This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By Peter Menzies, October 14, 2025
Freedom of the press means that anyone, through any media, has the right to gather and distribute—on any platform—information and opinion without prior restraint or significant censorship by the government. It means that if you want to publish material that is primarily designed to favour conservative perspectives, you are free to do so without fear of government censure or punishment. Ditto if you wish to favour liberal, communist, eco-warrior, or any other perspective.
There are, of course, restraints. Some of those involve civil laws concerning defamation, while criminal laws forbid hate speech and incitement for physical harm to be inflicted on others. The latter are evolving, controversially, to include emotional harm, but one of the greatest traditional restraints was something known as “market forces.” Back in the day, the need for solid readership numbers to support advertising revenue meant that publishers, while free to lean in whatever direction they preferred, were forever conscious of the need for inclusion of voices from all points on the spectrum in order to maximize market penetration.
Now that most Canadian media are subsidized heavily by the government, market forces are a less significant factor, which is bad news for balance, but they still have a role to play.
Following a century or more of barefaced political advocacy by publishers, the news business’s embrace of objectivity was fuelled by the discovery in the early 20th century that far more revenue was possible through advertising than subscriptions. And that meant that the broader and bigger the audience served and fairly treated—market forces—the more profitable the venture.
Today, that process appears to be moving in reverse. With advertisers largely abandoning the news business for social media, many startups are seeking cause-related audiences and subscription-based business models. Some of them are more broad-based than others, but most involve some sort of “ism.”
The Dhanraj dilemma
Which brings us to the inscrutable Travis Dhanraj, who, whatever his sins (we all have them), appears so far to be good to his word that he merely wants to practice journalism in the 20th-century sense of the word. His broadcast career with the CBC came a cropper this year in extremely noisy fashion and his criticism of his former employer and choice of legal counsel (a conservative married to Conservative campaign manager) led to him becoming a cause celebre among conservatives, many of whom remain in a mood to “defund the CBC” for what they see as its outrageous hostility towards them.
Having slipped the surly bonds of the Mother Corp (against which he has filed a Human Rights Commission complaint), Dhanraj recently launched his own podcast, entitled Can’t Be Censored (CBC…get it?) in partnership with Karman Wong, formerly of CP24. The first episode was dedicated to his CBC experience and was critical enough to have the “defund” crowd weak in the knees, giddy even.
More Tory swooning was evoked when episode two followed with an interview featuring Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. In part because it opened with a “Who’s your favourite wrestler” question (Bruce Hart was the answer), many of what are most easily termed the usual lefty suspects responded harshly. This prompted Chris Selley of the National Post to indicate he was “surprised by the antipathy Travis Dhanraj is eliciting among some legacy media types. I suppose I shouldn’t be.”
But then episode three turned out to be an interview with Green Party leader Elizabeth May, and Dhanraj shot back sarcastically with an X-post aimed at his critics: “Hey @atRachelGilmore @bruce_arthur @itsDeanBlundell just wondering if you were able to catch the latest episode of our alt-right conservative podcast? Or wait was it ‘conservative funded’?”
Looks to me like, so far, Dhanraj is working to manage market forces just fine.
All the best to him and Wong with their new venture, and the signal sent that they don’t intend to serve conservative audiences only, which means that, eventually, they will lose some of the most partisan Conservative Party supporters they may have won over in their first two podcasts. After all, while allegiances are frequent in politics, loyalties are fleeting.
Dhanraj’s criticism of the CBC may have attracted conservatives on an “the enemy of my enemy is my friend basis, but ultimately, his podcast’s success will be determined by the extent to which it is interesting and entertaining (market forces). The path forward for Dhanraj and Wong may also teach us a lot about whether conservatives embrace them because they believe they are fellow travellers or if they are just happy, as The Hub’s editor-at-large Sean Speer suggested, to at last be included within a legacy media eco-system from which they have traditionally felt excluded.
If it’s not the latter, that could be a wakeup call for those media currently most popular among and catering to conservative and other party supporters. The broader public has always been willing—whether as practiced by the relentlessly liberal Toronto Star or others—to tolerate publishers taking advantage of press freedom to favour certain causes. However, it draws the line at blind partisanship. In other words, bind yourself to principles but not parties. Because while the former are eternal, the latter eventually lose favour with the public and, when they do, you don’t want to go down with them.
The early indications are that Dhanraj has figured that out. We shall see.
Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, a Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, and a former vice chair of the CRTC.
