00:01:25.500For people that don't know your rather noisy departure from CBC, they don't know that story.
00:01:31.080Give us your elevator pitch version of it.
00:01:34.160Yeah. So I had been at the CBC for quite a while.
00:01:37.360I started there in 2013 at the George Strombolopoulos Tonight Show as an interview producer.
00:01:42.440And then I went to Current Affairs Radio and I worked on and off in Current Affairs Radio until the end of 2021.
00:01:49.980I worked on roughly a dozen shows in Vancouver and in Toronto.
00:01:55.500In a number of different roles, you know, chase producer, morning producer, night producer, occasionally director, just a lot of rank and file roles at the organization.
00:02:09.880And over the time that I was there, I found it harder and harder to get more different views on the air.
00:02:17.880And particularly during the pandemic, I found it a very frustrating time to be a journalist in those newsrooms.
00:02:24.620and decided eventually that I would leave.
00:03:46.440I would like to see the CBC thrive and survive.
00:03:50.240My experience there was that there was a lot of groupthink in newsrooms, that the editorial discussions and some of this stuff is more subtle than the public might imagine.
00:04:01.480It's just that you understand that certain stories are kind of a no-go and other stories are fine.
00:04:08.620that, you know, at one point I actually wrote a post for Substack about the exact contours of
00:04:14.300that consensus that I encountered in the newsroom. I think there's a lot of different things going on
00:04:22.440at the CBC. I think the CBC shares a lot of its problems with the press corps across North America
00:04:28.620and that is that many of us live in these big expensive cities. Many of us are highly educated.
00:04:35.720we are secular we are progressive um politically and we have a very narrow life experience really
00:04:44.640and this did not used to be the case in newsrooms we um there's a great study in the united states
00:04:51.000that has tracked the demographics of journalists over time and it used to be that something i think
00:04:56.460it's the numbers aren't i don't have them handy but it's something like 58 percent had a college
00:05:00.680degree, you know, in the 70s. And now it's 95 percent. And not only that, a lot of us have
00:05:06.400advanced degrees in the United States. A lot of people have Ivy League degrees. And in the past
00:05:13.380with the media, before the media was kind of consolidated and centralized in these big urban
00:05:18.260coastal cities, you would have journalists going to basically a farm team. You would start
00:05:25.340in small places. You would live in a lot of different places. You would live in rural places.
00:05:29.880You would encounter conservatives as well as liberals and everything in between.
00:05:35.480You would understand that the views that we in the journalist class hold are actually outliers.
00:05:42.160This is not the default position for most people in the public.
00:05:46.380And so I think that that has just really led to an atmosphere in newsrooms where people just don't have contact with people outside of our bubble.
00:05:53.720And in fact, the CBC's Brody Fenlon has acknowledged that dynamic in a public event called Trust Talks that I covered a while back.
00:06:02.820I'm laughing because I don't fit the mold that you're talking about.
00:06:06.820I only went to a two-year college degree, which my detractors love to remind me of.
00:06:14.140I worked in smaller centers before moving on to big ones.
00:06:17.420I did what you described how it used to be.
00:06:19.820And it's not because I'm from that age. It's just how my career went. And the groupthink that I started to encounter going back to, there is or was a press gallery at Montreal City Hall. That's where I started to first notice the groupthink and then covering provincial politics in both Quebec and Ontario and then getting to Parliament Hill and it hitting me like a wall going, how is it that we've got 308 people up here and one point of view?
00:06:49.820Yeah, it is a very fascinating thing to track and to try to measure. And I think the biggest thing, now that I'm talking about the book, more people are saying, what is one thing that we could do? Well, one thing that we could do that would be very simple would be to remove the degree requirement in hiring for journalists.
00:07:09.920I don't think we need degrees. A lot of my mentors didn't even have high school diplomas, let alone college degrees. I mean, this is a trade. It's a craft. It's something you learn on the ground and that you learn through mentorship and through trial and error, through making your mistakes, ideally in lower stakes settings in these smaller kind of locations. This is not rocket science.
00:07:36.740Okay, let's get into the solutions in a little bit, but let's start at the problem.
00:07:42.240And so in your book, The Trust Spiral, you open, I want to read the first couple of sentences of the opening.
00:07:49.860Leading up to the 2016 election, the U.S. media collectively lost its cool.
00:07:55.120Trump had long been a source of entertainment, a smug punchline, a ratings boon.
00:07:59.080But as election day neared, his habit of disparaging the press began to grate,
00:08:03.420and his knack for dominating the news cycle with outlandish claims started to raise legitimate
00:08:07.820alarms. The feeling that Trump was an extraordinary candidate and that ordinary journalism was
00:08:12.440insufficient to the task of covering him began to solidify. Is 2016 and Donald Trump, and of
00:08:20.380course that was also the year of Brexit, which most of the media just sneered at the idea of
00:08:27.100Brexit? How could these people want this? Was that kind of like the jump the shark moment
00:08:33.700for you in your view of how things progressed in the media in this trust spiral that we're in,
00:08:42.740which is a downward spiral, I would say? Yes. I think that it is, but I think what we need
00:08:47.880to understand is that the underlying conditions that made that possible were our economic
00:08:53.100precarity, that you had had decades of a collapsing business model, as we've already
00:08:59.360kind of talked about it, the consolidation in these big cities. We had a lot of underlying
00:09:04.540conditions. And my contention is that the economic precarity really led to a lot of
00:09:11.060panicked thinking in the journalism class. Okay. Economic precarity among journalists
00:09:16.080or in the public writ large or both? Among journalists and within journalism
00:09:22.020organizations. And so you have a class of people who have gone to university, who have done
00:09:30.420everything right in their mind, and still are in a position where many of us in this country are in.
00:09:36.160It's hard to get a journalism job. When you get them, it might be a contract. It might not be a
00:09:39.920full-time position. And, you know, in some cases at the CBC, you have a huge temporary workforce that
00:09:45.600doesn't even have contracts. I've been in that position as well, where you get your shifts two
00:09:49.260weeks at a time. That does not breed courageous journalism. If you are not sure how you're going
00:09:58.380to pay your rent, you are going to be timid. That's just a reality. And the same goes for
00:10:02.580journalism organizations. If you don't know if you're going to meet your bottom line, if you
00:10:07.700are juggling different revenue streams and terrified that the organization is about to
00:10:13.000collapse, that also doesn't breed courage. And so my contention is that this is the underlying
00:10:18.460situation that we found ourselves in. And then along comes President Trump. And the overreaction
00:10:27.180to him, I think, is a part of that kind of panicked precarity that we were already in.
00:10:34.460And so you can actually track the reaction in the press. There are a trail of op-eds that say
00:10:40.980that Donald Trump is not an ordinary candidate. He is an extraordinary one. And that, in fact,
00:10:46.520What we need to do in order to cover him is to throw out the playbook that we have been using in journalism newsrooms. Jim Brettenberg at the New York Times says explicitly this in an op-ed. And you can see that thinking proliferate throughout the media.
00:11:02.900And you can see the resulting erosion of standards and practices. And my argument in the book is that really what is at the heart of lost trust in the media is a lack of accuracy. And where did that lack of accuracy came from? It's because we threw out our standards.
00:11:18.640well there have been many calls for journalism not to be objective anymore and that look I'm
00:11:27.520I'm an opinion writer I did not start out as an opinion writer I started out as a by the book
00:11:34.100down the straight and narrow that's how I was trained you have to consider multiple angles
00:11:40.120views, and tell a story. Since the appearance of Donald Trump on the American political scene,
00:11:49.260there have been calls to say, get rid of objectivity. This is an outdated notion. Now,
00:11:57.520I would say this. Newspapers have always had a political bent in their editorial stance.
00:12:32.580Yeah, I think that everybody, I mean, just in the general public right now, everybody is a broadcaster, everybody has an opinion. And also, just to acknowledge that we're living in incredibly turbulent times and very volatile times in this country as well. There are a lot of contentious issues and people have a lot of opinions.
00:12:50.300That's not necessarily a bad thing for democracy, but for for journalists, I think that and some of the big fights in journalism over objectivity have come down to things like what are news gathering journalists and current affairs journalists, which is which is what I am and the umbrella that I was under at the CBC.
00:13:08.000What are you allowed to say on social media? And the problem with everybody expressing their opinions all the time on social media and often because of the incentives on social media in very inflammatory and sometimes malicious ways is that it does erode trust.
00:13:25.340If you are spouting off on X and you are getting in fights on that platform and the public is watching, they see your views.
00:13:34.940And how are they going to take a look at your news reporting?
00:13:38.840You know, a classic case of this was during the trucker convoy.
00:13:41.700How are they going to look at your news reporting and not see the opinions that you've already stated in public?
00:13:47.880And so I think that's a really clear line between the standards and practices eroding and the lost public trust.
00:13:57.040Forget about journalists. How about judges making public comments about the convoy and then still trying to weigh in on it?
00:14:05.240So how does the lack of trust relate to the broken business model that you detail in the book?
00:14:14.900We've all seen the massive layoffs, and the reason for the massive layoffs is simple.
00:14:24.520People are still reading newspapers, but they're reading them online.
00:14:28.340People are still reading the news stories that are generated by the TV networks, because the TV networks are now essentially newspapers, and the newspapers are now essentially broadcasters.
00:14:38.120We're all trying to throw everything at the wall.
00:14:41.820But despite still having a decent audience, the advertising all goes to into Google and Meta.
00:14:52.300And I'm not asking, you know, do we go and get the money off of them and force?
00:15:04.560I mean, I remember when I started, you get a report and you'd have time to read it before you reported on it. Now you get it and you've got to be immediately online or on air talking about it.
00:15:16.700Yeah. So in the book, I quote Jen Gerson from The Line on this very question. And she's very good at explaining exactly how this all collapsed. And, you know, one of her points is that prior to Donald Trump, all of this was in play already because you had, you know, the newsrooms gutted. And who leaves in a newsroom when it's gutted? It's often the senior people who are making the most money right now, you know.
00:15:43.300So you lose the newsroom hierarchy. You lose the mentorship. And she talks about a situation in Calgary where she was writing straight to the page at the end of her time in the newsroom there. There was no editorial process. And so, of course, errors go up and typos go up.
00:16:01.760So that already begins to degrade the product that we're putting out into the public, and it begins to degrade trust as well, because if the public is reading the newspaper and they're seeing typos and they're seeing mistakes that they know are mistakes, so all of that is already in motion ahead of time, and that is all strictly business model stuff.
00:16:20.500And to your point about having to digest huge amounts of information so quickly, I mean, I've been a journalist for 25 years. I have never seen an information environment like the one that we are in right now. There is just so much going on. It is a tidal wave all the time. And we are doing much more, too.
00:16:39.680I mean, when I was at the CBC in current affairs, I was doing two stories a day every day. And on the radio shows I was working on, I was told that, you know, prior to that era, you would do one. So, I mean, that's a huge difference. Learning one story a day, calling around, finding guests, writing a script, fact-checking all of it. One versus two.
00:17:00.920So the volume is there. But I also think that we in the profession are having the same problem that the public is having and that it is very difficult sometimes now to figure out what's actually going on. There is so much information and it is so fast.
00:17:16.940But in terms of hollowing out the business, you touch on something that most people overlook, Craigslist.
00:17:27.020It's pretty much gone now, but so are the little tiny ads that paid for so much.
00:17:34.720The classified ads in a newspaper used to be a cash cow.
00:17:39.720And when I worked for Quebec Corps, back when they owned the Toronto Sun and the whole Sun media chain, they also owned Le Journal de Mariel, which went on a multi-year, I believe it was, lockout.
00:17:55.780And the way it was explained to me is they were going to go on strike.
00:18:01.480And in Quebec, you don't let anyone go on strike.
00:18:03.100You lock them out because of weird labor practices in Quebec.
00:18:07.240But they were going to go on strike to try and keep the jobs of the women who took the ads in the classified section.
00:18:21.780By the time they come back, I forget the exact numbers, but it was maybe 20% to 30% of the journalists that had been putting the paper out before the lockout were able to come back, and the rest of the jobs were eliminated because the money just wasn't there.
00:18:38.320The major advertising has gone away, but those classified ads paid for so much.
00:18:44.260Yeah, I mean, one of the big mistakes that journalism made was not just creating our own online classifieds at that time.
00:18:52.880We didn't see the writing on the wall.
00:18:54.240There's one company that did, at least their Australian division, News Corp, which owns Fox News, Wall Street Journal.
00:19:02.360They did that with, I think, classifieds in real estate very early on, but they only did it in Australia and not in the U.S. or anywhere else.
00:19:12.480And so that helps them. But everywhere else, that's a lot of money gone.
00:19:20.220Yeah. The other thing that we're dealing with in this country as well is that people are habituated to not pay for news.
00:19:26.680And that's a problem that's going to have to be solved as well here.
00:19:31.040Just before we take a break then, let me ask you about that.
00:19:36.060CBC, and I don't want to make this all about CBC, but for those of us in the private sector
00:19:44.200trying to make money and people say put up a paywall, how do you do that when the public
00:19:52.260broadcaster gives away everything for free? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few things
00:19:58.040to say about the CBC. I do support continuing with the CBC and continuing funding the CBC.
00:20:02.900I think in a country that is the size that we are and as diverse as we are, as regionally spread out as we are, I do think that the public broadcaster could play a really important role in both establishing a shared set of facts and forging national cohesion. I think those are two really important roles. I think the CBC has done that at different points in the past. I don't think that they are living up to that mandate right now, but I would love to see them do that in the future.
00:20:30.320Where I think we have gone wrong is in subsidizing the private newsrooms. So now everybody is subsidized except for a few kind of small startups. And that I think is very difficult to innovate.
00:20:46.380I think that we do need change in this country, in the media. And the problem with everybody being subsidized is that, again, you have the public not paying and it doesn't incentivize the public to communicate to us journalists what it is that they need from us and what they are prepared to support. And so all the signals get mixed. And I think that's the point that we are in right now.
00:21:09.080Well, and it also erodes the trust that you write about here in the book, because people think we're all on the take. And I don't know if you've heard, but I'm in Mark Carney's back pocket. That's the claim.
00:21:23.220I encounter that all the time, that opinion all the time. And I've seen it expressed from a ton of journalists that I've interviewed. I've seen it expressed in committee by Unifor. I mean, this is a this is definitely a thing that is happening in this country is that the public do feel that the journalism is compromised when it is paid for by the government. And I think that that is something we're going to have to face.
00:21:47.460okay we're going to take a quick break when we come back i want to talk to you about
00:21:51.980objective versus neutral how do you get back to a place that maybe the public does start to trust
00:21:58.020us but first i have to tell the audience all about our merch because yes we've got a store
00:22:03.380we're going to sell you merch you know keep the lights on all of that do you want to bring your
00:22:07.880national post or toronto sun support beyond the headline shop the official official merch store
00:22:14.520We've got hoodies, hats, mugs, tote bags, and more
00:22:17.260designed for readers who like their journalism bold.
00:25:54.540In the United States, the Toronto Star became what it is because a bunch of Sir Wilfrid
00:26:00.600laureate donors decided to buy it so then you had the evolution of the penny press and that was
00:26:08.900starting to move towards subscribers and advertising as a business model and was taking a more
00:26:14.600democratic approach to the news it was covering more topics it was more interested in the
00:26:19.680experience of regular people and around that same time what you saw the the rise of the new york
00:26:27.720Times, which kind of set the standard saying that we're going to cover the news without fear or
00:26:31.980favor. And it was also in the aftermath of World War I and pretty egregious reporting failures and
00:26:39.000also the rise of public relations and the attempts to manipulate public passions. All of that was
00:26:45.660happening. And then you also had, you know, thinkers and that were being taught widely that
00:26:51.640were, you know, philosophers talking a lot more about cynicism and about critical thinking. And so
00:26:58.260in the wake of all of that, journalism understood that we needed to come up with a set of standards
00:27:05.380and practices that would mitigate against our own biases. And of course, at that time in history,
00:27:11.460the scientific method was really revered. And so the idea was that you have this set of standards
00:27:17.140and practices that will help us to overcome our biases and produce news that is both reliable
00:27:23.840and replicable. And so the way that I think about objectivity is just this collection of standards
00:27:30.140and practices. It is not about me trying to say that I'm neutral or even trying to behave in
00:27:36.640neutral ways. It's just trying to follow these practices. And so some of those practices are,
00:27:41.120You know, the minutiae of it is like not using inflammatory language in headlines. It is definitely not being beholden to one perspective, to interviewing a range of perspectives. It is having people of different perspectives in a newsroom so that you have, you know, editors going over your work from a different perspective, trying to find the holes in that.
00:28:05.480I mean, there's a lot there. And unfortunately, when we talk about media standards and practices, most people's eyes glaze over. But the consequences of not following those things are quite extreme, as we have seen in the last especially five years with a lot of big stories going sideways.
00:28:23.220Yeah, I remember as a young journalist talking about this issue with one of my news directors. And he said, you can't be unbiased. Everyone has a bias. We all have a personal point of view, a worldview, a religious view, a cultural view. But I need you to be objective.
00:28:43.140that's such a great way of putting it and be objective um now so some people say we can't
00:28:51.140be objective because of and you write about this and in the book um let me say it correctly both
00:28:57.340sideism um but you know i know you cite uh christiana and i'm poor uh from cnn saying
00:29:07.260well you you can't be neutral and i get it you can't be neutral but you can still tell both
00:29:11.980sides of the story, even in she was talking about her experience in Bosnia. Horrible, horrible
00:29:20.520experiences in that war. You can still tell both sides of the story. It doesn't mean you're taking
00:29:25.960the side of the Bosnians or the Serbs. But why are they each acting in that way, I think,
00:29:33.980is part of the story that you should be telling. Yes. And the whole both sidesism argument is
00:29:41.660really baffling to me and it has been interpreted very broadly in this country as a no platforming
00:29:47.820argument as in you know it started out with this idea of false balance the idea being that you
00:29:54.820don't cover both sides equally because one side is more legitimate than the other now i don't know
00:29:59.980who's supposed to make that moral assessment and especially at digital speed but but there you go
00:30:05.080that's that argument. Then that argument was interpreted as some people's arguments are so
00:30:11.520egregious that we will not be putting them on air. And then the list of who those people were
00:30:16.820and what those topics were expanded and expanded and expanded. You mentioned the word list. I know
00:30:23.280how excited everyone got when Travis Danraj went before the committee, the Commons Heritage
00:30:29.660committee and mentioned a list yes i'm talking about a like a metaphoric list right now i'm
00:30:35.700talking about not not a literal list but but the point here is just that we have come to in the
00:30:43.100in the mainstream in this country on a lot of issues believe that there are some people's
00:30:48.140opinions that are just beyond the pale and certainly in like in some major issues maybe
00:30:53.820that's the case, but we have applied it so broadly that you have mainstream opinions that many
00:31:01.200Canadians hold, for example, in the gender debate that are not represented in news articles. And
00:31:07.580this stuff you can measure. And in fact, Dave Snow has for the Hub. And I think it just really,
00:31:14.840first of all, I think it really irritates the public, but also it really erodes public trust,
00:31:18.380because if you are not reflecting the range of views that are out there, you're not reflecting
00:31:23.820reality. I remember being at a news conference a few years ago and the gender issue came up
00:31:30.840and it was about whether parents should be notified if their child is going to transition
00:31:38.280at school. And there was a fresh poll out from the Angus Reid Institute saying that 70% of people
00:31:49.020said, hell yeah, mom and dad should know if the kid is going to transition at school. Teachers
00:31:54.440should not keep that secret. That would tell you if 70% back something, that's not a controversial
00:32:00.380opinion. And I'm standing talking to some of the other reporters ahead of time, and they all wanted
00:32:06.300to ask, not about the poll, but they wanted to ask Ontario's education minister at that point,
00:32:11.460Stephen Lecce, about what they're going to do. And they actually framed it in the question
00:32:17.400that informing parents was controversial.
00:32:21.000And I, you know, you've been around news events
00:32:42.320And then they turned around and still framed it as
00:32:45.680you have a controversial idea that parents should be informed.
00:32:51.140I think it was like the did not know was like 16%.
00:32:54.800And the people that supported it was 14%.
00:32:57.840So that is a time that they held the controversial position.
00:33:03.060But that's the way that newsrooms operate, unfortunately.
00:33:07.260Well, I mean, hopefully not every time.
00:33:09.620I try to stay optimistic about some of this stuff.
00:33:12.080But I think in this case that this is exactly the direct result of us not having access to other opinions. And this is what happens in echo chambers. People become more extreme in their views. And it used to be in newsrooms that we would be able to pit bias against bias and do exactly what you did on the ground and produce other evidence, produce other points, argue it out and come to a more reasonable assessment of the situation.
00:33:37.760But we don't have that right now. And further, we all are living in the same neighborhoods. We're talking to the same people. We have the same social milieu as all of our colleagues. And there's no outside influence. And it's not healthy.
00:38:31.400And one of my pipe dreams is that we have sort of a, I don't believe in journalism schools,
00:38:37.820but I think it'd be great to have some kind of online platform for training these young
00:38:42.400people that are really interested in the news and want to perform a public service and training
00:38:47.000them in some of the rigors of best practices for how to do that.
00:38:50.700Yeah. So to use a recent example, we just recently marked the fifth year anniversary of the Kamloops residential school story and the 215 unmarked graves.
00:39:03.880I'd like somewhere between nobody died at these schools, which isn't true, and there are 215 children in a mass grave.
00:39:14.940that last one was something that was put forward by mainstream media with no evidence to back it
00:39:22.820up. And the influencers who are opposed to it say, oh, no, nobody ever died. We're being lied to.
00:39:28.680The truth is somewhere in the middle that, yes, children died. No, there's, you know,
00:39:34.580we haven't found 215 graves. Let's talk about what's actually there. It's taken five years for
00:39:39.920us to get to that point. Not that all of the mainstream media outlets are willing to admit
00:39:44.340that, but that is a major issue that had big implications in this country. And we got it wrong
00:39:51.780and got it wrong on all sides. Yeah. I just covered this for Persuasion,
00:39:57.260an American outlet, and I went through and built a timeline of exactly how that story spread of
00:40:02.600each article by article. And it is an astonishing story. It really is an astonishing story. The
00:40:08.360Global Mail editorial board is absolutely correct and appropriate in saying that it was a failure
00:40:13.460of journalism in this country. I think we need to take a look at how that happened. And as you
00:40:20.780point out, we are still no consensus on that story yet. As late as last year, Rosemary Barton was on
00:40:26.400the CBC saying, yes, there have been remains found across the country. CBC issued a correction that
00:40:31.780I believe it was the next day. So there's not consensus on this yet. And back to my overall
00:40:37.560point is that we need, we desperately need in this country a shared set of facts. And the grave
00:40:42.660story is a really good example of why. As you say, it's so polarized. And I think that the
00:40:50.680consequences of us not getting that story right are huge. I mean, first of all, you saw what
00:40:55.420happened in the aftermath of that story. There were churches burned, there were riots, there were
00:41:00.640statues toppled. There was incredible, incredible amount of unhappiness about the state of the
00:41:06.940country. And also, we are now in a position where we're moving backwards on reconciliation. You have
00:41:15.680people online who are saying very prejudiced things about Indigenous people. And I think
00:41:21.620the environment has really eroded in this last five years. There's consequences for getting
00:41:27.360these big stories wrong. And as you say, I think we can hold to ideas in our mind at once. We can
00:41:34.060say, yes, there is documented abuses at these schools, sexual, physical. We know that there
00:41:40.820was malnourishment. We know there was neglect. We know that there were deaths, as you say,
00:41:46.460mainly from tuberculosis. We know all of those facts are on the public record. And we should
00:41:51.520question stories like, which have been circulating, like saying that children were asked to, you know,
00:41:59.400dig their friends' graves, that there were babies born incinerators, I'm sorry, babies thrown into
00:42:05.580incinerators. This other stuff needs to be questioned because the consequences are big,
00:42:11.220because we need to move forward with reconciliation. We need to heal as a country and we need facts to
00:42:17.080do that. The book is The Trust Spiral, Why Media Needs Objectivity. Tara Henley, the author.
00:42:24.540Thanks so much for your time, Tara. Thank you for having me.