Brian Daly keeps a world map on the wall of his office to remind him of the map on that was laid out on a table in the study room in his family home where he grew up, and where his father still resides. Among other decorations and mementos in Daly’s office are two retro analog tape recorders, one of them the same model he and his younger brother used as children to interview their parents.
After nearly three decades in news media as a journalist and television producer, Daly teaches journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax.
In a recent interview with the Examiner, Daly talked about the Black community in Nova Scotia and its lack of representation in media.
[In Nova Scotia] the vast majority of the Black community can trace their roots to pre-Confederation, and that does make a difference because African Nova Scotians have a very strong sense of their Canadian identity. It’s a Black Canadian identity.”
I’m disappointed at the lack of representation of African Nova Scotians in mainstream media, and that’s inexcusable. It’s inexcusable that we haven’t seen, for example, some sort of program in the radio or television stations that should have been in place from … the outset of television broadcasting in the 60s.
Originally from Montreal, Daly moved to Halifax in 2018 when he accepted a position with CBC Nova Scotia as the main producer for the late-night Atlantic news broadcast, and as the main backup producer of the supper hour news broadcast.
“It was the first time actually in my career that I had my own show where I called all the shots,” he said.
Daly grew up in the same neighbourhood as his father, a Black community known as Little Burgundy in Montreal — a community known for its Black Canadian jazz culture, and where Daly said piano lessons in school were mandatory.
His late mother is from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean.
So then you have the intersection of the two important groups of Blacks in Canada, Canadian-born Black, which is my Dad, and West Indian. Because my Mom was part of the first wave of legal Black immigration, because Black immigration was illegal until 1953.
Daly told the history of how, under pressure from its allies, Canada “begrudgingly” allowed limited immigration of Black people after it had been officially banned by the Prime Minister’s office for most of the 20th Century. He said the change was done under what was called ‘The West Indian Domestic Scheme.”
So they basically said, ‘OK, you can send your women over as long as they work as maids for a year in our country and prove that they’re worthy of being Canadian. After a year, we might give them permanent residency.’
Daly said that Canada advertised the program in some of the British colonies. He said his mother and two of her friends answered one of the ads in their local newspaper.
And they came up in the middle of the winter to Montreal in 1957, put in their year, got their PR [permanent residency], and my mom then sponsored like six [of her] siblings.
Despite having a teaching certificate from Saint Vincent, he said his mother wasn’t allowed to teach in Canada and had to go back to school to get Canadian certification. He said she also registered at McGill University.
To pay her way through school she had to work in the computer lab. What did my dad do to make extra money while he was at McGill? Work in the computer lab. Dad walked in one day, saw a beautiful woman sitting there at the desk, and that’s where it started.
Breaking into news media
In 1992, at the age of 19, Daly enrolled at Ryerson University in Toronto to study journalism.
I’m in Toronto living it up because I’m reunited with my cousins who I drifted away from when I was a teenager. Now I got to be in Toronto, the media capital.
Toward the end of his second year, one of his instructors, Kevin Newman, who, at the time, was also a host of CBC Midday, encouraged his class to drop off resumes at CBC in Toronto.
“And I’ll make sure your resume gets on the desk of the right person, and who knows you might get a job,” he recalls Newman telling the class.
That summer, Daly landed his first job as an editorial assistant where he said he didn’t get to do much but was able to learn a lot.
I was there! I was working at CBC, right in the belly of it. Knowlton Nash, Peter Mansbridge, Alison Smith, Wendy Mesley, these people were all there — [Ian] Hanomansing, they were all right there in my face, it was unbelievable.
The news director at Global Halifax, Rhonda Brown, she was just before me as an EA. … Pamela Walling got hired away from CTV when I was there, to co-host the big show with Mansbridge.
Daly said a critical moment for his career happened when he was talking to fellow Montrealer, Ron Charles, who was filling in as weekend host for The National. Charles, along with Scott Laurie, was one of the only two Black national Canadian reporters in that era.
After telling Charles about his career aspirations, he said Charles encouraged him to get outside of Toronto and said he’d put in a good word for him at CBC in Montreal. Later that year when he went home for Christmas, Daly said he went to the CBC building where a man named Colin Cooper offered him a job upon graduation from Ryerson.
He said, ‘Just make sure you graduate,’ and I said, ‘Don’t worry about it I’ll graduate.’
Something new
By 2018 Daly had worked for CBC, The Canadian Press, CTV Montreal, radio station CAJB, French media company Quebecor, and Global News. However, feeling as though he had hit a ceiling in the Montreal news media market, he sent out “a barrage of applications” across the country.
Daly said CBC Nova Scotia in Halifax was the only non-Quebec news agency to respond. He said he initially interviewed for a position that he didn’t end up getting, but was given a heads-up about a possible future position.
Six months later he interviewed for the position of lead producer of CBC Atlantic Tonight and main backup producer for CBC News, Nova Scotia at 6. He was hired immediately and was told he was needed in three days.
With a wife and three children then ages eight, nine, and 14 in Montreal, Daly got on a plane, flew to Halifax, and lived at the Best Western Chocolate Lake while working in his new position at CBC Nova Scotia.
I wasn’t with my family, it was very very very difficult. I definitely started going back to church. It was tough. … Eight months without them.
His wife and children moved to Halifax on Canada Day in 2018.
Brian Daly. Photo: Matthew Byard.
“Teach it, but also tweak it”: a new focus
In his final year at Ryerson University, the top Black Canadian Journalists held meetings on the campus and founded the Canadian Association of Black Journalists (CABJ), a networking and advocacy organization for Black journalists in the country.
Daly had been a member throughout the years. Not long after he moved to Halifax, Daly said he learned CABJ’s executive director, Nadia Stewart, wanted to expand the organization to the east coast. Daly was offered, and accepted, the position of the CABJ’s first-ever Atlantic director.
One of the initiatives put on by the CABJ is J-School Noire, a media training and mentorship program geared towards Black Canadian youth.
Well, through J-School Noire is where I understood that I didn’t just like teaching, I loved it.
Teach it, but also tweak it. This job gives me an opportunity to do that. When you’re in the newsroom you can’t really change anything. You’re just producing content.
That’s not particular to the CBC, I’m speaking [generally]. But I feel like my role, now, is more suited to my skill set and where I’m at right now in my life. So that’s why I’m here.
In 2020, Daly organized and lead J-School Noire’s first workshop for Black youth on the east coast at NSCC in Halifax. Not only was this the catalyst that eventually led Daly onto his new career path at King’s, but he said that the workshop also sparked an interest in journalism for one of the students, Micah Mendes. He said Mendes has since been accepted into King’s and will begin studies this coming fall.
Diversity in the media
Before leaving CBC, Daly left his position as producer for the evening and late-night news and was the producer for the short-lived African Nova Scotian Content Unit.
For the three or four months that unit was around it gave us a glimpse of what’s possible. The programming that Keke Beats, Gbenga Akintokun, and Kyah Sparks created was outstanding, and it’s there on the internet for anyone to see.
The unit’s two-part series on Halifax Prep was picked up by The National in its entirety.
Daly gives credit to the other members of the unit, saying his job as the producer was simply “to just put the pieces in place and let the talent flow.”
Daly said in an ideal world, he feels a unit such as the African Nova Scotian Content Unit would be a permanent fixture.
We have the Newfoundlanders, who have their stranglehold on comedy ever since I was a kid with Air Farce, and now This Hour Has 22 minutes. It isn’t like we don’t have the recognition of unique and distinct people in this part of the country.
So, now it’s going to be up to the community to use the technology that’s available … to take our bull by the horns and start up your own thing.
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The Fifth Circuit’s opinion in NetChoice v. Paxton upheld an unconstitutional law that requires social media companies to publish content produced by their users that they do not wish to publish, but that the government of Texas insists that they must publish. That potentially includes content by Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen, and other individuals calling for the outright extermination of minority groups.
Meanwhile, earlier this month the same Fifth Circuit handed down a decision that effectively prohibits the Biden administration from asking social media companies to pull down or otherwise moderate content. According to the Justice Department, the federal government often asks these platforms to remove content that seeks to recruit terrorists, that was produced by America’s foreign adversaries, or that spreads disinformation that could harm public health.
Again, the Fifth Circuit’s more recent decision, which is known as Murthy v. Missouri, would devastate a Democratic administration’s ability to ask media companies to voluntarily remove content. Meanwhile, the NetChoice decision holds that Texas’s Republican government may compel those same companies to adopt a government-mandated editorial policy.
These two decisions obviously cannot be reconciled, unless you believe that the First Amendment applies differently to Democrats and Republicans. And the Supreme Court has already signaled, albeit in a 5-4 decision, that a majority of the justices believe that the Fifth Circuit has gone off the rails. Soon after the Fifth Circuit first signaled that it would uphold Texas’s law, the Supreme Court stepped in with a brief order temporarily putting the law on ice.
Yet, while the Fifth Circuit’s approach to social media has been partisan and hackish, these cases raise genuinely difficult policy questions. Social media companies control powerful platforms that potentially allow virtually anyone to communicate their views to millions of people at a time. These same companies also have the power to exclude anyone they want from these platforms either for good reasons (because someone is a recruiter for the terrorist group ISIS, for example), or for arbitrary or malicious reasons (such as if the company’s CEO disagrees with an individual’s ordinary political views).
Worse, once a social media platform develops a broad user base, it is often difficult for other companies to build competing social networks. After Twitter, now known as X, implemented a number of unpopular new policies that favored trolls and hate speech, for example, at least eight other platforms tried to muscle into this space with Twitter-like apps of their own. Thus far, however, these new platforms have struggled to consolidate the kind of user base that can rival Twitter’s. And the one that most likely presents the greatest threat to Twitter, Threads, is owned by social media giant Meta.
It is entirely reasonable, in other words, for consumers to be uncomfortable with so few corporations wielding so much authority over public discourse. What is less clear is what role the government legitimately can play in dealing with this concentration of power.
What the First Amendment actually says about the government’s relationship with media companies
Before we dive into the details of the NetChoice and Murthy decisions, it’s helpful to understand a few basics about First Amendment doctrine, and just how much pressure the government may place on a private media company before that pressure crosses the line into illegal coercion.
First, the First Amendment protects against both government actions that censor speech and government actions that attempt to compel someone to speak against their will. As the Supreme Court explained in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (2006), “freedom of speech prohibits the government from telling people what they must say.”
Second, the First Amendment also protects speech by corporations. This principle became controversial after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) held that corporations may spend unlimited sums of money to influence elections, but it also long predates Citizens United. Indeed, a world without First Amendment protections for corporations is incompatible with freedom of the press. Vox Media, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and numerous other media companies are all corporations. That doesn’t mean that the government can tell them what to print.
Third, the First Amendment specifically protects the right of traditional media companies to decide what content they carry and what content they reject. Thus, in Miami Herald v. Tornillo (1974), the Supreme Court held that a news outlet’s “choice of material to go into a newspaper” is subject only to the paper’s “editorial control and judgment,” and that “it has yet to be demonstrated how governmental regulation of this crucial process can be exercised consistent with First Amendment guarantees of a free press.”
Fourth, this regime applies equally to internet-based media. The Supreme Court’s decision in Reno v. ACLU (1997) acknowledged that the internet is distinct from other mediums because it “can hardly be considered a ‘scarce’ expressive commodity” — that is, unlike a newspaper, there is no physical limit on how much content can be published on a website. But Reno concluded that “our cases provide no basis for qualifying the level of First Amendment scrutiny that should be applied to this medium.”
Taken together, these four principles establish that neither Texas nor any other governmental body may require a media company, social or otherwise, to publish content that the company does not want to print. If Twitter announces tomorrow that it will delete all tweets written by someone named “Jake,” for example, the government may not pass a law requiring Twitter to publish tweets by Jake Tapper. Similarly, if a social media company announces that it will only publish content by Democrats, and not by Republicans, it may do so without government interference.
That said, while the government may neither censor a media platform’s speech nor demand that the platform publish speakers it does not want to publish, government officials are allowed to express the government’s view on any topic. Indeed, as the Supreme Court said in Pleasant Grove v. Summum(2009), “it is not easy to imagine how government could function if it lacked this freedom.”
The government’s freedom to express its own views extends both to statements made to the general public and to statements made in private communications with business leaders. Federal officials may, for example, tell YouTube that the United States government believes that the company should pull down every ISIS recruitment video on the site. And those officials may also ask a social media company to pull down other content that the government deems to be harmful, dangerous, or even merely annoying.
Of course, the general principle that the government can say what it wants can sometimes be in tension with the rule against censorship. While the First Amendment allows, say, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to make a hypothetical statement saying that he opposes all books that present transgender people in a positive light, DeSantis would cross an impermissible line if he sends a police officer to a bookstore to make a thinly veiled threat — such as if the cop told the storeowner that “bad things happen to people who sell these kinds of books.”
But a government statement to a private business must be pretty egregious before it crosses the line into impermissible censorship. As the Court held in Blum v. Yaretsky (1982), the government may be held responsible for a private media company’s decision to alter its speech only when the government “has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State.”
So how should these First Amendment principles apply to government-mandated content moderation?
In fairness, none of the Supreme Court decisions discussed in the previous section involve social media companies. So it’s at least possible that these longstanding First Amendment principles need to be tweaked to deal with a world where, say, a single billionaire can buy up a single website and fundamentally alter public discourse among important political and media figures.
But there are two powerful reasons to tread carefully before remaking the First Amendment to deal with The Problem of Elon Musk.
One is that no matter how powerful Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or any other media executive may become, they will always be categorically different from the government. If Facebook doesn’t like what you have to say, it can kick you off Facebook. But if the government doesn’t like what you say (and if there are no constitutional safeguards against government overreach), it can send armed police officers to haul you off to prison forever.
The other is that the actual law that Texas passed to deal with the Texas GOP’s concerns about social media companies is so poorly designed that it suggests that a world where the government can regulate social media speech would be much worse than one where important content moderation decisions are made by Musk.
That law, which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) claims was enacted to stop a “dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas,” prohibits the major social media companies from moderating content based on “the viewpoint of the user or another person” or on “the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression or another person’s expression.”
Such a sweeping ban on viewpoint discrimination is incompatible with any meaningful moderation of abusive content. Suppose, for example, that a literal Nazi posts videos on YouTube calling for the systematic extermination of all Jewish people. Texas’s law prohibits YouTube from banning this user or from pulling down his Nazi videos, unless it also takes the same action against users who express the opposite viewpoint — that is, the view that Jews should not be exterminated.
In any event, the Supreme Court already blocked the Texas law once, so it’s unlikely that it will reverse course when it hears the case a second time (the Court could announce that it will rehear the NetChoice case soon after its next conference, which will take place on Tuesday).
What should happen when the government merely asks a social media company to remove content?
But what about a case like Murthy? That case is currently before the Supreme Court on its shadow docket — a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the Court sometimes decides on an expedited basis — so the Court could decide any day now whether to leave the Fifth Circuit’s decision censoring the Biden administration in effect.
The Fifth Circuit’s Murthy decision spends about 14 pages describing cases where various federal officials, including some in the Biden White House, asked social media companies to remove content — often because federal officials thought the content was harmful to public health because it contained misinformation about Covid-19.
In many cases, these conversations happened because those companies proactively reached out to the government to solicit its views. As the Fifth Circuit admits, for example, platforms often “sought answers” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about “whether certain controversial claims were ‘true or false’” in order to inform their own independent decisions about whether or not to remove those claims.
That said, the Fifth Circuit also lists some examples where government officials appear to have initiated a particular conversation. In one instance, for example, a White House official allegedly told an unidentified platform that it “remain[ed] concerned” that some of the content on the platform encouraged vaccine hesitancy. In another instance, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy allegedly “asked the platforms to take part in an ‘all-of-society’ approach to COVID by implementing stronger misinformation ‘monitoring’ program.”
It’s difficult to assess the wisdom of these communications between the government and the platforms because the Fifth Circuit offers few details about what content was being discussed or why the government thought this content was sufficiently harmful that the platforms should intervene. Significantly, however, the Fifth Circuit does not identify a single example — not one — of a government official taking coercive action against a platform or threatening such action.
The court does attempt to spin a couple of examples where the White House endorsed policy changes as such a threat. In a 2022 news conference, for example, the White House press secretary said that President Biden supports reforms that would impact the social media industry — including “reforms to section 230, enacting antitrust reforms, requiring more transparency, and more.” But the president does not have the authority to enact legislative reforms without congressional approval. And the platforms themselves did not behave as if they faced any kind of threat.
Indeed, the Fifth Circuit’s own data suggests that the platforms felt perfectly free to deny the government’s requests, even when those requests came from law enforcement. The FBI often reached out to social media platforms to flag content by “Russian troll farms” and other malign foreign actors. But, as the Fifth Circuit concedes, the platforms rejected the FBI’s requests to pull down this content about half of the time.
And, regardless of how one should feel about the government communicating with media sites about whether Russian and anti-vax disinformation should remain online, the Fifth Circuit’s approach to these communications is ham-handed and unworkable.
At several points in its opinion, for example, the Fifth Circuit faults government officials who “entangled themselves in the platforms’ decision-making processes.” But the court never defines this term “entangled,” or even provides any meaningful hints about what it might mean, other than using equally vague adjectives to describe the administration’s communications with the platforms, such as “consistent and consequential.”
The Biden administration, in other words, appears to have been ordered not to have “consistent and consequential” communications with social media companies — whatever the hell that means. Normally, when courts hand down injunctions binding the government, they define the scope of that injunction clearly enough that it’s actually possible to figure out what the government is and is not allowed to do.
The common element in NetChoice and Murthy is that, in both cases, government officials (the Texas legislature in NetChoice and three Fifth Circuit judges in Murthy) were concerned about certain views being suppressed on social media. And, in both cases, they came up with a solution that is so poorly thought out that it is worse than whatever perceived problem they were trying to solve.
Thanks to the Fifth Circuit, for example, the FBI has no idea what it is allowed to do if it discovers that Vladimir Putin is flooding Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter with content that is actively trying to incite an insurrection within the United States. And, thanks to the Fifth Circuit, there’s now one First Amendment that Democrats must comply with, and a different, weaker First Amendment that applies to Republican officials.
We can only hope that the Supreme Court decides to step back and hit pause on this debate, at least until someone can come up with a sensible and workable framework that can address whatever problems the Texas legislature and the Fifth Circuit thought they were solving.
At the centre of the affair is the June shooting death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C. Canadian news accounts usually refer to him as a “Sikh community leader,” a “peaceful advocate for Sikh independence” or as president of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, B.C.
But almost every Indian mention of Nijjar is very explicit about noting that he is considered a terrorist by the Indian government. A recent column in the Times of India, for one, called him a “terrorist fugitive from India who emigrated to Canada.” In fact, when Trudeau made his abortive trip to India in 2018, the then chief minister of Punjab Amarinder Singh made a point of handing Trudeau a list of “Khalistani operatives” in Canada. As an Indian Express story noted this week, Nijjar was one of the names.
In just the last week, Nijjar’s lawyer, Gurpatwant Singh Pannu, recorded a viral video urging Indo-Canadian Hindus to “leave Canada.” “You not only support India, but you are also supporting the suppression of speech and expression of pro-Khalistan Sikhs,” he said. When Indian media reported on the video, they were issued a warning by the Indian Ministry of Information alleging that Pannu is also considered a terrorist, and that giving him a “platform” risked disturbing “public order.”
Canada is a hotbed for Sikh nationalist extremism
It’s nothing new that the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sees Canada as a safe harbour for extremist Khalistanis; Sikhs who seek an independent ethnostate in what is now the Indian state of Punjab. To date, the worst mass-murder in Canadian history remains the 1985 Air India Bombing, a terrorist attack organized by Khalistani extremists based out of British Columbia. And according to the Modi government, Canada is doing next to nothing to prevent any future violence from erupting out of its Sikh expat communities.
