family was ever looking for a useful gift idea for me. My siblings surprised me that year and delivered 30 wrapped books for my 30th birthday. That thoughtful present set me up to a habit of reading 30 or 40 books a year for most of my adult life.

Not having a TV habit enabled me to use my leisure time to pursue different interests. In 1986, I took a leave of absence from my government job and went to Tokyo for a year to learn about Japanese culture and work for a local advertising firm. In 1990, I won a competition for an international Rotary scholarship to the Philippines. I took night classes at the University of Victoria over a 20-year period and managed to earn a bachelor’s degree and a humanities diploma (I was probably the slowest person ever to earn a degree, but I had fun learning). One summer, I took a peace research course in Norway, and for several years I mentored a boy with dyslexia. I seriously doubt I would have pursued these adventures if my life had centred on keeping up with my favourite TV programs. My time was unmediated by a screen.

There were, of course, downsides of not owning a television in the pre-internet age. Visiting nieces and nephews were horrified at the prospect of spending a cartoon-free weekend at Aunty Thelma’s. I was frequently the odd one out at the water cooler, as colleagues and friends discussed the latest episode of their favourite show. I remember two friends talking about some person named Roseanne and thought: “This woman sounds like a jerk, I hope I am never introduced to her.”

TV then had strange effects on society. I had read about people in some countries using the show Friends as a teaching aid to learn English. After seeing an episode at my sister’s place, I thought the idea was strange. The lines delivered by the actors sounded like clever and witty phrases concocted by writers. No one I knew talked like that in everyday conversations; if they did, I would have thought they were a bit off. The sitcom-language-study model is fine for learning new words as long as you realize no one actually speaks that way.

I also avoided amassing a surplus memory full of unerasable real and staged violent scenes. Once while visiting a friend, I saw the television news of two girls hanging from a mango tree in India. The young women were strung up after being raped. I wept at the sight and still ache from that painful scene. Another time, I walked into my brother’s house as a scene from CSI was on the prominent living room screen. A group of young women were celebrating as they partied in a limo when one of them stuck her head out of the sunroof waving a glass of champagne—just as the car veered under a low-hanging sign. The memory of the five-second horrific glimpse still sends shivers down my spine. I have not been desensitized to violent images and have no impervious armour.

It is hard to believe that 100 years ago there was no such thing as television. And now, after millions of years of human evolution, few people on the planet exist without daily exposure to a steady stream of perpetually shocking images, as well as constant sales pitches from our televisions and screens.

***

After 15 years without a television, I married a man who had a big-screen TV. Television was a disappointment. I was traumatized to find the newscasters’ nostrils were bigger than my head, or so it seemed. The images looked kitschy and over-the-top. Sitting by the radio and listening to CBC News had been much more interesting than watching an announcer sit behind a desk reading a teleprompter. It felt hollow and lonely to be sitting in a room with another human being when we were both silently staring at a TV in the corner. The marriage was short-lived, and the big boring box exited with the man who loved watching it.

I spent another 10 years enjoying life without a TV until 2011, when I fell in love with a man who had three TVs. (Men with TVs are everywhere.) This time I was more careful. I laid bare my disclosure: I wasn’t interested in television, particularly violent content, but I did enjoy thoughtful movies. He played his cards well. Every weekend we spent together he would borrow a movie from the library. He consulted lists of the “most inspiring movies”—Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Dead Poets Society, and Groundhog Day—and we saw them all over the course of a couple of years. He also saved carefully considered programs and weaned me back to the worldwide tube. Usually anything with David Suzuki, 60 Minutes, or political humour worked for me.

After seven years of blissful weekends, we decided to live together. The expectant question on my mind was: How will I cope with television in my midst?

At first, the most shocking thing on TV was the wavy red, blue, and green, ribbon-like digital graphics on CTV’s station identification. The novel optical illusion of the compelling artwork was mesmerizing. I couldn’t get over the richness of the colours and the sharpness of the images. I felt like a child observing something fantastically new. TV in the early ’80s didn’t look like this. In those re-entry months, I found many programs and ads to be hysterical. I would actually slap the arm of the couch and nearly roll over laughing. The Olympic Rona ads were goofy comical—I got a kick out of the circle of about a dozen needle-nose pliers opening and closing to mimic synchronized swimmers, and the relay race with a Rona employee running across the country to deliver a single tool to a worker on the job. There was one shoe store ad where a woman was in her closet trying on half a dozen pairs of new shoes while dancing around as if in a state of delirium. Her husband kept calling her for dinner. He should have called a psychiatrist. The whole thing was too silly.

I only watched one episode of a reality TV show and it was absurd. Ozzy Osbourne was dumping a huge bag of large chocolate bars into a drawer in a cavernous kitchen, while nearby little dogs pooped on the floor. I pitied the poor souls who had to live in such a desolate environment. That was the end of reality TV for me. I agree with film director Spike Lee as he commented in a 2016 CBC interview with Peter Mansbridge: “I think one of the worst things that has ever happened to America, or the world, is reality TV…. [Reality TV] put the worst elements of us human beings on television, and made it entertainment.”

In 35 years, the evening entertainment medium has gone from Happy Days to an insulting assortment of so-called reality shows and a frightening abundance of crime dramas. We have gone from Perry Mason to Judge Judy; from “betcha can’t eat just one” or “reach out and touch someone”—cute ad jingles— to a barrage of stress-inducing, digitally constructed morphing monster graphics with laser beams shooting out of their everywhere as they inexplicably chase the latest version of the new car being advertised. I don’t get it.

And then I saw the sensational Wild Canada, a four-part documentary series on CBC’s The Nature of Things, narrated by David Suzuki. We have watched it several times and each time it makes me feel grateful to be alive and living in a country that is still full to the brim with magnificent natural beauty and thriving wildlife compared to many other places on the planet. I imagined what television could be if all the content were all as thoughtfully produced. I was reminded: It is not the TV itself, but the content we select.

***

After six months or so, I came to the new habit of watching an hour or two of television every day with my partner. My favourite daily program is CHEK TV, a local five o’clock community news show produced by a station that has been successfully employee-owned for nine years. They do a good job of covering events on Vancouver Island and they talk like sane, everyday people you might chat with at the grocery store.

If I had to pick a single weekly television show to watch, Real Time with Bill Maher would be the one. The program is well-named; the content feels real. I could actually imagine having a decent conversation with the guests; they aren’t there just to flog their books or their movies. We never miss it and are disappointed when Maher takes a holiday. What more could you want from a TV show when you sit down to relax after dinner, holding hands with your lover on a Friday night?

I enjoy some of the broad range of TV fare, but with the focus on President Donald Trump this past year in both news and entertainment, I am becoming bored. If I flip through the channels it usually feels like a waste of time. Violence, conflict, and anger are predominant themes. I don’t laugh at the TV as much as I did at first. The shine is off. Some days it is beginning to feel as if watching television takes me away from myself and makes me feel less alive.

When I am home alone, I never turn on the television. Frankly, I don’t even know how to. But I’m okay with that.

***

I never set out to be a freak, but reading the Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television in my early 20s led me down a different boulevard. TV-free living offered a rich set of decades for me—but I doubt I will venture back there. Recently I have been thoroughly enjoying the brilliant documentary filmwork of Ken Burns, especially his series on the Roosevelts. (Eleanor Roosevelt is my new hero.) Mind you, I do find myself winnowing my way into my partner’s heart with my audiobook-listening habits. At the moment we are getting refreshed by reading Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and we just finished swooning over Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. Reading together is even more pleasant than watching a little TV together. I’m torn.

But I am grateful to that Apple salesperson for the excellent book recommendation.

Mr. Mander had some compelling arguments.

“Do Canadians really use the word ‘eh?'”

“Yes, they do.”

Welcome to one of OMNI television network’s flagship shows, Your New Life in Canada. Produced in English, Punjabi, Cantonese, and other languages, it offers a taste of Canadian lifestyle, culture, and language to newcomers to Canada and covers everything from how food differs in Canada to what work environments are like in the country. Keep watching the Rogers Media network, and you’ll see anchors talking current affairs and local news in Mandarin, Vietnamese, or Tagalog, or even a broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada in Punjabi. The glitz and the glamour of Canada’s linguistic diversity: that’s OMNI’s shtick.

Canada’s multicultural media isn’t a topic that appears much in mainstream news. But in November, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) will gather a large group of media broadcasters in Ottawa to decide the future of multi-ethnic and multilingual media in Canada. The topic in question: which media network will be granted a special broadcasting licence, regarding section 9(1)(h) of the Broadcasting Act, worth millions of dollars. (For the sake of clarity, we’ll refer to it as the 9(1)(h) licence.)

The tussle for winning this speciality licence for ethnic media has been simmering since the CRTC took strict action against Rogers Media this year. In 2017, the CRTC awarded the 9(1)(h) licence to Rogers Media for OMNI. This licence makes possible the broadcast of certain diverse channels—including the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), CBC News Network, CPAC, and Accessible Media Inc. (AMI) TV— to millions of Canadians as a mandatory service, in an effort to improve access to media programming in languages other than English and French. A majority of 9(1)(h) licence holders are non-profit organizations that seek to serve the regional and national audience through a publicly funded television network. But the Quebecor group and Rogers Media are two for-profit corporations that have been awarded 9(1)(h) licences to air as a broadcasting distribution undertaking (BDU)—meaning Canadians pay a certain fee for TV or digital media services for a certain number of TV channels. As a result, these channels are considered taxpayer-funded.

Now, the CRTC is changing its tune over the Rogers deal, restricting its licence after 2020. The commission is asking the rest of Canada’s television producers to bid to replace Rogers— but the company is pledging not to go down without a fight. In the end, it has spoiled a process intended to diversify content across the country. Ethnic media has become a game of money and power—and it has largely gone unnoticed in mainstream Canadian media.

***

The 9(1)(h) Act came about in 1991 to promote multilingual media for the multi-ethnic Canadian population. According to the section on BDU, the criteria for assessing the value of a certain service include whether the programming safeguards, enriches, and strengthens “the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada; is drawn from local, regional, national and international sources; [and] includes educational and community programs.” There is another criterion, one that’s key to this article: that the programming “reflects and contributes to Canada’s linguistic duality and ethno-cultural diversity, including the special place of Aboriginal peoples in Canadian society.” (Twenty percent of Canadians use a language other than English and French at home, according to Statistics Canada.)

In 2017, Rogers received its licence from the CRTC for its OMNI Regional channels. The mandatory carry of OMNI as a digital basic service awarded to Rogers Media—one that is publicly funded—saved the network. Two years prior, Rogers Media shuttered multiple stations across Canada, citing unprofitability. The new 9(1)(h) licence was supposed to ensure a steady stream of revenue for OMNI’s newly rebranded regional feeds in B.C., Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec, covering all regions of Canada. OMNI Regional broadcasts news and current affairs stories about local communities across Canada, programming considered critical to many communities. These regional broadcasts also carry multilingual and multi-ethnic programming of national interest.

But based on the criteria laid out by the CRTC, issues around Rogers’ use of the licence arose. In 2017, Unifor, the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, and the Urban Alliance on Race Relations filed a complaint against Rogers Media for using Mandarin and Cantonese newscasts produced by Fairchild TV, an outside contractor. Under OMNI’s licensing agreement for basic distribution, Rogers Media is supposed to produce and broadcast original content for the local communities where it operates. OMNI’s BDU application was approved for developing a regional feed model—with four regional feeds broadcasting from the west to east coasts.

Some consumers aren’t happy about the programming either, claiming that dependence on outside sources has left them with stale content. One viewer from Surrey, B.C., whom we’ll call Harpreet, says OMNI’s recent programming has turned his family off of the network. “There are no shows that interest me,” he says, particularly of OMNI’s Punjabi programming. “Most of them have been taken from somewhere else—old shows from another network. Shows we have seen 10 years ago.” That sentiment is echoed online, where little is posted about programming aside from interviewees promoting their appearances on the channel. Of these posts, one outlier exists. It’s a tweet by a stand-up comedian from Toronto: “Fun fact: OMNI is a shitty TV channel in Canada,” it reads.

OMNI’s practices have even been questioned by its own media workers who have demanded a more stringent set of conditions regarding the licence. Jake Moore, president of the Unifor Local 79M, which represents OMNI journalists and media workers in Vancouver and Toronto, noted in a press release that the basic distribution licence should work toward delivering local news. Howard Law, Unifor’s media director, also pointed out that Rogers Media shouldn’t be handed a blank cheque if it doesn’t retain the licence.

Nigel Barriffe, president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations and part of the coalition that has raised concerns about Rogers Media’s skewed practices, says the “CRTC had given the licence to Rogers without holding them accountable. It has everything to do with money… They aren’t struggling with funding. This isn’t about helping them survive. They bid enough to be able to do this. It is the right thing to do.”

Laith Marouf, policy consultant at the Community Media Advocacy Center (CMAC), claims Rogers also tried to back out of producing more original content in-house at OMNI Quebec—an issue at the heart of the concerns raised against the corporation. “After agreeing to air 14 hours per week of original content from Quebec as part of their licensing conditions to obtain the 9(1)(h) licence, OMNI applied to modify the condition to 14 hours per month, claiming they had made a clerical error during their licence renewal hearing,” he says. “The CRTC rejected their claims and request for condition modifications.” (Marouf is also a project consultant at Independent Community Television [ICTV], an applicant that is competing against Rogers Media for the 9(1)(h) licence. It also isn’t the first time ICTV has raised issues with CRTC licensing: the company filed a complaint in 2015 against Vidéotron’s community channel in Montreal due to noncompliance with regulatory requirements of the CRTC; the CRTC ruled in favour of ICTV’s complaint.)

“We initiated the request to amend the licence in an effort to clear up confusion around the condition of licence for the independent ethnic service ICI,” Colette Watson, senior vice president of television and broadcast operations at Rogers Media, told This in response to the allegations. “While 14 hours weekly is the commitment we made as part of OMNI Regional licence, the intent was not to create onerous licence requirements for this small broadcaster. OMNI Quebec has met its weekly commitment of 14 hours per week and that is what we continue to deliver.” Rogers points to collaborations with regional broadcasters, such as ICI Montreal and Fairchild TV, to produce the content, and will make original content a priority should the licence be renewed. Critics, however, say this is an unfair practice that violates the terms of the CRTC’s 9(1)(h) agreement.

The CRTC wasn’t completely convinced by Rogers’ arguments, instead initiating a call for new applications for the licence and restricting Rogers’ licence until 2020. A recent Globe and Mail report, featuring an extensive interview with Watson, failed to mention why the CRTC decided not to renew Rogers’ licence. Meanwhile, the corporation had grown its profits by more than one-third to $425 million as reported at the end of its first quarter in 2018.

When it comes to promoting inclusivity and diversity in programming—the chief concern for critics of the Rogers licence—some say there’s plenty of work to do internally to improve matters. According to one former OMNI employee, who has asked to remain anonymous to protect their identity, “no one from the ethnic community is part of the executive team at OMNI. They do have an advisory council that suggests ideas, but it doesn’t make any decisions.” Watson denies this. “The reality is quite the opposite and we’re extremely proud of the diversity we have on the OMNI team, both in front of and behind the camera,” she tells This, citing multiple employees; those mentioned in her response, however, are part of the editorial leadership team, and not from the executive board.

Rogers Media has since made some controversial decisions for OMNI, closing local stations in Vancouver and laying off a large number of journalists across the country. The CRTC took notice of these shutdowns, both by Rogers and other networks, and has enforced a policy requiring a 120-day notice before closing a TV station. Local community media is, after all, essential to the prosperity of millions of Canadians outside of urban areas—and such cost-cutting measures only hurt them.

***

The 9(1)(h) licence Rogers Media now holds will be up for grabs in 2020, and though OMNI is still in the running, there are seven other media networks—large and small—also vying for it. Bell Media, Ethnic Channels Group Limited, Telelatino Network Inc. and Asian Television Network International Limited, Amber Broadcasting Inc., Independent Community Television Montreal, Corriere Canadese, and Multicultural Described Video Guide—all major players in the third-language media industry—hope to get their hands on the licence.

Some applicants provide an option that’s similar to what already exists. Bell Media, a large corporation in direct competition with Rogers, has requested that they be allowed to contract productions of national interest to independent production companies rather than producing them in-house. But others show promise for change that would be welcome by unhappy viewers: According to the CRTC’s instructions the broadcasters are supposed to produce content in at least four languages—Italian, Punjabi, Mandarin, and Cantonese. ICTV’s TELE1 and TELE2 plan is the most ambitious, with 45 languages as part of its broadcast. ICTV is also the only applicant that has proposed content in Indigenous languages.

Meanwhile, Rogers Media has started a robust public relations campaign on Twitter with the hashtag #supportOMNITV and a website to gather support letters. The public support is critical for Rogers Media to save its licence at the hearing, slated for November 26. “We have mandatory carriage on the basic service of all television distributors, which has allowed us to provide programming to over 40 different ethnic groups in over 40 different languages, and to continue offering our third-language newscasts in Italian, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Punjabi,” the Support OMNI website reads. “Now, we are at risk of losing this mandatory distribution which will mean closure of the service.” The website does not state why CRTC is reconsidering OMNI’s licence or why it could lose it.

“We believe OMNI Regional is the clear choice for Canadians and we look forward to demonstrating that to all stakeholders in November at the public hearing,” Watson says of Rogers’ strategy moving forward. “We received close to 5,000 letters of support for the renewal of our service— far exceeding the support received for other applications.” This could not independently verify these claims.

***

According to data from consumer marketing company Statista on BDU subscribers across Canada, the households receiving basic distribution through various services such as Dish or IPTV declined to 76.2 percent in 2016, down from 83 percent in 2009. Still, the reach is great, and allows diverse communities to consume programming that speaks to their realities.

In times when the local and community news media industry is facing extreme challenges, this CRTC licence could strengthen civil society institutions in Canada. As Harpreet notes, from a viewer’s perspective, multicultural media in this country “should [uphold] Canadian cultural values. The network should be sensitive about translating and transmitting the cultural and social issues of the ethnic community into broader Canadian society.”

When mainstream English- and French-Canadian media are facing its biggest challenge in decades, OMNI’s case highlights a different story: a certain brand of multicultural media is thriving in Canada thanks to taxpayers’ money. But what does creating silos of media representation do to media produced in languages other than English or French? The mundane affair of a broadcasting licence might appear to be prosaic, but perhaps one overused quote by a famous Canadian might help us understand the gravity of the situation: “The medium is the message.”

Check back for updates on the story after the CRTC decision this November.

Lena Dunham as Hannah in HBO’s Girls

I am quite open about the fact that I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD. Talking about it comes easy to me. More difficult to handle are the reactions I get from others. “So are you like that nerd on The Big Bang Theory?” someone in a work meeting recently joked after I mentioned my OCD.

That nerd is Sheldon Cooper, a character on the popular CBS sitcom whose habits include not wanting his roommates to sit in his spot on the couch and knocking three times. Sheldon is often what people think OCD looks like.

I don’t watch the show, but I have yet to hear of an episode where it takes Sheldon more than an hour to leave the house because he needs to repeatedly check all the taps in his apartment to make sure there is not even the tiniest drip that could lead to a massive flood, destroying all his Nirvana memorabilia, killing his cat, and leaving him homeless. I doubt this would make for Emmy-winning television.

The Big Bang Theory is certainly not the only show to play OCD for laughs. Glee, Friends, and Monk have also reduced it to a punchline. Movies from As Good as It Gets to The Aviator depict OCD as a quirk, eccentricity, or Type-A personality indicator. Marketing campaigns joke about Obsessive Christmas Disorder, online quizzes ask “How OCD are you?” and Khloe Kardashian calls OCD, which she doesn’t have, a “blessing” because it enables her to create perfectly symmetrical stacks of Oreos.

Of those with clinical OCD, more than 90 percent have both obsessions and compulsions, but pop culture portrayals focus only on the latter. Portrayals are also often exaggerated, with OCD depicted as being performed in a specific way (often counting) or as a character’s defining personality trait. These negative portrayals not only diminish the severity of the problem, but also hurt those, like me, who don’t consider embarrassing blisters on their hands from repeated doorknob checking a blessing.

These portrayals also lead to silence and suffering for those who fear they will be dismissed or mocked for their OCD. (I was seriously once asked if I bottled my urine like Howard Hughes after someone watched The Aviator.)

Not all people with OCD are clean freaks, counters, or constant hand washers, but that is what pop culture has reduced us to. A few months ago, a friend visited my apartment and was disappointed it wasn’t cleaner. They assumed my OCD made me exactly like Friends’ Monica Geller. The apartment wasn’t clean, but my stove certainly was—I hadn’t used it in months because checking to make sure it was off became too exhausting and it was easier not to use it. Unlike me, Monica never survived on microwaveable Lean Cuisine entreés and Cheerios for several months to avoid the stove.

It took until 2013 for me to see a portrayal of OCD I could finally relate to. Many things about Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls frustrated me, but the show’s depiction of OCD perfectly captured my crippling feeling of frustration, darkness, and isolation. Talking to her therapist, Dunham’s character described how her compulsions and rituals would keep her up until the wee hours, leaving her exhausted and zombie-like in the morning, when she would wake up and do it all again. When my OCD is at its worst I often put off going to bed, staying up until 2 or 3 a.m. to watch something I am not even all that interested in (Top Chef: Colorado, anyone?) just so I can avoid my pre-bedtime lock and window checking.

In the morning, I stay in bed long after my alarm has gone off because the thought of getting up and doing my hours-long pre-leaving-the-house checking, followed hours later by my pre-leaving-the-office checking, has me feeling exhausted before I even have my feet in slippers.

In between all my checking, I remain hopeful there will be more positive pop culture depictions of OCD and mental illness. John Green’s recent novel Turtles All the Way Down, which is an account of Green’s own struggles with OCD, gives me hope, as do the better and broader representations of mental health issues in characters like Gretchen Cutler in You’re the Worst and Ian Gallagher on Shameless.

Take that, Khloe Kardashian.

New programs across the country are allowing kids to build their own book collections.

– Having fun isn’t hard when you have a library card—or when you can build your own personal book collection. Since February, Winnipeg non-profit Share the Magic has donated books to nursery and kindergarten classrooms each month. Meanwhile, Calgary’s Love With Humanity Association has founded a multicultural outdoor library with books in Punjabi and Urdu.

– Hiking, fishing, and fire pits are a recipe for happiness—and Pride. Yukon’s first summer camp for LGBTQ adults in Faro filled up in days. Founder Roger Bower came up with the idea after noticing that there was little LGBTQ programming outside of Whitehorse, and has been delighted with how welcoming the 350-person community has been.

– Toronto theatre awards are becoming more inclusive for non-binary performers. The Dora Mavor Moore Awards is scrapping male and female categories. Instead, it will celebrate outstanding performers in dance, opera, and theatre, regardless of gender. Volunteer jurors will also undergo anti-bias training on equity, diversity, and gender inclusivity.

– Ready to learn how to hunt goose? The Cree Trappers’ Association and Cégep de Saint-Félicien are starting a traditional skills college program. Elders, land users, and accredited college instructors will teach the fundamentals of Cree lifestyle, including hunting, fishing, and building traditional homes. The program expects to welcome its first cohort of students in 2019.

THE BAD NEWS:

Hundreds of families remain on daycare wait-lists in Nunavut.

– As Alberta MLAs were voting on an abortion clinic buffer zone bill—one that would create a 50-metre protester-free area around clinics—the handful of United Conservative members in attendance all walked out of the chamber, only to return once the vote was over. The caucus has declined to comment on or engage with the subject.

– The highly contagious whooping cough is being significantly under-reported in Ontario, according to a new study. The researchers estimated that between 2009 and 2015, there were 12,883 cases in the province of people older than age one, but only 1,665 were reported to public health officials. This might be because doctors aren’t testing for it, have trouble diagnosing it, or simply aren’t notifying public health.

– In 2012, the Harper government introduced a career transition program for veterans, allowing them to claim up to $1,000 spent on career counselling, resumé help, and other job placement support. A recent internal audit at Veterans Affairs found that between April 2013 and March 2015, 335 vets applied for reimbursement—but only 40 got paid.

– More than 700 people are on daycare wait-lists in Iqaluit. The two-year-long list means many family members will have to drop out of work placements and training programs to take care of their children. Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada has promised to build a centre this summer, but its 60 spots are barely a drop in the bucket.

The new issue of People magazine has both celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and fashion designer Kate Spade on its cover. Sadly, the magazine is the only weekly tabloid to give both stars the cover treatment, with other magazines featuring only Bourdain.

When Spade and Bourdain died by suicide, just days apart, tributes and tweets celebrated the lives of both, but there was a distinct gender bias in the media coverage of the two deaths. While articles on Bourdain celebrated his life and accomplishments, writers speculated that Spade’s professional success and the pressure associated with it had, perhaps, finally taken its toll on her. Bourdain was heroic; Spade was tragic. If you don’t think gender has anything to do with it, please consider these two headlines:

From Rolling Stone: “Anthony Bourdain’s Meal With Obama Was a Proud American Moment” 

From Business Insider: “Kate Spade reportedly addressed a suicide note to her daughter”

The media largely focused on Spade’s career as a successful designer, on the business she built, and on the effect the things she created, most notably handbags, had on those who purchased them (often with some serious classist overtones). At times it was as if Spade was invisible, existing only in relation to how she made others feel, how owning a Kate Spade purse had made a writer feel like they had finally crossed over the threshold to adulthood. Spade was not a woman, but a symbol of first careers, of first moves to big cities like New York, of first steps towards the Carrie Bradshawing of one’s life. 

Bourdain’s tributes were much more emotional, much rawer, and more focused on keeping Bourdain front and centre. He was repeatedly described as a great listener, a great conversationalist, a great checker of white privilege. It was not just about his resumé, what he produced, or how we consumed it, as it had been with Spade. People talked about the effect Bourdain had on their lives, but never in a way that rendered him absent from the narrative.

Significantly more column inches were devoted to the sensationalist, tabloid-like aspects of Spade’s death. How did she do it? Was there a note? If so, what did the note say? Who was it addressed to? There was US Weekly-style speculation that perhaps Spade’s separation from her husband and business partner Andy Spade had led to her death.

In the hours after Spade’s death, the media was like TMZ on steroids. Spade was not a human, but a headline. A CNN online story notes the cause of Spade’s death in the first paragraph. It takes CNN eight paragraphs to get to the cause of death in their reporting on Bourdain.

Coverage of Bourdain avoided the celebrity gossip angle and was less concerned with details of motive or method. No one speculated about the state of his relationship with actress and director Asia Argento and no one questioned how or if it could have been a factor in his death.

Writers were respectful of Bourdain, repeatedly acknowledging that they may not have known what the TV host was going through. The same can definitely be said of Spade, but that didn’t stop the media from speculating widely about it. As a woman, they felt it was okay to project, to speculate, to speak for Spade—even in death.

Bourdain’s coverage largely questioned why he would take his own life when he had everything. His was a glass half full. Spade’s coverage referenced what she had lost, her business troubles, her marriage troubles, and how it might have all been too much. The underlying narrative was that women are weak, that this world is too much for them. That they cannot survive. She was a glass half empty.

Coverage of Spade’s death mentioned that she may have been drinking too much, may have been self-medicating with alcohol and pills to deal with business challenges and her crumbling relationship. Writers discussed how Spade may have been afraid her depression and drinking would jeopardize her brand so she kept it hidden. Remember, Spade was a brand. Bourdain was a human. It makes me incredibly sad that in her professional and personal life, Spade could have felt like she had to hide addiction, darkness, and depression to preserve an empire built on positivity and polka dots. This says so much more about the pressures that society places on women, and especially successful women, then it does about Spade.

Articles hinted at Spade’s drinking, but largely treated it like a shameful secret she kept. If only Spade had been a man, then her drinking would have been good for business. Bourdain’s coverage described him as a “drug-loving chef,” and while his battles with heroin have been well documented, most notably in his 2000 book Kitchen Confidential, tributes largely treated his addiction as a thing of the past.

While coverage didn’t speculate on whether Bourdain was using drugs again, it certainly would have if he was a woman. It celebrated his bad boy image, his status as a “renegade chef,” and talked of his second act which, of course, doesn’t include his past drug use. Celebrating, rewarding, and excusing the bad boy is something media and pop culture do again and again (see also: Charlie Sheen, Sean Penn, Johnny Depp and so many more). Both in life and in death, male celebrities always get a redemption story.

Both might have been drinking too much, but only one merits mention. In death Bourdain was a saint, and Spade a sinner. If you want to see this tired narrative in action some more, just compare the tabloid-like documentaries of the lives of Whitney Houston or Amy Winehouse, which chronicle every drug use detail and bad relationship decision, with the 2017 documentary devoted to George Michael’s life and career, with doesn’t mention drugs, public restrooms or undercover cops at all. Of course, Michael’s film was authorized by the artist; with Houston and Winehouse’s docs, male filmmakers thought it was okay to just take a woman’s story, pick it apart, and package it for moviegoers.

It’s not surprising that Spade’s role as a wife and mother was front and centre in all the tributes. Spade’s coverage often referenced her 13-year-old daughter and painted Spade as a selfish mother who had abandoned her child. Bourdain’s daughter was not mentioned as often, if at all, nor was he accused of abandonment or neglect. I actually had no clue he had a daughter until one article mentioned it days after his death.

Eventually, coverage of Spade’s death was replaced by Bourdain’s as he took centre stage. The tributes to Bourdain continue, while Spade’s death has largely faded from the media spotlight. Female celebrities are always upstaged by their male counterparts—and even in death, it is no different.

Story after story broke with revelations about so-called trusted names in news accused of sexual misconduct in the workplace. I began reconsidering my new career in media.

Some, like Mark Halperin of MSNBC, were accused of propositioning employees and engaging in unwanted sexual touching. A Vox investigation alleged that Glenn Thrush of the New York Times placed several young female reporters in uncomfortable romantic situations before spreading disparaging rumours about them in the workplace when his advances were rejected. Ryan Lizza was dismissed from the New Yorker for what the magazine cited as “improper sexual conduct.”

I began to think that being a woman in media meant condemnation to a lifetime of small injustices: mentorship conditional on acquiescence, fear that collegiality will be interpreted as romantic interest, weathering vengefulness after rebuffed advances.

While an individual incident might not have lasting repercussions, experiencing a pattern of harassment over years has likely prompted many women to reconsider their careers, if not abandon the industry entirely. Was a life in media worth it? I wondered if there were other aspiring journalists who shared my anxieties. Had these scandals made them reconsider their career plans?

Ann Rauhala, an associate professor at Toronto’s Ryerson School of Journalism, is a 29-year veteran of news media in Canada, having worked at the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the CBC. She’s seen this problem play out throughout her career. “This is an old story that is finally getting the light of day,” Rauhala says. But now, the public appears to have reached a “critical mass” moment with survivors of sexual harassment coming forward. “The whole #MeToo response, I think, is serious and important,” she says. “It is based on decades of outrageous behaviour that women in workplaces have endured. It’s pretty gratifying, to tell you the truth, to see it emerge.”

While many stories of misconduct have revolved around American outlets and reporters, Rauhala suspects that similar allegations may soon emerge in Canadian institutions as well. “I do hope that there are some sexual predators and sexual harassers who are not sleeping well these days,” says Rauhala. “Good. I’m happy that they’re not sleeping well.”

Days after I spoke to Rauhala, CTV News broke the story that two women had accused Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown of sexual misconduct, stemming from separate instances. Within hours, Brown resigned. In response to coverage of the Brown story, former broadcaster Bridget Brown described in a blog post an incident in which an unnamed CTV reporter is alleged to have forcibly kissed and exposed himself to her. Soon after, the outlet suspended Queen’s Park correspondent Paul Bliss.

Like me, Moira Wyton was disheartened by the plethora of allegations against prominent media men, those we trusted as reliable sources of information or held as sources of professional inspiration. Wyton, features editor at the University of British Columbia’s student newspaper, tells me that she was saddened by the implications of these numerous allegations. “I think about all the women who weren’t able to fully participate in the industry and who weren’t able to fully practice their craft,” she notes, “or were practicing it with fear and intimidation.”

At the Varsity, I spoke to Josie Kao, one of our associate news editors, who plans to pursue journalism after graduation. While media scandals haven’t altered her career plans significantly, Kao says, it has forced her to acknowledge the many barriers between her and a secure job in the journalism industry with “respect and decent pay.”

Still, she was hopeful that this public outcry would set a precedent for herself and other young female reporters. “I’d like to hope that if anything like this happens [to me],” Kao says, “I’d feel more confident speaking out against this, now that I know people in the media have done this before… and not been harassed out of existence.”

Both Wyton and Kao cited journalism’s strict hierarchies and competitiveness as potential reasons these incidents may occur more frequently. “You eat what you kill,” says Wyton, adding that by virtue of the job, journalists relinquish responsibility of their work to a hierarchy that decides its final form.

One’s desire to speak up may also be outweighed by the instinct to protect a professional reputation. “Women are incentivized to stay silent, because you just want to prove that you can do it, and that you can function in the industry,” says Wyton.

Student journalism is often where many begin to seriously consider careers in media, says Sierra Bein, editor-in-chief of Ryerson’s student newspaper, the Eyeopener. The platform enjoys a certain power to serve as a staging ground for implementing changes to workplace culture. “It’s definitely given us, and myself, a reason to look back at our newsroom,” says Bein.

The news presents an opportunity to examine why these issues may occur, and what steps can be taken to ensure a positive and valuable newsroom experience. As student journalists, “we’re not in the mainstream yet,” Bein says. But, she adds, “we’re going to be there very soon. So it’s something for us to be watching and whispering about on our own.”

At the University of King’s College in Halifax, assistant journalism professor Terra Tailleur runs a newsroom of more than 20 journalism school students. Aspiring reporters need to know their options when encountering workplace harassment, she tells me, including finding allies or mentors in the office.

While her newsroom’s previous discussions about harassment in journalism had focused on external concerns, Tailleur says my query about misconduct had prompted her class to discuss how to hold her accountable in creating a safe work environment. “I’m not just a classroom, I’m a newsroom,” Tailleur says. “I have to create an environment where they can learn and they can thrive and they can do their jobs, which means that I can’t have anyone harassing these students.”

Hearing that, I felt satisfied—at least for now, hoping that I had helped fellow student journalists feel secure in their job. The burden of improving this industry sits on all of our shoulders. Future journalists, I believe, are doing their share—it’s time for our elders to step up, too.

UPDATE (04/13/2018): A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Terra Tailleur is an associate, not assistant, journalism professor at King’s. This regrets the error.

Facebook has killed news.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced early last month that the network’s algorithm was changing to show “less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media” in users’ news feeds, instead highlighting personal posts that “encourage meaningful interactions between people.” The announcement cost him more than $3 billion of his own personal funds after Facebook’s stocks plunged, of which he owns more than 400 million shares.

The algorithm update indicates a dramatic change in the way users will consume their news—one that, ideally, is meant to curb the proliferation of fake news—but also in the way publications will have to promote their digital content. Facebook is no longer the audience gatherer it once was—and it hasn’t been for a while now.

Independent publications know this best. Created with the purpose of telling stories that may not be explored by mainstream media, Canada’s indie outlets know how to operate on a smaller audience and budget. And, in the ephemeral digital landscape, indie media has become accustomed to creating a community within the noise of the internet.

“Facebook has always been flawed. I think it feels less like a major change and a continuation of the fact that [digital media] just doesn’t seem like a priority to them,” says Haley Cullingham, senior editor of online magazine Hazlitt. She says Hazlitt’s Facebook strategy will not be changing after the announcement because its traffic mainly comes from people sharing its content organically, and from other social networks, like Twitter. “We’ve been very clear on the fact that we’re not going to change the fundamental tone and personality of the site just to accommodate the specific way the internet has provided [to best reach the audience],” Cullingham says. This is a strategy that other Canadian indie outlets, like Now magazine and the Tyee, share. For smaller publications, the focus has always been on the stories not told by mainstream media—not the likes and digital targets.

News outlets have long been warned against following algorithm changes too closely—as seen in Facebook’s push toward branded content, then image-heavy content, then video content, then its experimental (and largely ineffective) foray into live video. Companies that have dedicated resources chasing these trends have never seen the return on investment that they were promised.

“The danger of putting all your eggs in one basket is that someday, someone can just fuck up the basket,” says David Topping, senior manager of product at St. Joseph Communications. “Relying entirely on a social network that you have no control over, insight into or power to affect change with is always going to be a risky strategy. It’s not one that I would recommend.”

Topping says he hopes the new algorithm will encourage more originality and stronger dedication to meaningful content among publications. He warns that the recent trend of favouring clickbait and viral content may end up hurting outlets in the end. As publications inevitably move away from receiving funding from advertisers and shift toward asking their readership for money, he says “they will have spent so long reducing that value to that audience that, when the time comes … no one will care enough to do so.”

Michelle da Silva, online and social media manager for Now magazine, says her staff have been preparing for an announcement like this. Over the past two years, the publication has been devoting more resources into its digital platform. “Of course, we still have our print publication and that’s an important part of what we do and an important part of our legacy. But the only way forward is by making sure that you have a good digital strategy,” da Silva says. She says Now isn’t as affected by the algorithm change because Facebook clicks only account for about 10 percent of its total online traffic. Although it is still the “highest amount of traffic in terms of social channels,” the majority of its online hits come from Google searches, or people looking up the site directly—showing that, at least for indie mags, the concept of the “dead homepage” remains a myth for now.

This sentiment is shared by other indie publications, like Vancouver’s the Tyee. Bryan Carney, director of web production, says Facebook makes up around six to 10 percent of the publication’s total amount of online traffic in any given month. Although longer-term effects of the algorithm change are still yet to be seen, Carney’s first reaction isn’t to do a complete rehaul of his digital strategy. “You can watch the landscape and not necessarily throw money into promotion,” he says. “I think the winning way to do it is slowly build an audience rather than getting too excited about platforms.”

Carney mentions how Tumblr, the blogging site, was once touted as “the biggest thing that was going to take over Facebook.” Those rumours never came to fruition. He says, “We didn’t go and hire a Tumblr intern… and we’re probably pretty glad we didn’t.”

He also says that Facebook’s popularity, especially with advertisers, has devalued advertising on the Tyee’s site. “We’re not so tied to the fortunes of Facebook, nor do we feel any sort of loyalty to them,” he says. “It’s not likely there’s any love lost when it turns out Facebook will be less and less important for news. I hope this can be a positive development, that it’ll cause people to rethink the way we consume news and aggregate it and curate it… I think there’s a potential for this to be a positive in the industry for people to do something about it.”

The algorithm change could help slow down the breakneck speed of the news cycle. Misinformation and clickbait posts often come from the need to publish the most content faster than anyone else. If publications are phased out of readers’ news feeds, they’d need to find a new business model—one that, hopefully, relies more on publishing content that is more meaningful and nuanced than one-dimensional takes designed to go viral. However, it also does mean that people who have been using Facebook as a news aggregator may need to find an alternative. That includes more active support for digital content—like publicly supporting and sharing meaningful pieces, or subsidizing publications that commit to publishing them.

Ultimately, Facebook is putting the onus on the reader to go out of their way to find content that speaks to them—as it should be. Reading the news critically and evaluating different viewpoints should always be a conscious, active process instead of something done passively. And while the algorithm change represents a shift in the way news will be promoted and consumed, Canadian indie publications will survive using the same techniques that have kept them going in previous trying times: by creating meaningful niche content that personally speaks to its readers—and by not investing all their resources on a Tumblr intern.

In an era in which circulation figures for most newspapers are falling faster than water over Niagara Falls, do newspaper endorsements in election campaigns still matter? At the risk of appropriating the language of click-bait, the answer may surprise you.

While the Canadian experience is less immediate and, even among the most politically engaged Canadians, less discussed than the recent American example, let us begin to by examining the situation at home.

There’s a growing concentration of media ownership: There are only two truly independent dailies publishing in English—The Whitehorse Star and the Fort Frances Daily Bulletin—and the same number in French—Montreal’s Le Devoir and L’Acadie Nouvelle, from Caraquet, N.B. Consequently, endorsement decisions are no longer made at the editor’s desk in each Canadian community, to the extent that they ever were.

During the 2015 federal election, every Postmedia daily that endorsed a party called for the re-election of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives (some published an editorial credited to Postmedia and some wrote their own endorsement). That spate of endorsements was, surely, almost as predictable to their readers as the Toronto Star’s pro forma call on their readership to again back the Liberal Party.

Consider the fact that, in many Canadian communities, there simply is no longer a daily newspaper. Oshawa, Ont.—a city of 168,000 people—lost its daily in 1994 when it closed down in the midst of a labour dispute. Dailies serving Guelph, Ont. and Nanaimo, B.C., closed in 2016, while dailies in two other B.C. towns, Cranbrook and Kimberley, became weeklies in the same year.

The Guelph Mercury, a paper born in the same year as Confederation, struggled with declining circulation numbers for years. When its owners at Torstar finally pulled the plug on the paper, it had circulation of just over 11,000 (subscribers and individual sales), in a city of 120,000 people (not including surrounding townships). While some might argue that it’s difficult to lament the loss of an institution that was apparently so little valued in its own community, the truth is a little more nuanced.

The Mercury had for the last eighteen years of its existence been tied together with the Waterloo Region Record. For most of the time, it shared a publisher and an editor with the Record, and all copy editing, page layout and printing was farmed out to the Hamilton Spectator. With the remaining eight reporters doing their best to cover local news, sports, and entertainment, the real wonder is that the paper lasted as long as it did. It is hardly surprising that the longstanding indifference of its owner was met with the indifference of its target audience.

With daily newspapers suffering declining readership, does it even matter who they endorse? Certainly, the New Democratic Party, which received the endorsement of not a single daily newspaper in the 2015 federal election, would argue that it matters. Indeed, historically, the NDP has received support from a daily newspaper only twice in its history (the Toronto Star in both 1984 and 2011), and both of those were highly qualified, almost grudging endorsements that were widely assumed to have been brought on by the weakness of the Liberal Party at the time.

Meanwhile, the Bloc Quebecois can usually count on the support of Le Devoir, but other newspaper endorsements are split between the Liberals and Conservatives (as noted above, often predictably). For better or for worse, the prevailing “red door/blue door” narrative of Canadian politics is largely supported by a news media that assumes that there are no other choices, and—in the case of newspapers —makes that abundantly clear in its endorsements.

If endorsements didn’t matter, newspapers wouldn’t bother to publish them. Clearly, the owners of newspapers feel that they have influence over their readers and are not averse to using that influence. After all, television networks and radio stations in Canada don’t take editorial positions during election campaigns, although they are often accused of being too close to or to hostile to particular governments in their news coverage.

Even as their traditional readership declines, newspapers are part of a fierce competition for clicks, likes and shares. Published endorsements are spread widely on social media by partisans and others before the ink that printed them is even dry. In this way, they can be expected to have a much stronger impact now than when newspaper circulation was much higher.

***

Even with the growth in the importance of Facebook and other online advertising, newspapers still hold more credibility than bloggers, Twitter trolls or Instagram users, which is presumably why so much of the “fake news” that dominated the American presidential election pretended to come from more legitimate sources (if you’ve ever clicked on, or worse yet shared, a link from the Denver Guardian, for example, you were supporting the burgeoning fake news industry).

If the U.S. presidential election taught us anything (other than to be very afraid of whatever lurks in the souls of American voters), it is that newspapers and their endorsements still matter a lot—although not always in the way that they were intended to matter. Take, for example, the case of the Arizona Republic, which endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. That might not seem like such a big deal until you consider the fact that the paper began publication in 1890 and had never endorsed a Democrat until 2016.

In a story written for National Public Radio, Meg Anderson argues that “newspaper endorsements matter most when they’re unexpected.” She cites a 2008 Pew Research Center survey, in which “nearly seven in 10 Americans participating said that their local newspaper’s endorsement had no effect on who they voted for, regardless of who the paper picked. The rest were split between saying it made them more likely and less likely to support a candidate.”

She also points to a separate study that found “one scenario where a newspaper editorial board may make a difference: when a newspaper bucks its own tradition”; that is, when a conservative-leaning publication cannot stomach their party’s nominee and endorses a Democrat, or simply denounce their party’s nominee without formally endorsing their opponent.

One suspects that endorsements or anti-endorsements from publications that don’t normally express an opinion at all would similarly carry more weight than one from publications that habitually endorse one party or another. Thus, when the USA Today broke with 38 years of traditional neutrality to scathingly denounce Donald Trump or when Vogue made its first presidential endorsement ever, it was much more surprising to readers than the endorsements from the New York Times or the Washington Post.

To be sure, certain supporters of Trump thought the Arizona Republic’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton mattered a lot. The paper was besieged with death threats and vitriol for weeks after publishing its endorsement. Its publisher responded with a very brave editorial speaking out against the backlash (reiterating the reasons for their endorsement and citing something called the First Amendment), which only led to further attacks against the paper and its staff.

More newspapers endorsed “not Trump” than endorsed Trump himself (although he did receive the endorsement of the National Enquirer and the Crusader, the official newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan). He received far fewer editorial endorsements than did Mitt Romney in 2012 or John McCain in 2008, and many staunchly Republican papers endorsed Clinton.

Of course, both Romney and McCain lost, while Trump pulled off an improbable victory. Some might see this as a clear indication that newspaper endorsements don’t matter, or at least didn’t matter this time. But, in fact, it can be reasonably argued that they mattered a great deal.

***

One of Trump’s recurring narratives—and one that worked particularly well for him—was that the corrupt media elites were out to get him. As Time magazine noted during the campaign, “Trump has been laying out his theory for weeks, gradually expanding the list of institutions that are rigged against the American people…. Most of all, he blames the national media, which he claims is single-handedly keeping the Clinton campaign afloat. He said the Washington elite and national media existed for a single reason: ‘to protect and enrich itself.’”

If you believe Trump, and the election result is conclusive evidence that nearly half of the people who voted did, every newspaper endorsement (regardless of the source) was just further evidence that he was right about the media. There is something called “confirmation bias,” which Psychology Today explains as follows: “When people would like a certain idea [or] concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true.” It prevents climate change deniers and anti-vaccine campaigners from accepting facts that contradict their own deeply held beliefs. Similarly, the more the news media reported on outrageous things that Trump said, the more they became part of the grand conspiracy to keep him from becoming president.

In an interview with the CBC following the election, John Cruickshank (a former publisher of both the Toronto Star and the Chicago Sun-Times) responded to questions from host Diana Swain about the message that election results send to the media. “I think we’re part of the lives of about half of the population, and that was really proved out in the election in the United States. And we’ve seen it here, too, in Canada, where there is tremendous dissatisfaction among people who are of a more conservative bent, or more from the rural part of Canada, with the media…. The campaign was covered as if it were a plebiscite on the character of Donald Trump, but it wasn’t, really.”

Does this mean that the media should stop doing its job? Most assuredly not. But, they should recognize that all of their fact-checking and endorsements won’t change the minds of those who have already decided that the traditional media is the enemy.

Fact-checking and editorial endorsements will also do nothing to counter what has been called “the post-fact era,” in which uninformed opinion is given the same weight as evidence-based scientific studies and fake news and conspiracy theories get far more clicks than well-researched analysis. Countering that trend will take a much larger effort on behalf of citizens to demand better from both their politicians and their media and, in the case of the latter, to be willing to pay for it.

In the seconds after Melania Trump handed Michelle Obama a Tiffany box at the 2017 presidential inauguration, Jason Wong—from breakfast at a Vietnamese restaurant in downtown Los Angeles—raced to rewind the livestream he’d been watching on the Twitter app. “My brain clicked,” recalls the 20-year-old. “I wanted to post about it before anybody else did.” Repeatedly pressing his phone’s home and power buttons, Wong—as if handling a game controller—took a burst of screenshots and captured the exact still fit for his caption in mind. With reference to a 1990s movie cliché and a tweet, the meme was born: “*record scratch* *freeze frame* ‘I bet you’re wondering how I got into this situation’” above the former First Lady, upon receiving the present from her successor, staring into camera The Office-style. “It felt like she was asking ‘How did we get into this mess?’” he says of the now widely shared instant known as side-eyeing Michelle Obama. “I could relate and knew others would too.”

Who tells the inside jokes of the internet? Though memes are unavoidable on timelines, dashboards, and newsfeeds alike, the people who actually make them are often unknown with unchecked authority over what captures focus in our attention economy. Wong, with more than one million followers across Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram, has known the power to “make anything go viral within 48 hours” since high school. Viewing the White House greeting that early January morning through meme-coloured glasses was part of his job: a livelihood that earned him over $250,000 last year, supporting him through college, in founding his own consulting firm, launching an annual meme activity book, and most recently, gifting his mother a Toronto apartment. Meme-makers are hunters on the prowl, describes Nathan Jurgenson in his essay Speaking In Memes, ever-ready to pounce on the world’s most clickable, shareable, likeable, memeable moments. Wong, garnering nearly 100,000 retweets and favourites on his inauguration gag, made the kill.

Derived from the Greek word mimema (meaning “imitated thing”) and coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, a meme is historically defined as a unit of cultural transmission spread through replication with melodies, fashions, and catchphrases as examples. Today, however, the term’s meaning is broad, encompassing the consumer-producer dualism of Web 2.0: content that scatters rapidly from person to person to create a joint cultural experience, generates by various means of repackaging, and informs the social groups in which they propagate. “We’ve developed a kind of meme-literacy,” according to Jurgenson. “We hear retweets in words.”

At their best, memes bring people together and remind the isolated that they aren’t alone. For many, they are created and distributed as “coping mechanisms,” breaking down the hard-to-swallow into playful, punchy, bite-size pieces of media. In this way, how we interpret the world online and off has dangerously shifted: Significance is now equated to virality as the overall narratives of major news events are rewritten by the memes they spawn, dictating which parts resonate and which pass into obscurity. Memes can now inspire empathy by unprecedented means, but we fail to acknowledge where or who they come from. As meme-makers increasingly partner with brands to monetize memes into so-called “ideaviruses” that spread like global infections from consumer to consumer, we must also consider how these young social media influencers can and do abuse their platforms. Within these networks, we depend on a drug and, while readily letting them exploit our addiction, don’t bother to learn our dealers’ names.

***

Viral posts are hard to predict, but when Wong sensed the Michelle Obama meme picking up traction he, for “shits and gigs,” turned on his mobile social media notifications. Within minutes, he remembers, relentless vibration alerts sent his phone off the edge of his coffee table. When he first joined Tumblr in 2012, though, memes and their demand were in infancy. “The things we consider memes now would have not been considered memes back then” and vice-versa, he says. From the original rage comics and Pepe the Frog to early 2010s Bad Luck Brian and Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That to recent White Guy Blinking and Cash Me Ousside girl, he grew up through their evolution. While the forms memes take have drastically changed, Wong reasons, the root of their value will never be substituted: They’re relatable. Bullied in school and troubled with moves between China, the U.S., and Canada as a kid, Wong—now based in California—credits meme creation and curation with his self-discovery. By populating his blog, asian.tumblr.com, with memes that worked to assert his own identity, he attracted an international community of like-minded individuals. If he felt insecure in his body, for instance, a post such as, “I wish we could donate body fat to those in need” would receive over 200,000 reblogs from internet friends affirming they felt the same way.

Jason Wong.

Wong insists the gravity of his influence is not lost on him, but some—including the Reddit user who made a meme encouraging people to heat up spoons in the microwave to more easily scoop hardened ice cream—do abuse their command. “Honestly, I could create fake news or start a religion if I wanted,” he says. When Justin Trudeau met with Donald Trump in February, for example, a meme sparked by a Reuters image in which the prime minister seemingly refuses the president’s handshake told the story of a confrontation between the world leaders. “‘I don’t know where that hand has been’ – Justin Trudeau, probably,” read one popular tweet. Another: “[Trudeau is] cold as ice.” Despite the men being cordial during the photo op, the summit’s alternative narrative was largely accepted as fact, circulating as what the U.K.-based Telegraph called the biggest display of dominance in Canada’s history. “The incredible feature of memes is that they are noticeable among tons of texts on the internet,” clarifies Westminster School of Media lecturer Anastasia Denisova. “They easily go viral and intoxicate the mainstream.”

More than just uniting online communities, memes also establish physical ones. The 3,000-member Toronto Bunz Dank Meme Zone (BDMZ) private Facebook group, for instance, encourages the use of memes to express experiences of marginalization. At monthly meet-ups (called “meme-ups”), users take their interactions from URL to IRL. “In person, I don’t have to be guarded about being queer or having anxiety because I am so open about it [through the memes I post] in the group,” says 24-year-old Lavinia Tea, a BDMZ administrator who characterizes the site as a “safety haven” where harmful biases are challenged by “promoting critical thinking with memes about social justice and sexuality.” Member requests like, “please send anti-mansplaining memes. This one classmate won’t shut up so I need a good laugh,” call for virtual support in the face of tangible oppression. Scrolling through a folder titled “Memes” on her computer desktop, Tea pulls up image macros and GIFs poking fun at panic attacks and breakups made during her own hardships. “This is our way of normalizing our non-mainstream identities and stigmatized struggles,” she says. Without the BDMZ’s strict community standards, though, Tea speculates they would not be protected from the “edgelords” of the web who exist only to shock and offend. In public digital spaces, controversial “normie” (or mainstream) memes are circulated much more invasively with little regard for whose feelings they hurt. For this reason, when a candlelight vigil for Harambe the Gorilla—a meme banned by the group for mocking traditionally Black names and body types—was held at Ryerson University in September 2016, BDMZ members were disappointed but not surprised it drew hundreds in attendance. “It was just a joke,” says Mustafa Malick, the student who organized the memorial and calls arguments the meme promotes racist stereotypes “extremely farfetched.” “People get offended by anything nowadays.”

***

Ten hours after Wong spawned side-eyeing Michelle Obama, a reply appeared in his notification tab—surrounded by an ever-growing collection of heart and looping arrow icons—accusing him of being among the most shameful of cyberspace criminals: a meme thief. “God damn it,” wrote French user Sofiane A.K. “I did it first.” Nearly identical with slight variation in wording, his meme was posted 23 minutes earlier than Wong’s. “[I was annoyed] about my lack of luck,” he explains in an interview. “I did it first but I have a smaller audience so it doesn’t really matter if I did in the end.” While products of personalized creativity, memes also conform to public formulas and scripts that would make the independent design of two identical memes possible: “There is definitely a race to create and only one can survive,” Wong says.

But can a shared element of culture actually belong to an individual? Peaches Monroe—the woman who coined “on fleek” in 2014—thinks so, now seeking compensation via crowdfunding site GoFundMe for the phrase’s use by brands and celebrities. The unspoken rules of our mash-up society built on borrowed ideas, however, reason that such cultural products are forms of commentary that belong to us all. “Once you share a meme, it starts a life of its own, without copyright or signature from the author,” disputes Westminster lecturer Denisova. “It is no longer yours.” In fact, she continues, it never really was because memes are artefacts of popular culture, slang, politics, and so on: They’re “a recycled media unit.”

Though in theory anybody can be a meme-maker, the privilege to infiltrate the public norm is highly conglomerated. Because the most “famous” meme accounts—such as @Dory, @RelatableQuote, and @lifepost—notoriously steal and repost memes in early stages of virality, “there is a definite lack of representation of good content creators,” suggests Wong. While they openly disclaim not owning the content they post, these massively followed entities secure their superiority as meme providers by interfering with any everyday user’s viral momentum, reclaiming it as their own. “They changed absolutely nothing about my tweet, not even the amount of exclamation points at the ends of my sentences,” details user @hamlllton, whose meme of playwright and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda as an unrelenting universe was taken in March. “Mine had around 200 retweets, but in a few minutes that account had thousands.” Kassandra Tate, a 20-year-old Californian, has been acknowledged for the meme since Miranda himself publicly denounced the “joke-steal accounts” on her behalf. “I see people around my college campus sharing the meme [and they] have no idea I made it,” she says. “How amazing is it that with one tweet people all across the world start using the same slang and sharing the same pictures?”

When a price is put on a meme, the sense of entitlement grows. According to Wong, a meme’s worth is determined by its ability to infiltrate everyday conversation while still seeming normal. Marketers thus employ meme-makers to create and share ads disguised as memes that will strew from customer to customer, rather than from brand to customer. Like the mistaken announcement of Best Picture at the Oscars, true memes cannot be forced or manufactured, stemming from moments of off-script authenticity. To serve clients, meme-makers—like Wong and @Daquan of Canada’s most popular meme account—leverage the trust they’ve forged with their fans; the expectation that everything they post is in some way an honest output of their genuine feelings and experiences. The popular “you vs. the guy she tells you not to worry about” template, for instance, is then applied in promoting a Burger King chicken sandwich over a competitor’s instead of the meme’s traditional and organic use by jealous spouses. “It’s all very native on the account,” says Daquan, the 18-year-old from Calgary who reaches more than nine million users on Instagram with branded memes for a living. “Most of the time you can’t even notice it’s an ad.”

***

Once discussion of side-eyeing Michelle Obama had been replaced with crowd size disputes and #AlternativeFacts, Wong’s spiking activity of Twitter impressions steadied. He knew the meme was dead. “It represented a collective feeling toward a specific moment in time,” he says. Once that moment passed, the meme did too. Albeit expiring as quickly as it came alive, the meme made Wong—and the masses it reached—feel better about the swearing in of an unfavourable 45th president of the United States, even if for a brief period.

While memes may work to alleviate some of the pain, they inherently fall far short of a cure. Rather than watching President Trump sign a memorandum to advance construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline after months of Standing Rock protests in January, it was more comforting to see a Photoshopped childlike doodle of a “dinosar” in the executive order’s place. Instead of thinking about the implications of climate change on water resources around the world, it is easier to make light of its significant impact on our ecosystems through perplexed Bill Nye The Science Guy. Laughing at the prospect of World War III is less worrisome than contemplating the potential dire repercussions of the U.S. airstrike on Syria.While this may be the comic relief some seek, these memes also work to numb—convincing many that if they’re meme-ing about it, they’re doing enough. In ignoring where the viral concepts we digest and regurgitate come from, we—symptomatic of a society that avoids investing in the escapism afforded by music, cinema, television—miss the opportunity to understand the source’s effect on how we think and act, playing directly into the hands of those profiting from our disregard.

Though he doesn’t deny the banner fits his job description, like the nuanced difference between a comedian and somebody who tells a lot of jokes, Wong resists his meme-making label. “It’s supposed to be a natural phenomenon. You’re believed to feel connected to the content because it represents you and your thoughts and ideas,” he argues. “Giving yourself a title defeats the purpose. It’s like eating. I eat, but I’m not a food eater.” In this sense, memes have come to express what our pre-internet vocabulary could not: To regularly consume them is to process life through a new language. To be a meme-maker is to have defined the words.

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