What could journalists (in Canada) do to break with their corrosive habits?
Canadian journalism has long failed just as profoundly as its southern counterpart, but in uniquely toxic ways.
In the wake of the US media’s continuing failure to truthfully cover their country’s collapse into autocracy and fascism, soon to be retiring NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen posted the following:
Here's something I post from time to time. My answer to a reader who asked me: what could journalists do NOW to break with some of their more corrosive habits.
Defense of democracy seen as basic to the job.
Symmetrical accounts of asymmetrical realities seen as malpractice.
“Politics as strategic game” frame seen as low quality, downmarket, amateurish— and overmatched.
Bad actors with a history of misinforming the public seen as unsuitable sources and unwelcome guests.
Internalizing of the “liberal bias” critique seen as self-crippling, a historic mistake in need of correction.
For now, let’s put aside the obvious critiques – (does the US really still have a democracy to defend? Does framing fascism as a permanent horizon-threat that can never really arrive accurately reflect the moment or represent a form of deluded denial?) – and, as a quick thought experiment, transpose the list northwards to a profoundly different media culture.
Their corrosive habits: Canada’s corrupted mediascape
Canada, with some of the worst per capita carbon emissions and worst levels of forced car dependency on earth, is at the forefront of climate disasters such as wildfires – but you’d never know that based on the line of questioning from CTV broadcaster Vassy Kapelos. This cringe-fest interview, impossible to watch without second-hand embarrassment for Vassy, perfectly encapsulates how Mark Carney was elevated to the highest office while barely facing a single question of relevance.
Anglo-Canadians have been conditioned by their long-compromised mediascape (corrupted by an absurd proportion of US news) to conceive of themselves in the negative. “Living over a crackhouse” is a common expression, replacing Trudeau Sr.’s “Sleeping next to an elephant” from a previous generation.
Local news and reporting has been near dead (or at least on life-support) in Canada since Conrad Black’s infamous newspaper purge in the 1980s, largely providing a template for what’s happened in the US more recently.
In the 1990s, when Russia was throwing pesky journalists off of balconies for asking inconvenient questions, the Canadian media establishment had a much simpler, cleaner solution: Fire them. Any journalist who wanted to seriously cover climate change and the honestly report on any aspect of the oil and gas industries, (including how surprisingly insignificant its economic contribution is) was rendered unemployable.
Media giants like Rogers have long treated the news reporting as a lazy propaganda arm in the service of corporate interests. (Report international stories from a Canadian perspective? Why bother when we can carry stories off the US wire for a pittance? Etc.) Watching broadcast news in Canada is like entering an alternate dimension of 1990s strip-mall fancy dress, 1980s hair-helmets, where new pipelines, car traffic and US sports are always top of mind, and provide temporary breaks from a steady stream of ads for ever-inflating monster-truck SUVs.
The few, plucky, exceptional journalists who refused to abandon their integrity, and wanted to truthfully cover political corruption and the reality of climate collapse were forced to found their own independent operations such as the Narwhal.
What could journalists do NOW to break with some of their more corrosive habits?
So here’s a quick shot at translating Rosen’s five point list for journalists in Canada, (based in an imaginary mediascape where they wouldn’t lose their jobs for displaying integrity):
Defense of
democracyscience seen as basic to the job. Including both medical and climate science. This alone would represent a colossal sea change. (The biggest threat to democracy in Canada isn’t electoral malpractice, it’s a corrupted media establishment pushing corporate interests, fossil fuels and climate misinformation, fossil fuel-intensive lifestyles, and the political duopoly).Symmetrical accounts of asymmetrical non-realities seen as malpractice. Corporate Canadian media has long mis-reported reality by a relentless focus on partisan (Lib-Con) non-realities. The most obvious recent example would be relentlessly framing the so-called carbon tax as the be all and end all of climate action for the last decade. Of course, the bottom line accounting reality is that Canada has never taxed carbon. Canada has had carbon pricing at the consumer and industrial levels, but any revenue was always exponentially dwarfed by public carbon subsidies. All climate experts are in agreement that carbon pricing is merely one small aspect among many needed for a just transition to net zero.
“Politics as strategic game between the Liberal-Conservatives” frame seen as low quality, downmarket, amateurish— and overmatched. Had to also tweak this one to refer to the two Bay Street puppet parties. Obviously, Canada has a multi-party system, but this would be surprising to anyone informed solely by the corporate news. Infamously, when the NDP was the official opposition (2011-15), the anglo-media conspired to elevate the third party Liberals instead of fairly covering the new political reality.
Bad actors with a history of misinforming the public seen as unsuitable sources and unwelcome guests. This one gets retained unaltered from Rosen’s list. Corporate media in Canada has become unwatchable largely due to the same, stale roster of mostly-white halfwit pundits that get dragged out decade after decade. What would be the disgraceful fate of Christy Clark, probably the most corrupt premier in Canadian history, who proudly took bribes as a “second salary” in a brazen cash-for-government-contracts scheme? Why, well-paid CBC pundit of course! Because that’s what we want shoved down our throats.
Internalizing of the “liberal-conservative-bay-street-big-oil bias” critique seen as self-crippling, a historic mistake in need of correction. This reiterates a previous point. The Liberal-Conservative bias of the anglo-Canadian media establishment has manufactured a distorted political overton window that over decades has damaged democracy in Canada to a shameful degree, stunting the political and socio-economic imaginaries of multiple generations.
Let’s try to end on a hopeful note. What can be done? Most obviously, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to un-compromised outlets like the Narwhal. Canada needs to fund journalists with integrity. Big Oil’s coffers are near limitless, but the reality of climate collapse is now impossible to ignore. We all have to inhale the same, toxic smoke-filled air.
We can’t just not follow the news – that’s what the Bay Street media wants after all, a misinformed electorate distracted and enraged by bête noire lies like an imaginary carbon tax – but we can focus on the few gems who haven’t sold their soul. Apply litmus tests (how do they cover genocide and climate?) and keep score. Remain diligent. Staying informed and holding power to account isn’t just the job of journalists, after all, it’s everyone’s responsibility.