The Journalism Doctor

Mark Twain once said “a lie can spread half way around the world while truth is still putting on its shoes.” That’s even truer today than it was in Twain’s time because social media can spread lies and so-called “fake news” far and wide with lightning speed, and we’ve seen how this can have devastating impacts on our democracy.

One of the most chilling proofs of this came out the other day. In his blog Media Policy, Howard Law revealed the results of a public opinion poll conducted last summer by the Department of Canadian Heritage but for some reason never released. He said it turned up unexpectedly in an access to information request filed by Global TV journalist David Akin.

According to that poll, 60 to 70 percent of Canadians said they no longer believe many of the country’s public institutions are capable of making decisions that benefit the public. Those institutions include local, provincial and national governments and financial institutions. Perhaps most significantly they also include the only institution dedicated to dismantling lies and reporting truth. Canada’s legacy news media—our newspapers, television and radio stations—are only trusted by 32.5 percent of Canadians, according to the poll.

Why should we be concerned about this?

First, declining trust in the news media is not new. I documented its beginning 26 years ago in my book Yesterday’s News, which I intended as a warning for Canadian news leaders to change or perish. Readers and viewers needed to be educated about what journalists do and why they are worthy of our trust, I wrote. Our democracy, and the information Canadians need to vote knowledgeably, were at risk. The results of the Canadian Heritage poll show that battle may be irretrievably lost.

Second, those who say that social media makes information more widely available than ever before, thus strengthening democracy, are plain wrong. Reporting the news is more than just saying something happened and what people think about it. Verifying what happened, fact-checking what people say about it, putting it in context and striving to make sure it is the best available version of the truth is the core job of journalism.

The danger of this misconception was illustrated a few months ago when Elon Musk tweeted that legacy news media were dead, usurped by social media giants like X (which he owns). “What’s the point of reading 1,000 words about something that was already posted on X several days ago?” he asked. Within a few days, his post had been viewed 15.5 million times, and most of the replies agreed with him.

That’s the mentality that encourages people to skip the hard job of determining what’s true and glom on to conspiracy theories or believe outright lies or elect presidents like Donald Trump. Or worse, decide not to vote at all because you’ve lost trust in governments and don’t see the point. Going back to that Canadian Heritage poll, here are the percentage of Canadians who still say they have trust in democracy’s key institutions:

Question: To what extent do you trust the following to make decisions in the best interests of the public?

Local municipal government         41.7%
Financial institutions                    35.9%
Government of Canada                35.7%
Canadian news outlets                 32.5%
Provincial governments                31.0%
Social media companies               10.4%

This is simply shocking. Obviously an important arm of government felt it was in the public interest to commission and pay for such a poll. My question is: Why did Canadian Heritage keep it from us?

The surest reason for keeping something secret is that it casts you in a bad light. If there is evidence that 64.3 percent of Canadians distrust you, why would the federal government want us to know about it? But there’s another reason I can think of—it’s an indictment of the Liberal government’s controversial strategy, since 2019, of directly subsidizing journalism.Its argument at the time was that this was necessary to sustain factual journalism in the public interest and to strengthen democracy. Legacy media were shedding jobs and losing subscribers and advertisers to faster, more nimble digital platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter (now X). So the government decided to throw $595 million at the problem, in the form of subsidizing 25 percent of journalists’ salaries, and giving tax incentives to private companies that qualified as “registered journalism organizations.”

So the government got in the business of defining what journalism is, who qualifies as a journalist, and which organizations it will support or not, all the while claiming it is supporting “independent” journalism. It sounded sort of like Pete Rose claiming he really belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame because even though he bet on games he managed, he never bet on his team to lose.

In the five years since, there has been little reporting in the subsidized media about what that federal support has achieved (surprise, surprise). But by all accounts the news media have not stepped up to take full advantage of the funding by hiring journalists or transforming their businesses into charities. To date, only 11 news organizations have jumped through the hoops to qualify as “registered journalism organizations” eligible to issue tax receipts to donors under the Income Tax Act. Only one of them is a reputable legacy newspaper, La Presse of Montreal.

Given the lack of uptake, the group that lobbied hardest for federal bailouts, News Media Canada, showed its mojo by coming back to the trough for more. In November, the feds gave news media a big cherry on top by agreeing to more than double the tax credit for eligible new reporters. This subsidy now covers 35 percent of reporters’ salaries up to a maximum of $85,000 a year.

The 570 news media outlets eligible for these subsidies have responded by shuttering scores of century-old newspapers serving small towns, cutting coverage and laying off journalists in larger newsrooms, and asking relief from guarantees to cover local news that they gave when they were licensed to broadcast by the CRTC.

Furthermore, they pressured Ottawa to enact Bill C-18, which tried to force online news giants to compensate Canadian news media for sharing their stories. Google and Meta responded by blocking all links to news, an act that damaged hundreds of small digital start-ups that are trying to cover the ground that legacy media abandoned. Google recently settled but the $100 million it pledged to a new Canadian Journalism Fund will do little to prolong the life of existing newsrooms.

These policy failures suggest that Canada needs another federal royal commission on news, the first since the dawn of the digital age. Interesting new ideas for sustaining journalism have recently been advanced, first by respected conservative voices Konrad Von Finckenstein and Peter Menzies, and more recently by the aforementioned Howard Law and my old journalism school colleague Ivor Shapiro.

The only questions are, does this government have the courage, and do we believe it is capable of coming up with a workable solution?