Peter Menzies: It’s No Surprise the Public’s Trust in Journalism Is in a Tailspin

A man reads a newspaper while sitting on a park bench in downtown Vancouver in a file photo. The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck

Commentary

The world of journalism was done a huge favour last week when the Washington Post fired reporter Felicia Sonmez after she waged an online campaign against her own newsroom.

The Twitter barrage that led to her termination has been subjected to much commentary and an exquisite monologue by Bill Maher. But Sonmez was hardly a woke outlier. She is just the latest example of how trust in journalism is being undermined by too many reporters and so-called news outlets that lack the discipline to keep their opinions out of their work or on social media. Not only are they oblivious to the vandalism they are inflicting on their craft, they remain unaware that by taking government subsidies, what they think is viewed with growing suspicion.

It’s an inexplicable combination of foolishness and naivety. Do they think they are, as News Media Canada CEO Paul Deegan described them, democratic expression’s “most precious guardians” and therefore immune from consequences? He used that phrase while inexplicably lobbying for limitations on speech in a submission to Canada’s failed first effort at “Online Harms’' legislation. As evidence, Deegan pointed out that 30 percent of journalists self-censor on social media. Me? I worry about the 70 percent who don’t.

Day after day, they pour like waves of lemmings into an abyss crafted by their own hubris, offering intellectually vapid judgments on why Jordan Peterson, Pierre Poilievre, or Leslyn Lewis is a this, or a that. And they do this with smug chuckles and aren’t-I-clever giggles as if they are just hanging out in the bar with their pals after work. How they remain ignorant of the fact the rest of us are Right Here In The Room With Them, watching as they decimate their professional credibility is one of the most stupefying mysteries of the age. Perhaps it makes them popular at parties.

Some, I know, have been taught in journalism school that objectivity is an impossible, old-fashioned virtue no longer vital to the news business.

To which I say: Kid, ask for your money back. No one expects you not to have your own opinions, but if you can’t separate them from your work, if you can’t discipline yourself to keep them to yourself in public and produce work that is trusted for its fairness, then go sell shoes. Sure, objectivity is hard. So is honesty. And love. Everyone fails sometimes. But you don’t give up just because it’s hard, particularly when without it, everything falls apart.

(A brief digression: As a fan of good journalists, I try to write these days only for publications that won’t take government subsidies and respect their readers by hiring people who are Good at Being Journalists. In other words, ones you can trust.)

It comes as no surprise then to learn that public confidence in Canadian journalism is in a tailspin. According to the latest report—the third of its kind this year—only 42 percent of Canadians trust “most news, most of the time.”

This latest study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford is even more alarming for the English-language press, where only 39 percent trust news. That’s down 16 points in the past six years. Worse, only 27 percent of anglophone Canadians see their media as “independent from political influence,” down from 44 percent in 2016.

Funny thing about 2016: That’s the year I attended an event in Ottawa at which forlorn executives from legacy newspapers rolled out their pitch to the government for subsidy money to help their failing businesses “transition” to the digital world. Some of those papers went on to shamelessly use their front pages, news, and editorial pulpits to lobby for even more government assistance. Yet here we are six years and about $500 million in public support later, and they’re still knocking on the prime minister’s door like so many Oliver Twists, begging, please sir, for more.

In response, the federal government has tabled Bill C-18, the Online News Act. Its job will be to transfer money from social media and tech companies into newsrooms of which the government approves.

The fact that Bill C-18 will probably drive more money to the CBC than any other entity should be enough to reject it as deeply flawed. But that aside, the bill’s other huge problem to be addressed is that it risks propping up a lot of old companies that have failed to adapt to change at the expense of 100 or so new, innovative online news platforms that have sprouted up across the country.

But in the long run, there is an even bigger problem for Canada’s increasing number of subsidy-dependent, government-approved news organizations and their journalists. And that is that the more they abuse their craft and depend upon the political establishment, the more the public’s trust in them collapses. And the more that trust collapses, the more they will depend on the political establishment to meet their payrolls.

That’s some grave they’re digging.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.