Federal government’s latest media bailout another bad idea

The governmentalization of the news media in Canada continues apace. According to a recent announcement by the Trudeau government, the “CRTC determined that a new temporary fund for commercial radio stations in smaller markets should be created.” Now, radio stations outside of Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa-Gatineau will be eligible for taxpayer subsidies.

Clearly a bad idea. Firstly, there’s no obvious market failure the government will solve. If the value of local radio stations, as measured by how much revenue they generate, is higher than the costs of running those stations, no subsidies are needed to keep them going. Conversely, if the costs are higher than the benefits, it doesn’t make sense to keep those radio stations on the air.

The government said the new funding is “temporary” but as economists Milton and Rose Friedman famously observed, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” Taxpayers may can reasonably expect that subsidies to local radio news stations will become an ongoing expense instead of a onetime hit to their wallets.

Indeed, the Trudeau government has a history of making temporary or “short-term” costs permanent. Before coming to power in 2015, the Liberals proposed “a modest short-term deficit” of less than $10 billion annually for three years; instead this fiscal year the Trudeau government is running its 10th consecutive budget deficit with the cumulative total of more than $600 billion.

Secondly, the governmentalization of media will likely corrupt it. Here again an observation from Milton Friedman: “Any institution will tend to express its own values and its own ideas... A socialist institution will teach socialist values, not the principles of private enterprise.” Friedman was talking about the public education system, but the observation applies equally to other sectors that the government increasingly exercises control over.

A media outlet that receives significant government funding is less likely to apply healthy skepticism to politicians’ claims of the supposed widespread benefits of their large spending initiatives and disbursements of taxpayer money. The media outlet’s internal culture will naturally lean more heavily towards government control than free enterprise.

Moreover, conflict of interest becomes a serious issue. To the extent that a media outlet gets its revenue from government instead of advertisers and listeners, its customer is the government—and the natural inclination is always to produce content that will appeal to the customer. Radio stations receiving significant government funding will have a harder time covering government in an unbiased way.

Finally, as a general rule, government support for an industry tends to discourage innovation, and radio and other media are no exception. When new companies and new business models enter a sector, the government should not through subsidies try to keep the incumbents afloat.

“The media, like any other business, continually evolves,” noted Lydia Miljan, professor of political science at the University of Windsor and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, in a recent essay. “As each innovation enters the market, it displaces audiences for the legacy players. But does that innovation mean we should prop up services that fewer people consume? No. We allow other industries to adapt to new market conditions. Sometimes that means certain industries and companies close. But they are replaced with something else.”

To summarize—there are three major problems with the Trudeau government’s new fund for radio stations. First, it will impose costs on taxpayers that, despite the government’s label, may not be “temporary” and the compensating benefits will be lower than the costs. Second, increased government funding will damage the ability of those radio stations to cover the government with neutrality and healthy skepticism. And third, the new fund will discourage innovation and improvement in the media sector as a whole.