Canadian Media Is Killing Itself

On The Slow, Self-Imposed Death

It is fairly inarguable, in my view, that I’m a good writer.

Now, for those who will be preordained to bring up Texas or Virginia, being a good writer is not the same thing as being a good pundit, because even as I wrote things that ended up being false, the actual writing was good. It was persuasive, compelling, and from the metrics available to me, did quite well. Clearly, even when I turn out to be wrong, I’m good at writing, and I understand this world better than the average asshat with a Substack. And, given that, I understand better than most how all of this works.

Between this Substack and my work over at TheLines, I understand the dynamics of modern media as well as anyone, and I understand how the incentives differ when I’m writing for my (free, and totally voluntary) site as opposed to (the money-making endeavour that is) TheLines. I’ve never received a memo or anything at all telling me what to write, but inherently, whether what I write for TheLines gets clicks matters more to me than whether what I write for myself gets them, because whether I get 600 or 6000 hits on an article, I make the same money. I get the differences, even if nobody pointed them out.

And as I think about all of this, I also think of a very basic fact – the group of people who decide how the media is viewed is smaller than ever before, and the power they have, whether they want it or not, is as important as ever, and nobody understands it.

…

Let’s be very clear – the Canadian media very rarely ever lies.

It rarely, if ever, prints things that are explicitly incorrect, but that’s immaterial, because what they do is choose what stories matter and what doesn’t. Let’s take Jean Charest, who is running for the leadership of the Conservative Party, and whose past is both his best endorsement, and his biggest detriment, entirely based on how you write about him.

If you’re willing to look at Charest with optimism and a soft touch, he is the moderate Premier of Quebec who fought for a cleaner environment and gun safety while killing the issue of Quebec Independence. If you’re less inclined to Charest, you can paint the picture of a corrupt Premier who let Montreal’s construction sector enrich themselves at the expense of the people of Quebec and who took Chinese money to lobby the Feds while China imprisoned two Canadians on hilariously illegitimate charges. And the thing is, both versions of Charest as I described him are entirely factual. And that’s the problem.

Problems and people are multifaceted, and deciding what matters and what doesn’t is a hugely difficult job at the best of times, and with budget cuts and corporate pressures, these aren’t the best of times. But still, we don’t properly understand how much leeway the media has, and how much fuckery they can bring if their influence goes unchecked.

The reason I’m thinking of all of this is that Charest, the supposed electable moderate of the Conservative leadership race, has received a slobbering reception in recent weeks, with many commentators willing, if not eager, to put aside his many scandals in pursuit of Pierre Poilievre not winning the Conservative Party Leadership in September. The way so many members of the press have been willing to forgive working for Huawei and suppressing protests over tuition fees under the (unstated but clear) view that “Skippy would be worse” is horrifying, because people have an expectation that what they’re reading isn’t just true, but not hilariously slanted.

When I wrote Salvation In The Storm, I had to fight a similar version of this same fight, because the facts about a character are what they are, but how those facts are delivered, and in what order and in what time, isn’t clear cut. You can create a monster or a hero out of the same facts, just as you can create a fall from grace or a hero’s redemption from the same person, depending on which side of the story you tell first. It’s all choices, but for some reason, we pretend there’s an objective truth when there isn’t.

In another one of my (unpublished) books, I have two characters who have at one point fallen out of grace of the protagonist – the boyfriend who cheated, and the younger brother whose response to the protagonist’s homosexuality was homophobic abuse. Why did the younger brother find his way back to forgiveness and the cheating boyfriend didn’t? I can pretend there was a plot reason, but plainly, that’s not why. If I’m being honest, the brother got back into the protagonist’s life because it was the better choice, and it’s how I decided the rest of the book should go. It’s a choice, and while it’s one I think worked very well, fundamentally, it’s a choice.

When you work in this space, you’re faced with a series of choices – who gets first billing in an article, who gets the A Block of a TV segment, how do we frame X quote from Y politician – and at every turn the Canadian press is failing us. Why is the lead of almost every night’s Power And Politics, once Ukraine has been dispatched as an issue, “can Jean Charest make this a race?” and not “is Pierre Poilievre insane?” The reason, not that I need to be this explicit, is because an actually competitive Conservative leadership race is exciting for media organizations, and any attempt to point out Skippy’s lying out his ass will only provoke Conservatives to harass and abuse people, because that’s what happens now.

When a CBC reporter asked Freeland and Joly whether or not Trudeau should be home in Ottawa because of some arcane concern for the taxpayer’s dime, there was outcry, but reporter questions aren’t spur of the moment things that are decided by one person in a place and at a time. The decisions by media organizations are intentional, because they want a question asked at noon to be usable at 5PM on their politics show, and they want news broken by their reporters on the National or whatever the name of CTV’s equivalent to be the dominant story the next day. There is an intentionality to all of this, and the intentionality is what takes this from being incompetence to malice.

Postmedia having destroyed the concept of local media has made all of this worse, because the Ottawa Citizen and the Edmonton Journal end up relying on the same quotes and the same shitty Op-Eds to fill space instead of having their own Ottawa bureaus, and this ends up in a situation where there is no trusted guardian of truth. Liberals don’t trust CTV and Postmedia, Conservatives don’t trust the Globe, the Star, or the CBC, and Dippers end up defending the Star whatever garbage they run around Hebert and Delacourt. And the problem is, we’re all worse for it.

I’ve done this for coming up on three years now, from my start as LeanTossup’s in house writer to this site, and in this time, the more and more I understand how much how you write something matters more than what you write. It’s not lost on me that some of the dumbest things I’ve ever written – namely the column in 2020 where I told everyone to “Calm The Fuck Down About Florida” 3 days before Trump won it easily – have been some of my best performing content. Talent as a writer and talent as a correct prognosticator are not correlated, and that fact scares the living shit out of me these days.

Again, I started this column by saying I’m a good writer (which, like, deadass, fuck off if you disagree), but being a good writer and being correct isn’t the same thing. Yes, my track record in Canada is good (or, you know, very good, if I wanna be arrogant), but even putting aside whether I was right in 2019 or 2021, my work was extraordinarily well written, because I have a talent for oratory. But too often, the media sacrifices good reporting for good writing. Is a piece extolling Jean Charest’s moderate credentials good writing? It can be well done, but it’s also, read uncharitably, fucking crap, because of what it excluded - namely the Hauwei of it all. That’s fine – we all make choices, and I think versions of this piece is worth reading, despite my disagreements on Charest. But these choices matter a lot more when it’s the CBC and not a dude with a glorified blog, as I am.

The Canadian media’s willful refusal to understand its biases will end up killing it, and when – not if, but when – it happens, they’ll have nobody to blame but themselves.