Contrarian Voices Within The Canadian Legacy Media
In November of 2023, Canada’s home grown Munk Debates hosted an event with the resolution, “Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media”. The two individuals arguing in favour of this proposition were best selling English author Douglas Murray, and National Magazine Award winning journalist Matt Taibbi. Arguing the opposing viewpoint were Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times and Malcom Gladwell; Canada’s own fantastic author and journalist.
Prior to the debate commencing, the audience was polled and 48% agreed with the premise and 52% disagreed. Fairly even, but a slight edge to the trustworthiness of the legacy media.
Throughout the debate, Murray and Taibbi continuously brought up specific examples, often focusing on the manner the mainstream media covered the Canadian trucker protest, the 2020 American election, and Covid 19. Gladwell and Goldberg appeared unable to deal with the detailed examples and tried to counter with more general arguments about the virtues of legacy media.
The audience wasn’t having it.
The end result was the greatest swing in the Munk Debates’ history with the final polling ending at 67% in favour of the proposition and 33% against.
A full two thirds of the crowd no longer trusted mainstream media.
Over the last couple decades, many words have been spilled describing the perfect storm that descended on legacy media. Those of us old enough lived through this experience and can probably recall the big moments along the way. The shock when a significant amount of revenue was lost when free internet classified ads began to flourish. The partisan-free profit model based around selling advertising collapsed as advertisers fled print and cable for the burgeoning online world. This forced legacy media into a subscriber based profit model, creating a strong incentive to give readers what they wanted to hear instead of what they needed to hear.
Newsrooms were in such financial dire straits, in 2019 the Canadian government announced $595 million in government subsidies to qualifying media companies, and in 2024 we are currently subsidizing, by the governments own targets and admissions, taxes on 1/3 of the average journalist’s salary; an awkward situation for a supposed free press.
Complicating things, there has been a shift in elite journalism schools away from the traditional “neutral, objective presentation of facts” ideal, which allowed the readers to make up their own minds, to a commitment to “activist journalism” usually rooted in successor ideology concepts such as anti racism or other similar forms of critical theory. Nicole Hannah Jones of the New York Times and Taylor Lorenz, formerly of the Washington Post, often speak of this trend openly and positively.
Old habits die hard and I still wake up every morning and read the CBC news. It’s not like great journalism isn’t still found throughout the traditional media, it just may not be as balanced as most of them claim to be. For what it’s worth, if I were in the crowd that day at the Munk debates, I too would have cast my vote with the majority. As a naturally curious person who enjoys hearing competing perspectives on the issues at hand, I couldn’t help but notice the shrinking of allowable voices within legacy media; a growing trend that became harder to ignore with each passing day.
The potent combination of curiosity and time to explore forced me out of my normal media habits and I went off in search of fresh viewpoints. It didn’t take long to find the new, independent media landscape and its bountiful world of deep, insightful, diverse voices. Like any media environment, you still need to sort truth from fiction, but there were many diamonds to be found in the rough. Upon encountering such a wide swath of good faith arguments, many I had never heard before, the realization I had unknowingly been living in an echo chamber overtook me.
It is now my belief the echo chamber is the norm, not the exception, and unless you can point to what you are doing on a daily basis to combat being in an echo chamber, I hate to say it, but to some degree you’re probably in one. Realizing my beliefs were resting on a shaky foundation triggered what I have come to call “the year of killing my sacred cows”.
Nothing was off the table.
Everything needed scrutinizing.
During this period I adopted an 80/20 rule. Roughly eighty percent of my content consumption would be from sources that challenged my prevailing views. This turned out to be highly beneficial and a needed next step for my intellectual maturity. Spending more time engaging with perspectives I disagree with, than with perspectives I agree with, is a practice I maintain to this day.
There is just no getting around the fact viewpoint diversity is no longer a treasured value for much of the legacy media. To be fair, their top focus has been on avoiding slipping below the water line as it has taken all they can muster to just maintain treading the uncertain, economic waters. The situation gets uglier though, as mainstream media, in an effort to hold onto their credibility and the notion they’re the only trustworthy players in the game, constantly attack the reputation of independent journalism as disingenuous or conspiratorial. With each passing day this strategy backfires on them as case study after case study is put out on public display of independent reporters covering stories more accurately and honestly than their legacy peers, further eroding public trust in such institutions. The revelation regarding the lengths some of the press had taken to hide President Biden’s declining health from their own customers is a recent example of this, as independent reporters have been following this story for years and have done a commendable job documenting it.
It’s hard to say how this all plays out in the end, but I for one am very grateful independent voices stood up and filled the responsibility legacy media used to carry for us. It is understood a truly free press is a corner stone to a healthy, functioning democracy and it’s hard to imagine a society thriving if no one is willing to ask the difficult questions. It is in this spirit, and with mountains of gratitude to the people I have learned from, I would like to try and give back. My dream for the future is for Bad Canadians to be one of the hubs of viewpoint diversity in Canada. In our exploration we will centre the truth as our North Star, no matter where it leads.
Success will be measured by the ability to get as many diverse, good faith voices to as wide an audience as possible, as I believe this act of free speech is critical to a free democracy and wish not to discover what happens if we allow ourselves to abandon this commitment.
