For the sake of our democracy, American hedge funds should be banned from owning Canadian newspapers.
For the sake of our democracy, American hedge funds should be banned from owning Canadian newspapers
Canada’s largest newspaper chain, Postmedia, is owned by an American hedge fund headed up by a wealthy donor to Donald Trump.
Repeating this statement:
Now is the time to be getting information from Canadian Owned and Operated media.
There will be disinformation campaigns unlike any other election.
Now's also the time to admonish your friends and family for consuming enemy state media about their own country. Uncomfortable family talks.
I've already had one with my dad. He would've supported P.P and was asking my opinion.
Retired boomer with no imagination so he took up a part time job as a driver in a plumbing shop. His conservative coworkers poison his aging grey matter, and I have to deprogram him now and then. Thankfully my dad's not a reactive dick and will read sources I provide him that he's not read and change his mind. Begrudgingly. That old boy conservative mindset is ingrained in him deep. He always has a look on his face like he's betraying his community voting against cons. I don't get it, but he's not as bad as he could be.
My point is, people have to fucking try with family if there's a chance they can be reasoned with. Don't be cowards/doormats.
Those uncomfortable conversations are essential, and I appreciate that you're putting in the work. It's not about "deprogramming" so much as encouraging critical evaluation of news sources.
Media literacy is becoming increasingly vital as we approach the election. The challenge is that many people don't realize how their media consumption shapes their political views—they just see it as "the news."
What's worked for me is asking questions rather than making statements. "Where did you hear that?" followed by "Have you verified that information with a Canadian source?" opens the door without creating immediate defensiveness.
Your dad's willingness to engage with alternative sources shows he values truth over tribal politics, even if reluctantly. That's actually quite rare these days and worth appreciating.
The "betraying the community" feeling is something I've noticed with older conservatives too. There's this sense that changing one's mind is somehow disloyal, when really it's just part of being an informed citizen. Democracy depends on people who can evolve their thinking based on new information.
The issue really isn't foreign ownership, it's for-profit ownership or bias in the interests of wealthy owners. Do you think investigative reports into the Rogers family would happen on City TV or CTV, both properties owned by Rogers Communications? That's why we need to protect CBC. It's not free from bias, but it's much less biased than most mainstream media sources.
I think CTV owned by Bell? Not sure why Bell would want to cover up something their competition is doing wrong.
Also the CBC exists. It's owned by the government so you can get your news from there if you're worried about wealthy owners hiding stuff. CBC Marketplace is all about investigating companies doing shenanigans.
Yeah, you're right. I got confused about which member of the oligopoly controlled CTV.
As for CBC, I think that was the main point I was making.
A friendly reminder to everyone. Lemmy is absolutely not representative of the broader mass media dialogue happening around us. We have to be paying attention to how all people, close with us in our day to day lives interact with it instead. My boss is a retired mechanic who thought Trump was gonna run the US "like a business." I have been speaking very openly about my views on the American News Media bias in Canada. How new and legacy media are both monopolies controlled by the same small group of men. How the Heritage Foundation funded the Trump Campaign. How every far-right group appearing after Covid had the same names and message. America First, Canada First, Britain First, Ireland First, Francais Premier and all, coincidentally, funded by right-wing, American, Christian groups. Something clicked with him today, while he was on his phone and I watched as it all suddenly made sense to him.
Then I watched as he actually became worried. People know that it's Big Tech and we have to have these conversations, because that's how you get people to put their phones down and re-evaluate the idea of trusting 5 companies with all of their personal information and doing all computing in a web browser. That's how you wake them up to the fact that LLM's and embedded AI assistants are only their to spy on you and silence dissent.
Hey Co-pilot, have any of our user's expressed dissatisfaction with the regime? Here's a curated list.
We are so close to class consciousness do not let this echo-chamber be a safe space. Get Offline, get loud, get honest. Fuck Google
This is important information for people to read and unddrrstand. As a denizen of multiple communities for over 25 years I think the seeds of ideas start with these forums. They are almost like a canary in the coal mine to give us an idea what will bubble up to the surface to grandma.
We're not the majority on Lemmy, many instances are curated to keep out the filth. But content is recycled and moves throughout the net. I'm reminded of this old meme, eventually content makes it to facebook where my mom and elders consume content.
My boss is a retired mechanic who thought Trump was gonna run the US "like a business."
Running government like a business is a horrible idea.
The 2 are vastly different types of organizations with very different goals and motivations.
It doesn't even need to be specifically targeting the U.S. Canada should require all media operating in Canada with a physical presence to have Canadian majority ownership/controlling interest. That is (I believe) enforceable as well as non-discriminatory and fully justifiable as a matter of national security.
I highly recommend reading Manufacturing Consent[wiki]. It's easy to find free online. It explains how mass media is systematically filtered by five major factors, the first being ownership, which is more and more relevant every year as media outlets consolidate under the ownership of billionaires like Murdoch, Bezos, Musk and Bloomberg, who have very different material class interests to the other 99.99999[...]% of the population.
All private equity and/or hedge funds should be banned completely from owning anything.
They don't do anything positive for the majority of residents in Canada, preferring to bend the knee to the super rich billionaires.
Fuck them.
How about banned from owning any Canadian business? Yes, that includes the hedge fund that owns your org's parent company too
They did a smash up job with Hudson’s Bay. Financial terrorists is what they are.
They're vultures and parasites. They get a friendly CEO into a company who then sells off useful assets and changes to renting/leasing.
Does your org own property/offices. Sell those of to another company under the hedge to show high numbers for the first numbers. Then the company needs to rent - often from those same funds and possibly that exact same property they're still in - which then makes the business less and less profitable as supply chain is also replaced with whatever profits the hedge most.
Finally, declare bankruptcy, fire-sale any remaining assets (probably to hedge-fund buddies), close up shop and let all the workers go
A tale as old as capitalism
For the sake of our democracy, American hedge funds should be banned from owning Canadian things. --FTFY
If they’re going to be internationally owned, they should have to have a heading of the top of articles when the bias is made away from Canadian interests. We should have choice of news, we should also know where the bias in the reporting is coming from when it’s not Canadian owned.
Similar to a site like ground news that shows the way articles lean and from which publishers.
ive been saying this for years.
we need a bias label, and an ownership label, on the front of every newspaper and published story or "opinion piece article". we need to know who owns what, and where they come from, and why they own it in the first place, and what their ties are. not a nice little bow on the end that say "the author, larry smith owns a dog and a cat in new york and is married, the end" but completely leaves out the part where "larry smith" donated to the proud boy movement and has been known to spread misinformation.
disclaimers on things like cigarettes and alcohol make sense, so does this. if something can cause harm, we should know about it before we even get involved with it.
I think this is part of a larger issue, in which people, even a lot of journalists I know, see news media as this bastion of neutrality and facts. It's a noble goal, which I do think journalists should pursue, but in reality any news publication will have biases. Even just which news you decide to highlight can bring up bias, let alone the actual things you write about the news.
Things would be a lot better if every journalist, whether right-wing, left-wing, or centrist, were upfront about their views and how the environment they're in shapes them. Bias is unavoidable, but being upfront about your biases can at least properly frame your views.
American companies shouldn't be allowed to own or operate anything in Canada, period
Hedge funds shouldn't be allowed to own any company, period
American companies shouldn’t be allowed to own or operate anything in Canada, period
NAFTA is going to make that downright impossible sadly.
100% we need to fight oligarchy reach. They've already taken so much of our news and journalism we need to reclaim it and never let it go.
And apartment complexes, or department stores.
This, so much this. I literally just went by the bay and it'd just fucking sad. It's a squeezed out husk
I figured things were at the end when Nespresso pulled out their boutique from the flagship downtown Montreal location last year, or two years ago.
The homeless tents lined up on the West and East sides of the building didn't help, or the defective escalators.
They say the retail landscape changed too much and passed them by, but downtown there's Simon's that has IMO pretty much the same large store with clothes, sheets, bath supplies. No appliances or perfumes though, maybe The Bay was just too big.
Absolutely. I hope Carney has the cojones to make this happen. Can’t have a foreign country threatening to annex us, masquerading as Canadian media.
Carney is a former central banker, he will not do anything to upset the flow of money. Realistically, every single career politician in the world is complicit in this. Why can we build no more, houses? Why is everything so expensive? Why is the American party of "progressiveness" running Kamala Harris whose brother is CEO at Uber? It's an illusion, they are all compromised, they are all bought, that's just the nature of Capitalism. We have bring back the death penalty, but only for corporate person-hood. If you commit global terroristic acts like Meta, Muskrat and Amazon, we should be able to kill these things. We have to stop putting the 1%'s property rights over the lives of the 99%. It's our planet, why do we need elected individuals whose sole purpose is to make decisions detrimental to everyone but themselves. We need to make Fight Club a documentary.
How about banning them from majority share in any major Canadian business. I'm tired of the buy, drain, dismantle cycle perpetuated but these vultures
Don’t let them buy your houses either. In fact don’t let them own anything. Hedgefunds ate parasites that feed the wealthy.
They are being used as part of a major foreign influence campaign (Wild guesses as to who they are supporting) so yeah, we should put a stop to that bullshit
Look what their propaganda has done to the US. Don't let it do the same thing here.
It’s important to support Canadian owned news.
You’ll find great quality journalism from The Tyee , the Narwhal, or The Walrus.
I’m sure there are many more - perhaps we should create a list
Wouldn't it be a shame if everyday people went out and spray painted Trump on every conservative sign. That would be vandalism ppl and plain wrong.
If you want your information to be basically unpolluted - keep the American propaganda machines out of your country.
Did Canada sell them? Maybe the problem is that they are private. But even if private, can't guarantee it will be pro-democratic.
I disagree with this sentiment, to some extent.
For industries and areas considered critical to national security / functions, they ought to extend and enforce a Canadian content like requirement for the sector ownership structure. That is to say, you'd define news sources / papers as an area of national interest, and require that at least 51% (or some other percent) of that industry's stakeholders are Canadian citizens / organizations.
Blocking all foreign ownership of media is not the direction I would want to go, though I would like it to be transparent about its ownership structure, so that readers can make an informed decision about potential ownership biases in the content they read.
I also wouldn't be opposed to the Government keeping track of a formal list of licensed News Agencies / Papers, with their ownership structures and official sites. Not only would that make different smaller/local papers easier to find / add to feeds, but it would help in weeding out the "fake" (ie made by unknown/questionable sources) sites. Businesses have to get licenses to operate anyway, so I don't imagine this would be something too difficult to sort out for the Govt IT folks. Any information they'd require to make it work could be added to the licensing process pretty easily I imagine, and they could theoretically provide options for businesses to update their information in the event of things like site/domain name changes etc (if they expand it beyond just news agencies). They could even tie this in to the ACSS system, or Interac E-Transfers, to flag vendors that have Canadian hosted online payments available, for people wanting to avoid US card networks like Mastercard/Visa. As many business licenses are handled at a municipal level, you'd have in person verification options for all of these items, which could help cut down on potential fraud and abuse. Main hurdle would likely be sorting out how to have the information presented to end users, but if it used a federated approach with clusters for each municipality, province, nation-wide, and international, allowing users to opt in to whichever lists they wanted to reference/search for products, I imagine that sort of an approach could work... ? And honestly, might even give better results for marketing/connecting businesses and customers than something like Google or the existing search engines.
I admit I haven't really dug into what's online related to business licences etc as part of this, though I'm fairly sure we don't have something like that. If it exists I'd welcome some insight.
You sweet summer child