Canadian media bosses tackle how to regain citizens' trust
Principles, ethics and standards can't be calcified, they must be reviewed, says Toronto Star VP
Leaders of traditional Canadian news outlets admit they have a crisis on their hands. Their organizations depend on trust — and Canadian citizens increasingly appear not to trust them, or even consider their work relevant.
This applies to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation too. An international study published in 2023 by the Reuters Institute found that only 19 per cent of Canadians said "public service journalism" was important to them.
CBC/Radio-Canada President Catherine Tait welcomed a live audience to Trust Talks, an initiative co-sponsored by the Canadian Association of Journalists, Massey College, Victoria University and the Toronto Star.
It was held at Toronto's Isabel Bader Theatre, where IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed spoke with three media leaders about why journalism appears to be facing this crisis of trust in Canada and other liberal democracies.
The speakers were: Toronto Star's vice-president, Irene Gentle, the CBC News' editor-in-chief, Brodie Fenlon, and Sonia Verma, vice-president of Global News.
Here are excerpts from their conversation.
Global News' Sonia Verma
I do think that people recognize the value and the importance of news. Our challenges are around paying for the cost of producing it. And this is a very real challenge, to struggle financially — especially as a private company — to make sure that we are able to deliver credible news.
We have excellent journalists who work for us. We are still hiring. We're still doing important work. But it is getting more and more difficult because of those financial pressures. So, how do we differentiate ourselves from the rest of the noise? I really think it's about sticking to those core principles, which might sound old-fashioned but actually really mean something. Asking questions of those in power. Going to the places that we're reporting from.
The work that we did as a news organization on Chinese interference into Canada's political system — this was an enormous effort. This took a lot of work. It took a lot of courageous reporting. And frankly, it was reporting that we had to defend because we had a lot of questions [asked of us] when we started publishing our stories, which were based on sources who felt too scared to come forward because they worried they would lose their jobs. They worried there would be repercussions. But we really stuck to our standards. We stuck to our principles, and we made sure that what we published met a certain threshold. Those stories really made a difference. People read that work. There were huge repercussions politically as a result of that.
CBC News' Brodie Fenlon
For news organizations like ours that are aiming to reach and report on a consensus, and believe in a consensus around facts and truth, it gets really difficult when the world is starting to pull apart into camps. There's also evidence from the Reuters Institute that shows that countries where their media play into the partisan trap, trust in media falls to really low levels.
We use the word 'impartiality' — it's one of our core principles, along with accuracy, fairness, balance, and integrity. And there is a very robust debate. Whose definition of impartiality? How do you define it? Some people thought by 'impartial' we mean we're robots that give 50-50 to every story. And this person says climate change is real, this person says climate change is not real, ta-dah, your story! That's never what it was about.
But we've had to do a better job defining it within the newsroom, never mind outside the newsroom… What we say is when you show up at the story, your notebook is empty. You bring your full self and your knowledge to that story, but the story is not pre-written. You're coming to it for the first time and you're going to report it based on everything you know and everything you observe.
The Toronto Star's Irene Gentle
I love the fact that you said people don't agree on what the words mean... Sometimes when we're talking, we're talking at each other because we're not agreeing on the definition. The principles and the ethics and the standards with which we have conducted ourselves all these times are crucial bulwarks. We have to make sure that we don't calcify them and that we continue to review them as we go along.
Newsrooms or editors can sometimes have a sense of what normal is and what neutral is, and that isn't necessarily what someone else thinks is normal or neutral. Some things have been characterized as an intellectual debate where some people that are involved say, 'That intellectual debate you're having could actually get my family member shot.' It has real-life consequences to some that it doesn't have to someone else. And people need to know that. Newsrooms have to take that into account. I think we need to make sure that we don't lean on what we always did, because we have made mistakes in the past.
Listen to the full discussion on IDEAS wherever you get your podcasts, or stream episodes through the CBC Listen App.
*Transcript edited for clarity and length.
