Media Wars

Do you trust your local media outlet?

If you’re reading this post, you ignore the MM or simply scan a few headlines now and then. You’re following writers on Substack and can’t even imagine watching ‘news’ on cable TV. And no wonder: It’s become even more grotesque since the pandemic upended what was left of ‘normal life’. But you likely haven’t stopped worrying about it. Mostly because you know that without a functioning media, also known as The Fifth Estate, there’s no Democracy. Without honest and balanced reporting that at least attempts to get at the Truth, no democracy can survive for long. It sinks into the morass of extreme opinions and everyone ends up confused, cynical and weary. So, we have good reason for our sleepless nights and dark forebodings. You’re not alone: Even the media are worrying about the media these days. Take my favourite magazine, Tablet, which publishes The Scroll every afternoon, just as I was getting down to the serious business of thinking about the serious business of ‘covering the news’. They published this bit under their heading The Big Story:

A year-and-a-half-long Columbia Journalism Review investigation published on Monday lays out in exhaustive detail the pattern of legacy media outlets distorting and ignoring facts about the alleged connections between Donald Trump and Russia before and after the 2016 presidential election. Written by Jeff Gerth, a Pulitzer-winning journalist who had previously spent 29 years at The New York Times.

The postmortem on the media’s approach to the Trump administration identifies several key episodes in which the Times, The Washington Post, Slate, CNN, and other outlets published reports on the Steele dossier, Russian interference in the 2016 election, and phantom connections between Trump associates and the Kremlin that relied on false foundations. In multiple instances the outlets continued to endorse those erroneous reports even as mounting conflicting evidence came to light. (My bolding)

Gertz says that because of lying through their journalistic teeth on Russiagate as well as on numerous other occasions, American trust in their media is one of the lowest in the world—a measly 26% does so, representing a steep decline since 2016 when it was still at a healthy stage and trending positive. Put a different way, nearly 75% of Americans do not trust their media outlets.

Then, there are the so-called Twitter Files. Yes, Twitter is not the local paper, but it is far more influential than even large papers ever were. Until Musk bought the company, nobody knew that they were shadow-banning (banishing people without their knowledge) anyone with a conflicting story on the pandemic and the vaccines, and that the FBI had infiltrated them and was compiling files on the dissidents. Speaking of which, even the Department of Defence in the USA got into the act and began ‘dossiers’ on harmless citizens who might just be thinking wrong thoughts. This is the state of media freedom in America in 2023. And it’s even worse in Canada: Rebel News just ran a story on the almost famous Pastor Pawloski, who dared to give a speech to the remnants of the Trucker Convoy (remember them?) and was slapped with a lawsuit. https://www.rebelnews.com/theyre_prosecuting_pastor_artur_again_and_im_in_court_right_now_reporting_on_it?utm_campaign=el_pastorart_2_2_23&utm_medium=email&utm_source=therebel

This took place in Alberta, where the premier, Danielle Smith, promised to stop such abuses. And how about The Globe and Mail’s Gary Mason, their official National News Correspondent, who wrote this headline: How should the media treat Donald Trump? Like the menace to Democracy that he is.

Mason wastes no time in attacking Trump who is daring to speak at his rallies, once again.

The fact that this is happening is surreal and requires an important reminder: For his bid to secure the Republican nomination for the U.S. presidency to be covered as anything but an attempt by one of the greatest con artists in American history to further his own dangerous ends would be morally wrong.

Media reporting on someone who is running for President is morally wrong because Gary Mason says so. Fortunately, nobody reads him in the US, but here in Trudeauland, he is a big gun among the chattering classes, and The Globe is the most ‘respected’ paper in the land. Mason knows full well that letting people whose opinions you hate speak freely and then reporting on it in good faith is the very essence of a healthy media system. But he has long since given up on real journalism; it’s so much easier to write what amounts to some kind of hate speech. Mason and his ilk are the reason that a majority of people no longer trust the media. But is this actually the case?

Let’s find out. This is my new passion, accosting random strangers at malls and coffee shops with ‘questions of the day’. The surprising results I share with you, as objectively and fairly as possible.

At the YWCA coffee shop, I got lucky because not far from me there was a big table with at least eight old ladies engaged in very lively conversations. They didn’t look old and tired at all, so I walked over and introduced myself. One demanded a card which I didn’t have with me, another told me to talk to her husband at the next table because she never listened to news, but the rest were not averse to sharing what media they consumed and reveal if they trusted it.

The oldest in the group, a woman with medium length white hair and lively blue eyes and probably as ancient as I am, was the most vocal: it’s all so overblown, she said. They make everything so extreme. And then they report on something like a big storm on the east coast but they never tell you what happened afterwards. There’s no follow through. And they seem to be unable to talk about the weather in a normal way. It’s just too overwhelming.

She listened to various news outlets and read the local papers, but she wasn’t happy with any of them. She clearly cared about the state of the media and kept shaking her white head.

Next to her, a slightly younger lady thought that the sheer onslaught of information wasn’t something she could handle. She had no opinion on trust, but she certainly didn’t like the media world she lives in. Moving up the table, there were two ladies who had quite different ideas. One listened faithfully to the BBC as well as the Canadian equivalent, the CBC and for good measure, the American NPR. They were just fine, did a good job. The other lady wasn’t so sure; she listened to the local TV stations and read the paper but was sure that there was a dose of propaganda in there. I moved on to the husband of the news averse lady and his friend, both of them in their seventies. They listened to the local Global TV News, and it was all pretty good, they thought. No complaints from them. This guileless attitude turned out to be true of other old guys I talked to the next day, at the mall. They listened to CBC out of habit and only admitted that maybe it had become lefty and woke after some prodding. But they weren’t overly upset by that, in contrast to many of the old ladies. One old guy remembered the days of Peter Mansbridge fondly and that affection had carried over into the current CBC, which is nothing like that. Not living in the present, you might say.

At the mall, I talked mainly to younger folks and found that the younger they were, the more confused they seemed on the subject of ‘objective news reporting’. A youngish social worker told me that she didn’t believe in objectivity at all; all media were biased, it was human nature. And she didn’t seem to care, it didn’t make any difference. I pointed out that there are journalists who do swim against the extremist tide, but got nowhere. A young gay guy with lovely earrings was getting all his news from Facebook and thought that the actual news media and social media had merged completely so he didn’t have to actually read anything. Also, he was thrilled to have quit Netflix lately; now he was just watching documentaries on YouTube. And I’m so happy! he exclaimed.

Alas, he was the only happy person I found. Perhaps the most discontented was a cop, about forty-five, who was upset by about just about everything, the new lax drug control laws, (simple possession of even hard drugs is no longer an offence here, and we hand out drugs freely to addicts), the million-dollar bicycle lanes, you name it. As for the media, they were superficial and corrupt, woke, and useless. I asked him if he got mad because he cared. Oh, yes, I care, I do,he replied. He felt that the public was no longer safe with all the addicts running wild in Victoria. And keeping the public safe was his job, after all. He was clearly frustrated by the way things were going. His wife, a nice-looking woman a bit younger than him, nodded to everything he said but did note that she wasn’t quite as ‘cynical’ as her husband.

Finally, I managed to chat up a group of three Filipinos, two women and a man under the age of forty. They were immigrants and had been in Canada for decades. And like most of the people I cornered, they felt that the media did a poor job. It’s like politics, said the man, they treat it like a game. They are not telling both sides of the story, said the younger of the two women. They watched CTV, Global TV and listened to local radio. When I asked them about media in the Philippines, they immediately assured me that Canadian media is still better than the Philippine version, but not by much. They did appreciate the difference. Talking to them gave me a sense of how quite ordinary people are excellent judges of the media they consume. Nobody was going to fool them—they had seen the worst of it and remembered. And maybe that is the key: you have to have a standard in mind, and even the most basic one seemed hard to come by. Except for the Filipinos and the old lady at the Y, nobody appeared to have a clear idea of what exactly good media would look like.

Canada right now is known around the world as a country where democracy is in a state of decay. I would say that the media is aiding and abetting this process, secure in the knowledge that the people will still watch and listen though they distrust them utterly. The question is: how long can we go on like this? Because it feels like watching Fall of Civilizations, one of the best YouTube history channels. I wonder if my friend with the earrings is watching it. I rather doubt it because it’s not exactly uplifting. It makes you realize that we too could be in the lengthy process of a complicated downfall. Certainly, our media landscape is a compelling indicator.