Why Local Media Has Failed Us

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024, released this week, identifies the biggest short-term risk to the planet is from misinformation and disinformation, even above extreme weather events. The risk is highest during the next two years when “more than 3 billion people due to head to the polls in 2024 and 2025, including in major economies like the United States, India and the United Kingdom” where rightwing dictators and fascists like Trump, Putin, Poilievre, and Modi will be on the political stage.*

What has the WEF report got to do with local media? Trust. We need to trust local media. Trust that it’s honest and accurate, providing the coverage of events and issues that residents need, not disseminating disinformation or propaganda. Trust that its focus is on the residents, not the advertisers, the politicians, or the political ideology of the owners. Trust that the reporters will hold governments and politicians accountable, will ask the tough questions, will question officials and their statements, will take the time to examine and comment on the events and issues that affect us most, and not merely reprint propaganda.

And I will argue here that local media does not live up to that trust.

Traditional local media, a few years ago when we actually had locally-produced newspapers and radio news broadcasts, used to be far more trustworthy and credible even than national media. Like many smaller municipalities across Ontario, this was a connected community; people interacted closely and intimately; residents were very involved in community life and politics; and local news (and how it was presented) mattered deeply to residents.

There was, thankfully, never any local parallel to the blatant Putinesque propaganda outlets like Fox Newz, Rebel Media, InfoWars, or National Post (aka Nazional Post to some critics). Thanks in large part to ideologically rigid, rage-farming outlets such as these, public trust in media has been falling precipitously for years. Local media, instead of working harder to retain the faith people had in them, seems to have joined the slide in credibility and trust.**

Journalism, write Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil in their important book, The Elements of Journalism (4th edn) is “essentially a discipline of verification” (pages xi and 101). They dedicate the whole of Chapter 4 to it, writing,

If those who practice journalism and those who consume it do not understand journalism’s purpose in society and cannot differentiate journalism from political advocacy and propaganda, or opinion mongering from reporting, if they do not understand the discipline of verification or the requirements of passionate, open-minded inquiries, it is not journalism that is threatened. It is democracy…
[T]he discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art.

My first question is: do local reporters verify the statements made by politicians and bureaucrats? I’ll answer no, because we don’t see such verification in the stories. Verification requires reporters to actually ask questions, to look up data, assess it, and in some cases challenge the information given, and to publish those questions and answers. Instead, political statements are printed without any effort to verify, let alone correct or challenge them. Without verification, what gets reported from local political or bureaucratic sources is merely their propaganda. As Discourse Magazine wrote:

A major concern with the use of propaganda in democratic societies is that it changes the nature of the relationship between citizens and the state. A defining feature of liberal democracies is that citizens are the source of power, with those in government being subservient to the citizenry. The adoption of government propaganda flips this relationship. Citizens are viewed as an inconvenient barrier to the political elite achieving their desired goals. The elite use their political power to control the citizenry in the name of the “common good.”

My second question is: do local reporters make sure every story answers the five Ws (the basics every journalism student must learn): who, what, when, where, and why (and, where appropriate, how)? I’ll answer no again, at least when it comes to reprinting municipal releases or covering council meetings. “Why” is the toughest component for many reporters because again it requires them to ask questions, conduct interviews, and dig deeper. You can’t answer “why” by watching a streaming council meeting from your home or reprinting municipal releases.

On page 126, the book’s authors note that transparency “involves the journalist asking for each event, ‘What does my audience need to know to evaluate this information for itself?’ The answer includes explaining as much as is practical about how the news organization got its information.” Simply reprinting a municipal media release or parroting what was said in a council meeting does not provide the information or answers the audience needs.

Repeating the words of politicians, interested parties, corporations, or bureaucrats, and not digging deeper to verify facts, questioning their data, or demanding proof is not journalism. If they want the public’s trust, local media should not be a vehicle for corporate or political propaganda.

What is journalism?

The American Press Association (APA) notes, “The central purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society.” The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) notes, “An act of journalism sets out to combine evidence-based research and verification with the creative act of storytelling. Its central purpose is to inform and empower people to make sense of events and issues, and to serve in their interest.” By either definition, simply reprinting the statements made by politicians and bureaucrats is not journalism, yet this is exactly what appears in local media time and again. To paraphrase Truman Capote, that’s not journalism, that’s just typing. And it is a disservice to our community.

JournalismOnline has this:

Journalists also force citizens and the government alike to address public interest issues that the society would otherwise not see. Such issues become detrimental to freedom and democracy when we fail to address them. Thus, the media helps society to evolve and balance itself. At the local level, it creates public forums, disseminates information to citizens, and acts as a conduit of sorts for processes that healthy societies need to thrive… All this works together to create tolerances that, in turn, foster cultural diversity. By keeping the people informed, journalism keeps people united and aligned.

Kovach and Rosensteil note the role of watchdog remains critical to journalism: “Being monitors, sentinels who ask questions and dig, remains vital… the classic role of investigative reporting, uncovering wrongdoing…” When is the last time you can recall local media doing anything investigative like that?***

Why this matters

Over the years I have written many posts about journalism, reporting, and the role of the media. I have often been particularly critical of local media, not only because I believe that good journalism and honest reporting are essential for democracy, but also because I worked in it when we had a real newspaper here. I’ve always been passionate about what journalism means to the community. Perhaps that’s old-fashioned, more nostalgic than realistic. Perhaps it’s merely my arrogance. However, I think I understand reasonably well what journalism is, and what local media could and should be to best serve the community.

Democracy depends on an informed populace, and to paraphrase Joseph Pulitzer, democracy and the media rise and fall together. There are politicians and parties, as well as organizations, groups, individuals, billionaires, insurrectionists, presidential candidates, opposition party leaders, and even nations that have a vested interest in seeing democracy destabilize and even collapse. The easiest route to doing so is to control or emasculate the media so it cannot inform the populace, cannot offer assessments or opinions that contradict the views of those parties. And that has happened on both national and local levels. (see footnotes, below)

While the local online media outlets provide local information, entertainment, and news (in varying degrees, quality, and amounts depending on which outlet is being discussed and the source of that content), not all of what gets published qualifies as journalism if you accept the definitions noted above. In fact, I believe that little of the current online content qualifies.

The Columbia School of Journalism published a report in 2015 that read, in part,

Journalists today have an imperative—and an opportunity—to sift through the mass of content being created and shared in order to separate true from false, and to help the truth to spread. Unfortunately… that isn’t the current reality of how news organizations cover unverified claims, online rumors, and viral content. Lies spread much farther than the truth, and news organizations play a powerful role in making this happen… Many news sites apply little or no basic verification to the claims they pass on.

Who controls our media?

Despite claims of liberal bias by the ever-gaslighting Pierre PoiLIEvre, most Canadian media is now owned and controlled by ideological conservatives. Most of their outlets act openly as shills for the provincial and federal conservative parties. Some have become Rebel-Media-wannabes pushing far-right lines, but a few others have devolved into Der-Sturmer-wannabes shilling for the extremists. Many feed their readership with a barrage of strident opinion bloviators and editorials attacking Trudeau and the Liberals while remaining silent on any of the blatant lies, gaslighting, insults, and corruption of the Conservative leaders and parties.****

While no one wants a local media equivalent to these toxic, rightwing commentators, local media publishes no opinions on local issues, politics, or events. They don’t endorse anyone or anything. But informed editorial comment is often needed to make sense of the dry news they present. Editorial comment helps engage the public, encourages public debate and discussion. It also helps readers make sense of content: few readers have a background in municipal politics, finance, infrastructure, planning, or bureaucracy that may appear in stories.

I personally think it cowardly not to take an editorial stand on issues and events.

We no longer have a local newspaper, we no longer have local news on the radio. The online information sources called “local” media even when their actual servers and content providers are located in a different region. One online source is still owned by Metroland, an arm of TorStar, and former publishers of various print editions including the Collingwood Connection. TorStar was always a Liberal paper, until its recent purchase, and seems to have shifted to the right of centre editorially since then.

The other is owned by Sault Ste. Marie-based VillageMedia. I have not yet been able to discover the political leanings or associations of this group, but they are working in partnership with the ideologically conservative Rogers group.

What concerns me was a media release from Village Media published in 2020, that announced a new, “new independent journalism association.” In that release, Jeremy Klaszus, editor-in-chief at The Sprawl in Calgary, promised “a new way forward for Canadian journalism ‘rather than trying to preserve the models of yesteryear.”

Those models of yesteryear promoted a strong, ethical stance to promote and defend democracy, as independent watchdogs for the public interest, as noted in The Elements of Journalism. I suspect that their values are too old-fashioned for today’s reportage (much of which focuses on entertainment, celebrities and gossip, lifestyle, emotional reaction, and in rightwing papers, rage-farming). But, without any links to the new association in the article, I could not find any definition of just what that “new way” was supposed to be, or what the political affiliations of any of the associated media or groups are.

That lack of links (verification) is the same editorial oversight I have complained about when the company reproduces municipal media releases. Readers are forced to dig online for themselves to discover more, yet simple editorial oversight should have ensured those links were included.

Searching later, I found two associations of that name: Press Forward; entirely American, and a Canadian association (possibly separate from the American group) that also has no definition of the “new way forward” for journalism. I cannot find any direct links between the two and I am still in the dark about what this means for local media.

Independence?

Chapter five in The Elements of Journalism is titled “Independence From Faction.” In it, the authors make the point that, “There is a difference between journalism and advocacy, propaganda, or even just speech. If those distinctions are not grasped — if journalists cannot discern them — then the public cannot possibly hope to either. And journalism will be lost in the growing ocean of argument, disinformation, and misinformation, just as propaganda, with the advent of film and radio, became a new science a century ago.”

But merely repeating the words from a municipal media release is just that: propaganda. It’s especially disconcerting when a reporter’s name is on the piece, (the Collingwood Connection did the same thing). which suggests that the reporter did some background investigation and verification, instead of merely copying-and-pasting the municipal release. That adds a level of authenticity the piece does not deserve because it is merely propaganda. Neither reporter seems to have asked anyone involved for more details, for clarification, or to defend the suspect claims made in the town’s media release. As Kovach and Rosensteil write, “Journalists must maintain an independence from those they cover.” But that isn’t happening locally from what I see.

In its print edition, the Collingwood Connection was running four to six full pages of colour advertising for the Town of Collingwood and more for the Town of the Blue Mountains. Could any reader believe that its reporters would investigate or report any story about those municipalities or politicians that could hurt that advertising revenue? That they would publish anything but complimentary, supportive pieces? That they would print an editorial critical of local issues?

Now the print media has gone, the advertising and public planning notices have moved to CollingwoodToday. Does any reader believe that its reporters will investigate or report any story about those municipalities that could hurt that advertising revenue? As Kovach and Rosensteil write (p.328), “The kind of local news we get… owes a great deal to the level of profitability…”*****

Readers may recall how, a few years before it was closed, the Enterprise-Bulletin promoted the views and agenda of a small group of residents with a vested interest in overturning a council decision, headed by a personal friend of some EB staff members. On page 118 of The Elements of Journalism, the authors write what could be a pithy description of what happened here:

A master narrative, or metanarrative, occurs when journalists coalesce around a general view of a political actor or news event and then begin to look for more stories that illustrate that master narrative.

This was, of course, not on the same scale as The National Post or Fox Newz promoting the agendas of the far-right parties and extremists they support, but it was still propaganda.

What readers expect

The subtitle of the book I’ve been describing is What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect because it is also about the relationship between journalism and the public, about standards and expectations, about bias, objectivity, and independence, as well as about the watchdog role journalists should play. On page 338, the authors wrote:

We should expect to see evidence that the material has been prepared for our use above all. This means stories should answer our needs as citizens and not just the interests of the players and the political or economic system. It also means there is a demonstrated effort by the journalists to understand the whole community…

They also write that the public expects journalists to “inspire open public debate, not to further the narrow interests of a faction or a move toward a predetermined outcome (p. 339) and that journalists “monitor and hold to account the most important and difficult-to-challenge centers of power” (p.340; emphasis added). They add that the public has “a need for timely and deep knowledge of important issues and trends” (p.342). How many of these statements reflect what we read in local media reports and news? Have local media held any local politicians, councils, or bureaucrats to account, let alone asked them to verify their statements?

During the previous municipal and provincial election campaigns, did local media cover the big issues facing voters? Interview candidates and ask them the tough questions about their policies and plans? Advocate for everyone eligible to get out and vote? Explain what was at stake if people failed to vote? Not that I am aware. In fact, the voter turnout for both elections was at an all-time low, and in part media — not just local — has to take responsibility for that by not engaging its audience in the election process as fully or as deeply as they could about the need for participation in democracy.

Readers should expect, even demand more from local media. As the authors tell us on page 120, “The citizen should demand to be shown why he or she should believe any particular piece of content.” They add, “We have the right to expect that evidence of the integrity of the reporting be explicit. This means that the process of verification —how newspeople made their decisions and why— should be transparent (p337)… We should expect to see evidence that the material has been prepared for our use above all. This means stories should answer our needs as citizens and not just the interests of the players and the political or economic system (p.338).”

Collingwood, and all the audiences of local media, deserve better.

Notes:

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* The WEF report warns that “…foreign and domestic actors alike will leverage misinformation and disinformation to widen societal and political divides… the spread of mis- and disinformation around the globe could result in civil unrest, but could also drive government-driven censorship, domestic propaganda and controls on the free flow of information.” In 2022, the WEF reported that “During the 2016 US presidential election, for instance, Twitter identified over 50,000 Russian-linked spam accounts that were spreading divisive content related to the election. Climate change denial, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and war in Syria are other issues that have been steeped in disinformation.”

The 2023 WEF report continues,

The growing concern about misinformation and disinformation is in large part driven by the potential for AI, in the hands of bad actors, to flood global information systems with false narratives.

In a 2022 report on disinformation, the WEF noted,

 

Social media has ushered in an era of unprecedented connectivity. Yet it has also allowed disinformation and so-called fake news campaigns to proliferate and flourish. Disinformation—which includes false and out-of-context information spread with the intent to deceive or mislead—is largely propagated by people looking to distort public opinion and advance particular agendas… Experts note that one of the common facets of disinformation campaigns is discrediting authoritative voices.

** In both Canada and the USA trust in media has fallen and continues to fall, although more precipitously and more polarized in the USA. Canadians have somewhat more faith in media, but as reports and polls show, Canadians are getting more and more news from sources other than traditional mainstream media (MSM, also called “legacy” media) and trusting traditional media less.

In the USA: From Fortune magazine, Feb. 2023: “Trust in media is so low that half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them.” From Poynter.org: “American trust in media is near a record low, study finds. Only 7% of adults have a ‘great deal’ of trust in news media, a new Gallup poll found. 38% say they have none at all.” From a Gallup poll in 2022:

Just 7% of Americans have “a great deal” of trust and confidence in the media, and 27% have “a fair amount.” Meanwhile, 28% of U.S. adults say they do not have very much confidence and 38% have none at all in newspapers, TV and radio. Notably, this is the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in the media is higher than the percentage with a great deal or a fair amount combined.

In Canada: From the National Observer: “On the lower end of the scale, 40 per cent of Canadians said they trust the media…” From an Ipsos poll in June, 2021, “Trust in traditional news media has declined. Overall trust [among Canadians] is down 6 points since 2019, and trust has become more polarized (more [Canadians than Americans] trust media “a great deal” or “not at all”)… [but trust in media] is down, particularly when it comes to more traditional sources of news media like broadcast TV (-7), print newspapers (-9) and talk radio (-9).”

From a CBC story in 2021: “Canadian trust in journalism is wavering… Recent survey found 49% of Canadians think journalists are purposely trying to mislead. 52% agree that most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public. 52% agree the media is not doing well at being objective and non-partisan.”

From Abacus Data in 2022: “Millions of Canadians Lack Trust in Government and News Media… Almost half of those interviewed found themselves agreeing with the statement ‘much of the information we receive from news organizations is false.’ While this means a majority of Canadians have some trust in news organizations, more than 13 million adults (extrapolating 44% to an adult population of 29.5 million) don’t. Those with no post-secondary education, Alberta residents and those on the right show greater mistrust.”

A Pollara poll in 2022 found that only 44% of Canadians “tend to trust” our media now compared to 47% in 1992 and “younger Canadians trusted the media more in 1992, today it is older Canadians who trust them more.” Tending to trust seems rather lukewarm to me.

From a Pollara report in 2023: “In the wake of the collapse of small town newspapers, rural Canadians are significantly less likely to get news from print newspapers (12%, vs. 16% among urban) or online newspapers (27%, vs. 37% among urban)… The only media outlets with negative trust with the broader public are FOX News, Rebel Media, The Beaverton, and The Western Standard.” That report also found,

Liberal voters are significantly more trusting of traditional TV/print media outlets than Conservative voters. The only media outlets Conservatives trust more than Liberals are Sun newspapers, Rebel Media, and FOX news. Trust in media is not just a byproduct of ideology, as Liberal voters are more trusting than NDP voters of all media outlets tested. PPC voters trust Rebel Media more than all other media outlets (other than the Weather Network). Fewer Canadians say they’ve consumed news in the last month from nearly all these sources, most notably Facebook (-11), news radio (-8), print newspapers (-15) and talk radio (-9).

*** Readers might recall that I, not any local media, broke the story in 2022 about Trebor’s bankruptcy here. Although my piece came out three months after it happened, the single local media story about it only appeared several days after I had published mine (but not acknowledging my story).
In 2023, a letter from reader John Megarry was published on CollingwoodToday’s site. Megarry provided data and asked questions about Collingwood’s sky-high tax rate compared with a lower rate for similar services in neighbouring and similarly-sized Wasaga Beach. Although this should have been the perfect opportunity for investigative reporting, there was no followup by any reporter, no effort to verify his data, no article in which respective mayors and treasurers were interviewed.
Who says investigative reporting is dead in local media? Well, okay, everyone I speak to…

**** Citing an example from the 2011 federal election, PolicyOptions noted that at the time when there were 92 paid dailies across Canada of which 23 offered editorial political endorsements, “95% of editorial opinion expressed plunked for Stephen Harper… Of the twenty-three papers that did editorialize on behalf of one party or candidate, seventeen newspapers representing 70.5% of the editorial opinion expressed lined up behind the ruling Conservatives — well over twice the party’s standing once the polls closed (31.9%)… it is clear that, when push comes to shove, the owners call the shots.”

A chart of the major newspaper endorsements since 1980 shows the trend, as Canadian media was being bought by rightwing individuals and groups:

This week CanadianDimension published a piece about the editorial hypocrisy at the far-right NatPost, subtitled, “The extreme level of ownership concentration in Canada has resulted in a correspondingly extreme conservative media bias.” The article noted (emphasis added):

…the National Post was founded in 1998 by Conrad Black as an overtly partisan publication whose mission was to help “Unite the Right” of Canada’s then-fractured conservative parties. It not only succeeded spectacularly but took great pride in it recently upon its 25th anniversary. It also recently achieved the shameful distinction of being found by an international study of newspapers to have had the least accurate coverage of climate change… The ultimate irony is that almost all of Canada’s largest dailies are now solidly conservative, while the most conservative of all laments liberal bias in the media, so this is a classic Big Lie.

In another article about the sale of yet one more Canadian newspaper chain to American buyers, Canadian Dimension noted (emphasis added): “Canadian law supposedly limits foreign ownership of newspapers to 25 percent, but the country’s largest chain, Postmedia Network, is 98 percent American owned due to a legal loophole.”

***** CollingwoodToday‘s owners, Village Media, made the prescient decision to register individual domains for each of their community’s publications. Metroland chose instead to bury all the individual community publications inside the collective Simcoe.com, making access to the relevant content less obvious and more awkward to get at. On neither site can I find a list of employees including reporters and editors. A quick check on Collingwood council stories on Simcoe.com shows only eight stories published in the past four months. These are not even shown in chronological order: Jan. 10, 2024, (two stories), Dec. 19, 2023, Nov. 21 2023, Nov. 10 2023, Jan 12, 2024, Jan 18, 2024, and Sept. 14, 2023. CollingwoodToday does not have a searchable category for council news but presents council stories in a mix of regional (“local”) news, sports, and soft feature articles arranged by date.

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