As Canadians obsess, Americans barely register the latest tariff news
On Tuesday, at the eleventh hour, Donald Trump announced that Canada and the U.S. have reached a tentative trade deal, and paused a scheduled 50 per cent tariff on Canadian goods for three more days.
On Wednesday morning, the development featured as the top story on most, if not all, major Canadian news websites, including Bloomberg Canada, CBC, Global News, CTV and here, at National Post. It was also the front page story in today’s Globe and Mail.
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Press Gazette puts the New York Times, Fox, CNN and Yahoo Finance as the top news websites in the U.S. by audience and, on Wednesday morning, none of them featured the tariff development as the main story on their homepage.
Scroll down past the top articles on the Times website and you’ll see the headline “Canada gets 3-Day Reprieve From Punishing Trump Tariffs,” but the development didn’t get a mention on today’s front page.
The news is similarly low down on the CNN and Yahoo Finance homepages, while the highest-placed Canada story on the Fox News website is about WNBA star Sophie Cunningham drawing boos during a game against Toronto Tempo.
This lack of prominence may well be a judgement based on audience interest. After all, a poll from the Angus Reid Institute published on Aug. 9 found that Canadians are much more likely (91 per cent) than Americans (69 per cent) to be following news about the latest tariffs.
Meanwhile, a quick Google search of “tariffs” from Canada versus with a VPN based in the U.S. shows a stark difference between the websites Canadians are served compared to their southern neighbours.
While a Canadian user will see dozens of news reports about the latest development, the U.S. search results page shows an AI overview of what a tariff is, followed by a string of think tank and government websites. Trade negotiations seem to matter a whole lot more north of the border.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on nationalpost.com — the content belongs to National Post.
