To some extent, that anxiety is not misplaced. Whether mediated through a Fourth, Fifth, or perhaps now a Sixth Estate—or more radically, not mediated at all—any society that aspires to be taken seriously as a developed, democratic, pluralistic, well-governed, innovative, and creative force in the world—and isn’t that what Canada wants above all, to be a positive force in the world?—needs a journalistic environment that is healthy, exciting, and diverse.
Canada’s is the opposite of that: moribund, flaccid, and as glabrous as Peter Mansbridge’s pate. The blame lies less with the rapid disruptions wrought by new technology and instead with complacent owners, tremulous investors, and inattentive regulators, whose failure to recognize what is happening to media business models has been exacerbated by soft-minded journalists, who have largely missed the story of their own demise. It’s as if Canada’s journalists were assigned to cover a state funeral, and only now are wising up to the fact that the body in the casket is their own.
JOURNALISTS AREN’T EASY to love. They are less trusted than police, schools, banks, and the justice system, and only marginally more trusted than federal Parliament and corporations.1 But what journalists do is important, and it isn’t just the business of rooting out liars, holding policy-makers accountable, probing the public accounts, championing the underdogs, or hounding the overlords. It is all of those things, but it is more importantly the practice of using stories as a way to help people make sense of their world.
It is not enough to write the first draft of history. The job of journalism is also to recall and reflect on our shared history, to capture or at least help channel the currents of our times, and to help us imagine what sort of society we wish to invent for ourselves and for those who come after us. Yes, debates happen in this country’s legislatures, our rules of conduct are enforced in our courts, and our commerce is carried out, sometimes in public, often in private, and most of the system works for most of the people most of the time. But not always, and not for everybody—which is why our public square needs to include spaces where we can challenge the status quo, encourage dissent, listen at the margins, and champion new ideas, new ways of doing things, new ways of seeing the world, new ways of understanding our place in it. We need new places to share those stories in multiple and evolving ways.
To do all that, good journalism needs a home, many homes actually, but in Canada we’ve failed to keep our media house in order, and our public square is shrinking fast. Canadian journalism is on life-support—not because Canadian reporters don’t know how to do journalism, but because there are so few places to put it anymore. We’ve clung for so long to dinosaur media-business models that while pretty much everyone else in the developed world is driving the journalistic version of a Tesla these days, here we are all crammed into a second-hand Edsel, wondering if we can afford snow tires.
How did things get so bad? Will they get worse? Should we even care anymore? And if so, what should we do about it?
Someone once said that the environment is too important to leave to environmentalists, and the same could be said about journalism. If it is true that as many as ten thousand journalism jobs in Canada have disappeared in less than a decade,2 then arguably there aren’t enough journalists around anymore to report themselves missing, and the good ones who have survived thus far are likely to be hopelessly conflicted when it comes to taking proper account of the businesses that generate their paycheques. Veteran reporter Paul Watson has said that Canada’s big media companies, or “legacy media,” have become “old, slow, and lazy” and that Canadian journalists have essentially missed the story, focusing on the changing media landscape as a technology issue, rather than holding their owners, and themselves, to account. “Journalists are very good at putting the heat on other people . . . but they’re very bad at turning the heat on themselves.”3 As such, they have been complicit in their own demise.
With rare exceptions, such as Jesse Brown’s Canadaland podcast and website, there’s a lack of thoughtful reporting on what’s happening in our media. True, media closures (and the occasional opening) are routinely covered in what’s left of our media, and certainly what’s happening to the business produces plenty of hand-wringing at journalism conferences. Then there’s the dutiful quarterly reporting, really a death watch, over Postmedia’s latest losses. Or there’s an occasional splenetic outburst like we heard early in 2016 from the head of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), who scolded television executives for crying poor from the sterns of their luxury yachts or the seats of their private helicopters.4 But let’s just say that critiques of Canadian media, when left to Canadian media, don’t exactly brim with honest self-reflection.
When they have been stirred to respond to the crisis unfolding under their very noses, the response has been to plump for a demoralizingly nostalgic and insipid campaign that Unifor, Ryerson University, and a few media companies launched in 2015 called JournalismIS,5 which sounds like nothing so much as a drunken reporter about to fall off her stool at the National Press Club of Canada, except you can’t even do that anymore because the press club went bankrupt and shut its doors in 2007. JournalismIS, we are told, “essential to democracy,” “relentless,” “committed to the public interest,” and a “watchdog over the powerful,” and of course in an ideal world that would all be true. But in Canada, it hasn’t been true for a very long time. A more accurate campaign would be called JournalismWAS, and it could take its cue from Monty Python—“I’m not dead!”
Journalists? That’s the same conclave about which Baron Black of Crossharbour once famously said, “We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute ‘commitment’ for insight.”6 By that measure, why bother lamenting the loss of a single journalist, let alone an entire division of them? When it comes to journalists, who cares if the breed goes extinct? Those soi-disant “watchdogs over the powerful” have failed to keep a proper watch over their own sacred estates, possibly by confusing what Marshall McLuhan once said about the medium being the message, contorting themselves into a contented belief that mediocrity is a message and a medium both—and journalists are its avatars.
And then along comes the Oscar-winning film Spotlight to remind us that, imperfect as journalists may be, what they do sometimes matters, and sometimes it matters a lot. And Conrad Black should remember that it is the media proprietors, not the practitioners of journalism—lazy, drunk, or otherwise—who are the real villains in this piece. There is no shying away from the fact that it is the owners and publishers who have bankrupted and/or destroyed the value of Canada’s great media companies, and they’ve been getting away with it for decades. That, as much as anything, begins to explain how utterly dreadful Canadian media have become. Ben Bagdikian once wrote, “Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach’s St. Matthew Passion on a ukulele.”7 Well, the average Canadian newspaper is an instrument that has been stripped so bare that trying to be even a second-rate reporter in this country is like being asked to play Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” on a washboard. You have to wonder if it’s even worth trying.
Should anything be done to rescue Canadian media from themselves? The question seems to hit home especially hard when it comes to newspapers, because even though they are very much fading from view as the journalistic vehicle of choice in today’s sea of zeros and ones, there remains a belief—maybe just among the Vinyl Cafe demographic and former newspaper reporters like me, who remember what a good paper can do—that newspapers have a weight and authority that other media cannot match and never will. They have a “fixity,” as one study of