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  • Canada May Ban Fox News from Cable TV for ‘Abusive’ Tucker Carlson Segment

    The regulatory body that oversees broadcasting in Canada has opened a public consultation about potentially banning Fox News from cable TV. Initiated on May 3, the process was prompted by the LGBTQ advocacy group Egale Canada, which asked for the consultation in early April in response to a Tucker Carlson segment that, in their view, “aimed to provoke hatred and violence against 2SLGBTQI communities.”

    “This programming is in clear violation of Canadian broadcasting standards and has no place on Canadian broadcasting networks,” wrote Executive Director Helen Kennedy in an open letter. “Egale has experienced firsthand the hate that is generated from a single segment aired on Fox News in Canada. We cannot begin to imagine the broader impacts and potential rise in hate that might result from allowing more content like this to air in Canada.”

    The body conducting the public consultation is the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), essentially Canada’s version of the Federal Communications Commision (FCC). Among other things, the CRTC is responsible for enforcing the Broadcasting Act, which governs broadcasting in Canada.

    “The CRTC maintains a list of international channels cable, satellite and IPTV providers can include in their packages,” the National Post explains. And the list does change every now and then. “In March 2022,” the Post writes, “the CRTC removed Russia Today and RT France from the list, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

    Fox News was originally approved for Canadian viewers in 2004 and has been available in Canada ever since.

    The specific regulation Egale Canada is accusing Fox News of breaking is section 5(b) of the Television Broadcasting Regulations which prohibits broadcasts of “any abusive comment or abusive pictorial representation that, when taken in context, tends to or is likely to expose an individual or a group or class of individuals to hatred or contempt on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age or mental or physical disability.”

    Prohibiting what amounts to hate speech on public television may sound somewhat reasonable, but it opens the door for considerable censorship, as this story illustrates. After all, who gets to define hate speech?

    Now, we could quibble about this specific regulation and how it should be interpreted or whether it should even exist, but there’s a much bigger issue to highlight, namely, the issue of broadcasting regulations as such.

    For context, radio and television broadcasters in Canada are heavily regulated, much more than most people realize.

    For one, foreign ownership of broadcasters is significantly restricted. As University of Ottawa law professor Dr. Michael Geist notes, “The foreign ownership rules generally limit [broadcast] licensees to 20 percent foreign ownership (up to 33 percent for a holding company). This covers all types of broadcasters including television, radio, and broadcast distributors.”

    There are also strict rules about the amount of Canadian content—often called CanCon—that broadcasters must feature. The Canadian YouTuber J.J. McCullough draws attention to these requirements in an article for the Washington Post. “It is thanks to the CRTC, for instance, that Canadian radio stations ‘must ensure that at least 35% of the Popular Music they broadcast each week is Canadian content,’” he writes, “and that Canadian television stations must ‘devote not less than 50 per cent of the evening broadcast period to the broadcasting of Canadian programs.’”

    As you can imagine, there is a complex list of rules that specify exactly what is required for media to be considered “Canadian Content.” Many of the personnel involved must be Canadians, for instance, and at least 75% of program and post-production expenses must pay for services from Canadians or Canadian companies.

    Notably, it was these CanCon requirements that prompted much of the backlash against the recently passed Bill C-11, also known as the Online Streaming Act, which essentially aims at expanding these kinds of requirements to online platforms such as Netflix and YouTube. The legislation, originally called Bill C-10, has become quite contentious in Canada over the past few years because of the new powers it gives the government to regulate online content platforms.

    Now, some proponents of Bill C-11 point out that the current system is rigged against legacy media and in favor of online content creators, and that Bill C-11 will level the playing field. I agree the current system is unfair in this regard. But the way to fix that is to deregulate legacy media, not to impose the same restrictions they face on new media.

    Deregulating the broadcasting industry may sound radical, but it’s actually the status quo that should be cause for concern. Though they are rarely labeled as such, the current broadcasting regulations in Canada essentially amount to a form of protectionism. Steven Globerman comments on these regulations in a refreshingly candid 2014 study published by the Fraser Institute.

    “One of the longest standing shibboleths of Canadian public policy is that popular culture industries in Canada must be financially supported and protected by government if those industries are to survive,” he writes. “While it is certainly incorrect to characterize all culture policy as protectionist, Canadian content regulations and foreign ownership limitations can be fairly characterized as such.”

    The truth that is rarely spoken is that there’s a whole “Canadian Content” industry being propped up by these regulations, and it stands to lose a lot if the quotas and other protections were to disappear.

    A group called SOCAN, which lobbies on behalf of Canadian musicians, eagerly boasts about the success of these regulations.

    “In 1971, the Government of Canada recognized a problem: Canadian music wasn’t being played on Canadian radio, but foreign artists (mostly American) were. This meant that non-Canadian artists received the vast majority of radio airtime. Money flowed from Canada to support foreign talent rather than our Canadian talent.

    As a result, Canadian Content (‘CanCon’) rules were implemented for radio stations. The CanCon rules require that at least 35 percent of music broadcast by radio stations during peak hours must meet a defined minimum level of ‘Canadian.’ In Québec, the level increases to up to 65 percent for French-language radio stations. The rest of the ‘traditional’ sector (television and cable) also has its own CanCon rules.

    Those rules have been enormously successful in ensuring that Canada has its own cultural industry and Canadian voices, creating, sustaining, and building a significant source of monetary, emotional and cultural value. There are few, if any, aspects of Canadian culture that foster as much national pride and value as the success of music made in Canada.

    Today, we’re facing a similar but new challenge: Canadian music isn’t sufficiently prominent on internet-based services.”

    They go on to advocate for Bill C-10 (the precursor of Bill C-11) to “bring the Broadcasting Act into the digital era” because “it’s imperative to continue to sustain and build Canadian-made music.”

    If this reminds you at all of the whole “Made in America” rhetoric, then you understand this issue perfectly. And if the emphasis on “preserving Canadian cultural identity” strikes you as a Baptist cover for a Bootlegger motive, then you’re really paying attention.

    Why does this group favor the existing regulations and their expansion with Bill C-11? Because they represent the beneficiaries, the creators of “Canadian Content” who are given a competitive edge against their foreign counterparts with these quotas. An industry that owes much of its existence to a certain set of regulations tends to push pretty hard to keep those regulations. And if they can gain even more quotas in the increasingly dominant new media, all the better.

    Should broadcasting regulations be scrapped then? Absolutely. Not only is broadcaster licensing protectionist, it’s also censorious, because it gives the government the power to control who is allowed to broadcast. The economist and political theorist Murray Rothbard discusses this in his book For a New Liberty.

    “Because every station and every broadcaster must always look over its shoulder at the FCC, free expression in broadcasting is a sham. Is it any wonder that television opinion, when it is expressed at all on controversial issues, tends to be blandly in favor of the ‘Establishment’?”

    Just imagine if the government tried to create licensing for books or newspapers, Rothbard says. “What we would all consider intolerable and totalitarian for the press and the book publishers is taken for granted in a medium which is now the most popular vehicle for expression and education: radio and television. Yet the principles in both cases are exactly the same.”

    So what would a free market in broadcasting look like? Fortunately, we don’t have to guess. It would look like the internet, which the CRTC has thus far not been regulating (hence the push for Bill C-11). In other words, it would look like more choice and by-and-large better content.

    Now, some might object to a free market in broadcasting because certain producers of “Canadian Content” would go under as a result. This is probably true, but success in content creation should depend on your ability to win viewers, not on your ability to rig the system in your favor.

    Others may object because they believe patriotism and a national identity is important to foster. But it’s not the government’s place to foster culture. If the Chinese government imposed “Chinese Content” requirements for their broadcasters and had state-approved content creators to fill these quotas, wouldn’t that be considered an unwarranted interference with press freedom? Why should it be considered any less egregious when we do it?

    Still others may object because of concerns about hate speech, such as with the Fox News case. But hate speech laws already exist in the Criminal Code. Now, whether those laws are themselves legitimate is another matter. For the purposes of this discussion the point is that specific hate speech regulations on broadcasters are at best redundant with existing laws and at worst censorious. In either case they shouldn’t exist.

    A final objection that might be raised is that without regulation, Canadians would be allowed to watch foreign propaganda like Russia Today. And it’s true, RT would probably be on cable TV in a free market. But there’s a couple of points to make in response. First, it should be up to consumers to decide what constitutes state propaganda, not bureaucrats. And second, if your concern is genuinely that Canadians might be allowed to watch RT on TV, I would simply point out the irony that you are advocating for government censorship in the name of opposing authoritarianism.

    Speaking of irony, it’s curious that Canadian politicians love to posture on the world stage about their commitment to freedom. If they actually want to practice freedom and not just pay lip service to it, the complete deregulation of broadcasting would be a great place to start.

    This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.


    Patrick Carroll

    Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


  • Tucker Carlson Says Corporations Are Now the Biggest Threat to Your Freedom. He’s Wrong


    tucker

    Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg have no prisons. They’ve never run an internment camp or seized anyone’s home for failure to mow their lawn. Their body counts are a combined zero. Yet in a recent keynote address at the National Conservatism conference, Tucker Carlson suggested that big corporations—like Google, Twitter, and Facebook—are a greater threat to your freedom than the government.

    “The main threat to your ability to live your life as you choose does not come from the government anymore, but it comes from the private sector,” the Fox News host said.

    Echoing recent praise for Senator Elizabeth Warren and her brand of economic nationalism, Carlson declared that her book on the two-income trap is “one of the best books on economics he’s ever read.” (Might we recommend a bit of Sowell, Hayek, or Smith?)

    Is Carlson’s claim defensible? Not by a long shot.

    The genius of the Constitution is a result of the American Founders’ understanding that our freedoms and rights precede government and that an unrestrained government is the biggest threat to those freedoms. The Founders limited the power of the government through an intricate system of enumerated powers, separation of powers, explicit rights, and rights retained by the people to impede the abuse of governmental power.

    Limiting the potential for governmental abuse was fundamental to the design of our constitutional order and remains an abiding concern. No such concern existed for “big corporations” because businesses do not wield the power to promulgate civil and criminal laws and exact punishment for violations of them. The state, not business, has a monopoly on compelled coercion.

    While laws and law enforcement are essential in a free and orderly society, government abuse at all levels has riddled our history (from FDR’s internment camps to Jim Crow laws in the South) and is the stuff of daily headlines.

    Government has the legal authority to incarcerate you, allocate your tax dollars how it sees fit, and foreclose on your home if you fail to mow the lawn.

    You may recall the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission involving Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop. Phillips was asked by a same-sex couple to create a wedding cake for their upcoming ceremony. Jack politely refused. A complaint was filed with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which led to a years-long struggle for Jack as he sought to protect his business, his brand, and his reputation. Even though the Supreme Court ultimately sided with Jack, the state of Colorado sought to punish him for exercising his freedom of speech and association.

    Much of the nationalist right’s recent lambasting of big business seems focused on social media. A few media personalities like Alex Jones, Louis Farrakhan, Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulos have been de-platformed for violating terms of service or community standards, but where is the widescale conservative or nationalist purge? Even when users from the right have been suspended “permanently,” social media has reversed course and reinstated their accounts, sometimes within 48 hours. (Ask your attorney if you can appeal a conviction or civil judgment brought by the government within 48 hours.)

    The reality is that no person has a constitutional or natural right to a social media account. A user must agree to the terms of service and comply with community standards to enjoy the services offered by these platforms. No user can compel Facebook or Twitter to tolerate what it deems hateful or offensive language any more than they can compel Fox News to give airtime to pro-Antifa screeds.

    Where else is big business threatening conservatives’ freedom? Are banks refusing mortgages to conservatives? Are hospitals refusing to treat them? Are auto dealers refusing to sell F150s to boomers because of MAGA memes? Certainly, there are unfortunate stories of well-known conservatives being refused service at local restaurants, but the multi-year investigation into the IRS’s unfair treatment of conservative groups reveals where the greater threat lies.

    Carlson’s speech at the conference was titled “Big Business Hates Your Family.” While Carlson has railed against American companies for any number of reasons in recent years, his latest bête noire is Oreo. Nabisco, a parent company of Oreo, was in Carlson’s crosshairs for advertising that suggests kids “choose their pronoun” with their Pride Month “pronoun pack” cookies.

    Tucker dismissed the idea that people can start their own competing business if they don’t like a company’s practices. This dismissal of entrepreneurship is puzzling coming from an entrepreneur; Carlson is the co-founder of an online publisher. But there is an even simpler course of action than starting your own cookie company. If you are not happy with Nabisco’s business practices, buy different cookies… or bake your own at home with your family.

    It’s not clear what policy Carlson would suggest in response to Oreo, but Carlson’s characterization of big companies as monopolies may give a clue.

    Carlson has blasted social media giants as “digital monopolies.”

     

    Despite the national media celebrity’s histrionics, there are dozens of social media platforms and search engines. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram might be the most popular for now, but if a conservative doesn’t like these companies’ policies, they can unplug, deactivate their account, or try other emerging platforms like Codias, MeWe, Ricochet, or an alternative search engine like DuckDuckGo.

    Decrying social media companies as monopolies suggests that the companies should be broken up under antitrust laws. However, the Federal Trade Commission enforces antitrust laws where there’s a showing of anti-competitive practices. It isn’t enough to say that a company is too large or the company’s practices are not pleasing to pundits like Carlson.

    If companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook engage in anti-competitive practices, such as price-fixing or exclusionary contracts, they should be forced to comply with applicable law like any other company. But rather than fearmongering that these companies are a greater threat to freedom than the government, we should narrowly tailor a remedy.

    For instance, these tech companies’ greatest competitive advantage is that they have collected extensive data over the years. Rather than trying to break up these companies, users could be given the statutory right of data portability, where a person can delete their account and take all of their personal data with them. Giving users greater control over their own information would be one way to give consumers more power without breaking up the companies they enjoy using on a regular basis.

    Ultimately, it’s an odd time to rail against American capitalism. Unemployment has dropped to its lowest level since 1969, and worker wages are on the rise. Capitalism, including big business, is a source of economic prosperity for American workers and families.

    Rather than weaponizing antitrust prosecutions for political or social purposes, policymakers should eliminate the anti-competitive privileges of crony capitalism. Concerns about data privacy are real but can be addressed with focused remedies rather than the blunt tool of “breaking up big tech.”

    Americans are not at the mercy of businesses that don’t share their values. Like Tucker Carlson, we are free to start a competing business, or we can simply choose another supplier. By contrast, we can’t “log out” of laws and regulations—even ones we disagree with. Violating federal law or disobeying the instructions of a law enforcement officer can come with severe and sometimes deadly consequences.

    Our Founders wisely recognized that our greatest threat isn’t Nabisco or Facebook. With the memory of an overreaching British monarch fresh in their minds, they sought to establish a republic that ensured government—not private business—was properly constrained. We ignore their wisdom at our own peril.

    Doug McCullough

    Doug McCullough is a corporate attorney at the Texas law firm, McCullough Sudan, and is a director of the Lone Star Policy Institute. Doug is a co-host of The Urbane Cowboys, a podcast on policy, society, and innovation. He is a National Review Institute Regional Fellow and Better Cities Project Fellow. He is a regular contributor to Foundation for Economic Education, and has been published in Entrepreneur, The Hill, Washington Examiner, Arc Digital, Houston Chronicle, and San Antonio Express.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


  • Tucker Carlson’s Critique of Market Capitalism Suffers from a Flawed Premise

    Much attention has been given to a cable show monologue from Tucker Carlson. There, Carlson argued that “market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster.” Implied is the idea that markets are simply meant for human use, something to be picked up but that can also be put aside, ignored, or directed.

    Since the monologue went viral, many critiques have been leveled, as well as defenses made. One such defense by Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance declares the “market is not a Platonic deity, floating in the sky and imposing goodness and prosperity from on high.” In support of his critique, Vance cites various threats to our “social fabric” giving the opioid epidemic special attention. He concludes, referencing drug companies and other corporations, that “these entities are doing what the market demands, and in some ways, it’s hard to blame them. But shouldn’t our laws and policy make life harder for them?”

    But if we think of markets as a mere tool, we mistakenly believe we can discard them when convenient or fruitfully direct it toward our preferred ends. The “just a tool” mindset is prone to mistaken beliefs that making it harder is enough for good social outcomes. The tool metaphor suggests that the changes in job markets, culture, family structure, or even addiction are the manifestations of undisciplined free markets which can be corrected by“the man of system.”

    Tucker and Vance appear to defend an old concept, that markets, like a tool, can be employed as deliberately or as purposefully as a toaster, staple gun, or hammer, as the metaphor implies, to repair perceived harms. Yet this assumption misses key realities about the nature of markets, which makes them more than a tool.

    First, markets are expressions of human cooperation. They are a medium of human interaction that allows individuals and groups to coordinate—at times over long distances and even temporally—efforts and resources. In this sense, it is important to understand that even if labeled a tool, markets are a description of human interactions and processes that emerge to coordinate within the context of scarcity and constraints.

    The primary, but not exclusive, mechanism to coordinate human economic activity is price. As F.A. Hayek explains, the marvel of the price system signals the value of resources by tapping into vast networks of human knowledge. The price system acts as an information surrogate revealing the “particular circumstances of time and place.”

    This insight has been foolishly tested, most notably in communist regimes, which abolished prices and instead chose to stumble in the dark without this expression of human coordination. Rationing and poverty became the norm; increasing vulnerability to—and even creating—famines that claimed the lives of millions.

    This may not have been the greatest atrocity of these totalitarian regimes, but it was a dominant feature, and the consequences were disastrous. In socialist regimes, the absent price leaves no signal for production or distribution. Resources and capital are misallocated, directed according to the needs of the government, or what central planners perceive to be the best use of those resources without the wisdom of markets and market participants.

    The United States has forayed into this planning fallacy in the past, though on a smaller scale. The Great Depression was a time of economic experimentation, including policies meant to influence prices. This attitude of market control led to perverse programs, which, during a time of hunger and economic distress, would expend resources in nonsensical ways, such as President Franklin Roosevelt randomly designating the price of gold or paying farmers to not farm—a policy that persisted in some form into the current century.

    More recently, gasoline shortages in the late 1970s were at least partiallycaused by price controls. Since price was removed from the work of rationing and encouraging a growth in supply, the government had to step in with its own rationing scheme. Additionally, the cost of gasoline appeared in the form of time consumption as people desperate for gas waited in long lines at the pump. We have run this experiment many times of varying scales only to find attempts to control human coordination negatively impacted prosperity.

    One need not support a totalitarian regime to commit this error, only bear the mindset that markets are simply tools to be used to construct policy and society rather than expressions of individuals responding to their respective incentives and constraints to realize their preferences. This hints at a broader truth: free markets and prices are a key part of the social fabric.

    As Ludwig von Mises wrote:

    The pricing process is a social process. It is consummated by an interaction of all members of society. All collaborate and cooperate, each in the particular role he has chosen for himself in the framework of the division of labor.

    Attempts to manipulate markets toward particular policy goals often threaten the social fabric as they target a fundamentally social process.

    Not every free market arrangement is coordinated via the pricing mechanism. Economists such as Ronald Coase and Elenor Olstrom described alternate arrangements for coordinating efforts between individuals, such as firms or complex systems of self-governance, which often arise to solve problems where price has not materialized.

    Most important, though, is that these are part of the emergent order of free-market systems to serve members of society, subject to the churn of the market process. Allowing that process to take place avoids capture by the political system and strengthening social ties.

    Second, when decisions are not made by free markets, then political markets take control. Distribution of resources then becomes a question of the political process. Here, the currency is rarely as transparent as the price mechanism. The currency of the political economy is often money, but it is also votes, political favors, rents, power, and special legal treatment. The incentives shift from serving others through mutual exchange and coordinating resources and talents to maintaining political power and subjecting resources to political ends. Political markets are the natural outcome of turning free, or capitalist, markets over to the political process.

    This observation is clear: that markets are more than just a tool, but in some regards a reality of human behavior. Leaving a market where price and choice govern substitutes it for other forms of human coordination, each with their own currency. The political system seeks to maintain the status quo, entrenching incumbent market and political actors.

    Markets aren’t perfect, and we should not expect every outcome to meet such an ideal. People lose work, are injured or die, or fall into addiction. None of these are to be lightly dismissed, but the long-term trend is that each of these can be addressed through the market process. In the free market, we find the ability to deal with downsides as we see fit, in coordination with others through voluntary transactions made through mediums of human exchange. Alternatively, government action is often less responsive and monopolizes solutions to complex sociological problems.

    Giving government the monopoly on dealing with the downsides of choice hinders coordination in the market to ease the burdens on individuals, families, and societies from those very problems. It impedes the process of creative destruction and cooperation.

    This reveals a third reality of free markets that makes them more than tools. Markets lay out incentives for people to solve each other’s problems, constantly innovating, seeking to reduce transaction costs, and providing better outputs via the process of creative destruction. What we see often when governments interfere in market processes are the unintended and often worse consequences that spring forth from intervention. Interference in the free market is usually more costly than the perceived benefits.

    The costs and consequences of the political market are many. Redirecting resources reveals opportunity costs. Preventing people from their preferences raises the cost of enforcing laws and regulations against those preferences. People look to substitutes when prices rise, often turning to unsafe or even dangerous alternatives. The law of unintended consequences runs rampant in the world of economic intervention, and all of these costs must be accounted for when attempting to remove people from their preferences.

    Observing market behavior, in its entirety, allows for a comparative evaluation between free markets and their alternatives, the record is rather clear: free markets produce the greatest amount of prosperity, choice, and set of incentives.

    Perhaps we can treat the free market as a tool, as Carlson claims; much like a hand, foot, or eye can all be called tools. Yet, they are also more than just tools, as are markets. Embracing free markets allows us to pile “idea on idea,” as Deirdre McCloskey has written, and permit “market-tested betterment” to increase prosperity, as it has done.

    Markets are inescapable realities, part of social processes, and we stand able to choose which market process we employ—free markets or centralized political markets.

    Source: Tucker Carlson’s Critique of Market Capitalism Suffers from a Flawed Premise – Foundation for Economic Education