Trudeau-funded media demands pro sports boycott Elon Musk’s X

On Saturday, Canadian news outlet The Globe and Mail, which received a government subsidy in 2019, suggested that due to the "growing toxicity" on the social media platform X, professional sports leagues should cut ties with the platform. 

In the article, The Globe explains how the Sportsnet account has been posting hockey clips as memes and that the hockey conversation on X "is often more entertaining than the games themselves." 

However, it claims that X owner Elon Musk "torched what little brand value remains of the service he bought only 13 months" when he told advertisers to "f*ck off" earlier this week. The Globe says that the organizations should join the advertiser boycott that was sparked after a Media Matters hit piece about Musk was published. 

The Globe argued that because sports contracts have a "morality clause" and organizations use the platform to support social causes "It’s hard to understand why any of them would want to continue engaging with Musk’s capriciousness and his broken platform."

According to True North, The Globe and Mail was one of several news organizations that received money from the Canadian government's $595 million subsidy program for media organizations in 2019. The outlet also reports that The Globe received $2 million worth of untendered contracts from the federal government. 

The Globe publisher Phillip Crawley was again asking for more assistance in May 2020 due to a forecasted 32 percent drop in print advertising. He said, "That’s many millions of dollars of high-margin revenue, and we won’t be the biggest victims in Canada.”

Of the assistance received from the government, Crawley said, "This is welcome and substantial assistance from the government, but let’s be clear: the long-term outlook for The Globe and many others has darkened because of the pandemic." He added, "Print advertising revenue, once the backbone of newspapers, will go into accelerated decline.” 

In an interview at the New York Times Dealbook Summit on Wednesday, Musk sent a message to the number of advertisers that are banding together to "blackmail" X, telling them, "Go f*ck yourself" and to not advertise on the platform.