“We need fewer activists in our newsrooms, and more journalists.”
We need zero activists in newsrooms and all real journalists. We need zero activist judges and all real jurists. We need zero activists in education and all real educators. We need to reduce the industry of activism and replace it with real enterprise and industrialism where people make, grow and fix real things instead of peddling grievance for cash.
As Noam Chomsky once pointed out to a BBC reporter years ago - that reporter would never been hired if he believed something different from what his bosses wanted! Hiring graduates from journalism school will not get a representative perspective! The greatest living American Investigative Reporter Seymour Hersch was from the working class! As a rule these reporters despised elites because they knew they lied about everything all the time! Start hiring these kind of skeptical people and maybe main steam media can recover some respectability! Of course they won't because the people who hire and fire are true believers! A cult if there ever was one but the thing about cults is - their members can't recognize that they're in one! Thank you Tara for daring to break free and go your own way! I applaud your courage and hope you can continue your good work! There's no money in it but I bet you sleep better at night!
Here’s an idea for Ms Tait: if you see the public is losing trust in your news outlet, how about exercising some leadership, and touring cross country to ASK people how you can do better? Accountability to your customer. And in the case of CBC, your de facto shareholders, aka Canadian taxpayers. The foolishness of blaming someone else for your failures, the hubris and condescension of assuming the answer to too much propaganda is more propaganda is ... well it would be divinely comedic if it wasn’t my money they are wasting on this little adventure. NB I see myself as left of centre, and was once a fierce defender of the CBC. (I personally thanked Peter Mansbridge for his service the year he retired.) I’m not the trope of the CBC critic that our PM likes to mock. And I know many more like myself. If the political tides change in this country, it’s not clear to me the CBC kids will still have their jobs. But they could maybe save it, if, as you wisely point out, they start listening.
The reporting on the pandemic and the Freedom/Truck Convoy was the final nail in the coffin for me. I have conservative friends and read the conservative media in order to challenge my beliefs and understand others’ thinking. After seeing the CBC, CTV and more left wing outlets like the National Observer and the Tyee lie I knew I could never trust their reporting until they admitted their mistakes and corrected false stories. Instead these media organizations just pander even more to their highly partisan supporters. One example of a lie: the CBC and Tyee claiming Russia supported the Truck Convoy.
Sad that at the same moment other institutions like political parties are extremely partisan too. I am a former Green who has no interest in voting for the Greens again. A former Friends of Canadian Broadcasting member who now wants to defund the CBC as well.
Personally, I think many educated people on the center left just think they are smarter than everyone else. It is what I encounter when activist friends hear my alternative viewpoints. Rather than listen they lecture me and send me links to articles from media like the CBC or Tyee..lol.
On a positive note: I agree with Tara that woke is slowly dying.
I agree with your comment that "many educated people on the center left just think they are smarter than everyone else." But why have they started becoming authoritarian about suppressing alternative views? Maybe they've always been that way, but internet has made it easier to find alternative views?
From my digging I have come up with some alternate reasons why the mainstream media is no longer objective. It seems to have started decades ago with colleges pushing the liberal point of view and graduating liberals. This was fine until the internet came along and slowly print and TV media has been dying. Fox News seems to have been the fist major agency to move towards picking one side and went with promoting conservative journalism viewpoint. The other major news networks went mostly to the liberal side and promoted their views, possibly because their major commercial buyers were drug companies. Objectivity was second to making a profit and staying alive. For a young person wanting to break into a job at a major news agency in New York they had to toe the liberal line and at a salary that barely covered rent.
In Canada the transition took a different route as successive Federal governments refused to bail out the failing major media until in 2018 the Liberal government suddenly reversed course and invited appx. 30 heads of major media to a meeting to divvy up over half a billion dollars in subsidies. Now the conservatives would never support a failing business, the NDP will never form the government so the only answer to stay alive and get more subsidies is for a news agency to support the liberals.
It is a curious coincidence that the meeting took place a year before the Plandemic started.
So there you have my view on why the News media has been corrupted. Feel free to chime in with your own views and criticisms.
A decent start Fred. Yet, you've missed something, I think. As we both pay for this content, let me add that when consumers have a choice, they'll pick what they value. That is typically a quality product. Producers of content are in business to make money with their product, first and foremost. If they can't, see ya! So my thesis is competition fixes most things and a decentralized, local (and competent) model in journalism is hastening the demise of the current centralized, and corporate approach mentioned in the piece. Newspapers didn't transition well to the digital age, with a few exceptions. All that said, I think independent journalism is thriving, particularly on Substack. It is refreshing and exciting to see the quality journalists writing and podcasting here. It is the opposite of the subsidized, untrusted Canadian corporate which is "quantitatively inadequate, profoundly unimaginative and dangerously superficial..." I love that turn of phrase from the polarizing "pen" of a former local news baron (whom I won't name.) CBC and Ms.Tait are doomed and they've only themselves to blame.
In my follow the money approach I see it that 20 million dollars average paid to each Canadian mainstream news outlet might be an enticement as they probably cannot get that from a subscription based business model. We are moving towards paying for news but at present the internet still offers many free news services so why pay for something when you can get it for free. The government subsidy helps keep CTV free. I choose to support more honest news sources for ethical reasons and to stop being fed some of the BS from mainstream Media. Competition only works when it is profitable to do so. Competing with a free news service like CTV and CBC is difficult. The cost of researching news stories can be very high so someone has to pay for journalist's time to make it worthwhile. Thus being the most honest news source requires someone to pay the bill. In a pure capitalist business model there are envitable failures when costs exceed sales revenue.
I agree that in Canada govt subsidies make it a lot easier for woke media to survive (which is why the Liberals continue to prop it up) and make it harder for alternatives to compete. But I still don't think it explains the why the mainstream media got to woke. US media is woke too, without the same subsidies, and CBC has been subsidized for a long time, but seems to be getting more woke even though the subsidies aren't changing.
Subsidies are often not that explicit. The Biden administration spent $1Billion (yep, with a B) to its favored media organizations to promote the government diktats on covid/masks/vaccines. It never mattered whether they were right or wrong (they were virtually all wrong) -- but for $1B you will say/skew an awful lot. Add that to the Pharma dollars for the relevant substances, all paid for using tax dollars extorted from the citizenry and not subject to anyone's control (except the democrats) and the amounts of money are far too much to ignore.
So following the money, as usual, leads to the right answer. Sometimes the money is just hidden/disguised a little better.
Thankyou for the lead. I dug up some of the news stories about the Billion dollars in advertising for masking and the Vaccine. However the money came with strings attached whereby the news agencies agreed to only say positive things about masking and the vaccine.
But wokeness is much more widespread - Covid is the least of it eg Universities went insanely woke around 2015, with no particular change in the subsidy regime .
I spent an hour looking into what motivated the US liberal media to be less objective and push their agenda but no conclusions yet. There were indications of
"if you ain't liberal you ain't working here", Democratic government interference,
preferences of owner (Jeff Bezos, an acknowledges liberal, owns Washington Post, my initial research subject), etc but no obvious money trail. I will say that the broadcast media is licensed by the FCC so if the government influenced their licensing permits that could impact the news direction of a broadcast however Fox News is still in business.
Arguably, dropping money from a "helicopter" hasn't worked. CTV and Global are awful. Whatever "pure capitalism" is, and I'd suggest we don't and never have had it, subscriptions work, but they are not easy, as you mentioned. The people running newspapers and media are incompetent technocrats and undercapitalized to boot. Subscriptions work! As a boy, I carried all 3 big daily newspapers from Toronto and our local in my neighborhood. All paid for. The product has to be good and it just ain't in the mainstream. Moreover, as Margaret Atwood has opined recently, the centralized approach to media planning results in censorship. Great having a back and forth here Fred. Truly appreciate your response and I think we are in agreement. Thanks to Tara and Substack for bringing us together!
As a followup, Blacklock's Report put out a story about how the News Media who got Subsidies during Covid did not use up all of their available subsidies as they did not maintain their staffing level (a condition of receiving the subsidies). I wonder if that is due to their losing audience and thereby needing to lay off staff.
The most successful businesses (aside from those with a government mandated privilege like CN rail) are those that read and respond to the market place correctly. I call it the "art of looking good". Ronald Reagan was very good at that skill.
I don't think Fox was the first to pick a side. I think the media was drifting left for a long time - arguably as a result of colleges becoming more liberal and feeding through into media. Fox was explicitly started as a response to the leftwing drift of the other media. They were more explicit about their partisanship, but that doesn't mean the prior media wasn't partisan, just that it was disguising it. My point here isn't whataboutism - it's that the underlying trend is longer term.
Re it being driven by colleges, that is certainly plausible. Colleges have always been relatively left wing and it is getting worse as many faculty are pushing a left wing agenda in hiring, so the faculty is becoming less ideologically diverse. As Niall Ferguson once said "They beat us in the committees." And I also agree that many faculty members are explicitly pushing a progressive agenda without regard to objectivity. So that's all by way of saying, yes, colleges have generally given up on truth seeking in favour of an ideological agenda, and that happened before the media shift in the same direction. So, very plausible that the shift in colleges drove the shift in media. But on the other hand, the faculty have been trying to push an ideological agenda on their students, but are they actually having an impact? Professors are one influence, so are parents, peers, high school and elementary teachers, social media etc. Now, I do think that colleges are in urgent need of reform and should return to a truth seeking telos. But the activist shift in colleges is the same as the activists shift in other elite institutions, eg media, so maybe activism in colleges isn't the cause of activist shift in media - maybe both are a reflection of some other underlying trend.
I have not looked into the US journalism deterioration cause as much. A Blacklock's reporter article pointed to the meeting between Canadian Media and the CRA, supported by articles in the mainsteam media. My suspicions of drug company advertising revenue comes from an article I read a couple of weeks ago. I have not dug into that issue yet to see what the source of funding is for major liberal news outlets and FOX. Like most of us, for me this is a hobby, supported partially by my wife's own investigations.
Well however Fox started, it's more like a gust of sulphorous gas today. I've tried watching it but there isn't the slightest attempt at a balanced viewpoint. It's Pravda for MAGA.
An article I read on the history of liberal wokism stated that many years ago after the introduction of internet news that Fox was the first to economize and rationalize their news coverage to more conservative news with most of the other MSM later rationizing and covering more liberal news (investigative journalism, opinion pieces, etc). That reduced their labour cost.
As you say, it's "mind-boggling" to watch journalists decide that the way to restore public trust is to double down on the activism. So mind-boggling that we have to ask what is driving this perverse reaction. Do they all want to be out of a job in a few years?
It's obvious that the reason for loss of trust in mainstream media (and other elite institutions) is that they have shown they are are not trustworthy. It is also pretty clear that they are not trustworthy because they think they are smarter than the public, and if they give us the facts, they don't trust us to come to the 'right' answer. So instead they distort the facts in an attempt to manipulate us into believing what they believe is right.
A few questions: Where do they get this hubris? Why do they think they're smarter than the public? I am partial to the midwit hypothesis - it is journalists who are educated enough to think they are smarter than everyone else but dumb enough to think that there are simple solution to major problems and they know what those solutions are: essentially the Dunning-Kruger effect. But that's just a guess.
Where is this coming from? What I commonly hear is that it is the younger journalists who are activists, and the senior journalists are more objective, but management is caving to the younger crowd. Is that right? How much is being driven by the revenue structure eg partisanship generates hate clicks?
I'd be interested in a round table discussion or something like that addressing these issues. I find it really difficult to understand why mainstream media seems to be digging it's own grave.
I see this lack of insight is an evolutionary regression caused by lack of natural selection in recent generations, leading to loss of critical thinking skills, and replaced with fixed beliefs. We should not take our intellectual skills for granted, because they totally depend on good immunity, and we have not been selecting for immunity for some time, and now we may be reaping the results. We can see how the latest generation is driving the standard downhill, but I think journalists and the media are just the canary in the goldmine, and are most exposed to this dumbing down. There is no quick fix, but pushing back with insight to cut through the hubris is definitely needed. Peoples intellectual skills seem to have been going downhill since the Great Generation.
I have read through all the comments and before I say more, know I am neither a journalist nor an activist. There’s not much I can really add to all the thoughts and opinions put forth. They speak much more eloquently than I could.
That said, I have been following Tara’s work for a while now and I have to say, as an ordinary citizen, it is refreshing to have ideas presented in such a way that it makes me want to learn more. Is that not what journalism is supposed to do? Simply provide food for the person who doesn’t have knowledge on a topic and allow that person to form their own thought, opinions? Knowing that when you get more information, which may conflict or support your first initial conclusion, you may either modify your opinion, change it completely or find it supported by the added nourishment?
Tara, thanks again for this. i was really hoping that you would comment on Tait's continuing comments about the CBC.
i, too - and seemingly many others - have been exasperated by Tait's comments on her "tour." It is hard not to see a certain ideological blindness in all this. If we want to respect Tait's word, then she must really believe that all these nefarious forces are attacking the CBC.
So while i also hope that the end of "Woke-ism" is ending, i am far less optimistic than al-Gharbi and others. For there is an entrenched power at work here, one that will not back down. And why should it? If the CBC can continue to exist without changing - even as its viewership moves to a precipitous decline - why should/would it change? If they can keep enough of their viewers, why should they engage in any soul searching? When one believes that one is fighting the "good fight" against evil as a kind of beleaguered minority, there is little incentive to change or see "objectivity" as anything other than capitulation.
So again, i am less than optimistic that the legacy media (including the CBC) will come to their senses, than i am that the burgeoning "independent" media will continue to flourish. How much power will move to that "new media" is a question. Perhaps some. Whether there can be any reconciliation between these two forms of press, i don't know. It seems like it is in the legacy's media court on this - but it would take something of a "miracle" for me for them to let go of the "progressive project" driving so much of their coverage.
Sorry for the long winded comment. Thanks again, Tara.
Very real to be a skeptic jason. I'm sure a change government would sharpen the focus at the CBC. I know the institutions are captured ideologically, but there are more of us than them, which is why I remain cautiously optimistic.
I'm old enough to remember when activists would accomplish something productive and beneficial, and journalists would actually report what was happening — instead of them all trying to tell everybody what to think and how to behave.
Journalism is doomed based on today’s model that requires a university degree. How does one remain objective when over 80% of professors report as being left thinking/progressive in their thinking? And when kids are taught, at the university that the RCMP was established solely for the purpose of eradicating our Native communities, and that toxic masculinity is why rape culture has taken over university campuses, are only a few comments I have heard from our young people attending these institutions recently. Maybe we need the entire industry to collapse inwards, before we can start again. I fully support a state sponsored media, but it has to serve small communities the same as large municipalities. Otherwise it has no place in our society if those entrusted with reporting simply parrot a script.
Great show worth watching about government interference on CCTV and a complicit media - “Capture”, it should shake a few people up, because becoming a complicit society serves no-one.
Too many journalists hired these days with an adjective in front of this word. Once you get someone who identifies with a cause, that person is viewing everything through that lens. As someone who worked in this field for decades, I am dumbfounded when I see journalists denouncing a group as one thing or another, without speaking to a single one of them. Or advocating for writers or speakers to be "cancelled" without talking to a single soul who might want to hear these opinions. SO much moral clarity from 20 and 30 somethings. Thanks but no thanks. If you want to restore trust, do your job properly. "Hold your nose," and speak to the other side. I interviewed plenty of people I could not stand throughout my career and no one ever knew I felt that way.
You might argue that once reporters became journalists, their self-importance increased commensurately, as did their belief that they had a special right to tell people what to think. I started to see the current deterioration when news pieces began with lines you might see at the beginning of a novel, something like, "The sun rose haltingly as the fog slowly receded, like a young boy told to go to bed at night, from the streets of Everytown, Manitoba." This ego inflation has led me and apparently millions of others to abandon organizations like the CBC and the Globe which adamantly refuse to publish stories that contradict what "journalists" believe is their moral imperative. Fortunately, we have Substack and people like Tara, and a number of other platforms that, even though opinion based, do more actual reporting than the papers.
Once a person decides to believe in multiple truths, one can then discard the goal of objectivity. Once objectivity is discarded as a value, narrative becomes central. Once narrative becomes central, reality itself isn't allowed to arbitrate claims made about it and we divide into partisan pseudo-religious camps of Good Believers or Bad People. This virus has fully infected not just legacy media but all institutions in the Western world. It will take not just time but individual courage to overcome.
“We need fewer activists in our newsrooms, and more journalists.”
We need zero activists in newsrooms and all real journalists. We need zero activist judges and all real jurists. We need zero activists in education and all real educators. We need to reduce the industry of activism and replace it with real enterprise and industrialism where people make, grow and fix real things instead of peddling grievance for cash.
As Noam Chomsky once pointed out to a BBC reporter years ago - that reporter would never been hired if he believed something different from what his bosses wanted! Hiring graduates from journalism school will not get a representative perspective! The greatest living American Investigative Reporter Seymour Hersch was from the working class! As a rule these reporters despised elites because they knew they lied about everything all the time! Start hiring these kind of skeptical people and maybe main steam media can recover some respectability! Of course they won't because the people who hire and fire are true believers! A cult if there ever was one but the thing about cults is - their members can't recognize that they're in one! Thank you Tara for daring to break free and go your own way! I applaud your courage and hope you can continue your good work! There's no money in it but I bet you sleep better at night!
Here’s an idea for Ms Tait: if you see the public is losing trust in your news outlet, how about exercising some leadership, and touring cross country to ASK people how you can do better? Accountability to your customer. And in the case of CBC, your de facto shareholders, aka Canadian taxpayers. The foolishness of blaming someone else for your failures, the hubris and condescension of assuming the answer to too much propaganda is more propaganda is ... well it would be divinely comedic if it wasn’t my money they are wasting on this little adventure. NB I see myself as left of centre, and was once a fierce defender of the CBC. (I personally thanked Peter Mansbridge for his service the year he retired.) I’m not the trope of the CBC critic that our PM likes to mock. And I know many more like myself. If the political tides change in this country, it’s not clear to me the CBC kids will still have their jobs. But they could maybe save it, if, as you wisely point out, they start listening.
Totally agree.
Also, I am an old school leftist.
The reporting on the pandemic and the Freedom/Truck Convoy was the final nail in the coffin for me. I have conservative friends and read the conservative media in order to challenge my beliefs and understand others’ thinking. After seeing the CBC, CTV and more left wing outlets like the National Observer and the Tyee lie I knew I could never trust their reporting until they admitted their mistakes and corrected false stories. Instead these media organizations just pander even more to their highly partisan supporters. One example of a lie: the CBC and Tyee claiming Russia supported the Truck Convoy.
Sad that at the same moment other institutions like political parties are extremely partisan too. I am a former Green who has no interest in voting for the Greens again. A former Friends of Canadian Broadcasting member who now wants to defund the CBC as well.
Personally, I think many educated people on the center left just think they are smarter than everyone else. It is what I encounter when activist friends hear my alternative viewpoints. Rather than listen they lecture me and send me links to articles from media like the CBC or Tyee..lol.
On a positive note: I agree with Tara that woke is slowly dying.
I agree with your comment that "many educated people on the center left just think they are smarter than everyone else." But why have they started becoming authoritarian about suppressing alternative views? Maybe they've always been that way, but internet has made it easier to find alternative views?
From my digging I have come up with some alternate reasons why the mainstream media is no longer objective. It seems to have started decades ago with colleges pushing the liberal point of view and graduating liberals. This was fine until the internet came along and slowly print and TV media has been dying. Fox News seems to have been the fist major agency to move towards picking one side and went with promoting conservative journalism viewpoint. The other major news networks went mostly to the liberal side and promoted their views, possibly because their major commercial buyers were drug companies. Objectivity was second to making a profit and staying alive. For a young person wanting to break into a job at a major news agency in New York they had to toe the liberal line and at a salary that barely covered rent.
In Canada the transition took a different route as successive Federal governments refused to bail out the failing major media until in 2018 the Liberal government suddenly reversed course and invited appx. 30 heads of major media to a meeting to divvy up over half a billion dollars in subsidies. Now the conservatives would never support a failing business, the NDP will never form the government so the only answer to stay alive and get more subsidies is for a news agency to support the liberals.
It is a curious coincidence that the meeting took place a year before the Plandemic started.
So there you have my view on why the News media has been corrupted. Feel free to chime in with your own views and criticisms.
A decent start Fred. Yet, you've missed something, I think. As we both pay for this content, let me add that when consumers have a choice, they'll pick what they value. That is typically a quality product. Producers of content are in business to make money with their product, first and foremost. If they can't, see ya! So my thesis is competition fixes most things and a decentralized, local (and competent) model in journalism is hastening the demise of the current centralized, and corporate approach mentioned in the piece. Newspapers didn't transition well to the digital age, with a few exceptions. All that said, I think independent journalism is thriving, particularly on Substack. It is refreshing and exciting to see the quality journalists writing and podcasting here. It is the opposite of the subsidized, untrusted Canadian corporate which is "quantitatively inadequate, profoundly unimaginative and dangerously superficial..." I love that turn of phrase from the polarizing "pen" of a former local news baron (whom I won't name.) CBC and Ms.Tait are doomed and they've only themselves to blame.
In my follow the money approach I see it that 20 million dollars average paid to each Canadian mainstream news outlet might be an enticement as they probably cannot get that from a subscription based business model. We are moving towards paying for news but at present the internet still offers many free news services so why pay for something when you can get it for free. The government subsidy helps keep CTV free. I choose to support more honest news sources for ethical reasons and to stop being fed some of the BS from mainstream Media. Competition only works when it is profitable to do so. Competing with a free news service like CTV and CBC is difficult. The cost of researching news stories can be very high so someone has to pay for journalist's time to make it worthwhile. Thus being the most honest news source requires someone to pay the bill. In a pure capitalist business model there are envitable failures when costs exceed sales revenue.
I agree that in Canada govt subsidies make it a lot easier for woke media to survive (which is why the Liberals continue to prop it up) and make it harder for alternatives to compete. But I still don't think it explains the why the mainstream media got to woke. US media is woke too, without the same subsidies, and CBC has been subsidized for a long time, but seems to be getting more woke even though the subsidies aren't changing.
Subsidies are often not that explicit. The Biden administration spent $1Billion (yep, with a B) to its favored media organizations to promote the government diktats on covid/masks/vaccines. It never mattered whether they were right or wrong (they were virtually all wrong) -- but for $1B you will say/skew an awful lot. Add that to the Pharma dollars for the relevant substances, all paid for using tax dollars extorted from the citizenry and not subject to anyone's control (except the democrats) and the amounts of money are far too much to ignore.
So following the money, as usual, leads to the right answer. Sometimes the money is just hidden/disguised a little better.
Thankyou for the lead. I dug up some of the news stories about the Billion dollars in advertising for masking and the Vaccine. However the money came with strings attached whereby the news agencies agreed to only say positive things about masking and the vaccine.
But wokeness is much more widespread - Covid is the least of it eg Universities went insanely woke around 2015, with no particular change in the subsidy regime .
I spent an hour looking into what motivated the US liberal media to be less objective and push their agenda but no conclusions yet. There were indications of
"if you ain't liberal you ain't working here", Democratic government interference,
preferences of owner (Jeff Bezos, an acknowledges liberal, owns Washington Post, my initial research subject), etc but no obvious money trail. I will say that the broadcast media is licensed by the FCC so if the government influenced their licensing permits that could impact the news direction of a broadcast however Fox News is still in business.
Arguably, dropping money from a "helicopter" hasn't worked. CTV and Global are awful. Whatever "pure capitalism" is, and I'd suggest we don't and never have had it, subscriptions work, but they are not easy, as you mentioned. The people running newspapers and media are incompetent technocrats and undercapitalized to boot. Subscriptions work! As a boy, I carried all 3 big daily newspapers from Toronto and our local in my neighborhood. All paid for. The product has to be good and it just ain't in the mainstream. Moreover, as Margaret Atwood has opined recently, the centralized approach to media planning results in censorship. Great having a back and forth here Fred. Truly appreciate your response and I think we are in agreement. Thanks to Tara and Substack for bringing us together!
As a followup, Blacklock's Report put out a story about how the News Media who got Subsidies during Covid did not use up all of their available subsidies as they did not maintain their staffing level (a condition of receiving the subsidies). I wonder if that is due to their losing audience and thereby needing to lay off staff.
The most successful businesses (aside from those with a government mandated privilege like CN rail) are those that read and respond to the market place correctly. I call it the "art of looking good". Ronald Reagan was very good at that skill.
That is plausible, but I'm not totally convinced.
I don't think Fox was the first to pick a side. I think the media was drifting left for a long time - arguably as a result of colleges becoming more liberal and feeding through into media. Fox was explicitly started as a response to the leftwing drift of the other media. They were more explicit about their partisanship, but that doesn't mean the prior media wasn't partisan, just that it was disguising it. My point here isn't whataboutism - it's that the underlying trend is longer term.
Re it being driven by colleges, that is certainly plausible. Colleges have always been relatively left wing and it is getting worse as many faculty are pushing a left wing agenda in hiring, so the faculty is becoming less ideologically diverse. As Niall Ferguson once said "They beat us in the committees." And I also agree that many faculty members are explicitly pushing a progressive agenda without regard to objectivity. So that's all by way of saying, yes, colleges have generally given up on truth seeking in favour of an ideological agenda, and that happened before the media shift in the same direction. So, very plausible that the shift in colleges drove the shift in media. But on the other hand, the faculty have been trying to push an ideological agenda on their students, but are they actually having an impact? Professors are one influence, so are parents, peers, high school and elementary teachers, social media etc. Now, I do think that colleges are in urgent need of reform and should return to a truth seeking telos. But the activist shift in colleges is the same as the activists shift in other elite institutions, eg media, so maybe activism in colleges isn't the cause of activist shift in media - maybe both are a reflection of some other underlying trend.
My approach when something doesn't add up is to try following the money. It usually reveals more of the truth.
Do you think that explains the US?
I have not looked into the US journalism deterioration cause as much. A Blacklock's reporter article pointed to the meeting between Canadian Media and the CRA, supported by articles in the mainsteam media. My suspicions of drug company advertising revenue comes from an article I read a couple of weeks ago. I have not dug into that issue yet to see what the source of funding is for major liberal news outlets and FOX. Like most of us, for me this is a hobby, supported partially by my wife's own investigations.
Agree. Fox was not the first to pick a side. Fox was a breath of fresh air in a suffocating universe of liberal press group-think.
Well however Fox started, it's more like a gust of sulphorous gas today. I've tried watching it but there isn't the slightest attempt at a balanced viewpoint. It's Pravda for MAGA.
An article I read on the history of liberal wokism stated that many years ago after the introduction of internet news that Fox was the first to economize and rationalize their news coverage to more conservative news with most of the other MSM later rationizing and covering more liberal news (investigative journalism, opinion pieces, etc). That reduced their labour cost.
As you say, it's "mind-boggling" to watch journalists decide that the way to restore public trust is to double down on the activism. So mind-boggling that we have to ask what is driving this perverse reaction. Do they all want to be out of a job in a few years?
It's obvious that the reason for loss of trust in mainstream media (and other elite institutions) is that they have shown they are are not trustworthy. It is also pretty clear that they are not trustworthy because they think they are smarter than the public, and if they give us the facts, they don't trust us to come to the 'right' answer. So instead they distort the facts in an attempt to manipulate us into believing what they believe is right.
A few questions: Where do they get this hubris? Why do they think they're smarter than the public? I am partial to the midwit hypothesis - it is journalists who are educated enough to think they are smarter than everyone else but dumb enough to think that there are simple solution to major problems and they know what those solutions are: essentially the Dunning-Kruger effect. But that's just a guess.
Where is this coming from? What I commonly hear is that it is the younger journalists who are activists, and the senior journalists are more objective, but management is caving to the younger crowd. Is that right? How much is being driven by the revenue structure eg partisanship generates hate clicks?
I'd be interested in a round table discussion or something like that addressing these issues. I find it really difficult to understand why mainstream media seems to be digging it's own grave.
I see this lack of insight is an evolutionary regression caused by lack of natural selection in recent generations, leading to loss of critical thinking skills, and replaced with fixed beliefs. We should not take our intellectual skills for granted, because they totally depend on good immunity, and we have not been selecting for immunity for some time, and now we may be reaping the results. We can see how the latest generation is driving the standard downhill, but I think journalists and the media are just the canary in the goldmine, and are most exposed to this dumbing down. There is no quick fix, but pushing back with insight to cut through the hubris is definitely needed. Peoples intellectual skills seem to have been going downhill since the Great Generation.
Perhaps my insight above will shed some light on what is happening.
I have read through all the comments and before I say more, know I am neither a journalist nor an activist. There’s not much I can really add to all the thoughts and opinions put forth. They speak much more eloquently than I could.
That said, I have been following Tara’s work for a while now and I have to say, as an ordinary citizen, it is refreshing to have ideas presented in such a way that it makes me want to learn more. Is that not what journalism is supposed to do? Simply provide food for the person who doesn’t have knowledge on a topic and allow that person to form their own thought, opinions? Knowing that when you get more information, which may conflict or support your first initial conclusion, you may either modify your opinion, change it completely or find it supported by the added nourishment?
My two cents.
I wonder if Barbara Frum foresaw this state of affairs when she nicknamed the, then new, CBC centre in Toronto the Ministry of Truth.
Tara, thanks again for this. i was really hoping that you would comment on Tait's continuing comments about the CBC.
i, too - and seemingly many others - have been exasperated by Tait's comments on her "tour." It is hard not to see a certain ideological blindness in all this. If we want to respect Tait's word, then she must really believe that all these nefarious forces are attacking the CBC.
So while i also hope that the end of "Woke-ism" is ending, i am far less optimistic than al-Gharbi and others. For there is an entrenched power at work here, one that will not back down. And why should it? If the CBC can continue to exist without changing - even as its viewership moves to a precipitous decline - why should/would it change? If they can keep enough of their viewers, why should they engage in any soul searching? When one believes that one is fighting the "good fight" against evil as a kind of beleaguered minority, there is little incentive to change or see "objectivity" as anything other than capitulation.
So again, i am less than optimistic that the legacy media (including the CBC) will come to their senses, than i am that the burgeoning "independent" media will continue to flourish. How much power will move to that "new media" is a question. Perhaps some. Whether there can be any reconciliation between these two forms of press, i don't know. It seems like it is in the legacy's media court on this - but it would take something of a "miracle" for me for them to let go of the "progressive project" driving so much of their coverage.
Sorry for the long winded comment. Thanks again, Tara.
Very real to be a skeptic jason. I'm sure a change government would sharpen the focus at the CBC. I know the institutions are captured ideologically, but there are more of us than them, which is why I remain cautiously optimistic.
It comes down to honesty. If journalists aren't honest, or perceived to be honest, how can there then be trust?
After reading this, did you feel the fresh air around you?
I'm old enough to remember when activists would accomplish something productive and beneficial, and journalists would actually report what was happening — instead of them all trying to tell everybody what to think and how to behave.
Journalism is doomed based on today’s model that requires a university degree. How does one remain objective when over 80% of professors report as being left thinking/progressive in their thinking? And when kids are taught, at the university that the RCMP was established solely for the purpose of eradicating our Native communities, and that toxic masculinity is why rape culture has taken over university campuses, are only a few comments I have heard from our young people attending these institutions recently. Maybe we need the entire industry to collapse inwards, before we can start again. I fully support a state sponsored media, but it has to serve small communities the same as large municipalities. Otherwise it has no place in our society if those entrusted with reporting simply parrot a script.
Great show worth watching about government interference on CCTV and a complicit media - “Capture”, it should shake a few people up, because becoming a complicit society serves no-one.
Too many journalists hired these days with an adjective in front of this word. Once you get someone who identifies with a cause, that person is viewing everything through that lens. As someone who worked in this field for decades, I am dumbfounded when I see journalists denouncing a group as one thing or another, without speaking to a single one of them. Or advocating for writers or speakers to be "cancelled" without talking to a single soul who might want to hear these opinions. SO much moral clarity from 20 and 30 somethings. Thanks but no thanks. If you want to restore trust, do your job properly. "Hold your nose," and speak to the other side. I interviewed plenty of people I could not stand throughout my career and no one ever knew I felt that way.
spot on Tara
Objectivity is hard...
Opinions are easy.....like noses, everyone has one and they all smell. Some people just have
more "barrels of ink" than others
You might argue that once reporters became journalists, their self-importance increased commensurately, as did their belief that they had a special right to tell people what to think. I started to see the current deterioration when news pieces began with lines you might see at the beginning of a novel, something like, "The sun rose haltingly as the fog slowly receded, like a young boy told to go to bed at night, from the streets of Everytown, Manitoba." This ego inflation has led me and apparently millions of others to abandon organizations like the CBC and the Globe which adamantly refuse to publish stories that contradict what "journalists" believe is their moral imperative. Fortunately, we have Substack and people like Tara, and a number of other platforms that, even though opinion based, do more actual reporting than the papers.
Once a person decides to believe in multiple truths, one can then discard the goal of objectivity. Once objectivity is discarded as a value, narrative becomes central. Once narrative becomes central, reality itself isn't allowed to arbitrate claims made about it and we divide into partisan pseudo-religious camps of Good Believers or Bad People. This virus has fully infected not just legacy media but all institutions in the Western world. It will take not just time but individual courage to overcome.