Transcript: Tara Henley and Rudyard Griffiths

A conversation on the 2024 Massey Essay on the media

Lean Out is back from our annual summer hiatus — and we have a special conversation to share with you this week. Many of you know that I wrote “The Trust Spiral,” the 2024 Massey Essay on the state of the media, a partnership between Massey College at the University of Toronto and the Literary Review of Canada. Before I went on summer break, Massey College hosted a public discussion about this essay, and I was lucky enough to be interviewed by someone I greatly admire.

Rudyard Griffiths is co-founder and chair of the Munk Debates. He’s also a senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and the executive director of The Hub.

Rudyard Griffiths and I are in conversation, this week at Lean Out. 

Special thanks for this week’s episode go to Emily Mockler and Jonathan Rose at Massey College, to Kyle Wyatt and the team at the Literary Review of Canada, and of course to Rudyard Griffiths.

This is an edited and condensed transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the full event, including questions from the public, for free here.

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RG: We have the luxury of stepping out of limited tweet characters and 30-second videos to luxuriate in a 45-minute conversation. No pressure! I really do feel that we have a lot of interesting people in this room with backgrounds in the media. So, I think what I'd like to do, Tara, if you're okay, is we'll just keep a watching brief and if something comes up in our conversation that you want to interact with, just put up your hand or catch my eye and I'll bring you into the conversation. I don't think we need to keep to the kind of formality of a set speech conversation between the two of us and then questions from you. Let's really try to turn this into an interactive discussion. But let me do a little bit of preamble — just to kind of get us all hopefully on the same fact set, as we dig into this excellent essay. Tara, why don't you just give us first the background of the essay. How did this come about? What's the purpose of it? Why were you invited to write it?

TH: Thank you so much Rudyard, and thank you all for being here today to discuss this topic. And of course, thank you to Massey College and the Literary Review of Canada. It's a real honour to be here. And an honour to be in conversation with you, Rudyard, who does so much in this country for dialogue. The Massey Essay is an annual piece of media criticism, and it's a longform piece of media criticism. I was asked by Kyle Wyatt, my editor at the Literary Review of Canada, to tackle it this year. We landed on the topic of trust in the media because this is a topic that has been getting a lot of discussion. We are at an alarming point right now with public trust in the media. Roughly 37% of Canadians trust the media. But if you want to go to a high level of trust, there is recent Statistics Canada data that's even less than that, like 16%.

It's a very dire state of affairs and it has implications for democracy. So, Kyle and I worked together on a framework for this essay and tried to give the public a way of thinking about this problem. It's a multifaceted problem. There is a lot that goes into thinking this through, and we wanted to find a framework that would bring all of that together in one place and allow the public to think through the crisis that we're in right now.

RG: Great. So, let's spend a little time with the piece and your thinking and kind of break it down into its constituent arguments. The first line that threads through the piece is a historical examination of a crisis of trust that has emerged. So let's start there. What's the antecedent? Is there an event that causes this trust crisis to begin? Is this simply a longstanding process that's unfolding over decades and is now culminating in this moment? Give us a sense of the historical lens that you've passed over this challenge, this problem of declining trust in the media. 

TH: Well, trust has been declining for some time, but I argue in the piece that there was an existential crisis in 2016 that triggered this trust spiral. And that crisis was the media's reaction to the election of Donald Trump. There was a lot of fear and panic in the media about Donald Trump, fueled in part by some of the outlandish things that he says. But the media's reaction to him was to decide — and this is coming from the U.S. media, which the Canadian media typically follows — the media's reaction was to decide this is an extraordinary candidate, that ordinary journalism is not going to cut it, and that we need to take on more of an activist role. And you saw this being articulated very explicitly in the U.S. press. I'm thinking of a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review by David Mindich who was basically saying this is a Murrow moment, in relation to the famous journalist who spoke out against McCarthyism. That it's a similar situation and that anybody who does not speak out against this is complicit in this crisis in democracy. The New York Times was even more explicit. Jim Ruttenberg, writing in the New York Times, said that it's time for us to throw out the playbook of journalism that we've been using for almost a hundred years. And that we are going to have to go a lot farther than any non-opinion journalist could have contemplated. 

So, this was a very explicit articulation of “it's time to throw out some of these norms and practices, we are in an emergency.” The problem with that is that guardrails exist for a reason. And that the throwing out of these guardrails, these typical norms and practices that governed newsrooms, did not stay limited to Trump or even to the Trump era. So, we've seen what are basically a series of rolling moral hysterias that have taken over. As soon as one emergency ends, the next emergency is there to justify why we can't stick to the same standards and practices. And those are everything from using inflammatory language like “lie” in journalism, which there was quite a lot of debate about, but seems to have been now accepted. The problem being, with that word, that if it doesn't just denote a falsehood, it also denotes the intent to deceive, which is very difficult to prove — and is often read as an overtly political statement, whether or not it's accurate. That's one example. But there are many others. 

We've seen more silent edits happening, meaning that editors will go in and correct copy without issuing corrections after the fact. We've seen more anonymous sources. We have seen when hit pieces are written, there is less of an effort to reach out to the subject of that hit piece to get comment before going to press. And the big norm that I'm sure we'll talk about later is objectivity. So we've seen a huge sea change in the media happen in the last eight years, and my argument is regardless of how we feel about Donald Trump, that this has been very negative for the press, for our operating and for public trust in us. 

RG: How do you see this, what's happened since 2016, as different from, at least within the media, the longstanding belief about a public function — a role of holding the powerful to account, of being that check on power and authority in society? Was this an amplification of that? Are there legitimate antecedent roots in that kind of philosophy? Or do you genuinely think that this is something different than that older, much longer-standing tradition of a kind of oppositional attitude that's always existed, at least in the modern press?