Christy Kelly-Bisson

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Beyond Bandaids Community Action Workshop

By

Christopher Kelly-Bisson

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Thursday, June 11, 2026 – Community Action Workshop – Blockhouse Firehall

Media Lens Response (8 min):

Question from the moderator: “From your perspective and experience, what practical steps and actions can be taken individually and collectively to advocate for positive change in our communities. Please try to keep your response specific – use examples to try to help your ideas come to life for attendees!”

The goal of public interest research (2 min):

I want to answer this question first by briefly defining what public interest research is and describing what I think is its goals. This kind of research, in journalism, academia, and popular education moments like this, is meant to provide the public with the information and analysis it needs to defend our common, public interest from those who seek to exploit and undermine it for their private gain.

Research is not something that belongs only to the elites of society. We have everyday experts in their workplaces and communities that possess important insights that can inform positive change.

The goal of public interest research is to help our communities develop a sense of consciousness for itself, rather than being a group of people by accident that do not have a sense of their own interests and capacities.

This is important because when the public has a consciousness for itself and its power, then it can become organized and capable of acting collectively based on the information we uncover to assert a public interest.

The problems we are facing right now:

Now I am going to explain the problematic situation we find ourselves in, in the media, education, and society more broadly.

We are in a time where a handful of powerful people in Canada are consolidating their hold over important democratic infrastructures, like the media, communications, and education.

Newspapers are being bought up by massive private equity funds and closed down in asset-stripping schemes.

Universities and research funding agencies are having their budgets cut and privatized giving control over knowledge production over to wealthy private interests.

We are becoming more dependent on corporations and wealthy individuals who have an economic interest to limit our democratic control over our government and the economy. The present kind of capitalism we are living under is one where the boundaries of the state and corporations have become exceptionally thin.

We all act within the bounds of an almost totally captured media sector when we use . But at the same time we are able to conect with other people and exchange ideas and actions through our connectivity.

And there are, among us, pockets of consciousness that seek social justice and yearn to connect and organize for change. We need to connect those we can if we hope to rebuild the democratic infrastructure that deficits our rural communities. And I think that is what we are here doing right now.

Here is what I think we need to do about the media consolidation problem:

There are some individual or small-group activities that can address some of these problems. Though, in this event, we may call them “band-aids”. This includes:

  • Taking out subscriptions for local, non-profit, independent, and critical news organizations, like the Halifax Examiner, New Brunswick Media Co-Op, or the Independent in Newfoundland and Labrador, or what was the Lunenburg Barnacle.
  • Charitable organizations can donate to and establish arms-length funding relationships with non-profit media groups.
  • We can also write to our political representatives and organize petitions to demand public support for local media.
  • I also think it is import to promote critical media literacy and re-humanize the ways we communicate and access news. To me this means being very, very intentional about the ways we use social media to connect people and develop alternative ways of reaching community members with the goal of bringing people together in the same room on a regular basis.
  • I think it also means rejecting practices and technologies that make use offload our critical thinking skills. Newsfeeds and For You Pages on social media platforms remove the practice of consciously engaging with what we consume as news.
  • Alternatively, one can access news by curating a list of bookmarks in your web browser based on a conscious idea of the quality of reporting, knowledge of who funds them, and understanding of their politics and perspectives. Effectively, we need I am very cautious about news apps that present an analysis of political position. I don’t think I have thought enough about how that kind of analysis can be separated from the extractive business model of a subscription service. The consciousness that we develop when we get our livelihood through the extraction of rent through ownership seems to impress an ethos of extraction in our understanding of the world.
  • To that end, we ought to be skeptical of those who claim neutrality and objectivity and look into where their paychecks come from. This is critical now given the proliferation of extractive media platforms like . There are many sites that get a lot of media traction that are backed by wealthy individuals that use poor journalistic practices.
  • Look instead to see how a media organization is accountable to the communities they serve and check their websites for statements of journalistic practices to make sure that the ways they are sourcing information is sound. Beware that all media comes with a bias and interpret what they say accordingly.

I caution against using and consuming information produced using large-language models, or so-called artificial intelligence. Such technologies produce media that are full of factual errors and don’t give you a genuine sense of where facts are coming from. The more that communication becomes automated, the more we are learning that correcting AI takes more work than writing things from scratch. Corporations around the world are reporting little gains in productivity or profits, and Silicon Valley CEOs are scrambling to keep the bubble from popping.

Furthermore, the act of researching, reading, and composing our thoughts allows us to be fully conscious with constellations of facts, stories, feelings, and ideas for long enough to think through well-rounded perspective about something. Intelligence apparently can be automated, I have my doubts, but there is no such thing as artificial consciousness. Only humans can posess relational ways of knowing and experience the process of engaged knowlege production.

We need to be critical of claims that these kinds of technologies are inevitable and superior to human-made media. Such claims are mostly marketing-spin to impress upon us a sense of fear of missing out or being becoming obsolete. There is a massive, desperate financial interest behind those making us believe these things. The truth is that human-made media from a public interest perspective serves our common interests best and no machine can replace that.

These are all important actions and intentions that serve as a starting place for change. But really what we need are movement-based solutions to the problems consolidated power in media. We cannot rely alone on getting the right funding calculation or cultivating good individual media consumption habits.

The media ecosystem is being transformed to undermine our common power. We need to bring a diversity of people together in the same room to engage with each other in popular education, use these skills to do public interest research, and organize power around this knowledge to assert our common interests.

Such a strategy is no doubt more challenging, more work, and prone to tension and discomfort. But democracy and justice are worth enduring the challenges of struggling together for common causes, and we become so much more wise and understanding when we go through tough conversations.

I think that bigger strategy begins with events like this that I hope continues and grows into the kind of movement necessary to bring about a more livable, just, and sustainable society.

Biography:

Dr. Christy Kelly-Bisson (he/they) is a public interest researcher and journalist, and a garlic farmer located in Sulieweykitk (New Germany), Mi’kma’ki. They have written as a volunteer journalist for the Leveller, The Hill Times, and Ricochet Media. Most recently they worked the Lunenburg Barnacle to cover federal, provincial, and local politics in our area with the focus on accountability and analysis of power dynamics in the local political economy. In his day job they work as an organizer with the Land and People Pillar of the SSHRC-funded Common Ground Network based at Dalhousie University. They have also worked as a policy analyst with Seed Change Canada and they are a member of the National Farmers Union. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Ottawa, where they researched farmland grabbing in the Kitchi Sipi (Ottawa) Valley. He is currently working to publish their doctoral thesis into a book with Fernwood Publishing. They are also pursuing funding opportunities to conduct similar research here in Mi’kma’ki.