The Murray scheme: advertising and editorial independence in Canada, 1920
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada’s capitalist economy faced several challenges in 1919. These threatened the ruling Conservative Party and its ideological ally, the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association. At stake was control over national tariff policies designed to protect Canadian industry. Gilbert Murray, late of the CMA, believed the press ‘poisoned the hearts and minds’ of Canadians against capital. He organized an advertisers’ boycott of all newspapers opposing the tariff and simultaneously acquired editorial control over several hundred weekly newspapers. He meant to silence ‘anti-business’ papers and thereby blanket Canada with Conservative news outlets in time for a general election due in 1921. Liberal and Conservative editors decried the scheme and its implications for a free press. More interesting, however, was the opposition of the business press, which argued that the scheme would undermine the emerging credibility of advertising itself. The scheme represents that moment in time when the media, advertisers and politicians recognized the social power of modern advertising.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".