Transcript: Stuart Thomson and Tara Henley

A Trust Spiral conversation at Cardus in Ottawa

One of the themes of the Lean Out podcast is a crisis in confidence in the mainstream media. In a few weeks, my new book on this topic will be released in the United States and Canada. The Trust Spiral: Why the Media Needs Objectivity unpacks where we in the press have gone wrong — and what we need to do to regain the public’s trust. Cardus in Ottawa hosted me for an event on June 9, where I was joined on-stage by a fellow Canadian journalist. I am happy to share a portion of our discussion today.

Stuart Thomson is a Canadian journalist and the Parliamentary bureau chief for The National Post. This is an edited transcript. You can listen to the interview here.

ST: Thank you all for coming out. You could have been on a patio tonight, so we do appreciate that you chose not to do that and came here [instead]. The Prime Minister’s garden party is also tonight. That means we can really stick the knife in on the press gallery, on media criticism — they won’t be here to defend themselves. I’m sure you all know Tara. I have a little bio here, but I think Andrea did a pretty good job of telling you who she is. I also read Tara’s book. I will, as a small endorsement, tell you that I read it at Starbucks a couple of weeks ago. I was so engrossed by it that I was nearly late taking my daughter to ballet, which is not a testament to my parenting but a good testament to your book. It is about something that I really care about and something that worries me, and that is the crisis in journalism right now.

One of the interesting things about this problem is that everybody has a diagnosis and I think Tara does a good job of going through all the various diagnoses. I think probably all of them have some truth to them too, and we can talk about that. But your book starts where I think we have to start, which is with U.S. President Donald Trump. The book has the hypothesis that something very fundamental changed in 2016. What do you think that was, Tara?

TH: Well, let me just first welcome everybody and say thank you so much for coming. Often when we talk about media policy everybody’s eyes glaze over, so I appreciate you being willing to come. And thank you to Andrea for organizing this and to Cardus for having us — and thank you to you, Stuart, for doing this. It’s very lucky to have someone interviewing me who knows so much about the media.

In terms of what changed, what I started to observe in 2016, in the beginning stages of Donald Trump, [was that] there was an understanding in the media that this was not really going to go anywhere. He was a ratings boon for the media; anything that you put Trump on would get huge numbers. [Trump] was a bit of a smug insider joke for most of the media … That really changed, and [he] became, in the U.S., an existential threat. You can track that in the media’s own writing about it. So you had columnists at The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review and The New York Times stating explicitly, “This is not an ordinary candidate, this is an extraordinary candidate. We have to adjust our standards and practices. We need to tear down the standards and practices because they will not meet this moment.” You had, in the New York Times, for example, Jim Rutenberg saying, “We have to throw out the playbook that we’ve been operating under” for the last hundred years.

That was the beginning of it all. The argument of the book is that guardrails exist for a reason and it was not just limited to Trump or even the first Trump era. Since then we’ve had these rolling panics and with each one we shed our standards and practices more. As a result, we make a lot of factual errors. This is how we end up losing the most trust — because we’re not reliable in terms of information.

ST: I really enjoyed the chapter on this because you get into the pushback from some journalists on this. Because in hindsight, it’s easy to look back and say we lost our collective minds, which I think is generally true. But I remember having these discussions in the National Post Ottawa bureau in 2017 where you could perceive that something was going awry and that maybe we were losing those fundamentals that we always had. But I remember some very prominent voices saying, “We need to stop this.” Some of them were wire editors, people who knew that their bread and butter was being objective and being a product for everyone. I’m curious, why do you think that pushback didn’t actually take hold in the broader media?

TH: I think there are a lot of reasons for it. One is economic. I think it’s really important to state that here and in the U.S. we’ve just been through 20 years of a collapsing business model. We have seen mass layoffs, outlet closures. Obviously what happens in all of that is you lose the newsroom leaders. You lose the people that have been there a long time because they’re the ones making the most money. And you lose the hierarchy so you also lose the mentorship. You lose the [national] network. It used to be — and I’m looking at Holly Doan right now, I remember her saying this to me on my podcast — that across the country you had all these small outlets. As a journalist, you would go and work in these small towns and cities. You would learn the ropes of journalism. It would be lower stakes. By the time you got to Ottawa, you understood how to do your job. It used to be in the newsrooms that you would have these veterans that were a little on the harsher side. You remember this: They weren’t going to let you get away with anything.

For me, in CBC Radio, we would sit down with an editor and vet the script, and every word they would talk to you about it. “How do you know this? Why do you say that? Where’s the evidence for this? That question is leading.” That doesn’t happen anymore. It just doesn’t happen in the same way. So you’ve lost the network of going across the country and working in all these places and ending up in Ottawa as a skilled practitioner. But you’ve also lost the veteran voices and you’ve lost the atmosphere in which it’s appropriate to be quite harshly critical of younger journalists — which we need.

ST: I remember Randy Hardisty, assistant city editor at the Edmonton Journal. I had written that somebody was emotional and he came over and he said, “Which effing emotion?” I was like, “Ah.” You just got that every day of your life as a daily news reporter. The key to that was that I’ve always remembered that lesson. I’ve never written that someone is emotional in newspaper copy ever again.

This is something that actually worries me a lot. I’m going to go a little off our track here, but you mentioned this newsroom culture. Almost every — I think actually literally every — daily newspaper is a remote newsroom right now. We have a bureau at the National Post where there’s seven of us in a room. That’s partly why I came to the Post from The Hub. I loved The Hub. It was a really fun thing to be a part of, but I was in my basement in Kanata going a little insane. What do you think that does? Because you’re covering the city but you’re in a house somewhere, maybe in the suburbs. Maybe you’re not actually going outside in the run of your day.

TH: I have so many thoughts on that. I feel so nostalgic about newsrooms. I miss the newsroom so much. There’s a bunch of functions. Around 2020, during the pandemic, there were a lot of eulogies written for the newsroom by famous journalists. One of the things that I think is under appreciated is the gallows humour that we have in newsrooms. What we’re dealing with is obviously stressful stuff and there is that ability to let off steam. I think that is really under appreciated.

But also, I think part of how we got in so much trouble in 2020 is that everybody was working remote. If you have colleagues and you have 10 interactions with them a day and nine of them you’re being very generous — maybe you’re getting them a coffee or whatever — you have that in a bank. Then [when] you go into your story meeting and you argue, it’s not as charged because you’ve had all these other interactions throughout the day. You can handle it. But if you’re online and you barely know the people you’re working with and you’re arguing about the most contentious issues in society, you have nothing in your bank because you don’t know each other at all. I think that’s part of how we got into such trouble.

ST: Every big media story that you saw in the early 2020s, it was a Slack-channel-origins discussion. I think that’s a lot of the story right there. Let’s stay on Trump for just a little bit longer. I have had the theory — and I’m curious what you make of this and maybe how you would diagnose it — that there is a segment of journalists out there, especially in the U.S., who are consciously doing “resistance journalism,” almost like anti-Trump-style journalism. But I’ve always thought that more broadly the issue is that people just don’t run in circles where anybody would be sympathetic to the right. That’s where, when you talk about the collective mind-losing of American journalism — and Canadian journalism also — it was more a matter of the idea of a Trump supporter was an abstraction to them. But on the other side, they knew all these people, their whole peer group was people on the centre-left. Do you think that might be what was going on there?

TH: I do think that’s part of it, for sure. What has happened to the press corps in the last couple of decades is that we went from being a working-class and middle-class profession to being an elite profession. Which doesn’t make sense because our business model is collapsing. It’s a strange paradox. I have the data on this in my book, but it went from [not all] people not having college degrees, a split anyways, to now being overwhelmingly — I think it’s like 95 percent — having college degrees. In the United States, a lot of those people have college degrees from Ivy League institutions. Very elite education, which is expensive. Also, because of the collapse of the business model, you’ve had a situation where people start doing these internships that are poorly paid or not paid at all. They’re in really expensive cities. All of this has contributed to a dynamic where the press now overwhelmingly comes from financially privileged backgrounds.

Even the economics of an op-ed. An op-ed pays $200, $250. Who can afford, full-time, to be writing these op-eds if you didn’t have financial backup? That’s one element of it. But also, with the consolidation of the business, it’s become much more centred in big urban centres. You have way less [outlets] in different places. So people are not exposed to different ways of thinking and different sets of politics, different considerations. The rural-urban divide is a big deal, as well as education and economics. Also, I don’t really think that many people I’ve worked with have ever talked about faith — secular and people of faith, that’s another divide.

Basically [the people] who work in our newsrooms now are largely white, largely very highly educated, largely progressive politically, secular, and coming from an urban perspective. That’s a very narrow slice of people, actually. We just don’t have exposure to a lot more views.

I think that’s part of what happened. I also think that the contingent that was advocating for the very progressive politics — I don’t know what else to call it but it doesn’t seem progressive to me. But that contingent was extremely loud and really mobilized social media in a way that I think was very difficult for newsroom leaders to stand up to. You asked earlier, “Why did it get through?” That’s part of it. There was a culture of very loud advocacy on social media and it was drumming up a ton of support. That support was often channelled into these high-profile cancellations, which resulted in purges in newsrooms. We’ve, of course, had that in this country. Wendy Mesley is a really good example of that happening. It had a huge chilling effect. There were real repercussions for people that stood up to it, in terms of reputational damage and lost employment.

Then something more vague and amorphous, which is what my friend Meghan Daum in the States talks about as being “problematized.” Maybe you’re not necessarily cancelled, but you’re considered problematic. You don’t know why you can’t place that piece or why you don’t get invited to this conference, or whatever it is, but you know something is going on. All of those factors, I think ... It would have been really nice if the senior news leaders had stood up to that tide. But that is not what we saw. So it steamrolled over.

ST: I think, actually, there’s an overlap there with the highly educated nature of our newsrooms, which is you learn an unspoken conformity on ideas from university. Then that’s been brought into our newsrooms, where everybody sticks to the same party line. It may not even be explicit, but you just know, “I’m not going to touch that topic. That would be a bad idea. Other topics are more fair game.”

I think part of this comes down to — you mentioned this, this is in the chapter about our failing business model in journalism. The National Post bureau I’m in right now, I think it’s the biggest it’s been in at least 10 years. This is an outcome from the subsidies, the federal government subsidies, which push money towards covering democratic institutions like Parliament, like legislatures and city hall, but it does actually suck it away from other parts of the country.

You can see that there are fewer alt-weeklies in Canada. There are fewer community newspapers. You started at an alt-weekly too, right? I started at the Mayerthorpe Freelancer and the Whitecourt Star in rural Alberta. Then I went to the Edmonton Journal after that. I was a web desker. I covered GA, like general news. Before I got to politics, I had seen a lot of stuff. I’d done cop reporting and seen car crashes. I do wonder if coming into politics straight, almost fresh, gets you a different kind of reporter because you haven’t seen that stuff. You also haven’t developed certain skills of, “Maybe I’ll be able to see this from all sides because I’ve seen a few things before.” As opposed to coming from university, which is highly ideological and idealistic, and then going straight to Parliament Hill. Do you think we’re going to be feeling the effects of the lack of these minor leagues?

TH: Yes, I absolutely do. There’s actually a really interesting quote about this that I just came across. Jacob Siegel, who wrote The Information State, came on my podcast and he was talking about Ben Rhodes, who worked with Obama, explicitly addressing this. Talking about their strategy on Iran and how they were able to sell that to the press corps because basically the press corps now consisted of 27-year-olds who knew nothing about the world. I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like that. That’s not slagging individual journalists. It’s just that you had gone from a press corps of people who had been overseas for 30 years, 40 years, had extensive contacts, were very seasoned, had a natural disposition to be very skeptical of power — to someone who has covered an election campaign in Washington, once. It’s just not the same. I don’t know how you go back to that really deep knowledge. I’m not sure how we get back there.

I also think that this younger class that was arguing for most of the 2020 era against our standards and practices did not have direct experience of what happens when we lose those standards and practices. My hope is that now, when you see all of these stories go spectacularly sideways, that there will be an appreciation that things like anonymous sources, inflammatory language in news headlines, writing hit pieces and not calling the person for comment first, always verifying information that seems doubtful to the reader, and also, very importantly, always speaking to a range of perspectives so that we’re not held captive to just one — these things are very boring to a lot of young people. But I don’t think they have seen the consequences when we don’t have them. We’re definitely seeing that now.

ST: Tara has a very good chapter called The Great Awokening. I do think that the ideological drift in the culture at that time — I think we did generally get more left. What happened especially was that there’s an education polarization going on. So highly educated people went to the left pretty hard. Working-class people went to the right, and we’re seeing this realignment in Canadian politics also, but it was probably bad for journalism that these polarizations were pushed so far.

This is probably a good time to talk about the Kamloops Indian Residential School story. I was at The Hub when that broke and we were writing about economic policy, so I can’t say that I got it right or got it wrong. I was mostly watching it from afar, actually. What do you think? What should Canadian media be doing in the wake of this? How can you amend for an error like that? What do you think individual reporters and news outlets should be doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again?

TH: There’s so many lessons from that. We in the media this week are in a pretty deep reckoning over that story and how much we messed it up. I just spent probably 50 hours in this last week creating a detailed timeline of every article, when it came out and how that narrative spread. I think the lessons from that are the same as the lessons from the rest of the media stories that I deal with in the book — although I did not write about [the graves] in the book. Again, you get back to this weakened press and the fact that we didn’t have strong training or strong mentors. Then you have these existential moral panics that sweep through. Then you have the purges in newsrooms and the enormous consequences for deviating. In this case, Terry Glavin came out a year after the announcement of the potential graves and went through all of the media’s mistakes. That was a 5,500-word piece. Yet even as late as last year, Rosemary Barton is on CBC saying, “Yes, there have been remains found across the country.” That is just egregious. And how did we get there?

Again, in this piece I’m working on, I try to map that out exactly. The lessons, I think, going forward are back to the very boring basics. We in the media need to apply neutral rules, which is just basic liberalism. We need to scrutinize all claims equally regardless of the identity of the person who has presented those claims. That was one of the big fallouts in 2020. Identity politics were so popular; there became different standards for how you deal with different groups of people. I just don’t think that is sustainable. We are all human beings. We all make enormous mistakes regardless of our identity markers. I just don’t think that is sustainable. I think, in addition, there needs to be more oversight from senior leadership. My understanding of this [graves] story is that a lot of people understood that there were holes in this story and were either too afraid or too timid to go after it. That’s not going to work either.

ST: We can talk about a more fun incident. I thought you did a really good job of recounting this one, which is the Tom Cotton incident at The New York Times. You guys may be familiar with this, but he wrote an op-ed calling for the military to intervene in riots in the U.S. This is another one of those Slack-centric freakouts that happened inside the media. I think this was younger New York Times reporters demanding answers from their editors and actually getting it. One of the editors was fired. A grovelling editor’s note was placed at the top of Cotton’s column. It’s still on the Times website, you can read it, it’s quite remarkable. I think most of the leaders in the newsroom knew this was crazy in the moment. Can you tell me why they didn’t just bring the hammer down and say, “Look, you’re a health reporter. You don’t control the op-ed page at The New York Times.” What was going on there?

TH: Look, you’re a coder on the website, you don’t control [the op-ed page] ... This is basically one of the biggest fights in journalism in the last couple of decades. What happened was, during 2020, during the unrest over the murder of George Floyd, you had the opinion section run a piece from a sitting senator, Tom Cotton, saying that there had been violence in a number of locations, there had been police officers that were shot at and run over, and that there was a need for a strong show of military force. That was the argument. This is a sitting senator in the U.S. And at the time, that opinion was, I think, at least half — maybe more, a majority — a very significant part of the American population agreed with that.

The New York Times staffers were outraged. They had a coordinated Twitter protest where they said that publishing this put Black staffers in danger, physical danger. The opinion editor, James Bennet, tried to come out and make the case in public that it is really important that the Times’ readers are aware of these debates going on, particularly from someone who has influence in the White House. And that this is what a liberal paper should be doing, giving all sides of these contentious debates.

Unfortunately, the Times leadership caved after a thousand Times staffers signed a letter of condemnation for running this piece. I interviewed people at the Times who were there, people who were in the union who were arguing against this. The tide was just so strong at that time and leadership backtracked. They put an editor’s note on it that apologizes for not paying more attention to “factual questions.” There were no correctable errors in that column. Over the years, all of the people involved have come out and talked about it. The reason why that is so significant is because that episode was a watershed moment. It really put the fear in so many editors. But also it also showed that this mob protest could actually radically alter standards and practices.

In Canada, we had our own moment like that at the CBC. There was an internal push to amend the standards and practices, and that went on for quite some time. That was to do with what news-gathering journalists and current affairs journalists — which is what I was, under that same umbrella — were allowed to say on social media. The contingent that was pushing for that was able to move the dial quite a bit on that issue. Again, we’re back to these very boring standards and practices. Are news-gathering journalists allowed to make these sweeping opinion pronouncements in public about very contentious issues? You have the repercussions of that conversation that continue to this day.

ST: I’ll admit that I was the dumbass on Twitter when I was 25, and it’s really hard not to be that way. But as a manager, I wish I could ban reporters from Twitter.

TH: I was very ideological when I was in my early 20s too. I think we do need to give some grace to younger journalists, but I think that’s why you have more experienced people in the room to talk about why this is not a good idea and why these practices are in place and why it’s so important for public trust in particular. When people see you expressing strong opinions about controversial issues online, they take that as representative of your news outlet. But also anything you write from that period forward will be called into question if you’ve already expressed your views in a strong way like that.

ST: Speaking of being loud on Twitter, we should talk about Wesley Lowery, a really good case study in your book. This is a reporter who rose to quite a lot of prominence, actually. I remember seeing him on Twitter during the BLM protests, this was during the pandemic. There was just so much of this going on. He urged journalists to move away from objectivity and instead focus on moral clarity in their reporting. I still don’t really know what that means. It’s a hard one to untangle. One of the things you learn in this job, especially when you’ve covered a lot of different sides, is that everybody has a different idea of what moral clarity is, or where their morals should be pointed. Those ideas, though, I think took hold with a generation of journalists. Do you think we’re still seeing that, or do you think that was a frenzy during the pandemic that’s mostly over?

TH: I think the answer is yes and no. In Canada, we absolutely are still seeing that. Just last month, the Dalton Camp Prize, which is awarded by Friends of Canadian Media — it’s a $10,000 prize for an essay — was on moving beyond objectivity. So I think in Canada, we are very much still in that place. I think the U.S. has moved on from that.

Just to be fair to Wesley Lowery, who I heard from last week actually — this is someone who won a Pulitzer Prize at a very young age. So, I definitely want to show respect for him. I also want to point out that he went on in 2023 to write a very long and nuanced piece for the Columbia Journalism Review about objectivity. So, my critique is really focused on his arguments in 2020 and the impact that they had. He was basically saying that we in the profession had failed to live up to our objective of being neutral, impartial journalists. That that’s a standard we cannot achieve. He pointed out a lot of failures. I think that’s an absolutely fair point. I don’t think that we have lived up to that aspiration at all.

However, what he proposed was to move beyond that into something else, and he called that “moral clarity.” I think that unfortunately the formulation was vague enough that a lot of activist-minded journalists really took that as a licence to reject a lot of standards and practices. I think that moral clarity — as you say, we all probably think that our own worldview is sound and we all have different ways of approaching the world. The facts in the environment that we’re in right now are moving at such an incredible pace that it is very difficult to try to go into it from a moral standpoint. It is hard enough to establish a shared set of facts right now.

I will also say that Wesley Lowery wrote a very famous op-ed during that period about moral clarity and about moving beyond objectivity. He looked at the Tom Cotton scandal we’ve all just talked about and applied his moral clarity model to that, basically saying what you had in that newsroom was a classic case of accountability. It was: The facts were not represented properly, and it wasn’t proper editorial oversight, and that is what happened there. It was a “rare case of accountability.” That conclusion that he jumped to has very much fallen apart in the reporting in the last four years. We’ve seen all of the editors that were involved in that come out and rebut a lot of what was initially said — saying there was editorial oversight, there were senior editors involved, there were no correctable facts, all of these things.

Again, you get into this minutia. It’s such a rabbit hole. But the consequence of that is just to say that this moral clarity model is very vague. I don’t think it holds up well under scrutiny. I think that the old standards and practices, as flawed as they obviously are … We cannot possibly be objective, that’s why we need objective methods and practices to try to mitigate against that. I think it’s better than saying we’re all going to try to follow our moral intuition. I think that that’s gotten us a lot of trouble recently.

ST: We’re going to do two more [questions]. One of them is another failure, and one of them is we’ll just solve the problem of journalism after we do that. [Laughs] The one I wanted to touch on is probably the one that drove me the most crazy while it was happening, which was reporting during the pandemic. I was at the Post for the first six months of the pandemic, and then we went off to start The Hub, so I missed the rest of it. But I do very vividly remember writing a piece for the National Post about what Sweden is doing and what Hong Kong is doing and saying, “We’re doing lockdowns. These places have done it a different way. Here’s what I thought was an objective look at what they’re trying to do.” I remember a prominent academic saying that I was “pro-death” on Twitter for writing that piece. I thought, “I didn’t feel pro-death to write that.” It was one of the strangest moments of my career. I thought I’d written this very boring analytical piece about non-pharmaceutical interventions in a pandemic. I don’t think that affected what I would write. But I do know that those are the people that my colleagues run with: academics and highly educated people who feel strongly about this stuff. I wonder if maybe even just that peer pressure affected some of the reporting that was coming out of the pandemic.

You mentioned the book In COVID’s Wake, which is phenomenal. One of the key things they say is that we still don’t really have evidence that most of those non-pharmaceutical interventions actually worked, especially lockdowns. And lockdowns were never even recommended before the pandemic.

One of the things that bugged me the most about this is that, as a journalist, I was working on a laptop. I could do it at home. I could do it in my backyard. I could go to a coffee shop. My daughter started kindergarten in 2020, and I remember standing at the bus stop with parents who had to go to real jobs. They had to go to a building to do their jobs because they were important. And every time that lockdowns happened, it ruined them. They just had to find ways — put the kid with the grandparents or take three months off work. Then if the buses stopped, they were screwed again. I just felt like there was a real class dynamic in the pandemic that wasn’t even being reported on in journalism because we all had our own experience of it that was actually not that bad.

This class thing, you’ve touched on a little bit before, but how do we solve that? Because in journalism, I look around at my colleagues, I’m a two-year college diploma and I’m the dumbest guy in the newsroom. Everybody else has advanced degrees now. How do we solve this problem?

TH: I think we change our hiring practices. I think we stop requiring university degrees to become journalists. I don’t think you need a university degree to become a journalist. It’s a job that is learned on the job. It is a skill, a trade. It does not require going to university. And I think that if we did that, we would open up the pool in all kinds of ways. I think you would get a much more diverse [workforce] — in every way. Racially, in terms of religion, in terms of areas of the country. I think that it would just really increase the talent pool.

I do think that the working-class perspective is very missing in the newsroom, and it was quite evident during the pandemic. We were also working on laptops at the CBC. We didn’t go into the building. I think personally I was afraid a lot longer than I would have been if I had to just get out there.

I have a dog, so I was often out walking and talking to doormen and garbage men and people who were out working every day. They had very different views than me and my colleagues. The consequences for the poor policy were borne out by people in very different ways.

Pandemic policy — that is something I’ve really focused on in the book because a lot of that reporting has now fallen apart. It’s everything from the lab leak origin of the pandemic being considered a conspiracy theory … I thought it was at the beginning as well. Many of us reported that it had been debunked and later learned that that debunking had happened [from] scientists who had vested financial and professional interests that were at stake. Over the years, that story has shifted. It’s become a touchable story now. You’ve seen numerous American agencies investigate it, and now it looks like a possible theory. It’s certainly worth consideration.

The same thing happened with the lockdowns, as you mentioned. The school closures is another really big one that was an untouchable subject, particularly here in Canada. The New York Times has now come out and said that there’s no evidence that those closures did much to stop the spread of COVID, and that we have quite a bit of evidence now of the harm that they caused, particularly to lower-income kids. So this was radical, radical public policy. I certainly don’t have a lot of answers on it. I just know that we should have been able to debate it.

ST: This is our final question … This is a paradox that I was mentioning to you before. Which is that I agree with all of your remedies for us, which is that we need to be objective. We need viewpoint diversity. We need to be a little less invested ideologically as journalists. But my experience in the new model of journalism suggests that people actually want the opposite when they are paying subscriber fees for something. It used to be that you had a newspaper, it was fuelled by advertising, so the advertisers needed objective, almost neutral reporting that wouldn’t taint their ads. But now, if you want people to subscribe, you kind of have to give them what they want. Is there a way to square that circle? Do you see a way to lure people in with fair and balanced journalism?

TH: I don’t know, I think the jury is still very much out on that. We are in a really difficult moment in terms of the business models, and it’s extremely hard to produce journalism according to the old model in this environment that we’re in right now. There are people who are doing it. Blacklock’s Reporter is doing it. I also want to point out that The New York Times has a massive subscriber base here in Canada. Now, I think the New York Times gets stuff wrong. I’m not saying that, but they do have a lot of great reporting in that newspaper still, and they are trying really hard to hew back to those pre-Trump standards and practices.

When you look at the data from the Reuters Institute for Journalism, from Pew Research — from reams of anecdotal evidence that I can tell you of what people tell me they want and what people online say that they want — there does seem to be a very strong sentiment in the public that people would very much like us to give the facts and treat our readers and listeners and viewers like adults who can make up their own mind and decide what it means. That exists.

Also, the incentives online all go in the direction of more and more overheated rhetoric, more and more opinion, less rigorous facts. None of the economics really work out for doing the kind of journalism we’re talking about on a mass scale, yet. I just mentioned I did this piece that I’ve worked on for 50 hours to try to piece together the timeline on the graves story — which, by the way, I didn’t cover well either in the beginning, just to be clear. There’s no freelance journalism outlet that is going to pay me the amount of my labour that it costs to actually do that and do that properly. This is not even going and reading all the volumes of the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission]. It’s doing three interviews for that piece instead of the 30 that you should probably do. There’s no way yet that we’ve figured out to do that.

I will [also] say that, as well-intentioned as the subsidies are in this country, I think they have really skewed it for us. It’s incredibly hard to scale a business right now. I have a small business, and it’s extremely hard to scale because my competitors on podcasts all have a staff of 10 and I’m one.

These are all open questions. I don’t have any particular solutions yet, but I think as a journalist, the diagnosis is important. I trust that those solutions will come from the public, that the public will decide what it is they want from us, what they need from us, and that solutions will flow from that.