By Natasha Baldin
When discussing the current state of political journalism in Canada, some view the media landscape through a positive lens. Others, however, can’t view the news industry and journalistic profession with anything but a pessimistic perspective.
A Saturday panel discussion on the current state of political journalism brought together six reporters and columnists to discuss how Canadian consumers view the media and how journalists should work to build up the trust of their audiences.
“I don’t think the media is meant to be liked — we’re adversarial by nature,” said Tara Henley, author of the popular Substack newsletter, Lean Out. “But when people say, ‘We fundamentally don’t trust you,’ that’s a big problem.”
David Moscrop, a freelance political commentator, said he thinks prospects for journalism are “better than we might think,” pointing to the pluralization of digital media and emerging independent outlets that he said are “punching way above their weight class.”
“We don’t have a single mainstream audience anymore, but all these new people have come in and created these spaces for people that haven’t been represented before,” he said. “I think that’s tremendously important and tremendously powerful.”
Charelle Evelyn, managing editor of The Hill Times, said she’s also approaching Canadian journalism with optimism as the digital landscape expands opportunities for journalists to tell stories that have traditionally gone untold in mainstream media.
“It might be harder to find the particular (coverage) that you’re looking for, to find the kind of political journalism that you want to consume, but it exists,” said Evelyn.
However, panelists Brian Daly and Niigaan Sinclair said it’s hard to dissect the positives in Canadian journalism as, by and large, it continues to suppress the stories of marginalized communities.
“By virtue of being Black, I think that we have a built-in media criticism, and we don’t see things as rosily as we otherwise might. I’m incapable of saying that we’re doing better than the States,” said Brian Daly, an associate professor of journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax.
Sinclair, an Anishinaabe writer with the Winnipeg Free Press and journalism professor at the University of Manitoba, said “there’s a reason that the TRC called upon journalists to be capable . . . The fact is that journalism is, and continues to be, completely incapable of engaging colonialism,” said Sinclair.
Sinclair recently won the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award in the non-fiction category for Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from An Indigenous Centre, a collection of his newspaper columns and other writings. His late father, the former judge and senator Murray Sinclair, was the chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
CBC Ottawa broadcaster Amanda Pfeffer, host of the Ontario Today call-in show and panel moderator, highlighted that a major challenge in the current media landscape is whether coverage is “helping or hurting” Canadian political engagement.
Aaron Wherry, a senior writer with CBC’s parliamentary bureau, said while responsibility for political engagement doesn’t inherently lie with journalism, the media can play a role in making politics more accessible.
“We need to ask ourselves whether we’re making democracy … easier to understand for people,” said Wherry.
“There has been a move over the last decade towards more explainer pieces, but I think it’s still treated as a supplementary and secondary thing, instead of a central part of the mission.”
Panelists also highlighted the challenges of navigating the ways Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative party interacts with the news media — much of which he routinely dismisses as a “propaganda” arm of the Trudeau government — while also discussing the inherent newsroom biases that exist against Conservative voices.
Henley said she believes the Conservative viewpoint is underrepresented in the media, highlighting that she never worked with a single open Conservative during her time at the CBC.
She argued that this political tilt within the media contributes to public distrust.
“We don’t know what we don’t know,” she said. “We’re missing a lot of the story and there’s a feeling among the public that we in the media are actually antagonistic to (Conservative) interests and their views … and we have to find a way to confront that.”
Moscrop added that journalists often feel discouraged from discussing viewpoints that exist outside of the mainstream consensus, whether from marginalized communities or differing political perspectives, out of fear of upsetting the status quo.
“The project I’ve adopted for myself as a semi-mainstream writer is to take those perspectives, and sneak them into the mainstream bit by bit,” Moscrop said. “There is some opportunity to sneak them in, but we have to put in the work to do that.”