Newspaper and periodical reading room, Library of Congress, 1901. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

The recent revelation that data offered up by a Toronto Metropolitan University research centre had for years systematically inflated the number of newspaper closures in Canada points up the weakness in Canadian media research. It’s a problem that academics have noted for decades and something I have been harping on for more than 20 years. Peter Desbarats, who was then head of the University of Western Ontario’s journalism school, wrote in 1989 that “public debate about journalism in Canada suffers from a constant shortage of historical perspective and reliable data.” A Senate committee report on news media in 2006 noted that “Canada does not have a permanent centre with stable funding for research on the media similar, for example, to the Pew Institute in the United States,” and suggested that Canada develop its own independent media research centre. The federal government has “supported a number of networks of centres of excellence in medicine, engineering, and the social sciences,” it argued. “There is no reason why a similar network could not be created to fund research on the news media in Canada, building on the admirable strengths that already exist in universities across the country.” Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin put it succinctly in 2022. “Despite its exponential growth in importance the media industry gets only a small fraction of the scrutiny that other powerful institutions do,” he pointed out. “Big issues go largely unexamined in Canadian media… There are precious few media columnists in this country. There is no overarching media institute to address the problems.”

Our federal broadcasting regulator is charged in part with monitoring the communications landscape, but the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission’s annual reports have proved less than timely and forthcoming. “Release of the CRTC’s annual flagship Communications Monitoring Report has been occurring later and even spilt over into the beginning of this year, 2021, for its review of conditions in 2019,” complained Carleton University researcher Dwayne Winseck a few years ago in his annual report on Canada’s media industries, which is one of the few worthwhile media research projects in Canada. “The problem with this laggardly approach is glaring given that while there are three regulatory reviews of........

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