‘Bipartisan’ local journalism committee jousts over report

A new report on Manitoba’s news media industry urges the government to commit to spending a quarter or more of its annual advertising budget on local radio, print and other media outlets.

The announcement made Friday was immediately met with scrutiny on the part of Progressive Conservative members of the “all party committee” behind it.

The eight-page document does not — contrary to its title — reflect input from the Opposition bench, PC MLA Greg Nesbitt said.

Nesbitt said he was surprised when an advance copy of the report landed in his inbox earlier this week.

His request to have his name removed from the document was ignored, the former community newspaper publisher said.

“We were used here, a little bit — that’s what it makes you feel like,” Nesbitt said, noting that neither he nor Konrad Narth, the only other Tory representative on the six-person committee, helped draft it.

Billed as a collaborative, non-partisan initiative to protect freedom of the press, it has faced several hurdles since its inception.

PC leader Obby Khan accused the province of springing the project on the Tories without warning in May.

The group’s first public consultation, originally scheduled for June 26 in Gimli, was cancelled due to dismal interest.

Committee chair Robert Loiselle, however, defended the project’s results, saying he was proud of the final report informed by numerous conversations with Nesbitt and other colleagues.

The NDP MLA for St. Boniface accused the PCs of politicizing the topic and distracting from consensus-based recommendations.

Throughout a mix of virtual and in-person sessions that took place over the summer and early fall, the panel heard 43 presentations.

The committee heard from representatives of for-profit and non-profit entities in Winnipeg, Brandon, Winkler, Thompson and northern Manitoba.

“We can’t afford to lose local media in Manitoba. We’ve lost a lot of ground — that’s one common thread we heard,” Loiselle said, adding the goal of the recommendations is to regain some of what’s been lost.

The 2025 wildfire season only reinforced the importance or protecting local media outlets that, in some cases, provided readers with life-saving information about evacuations, he said.

Loiselle could not provide the exact level of government advertising dollars currently being spent on local media outlets, but he said “25 per cent is an achievable target.”

The chair noted that figure was raised during public consultations in connection to Ontario’s 2024 revelation its key agencies would start spending a quarter of their advertising dollars on publishers in that province.

Nesbitt, who attended all the public events, said stakeholders did not provide a clear-cut endorsement of Ontario’s approach.

“We heard the percentage of ad spend needed to be majority earmarked for Manitoba media. That’s what we heard,” the MLA for Riding Mountain said.

Participants’ calls for grants for non-profit-run newsletters and tax credits for hiring journalists and advertisers stood out to him, he said.

The Tories’ were quoted $500 earlier this year in response to a freedom of information request to learn how much the province spent on advertising via Google and Facebook over a three month period.

Nesbitt said he took issue with the fact the chair never released a breakdown of status-quo government ad spending percentages to inform their discussions.

A spokesperson for the premier’s office said the province is already meeting the 25 per cent threshold on ad spending.

Golden West Broadcasting CEO Elmer Hildebrand said in a government news release Friday that he was encouraged by the bipartisan committee’s “progress.”

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Local Journalism report