What I do
I started this blog in February 2008 with “The case against Maclean’s,” a challenge to the mainstream media who were supporting the magazine for printing a series of inflammatory attacks on Muslims.
One of the articles, by Mark Stein, claimed that Muslims in the West were poised to take over entire societies and “the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.” Without documenting his claims, Steyn wrote that enough Muslims are terrorists to make the religion a global threat, and they will subject us all to rigid Muslim laws when the takeover is achieved.
Critics took the magazine to the Ontario, B.C. and federal Human Rights Commissions after the magazine refused a request for a more balanced article about Islam. The legacy media, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, leapt to the defence of the magazine. Freedom of expression and the press must be defended at all costs, they said.
I said they were wrong. The issue wasn’t freedom of expression or the press at all. The issue was inaccurate stereotyping based on race and religion. In other words, bad journalism.
But that’s me: The fly in the ointment. The gadfly who stands up for responsible reporting, calls out its sloppier failures and takes pleasure in puncturing the pinata of self-righteousness that is driving legacy media to its grave.
In the 15 years since then, my blog has called out plagiarists, unpacked management decisions that deviate from commonly accepted journalistic norms, shone the light on irresponsible reporting on race and gender, identified white privilege and systemic racism in news organizations and schools of journalism, and drawn attention to many other blind spots in journalism.
I have relied heavily on my 55 years of experience as a front-line newsroom manager, chair of a journalism school, academic researcher and expert witness in libel cases. My book Yesterday’s News, published in 1998, warned of the public’s growing lack of trust in Canadian newspapers and what journalists needed to do about it. I have watched with sadness ever since as those lessons have gone unaddressed.
Being a media critic is a lonely job. Old colleagues, of course, resent being called out for their journalistic shortcomings, and I have lost many friends in journalism that I wish I still had. More than a few news organizations refused to publish my critiques of their performance. So I turned to the blog as the best way to make the pubic aware that journalism, a noble craft, is not perfect.
Therefore, it’s gratifying to see The Journalism Doctor listed as No. 9 on a list of the 25 best blogs on journalism in Canada. My blog posts are also published by Rabble, which ranked No. 2 on the list.
Keepers of the list say sites are ranked by “traffic, social media followers, domain authority and freshness.” I am not sure how my site came to their attention but Feedspot, the organizing agency, said its team of 50 experts has curated over 250,000 popular blogs and categorized them in more than 5,000 niche categories and industries. With millions of blogs on the web, they say their aim is to find influential, authoritative and trustworthy bloggers that the public can rely on.
So perhaps I should reiterate exactly what I do and why.
The only purpose of my blog is to educate the public about the important role played by journalism in our democratic society, a reality that has been worn down by Trump-like attacks on “fake news” and opinion-disguised-as-news dispensed by outlets like Fox News and Rebel Media. Contributors to those sites are merely polemicists posing as journalists.
In the course of establishing my blog and the time I spent teaching students how to take their first steps as journalists, I’ve realized how little the general public really knows about the profession I have spent my life working at. The blame for that rests with most news organizations, which cynically claim they act in the public interest but hardly ever explain themselves to us.
Good journalists do not, as critics on the right claim, make things up. The news is usually based on meticulous and time-consuming research on all sides of an issue, reporters operating much as scientists do, seeking evidence to prove or disprove an hypothesis.
When journalism falls short, it is usually a sin of omission rather than a sin of commission. A key source who could not be found or who refused to be interviewed, for example. A cultural or attitudinal blind spot that makes the reporter overlook context. Or facts not verified in the rush to deadline.
Good journalism is fearless. It races to the scene of the action, presses for credible answers, holds those in authority to account, tells human stories of achievement and grief. But the conditions for its success are vulnerable, to economic pressures that have stripped newsrooms of resources and deprived too many small communities of a home-town newspaper to put their stories before the world.
The shortcomings of journalism are taken up by aggrieved readers and viewers, editors and publishers, press councils and courts of law. I am there to do my part, since I believe good journalism encourages democracy, while bad journalism leads us astray.
One of my favourite tributes to journalism was delivered by Henry Grunwald, the legendary chief editor of Time magazine. The recent tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, where reporters questioned the original version of how police responded to a school shooting, brought it back to mind. “Journalism can never be silent. That is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.”
May we always have a healthy news media. And may we always learn from its mistakes.