The Canadian news industry is in a dire spot. Canadian trust in news media is suffering each and every year, with an Ipsos poll finding that trust in news media hovered around 58 per cent, down eight points from 2021 and 14 points since pre-pandemic levels. An Abacus Data poll in 2022 found that 42 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement “much of the information we receive from news organizations is false.”
On top of this, the industry continues to see layoffs at companies big and small, while the impact of Bill C-18 means that news organizations have lost much needed traffic and revenue from Google, Facebook, and Instagram.
Still, with declining trust in media, legacy news media receives a disproportionate amount of support from consumers. An annual survey by communications firm Kaiser & Partners found that 53 per cent of Canadians trusted established news media.
Why has trust declined?
John Miller, a former chair of Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism for ten years and author of the book Yesterday’s News: Why Canada’s Daily Newspapers are Failing Us, said that since the book was published in the 90s, the news industry as a whole bears the responsibility for declining trust in news.
“Then, concentration of ownership was galloping ahead,” Miller said. “The quality of the media, it wasn’t operating as a public service, it was a profit centre.”
Miller also said the closing of local newspapers and news media has decimated the reliability and relevance of news in towns outside of large cities.
In 2017, National Post owner Postmedia and then Toronto Star owner Torstar swapped ownership of local community newspapers before shuttering most of their doors. This move directly affected the politics of Miller’s community.
“In the subsequent local election [after the 2017 deal] there was a turnout of 19 per cent of my municipality. I think that’s a direct correlation of the fact that there wasn’t a reliable source of news and so people didn’t know what the issues were,” he said.
Among other factors for declining trust, Miller pointed to the diminishing importance of journalism, with technology outpacing the industry and a failure to effectively combat the narrative of “fake news” championed by far-right figures like former US President Donald Trump and Canada’s Opposition and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
READ MORE: Don’t fall for Poilievre’s war on the media
“That’s accelerated the trend from people actually paying for news and supporting their local media because there’s no countervailing argument,” Miller said. “Journalism has become so devalued, that you can’t begin to explain it to people so that they will listen because they just say, ‘Well, that’s, that’s your opinion.’”
Abdicating responsibility
In a January panel on the subject of declining trust in media, President and CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada Catherine Tait pointed to “polarization and disinformation” as the growing concerns plaguing trust in news media. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, a Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, pointed to the growing issue of engagement bait, where news agencies chase inflammatory headlines to attract negative attention and clicks.
The disinformation aspect of trust in news has been a subject of scrutiny lately. As editor and journalist Davide Mastracci wrote in The Maple, double standards in how disinformation is reported “both misrepresents the problem and hampers the process of finding an actual solution.”
Miller didn’t emphasize the role of disinformation itself, rather the devaluation of investigative news, and the polarized news consumer who can choose to disregard information that doesn’t conform to their world view.
Other aspects of legacy news media have been criticized for failing to connect with the average Canadian. Independent journalist Jeremy Appel wrote in November of 2022 about the CBC’s sympathetic framing of landlords and the absence of the power dynamic they hold over renters being reported in their stories.
The Reuters Institute, an entity which researches journalism and its effects on society, releases an annual report on the state of digital journalism. In their 2023 report, they found only 19 per cent of Canadians believe public service journalism is important for them, while only 28 per cent believed it was important for society.
Where does news media go from here?
With the response by tech companies Meta and Google over Bill C-18, other journalists like Nora Loreto have called for a public alternative to promote the utility of a Canadian-centric solution to competing with tech oligopolies.
In terms of solutions, Miller believes that news media is at a crossroads in Canada.
“I think the government is going to have to decide whether verified factual reporting is important to democracy. That’s going to be a tough call, because it’s going to cost a lot of money to restore it, and support it,” Miller said. “I think it has to be the government, or some kind of public entity, because all that money that the federal government offered to newspapers, three years ago, they haven’t even fully subscribed to it.”
“So the money’s there for them, and they’re not claiming it and so the private ownership of newspapers is failing us,” he concluded.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
