Fall 2023 newsletter
I’m worried about the unhealthy state of journalism in democracies.
No system of government is perfect, but I do believe there are two foundational approaches: govern by terror, or govern by consent. I’ll take consent, please. Governing by consent means voters in a democracy must be able to make informed choices, and in order to make informed choices, they need information they can rely upon.
And that means democracies need a fourth estate that is independent, tenacious, and unafraid.
Yet, exactly at the time when there is a great need for reliable information (climate change, AI, wars, just to name a few potentially existential threats), many news organisations are in trouble. Or, at least, the ones producing mainstream journalism are in trouble. (I’m not referring to tabloid or fringe media.)
In many countries, including many democratic states, journalists are increasingly at risk of verbal, cyber or even physical attack. In addition, many news organisations are facing crushing financial pressures as audiences fracture and ad revenues plummet. In Canada alone, in the past few months, the biggest players in the Canadian industry – Bell Media; TorStar and my former employer CBC News – have all announced big cutbacks. Thousands of journalism jobs have been axed, local newspapers shut down and foreign bureaux closed.
Newsgathering – the business of journalism – costs money. I do not envy the job of news managers, in public or private news organisations, trying to find a sustainable economic model. That is not, and never will be, an easy task. Sadly however, in my 25 years in journalism, I’ve seen many misguided and harmful attempts to attract more eyeballs, in the hopes of increasing revenues.
I made my main character, Marcie Blanchard, a journalist. It’s always good to write about what you know. But mainly, I wanted to make some points – truth via fiction if you will - about how important it is to manage the business of journalism properly, so that journalists can be independent, tenacious, and unafraid in their reporting.
Marcie started out in journalism as a respected on-air reporter, investigating and breaking news stories on important issues. When her local TV station was sold, new management overhauled the supper hour newscast, insisting that sex, crime, and weather stories dominate, in an effort to attract more viewers. The idea for this subplot didn’t come to me out of the blue. During one particular era, CBC News management brought in outside media consultants. In group and individual training sessions, we were informed we had to give viewers what they really wanted, which, according to these consultants, was more crime and weather stories. At one point we had meteorologists (nothing against meteorologists!) popping into the newscast every few minutes with micro-weather updates, whether there was unusual weather happening or not. Fortunately, the consultants’ ideas eventually fell out of favour. I have no idea if ratings increased, but I am certain we did a lot of harm to our journalism during this era, because any other news that didn’t fit the crime or weather bill, i.e., stories about complicated but important issues, often had no place in our newscasts. In an hour long newscast, there simply wasn’t enough time.
Another misguided attempt I’ve witnessed, in both public and private broadcast news organisations, is putting pretty young people in prominent on-air positions, promoting them as figures of journalistic authority. I believe this is one of the reasons why public trust in, at least broadcast news journalism, is in freefall. Many in the audience know they are looking at performers, not seasoned journalists with the experience and skills to know when to dig deeper, expose uncomfortable untruths and ask difficult questions.
In How the Invisible Woman Learned to Fly, Marcie, who is neither young nor pretty, is forced off the air by new management and sidelined into a low-skilled, low-paying off-air role. There, she toils as a glorified babysitter for the inexperienced reporters hired to replace her, forced to produce their news stories about such civically important topics as a calendar featuring scantily clad female basketball players. So much talent and experience wasted when people like Marcie are pushed aside in favour of pretty performers. So many lost opportunities to do important journalism.
Don’t get me wrong. Striving for large and diverse audiences for mainstream journalism is an excellent goal: the more people who receive reliable, factual information; the better. But I would hope news managers would carefully consider the harm they can do. The easy choices aren’t always the right ones, but a healthy news media is always vital to healthy democracies.