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No News Is Bad News
Hiking on the Edge: Canada’s West Coast Trail
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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.
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