This article originally appeared in the Rewrite, a new Substack from MLI senior fellow Peter Menzies.
By Peter Menzies, May 6, 2024
The Rewrite was chatting over lunch recently with a former newsroom colleague.
Having wisely found a different and more prosperous career, he nevertheless remembered his years in the industry with some affection despite not sharing the same worldview as most of his colleagues, who he recalled leaned heavily to the left.
What struck a chord wasn’t his preference these days for The Wall Street Journal and The Economist due to their trustworthy natures. It was the reason he gave for abandoning his Globe & Mail subscription that made me pause.
He immediately dumped it, he said, when in June of 2022 it announced that a review of its Editorial Code of Conduct had concluded that “expecting objectivity of individual journalists is not the right measure.”
The Globe’s Public Editor at the time, Sylvia Stead, put it this way:
“Ultimately, truth and accuracy should prevail,” she wrote. “While this process is critical, news stories cannot always strive for “balance” – a sometimes misguided approach that gives lies and misinformation the same treatment as the truth.”
Stead further justified the erasure of objectivity from the Globe’s expectations because:
“A recent survey by the Poynter Institute, a U.S. journalism-training organization, found that the statement most supported by journalists was that “journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.”
For sure, politicians tell whoppers all the time and journalists have to decide how or whether to report when they say things like “the report in the Globe & Mail is false” or “my opponent is a white supremacist.” And certainly there has been a lot of academic discussion about this issue, a great deal of it epitomized by this piece in The Harvard Crimson, which begins with the usual (author inserts bias) pathetic trope:
“Firstly, objective journalism is impossible to begin with.”
Here at The Rewrite, we strongly oppose the idea that objectivity in the search for truth can be abandoned simply because some aspiring journalists view it as being impossibly difficult. Yes, people are all prisoners of their biases, but that doesn’t mean the work they produce can’t be free from it. Giving up on it is just intellectually lazy (just imagine the impact on society if the judiciary were to take the same approach.) And – dare we say it – if you think the work of serving the public with unbiased news is too hard, stay away from a newsroom. Please.
(As an aside, The Rewrite also strongly opposes beginning a sentence with “Firstly” and ending it with “to begin with,” but we’ll leave discussions on sentence structure for another day.)
More important is that, if journalism is going to survive as – or even resemble – a public good, then what The Rewrite, The Harvard Crimson and the Globe & Mail newsroom committee might think doesn’t actually matter.
Because what surveys consistently show is that no matter what academic goulash newsrooms want to feed them, what the customer wants to consume is reporting that lays out, in an unbiased/objective fashion, the facts as they are known on the events of the day and leaves readers free to draw their own conclusions.
Or, as noted in this comprehensive discussion on how newsrooms can rebuild trust among an increasingly skeptical public, “they want and expect coverage to be fair, accurate, and impartial.”
If the people operating newsrooms were running restaurants, they’d be serving pizza to patrons ordering chicken. And they would fail miserably.
The choice is simple: serve the reader or die.
Public anxiety that journalism has been hijacked by the woke/radical left is unlikely to be calmed by online courses such as this one – Decolonizing Journalism – being put on by the University of Toronto.
Looks like a great $799.00 investment if you’re hoping to enhance your social status within the haughty salons of downtown Hogtown, but if you’re a young journo trying to find a job covering city council and school board in North Bay, maybe it’s better to invest in other skills.
Because according to one reader, good help is getting hard to find.
While agreeing with the point made last week that “a big part of the problem with Canadian journalism is Canadian journalists,” said reader responded that “it’s not woke that concerns us most (although that’s a thing) it’s the pups don’t have any fact-finding skills.
“When people suggest (we) should be expanding, I say ‘with what labour?’ Tried that. It just cost us money and led to arguments with ‘reporters’ who couldn’t find the lede (introductory paragraph/news angle) at a committee meeting but offered up press release re- writes.”
Heads up to young journos: News organizations can hire guys in India who will rewrite news releases and grab a quote via email for $10 a story. And AI can convert box scores into standard sports reports.
In an age when most Canadian media now depend financially – and increasingly so – on the government, Andrew Neil of The Spectator has provided an unequivocal statement on what the relationship between journalists and politicians should always be: bad.
His appearance before a Scottish committee pondering intervention into the news industry is an absolute pleasure for those of us who still believe in independent media.
You can – and must – watch it here.
While at least half of Canada’s media continue to ignore Britain’s ground-shaking Cass Review of the uncertain assumptions surrounding the treatment of gender dysphoria in children, CTV Edmonton finally got around to it last week.
The subject came up in an “exclusive” interview with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, contained a robustly rote dismissal of Cass’s findings by Kristopher Wells and probingly asked Smith whether her planned gender dysphoria policies were inspired by a desire to pander to the “far right.”
Of course it did.
The report did not mention that Smith’s plans are generally backed by the public and are similar to policies recently put in place in England, Scotland, Finland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and other countries. Nor did it mention the unexplained increase in the numbers of Canadian cases or how they have shifted from majority male to overwhelmingly female.
CTV fell into the trap of, while expressing concern about Smith pandering to the far right, not considering that Wells might be doing the same in regards to the “far left.” This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have shared his perspective. Sure, he is unashamedly partisan and predictable, but sometimes journalists like that and after all he does hold a Canada Research Chair (Tier II) at McEwan University.
What is less understandable is the unwillingness to more fully inform readers and viewers by presenting them with other perspectives. Dr. J. Edward Les is an Alberta pediatrician who doubles as a Senior Fellow with the Aristotle Foundation and has written on the subject of gender dysphoria for Inside Policy – a publication of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (disclosure: I am an MLI Senior Fellow).
Les also recently wrote that the Cass Review constitutes a “careful and patient exhibition of evidence, without hyperbole and without rancour.”
Meanwhile, it took a couple of weeks, but Globe & Mail readers were finally exposed to news of the Cass Review and its repercussions when columnist Robyn Urback broke the silence with a lengthy and thorough examination of the latest developments, the evolution of treatments and the hope that it is science and not the loudest voices that will prevail. It is well worth the read as this is a story about how the loudest voices have, for the past decade, prevailed. Who knows? Perhaps one day reporters will be assigned to cover the story – without fear or favour.
Speaking of objectivity, CBC appears to have made it through the week without being tied to too many rhetorical whipping posts.
The Rewrite did, however, notice one deviation from standard journalistic practice worth noting.
This story involves the Prime Minister wishing Saskatchewan “good luck” with the Canada Revenue Agency in light of Premier Scott Moe’s decision to neither collect nor remit the federal carbon charge on natural gas.
At issue in the story is the section entitled “How carbon pricing works” which states without attribution that “ninety percent of government revenues” from the tax are returned to households” and that “the parliamentary budget officer has consistently found that nearly all households receive more from the carbon tax rebate than they pay.”
It’s most unusual for news organizations to make statements of any kind on contentious matters without attributing the information to a source (ie, “according to the government.”)
Even more unusual is that the parliamentary budget officer has reported on the matter by saying things like: “Based on our analysis, most households will pay more in fuel charges and GST—as well as receiving slightly lower incomes—than they will receive in Climate Action Incentive payments.”
This appears inconsistent with the CBC’s journalistic standards and practices.
Confused? Puzzled? So is The Rewrite. OK, maybe you aren’t. Feel free to send tips.
Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an award winning journalist, and former vice-chair of the CRTC.
