It’s a annus horribilis which ends for traditional media. One more.
The communications giants have spent the last few weeks imposing cutbacks: TVA Group has eliminated 547 positions and CBC/Radio-Canada 800, including 250 on the French-speaking side. The news media are also suffering very hard, once again: the Information Coops have eliminated 125 of their 350 jobs; THE Montreal Gazette ripped 10 pros from his newsroom, where only 31 remain; Metro Média no longer exists, farewell and our best wishes to the 70 colleagues. In total, in these five companies, 1,552 jobs have just been lost and the bleeding could continue in 2024.
Should we really add the conflict triggered by federal Bill C-18? The rules that came into force on December 19 oblige Web giants to pay royalties to the country’s media since they monetize the online relay of their expensively produced information? Google has negotiated an agreement and will provide $100 million per year, mainly to newspapers, including The duty, while Meta blocks news on its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
In short, things are bad. But how and why? And first, how can we characterize what is happening? Should we even talk about crisis as we so often do, including in the media which cover almost everything, including their own misfortunes?
“Someone has already said that we should not talk about the climate change crisis as if a specific event called for a single specific solution,” responds Professor Michelle Stewart of UQAM, a specialist in communications and digital technology. Likewise, we are talking about a crisis for our information environments, but it is something very broad. There is no single easy solution to solving problems, such as changing business models. We are facing an ecosystem situation. »
Crisis, which crisis ?
Quebec Minister of Culture and Communications Mathieu Lacombe, himself a former journalist, developed his own idea on the impasse in mid-November before the annual conference of the Professional Federation of Journalists of Quebec. He then asked if information professionals had some responsibility in the loss of confidence of part of the population in their profession. A recent Léger survey shows that two out of five Quebec adults have little or no confidence in the media.
Minister Lacombe also spoke of the community’s capacity for self-criticism being “a little thin”. François Cardinal, deputy editor of The Press, replied to him a few days ago that there is no link between the media crisis and public confidence. He underlined “none” in capital letters. “The media crisis is a crisis of revenue, of advertising, of innovation,” summarized the vice-president and deputy publisher of the free dematerialized daily, which has become an NPO.
“It is certain that fundamentally, the basis of the crisis is economic with the flight of advertising revenues and the evolution of the media ecosystem which has slightly surpassed the news media,” comments Philippe in turn. de Grosbois, CEGEP professor and media critic. He published the essay in 2022 The Collision of Stories. Journalism in the face of disinformation (Ecosociety).
Mr. de Grosbois finds it “positive” to see the development of public aid for the fourth estate. However, he cannot help but ironize about the variable geometry principles of certain lesson-giving entrepreneurs who, in the media sector as elsewhere, defend the free market while pocketing subsidies.
“I would like to remind you that for decades, private media leaders themselves told us that public assistance was for lazy people incapable of adapting, for profiteers from the system,” said Mr. de Grosbois. The community now realizes that the for-profit news media model is having a hard time surviving and suddenly, the way public assistance is viewed completely changes. »
Professor Stewart, of American origin, goes on to emphasize that the model developed in Canada allows state support for quality journalism. Help comes in all kinds of forms, from grants to CBC/Radio-Canada, tax credits to pay reporters, funds for digital development and now, this law that extracts millions in annual royalties from Google, less than expected, but still. “There is structured support for a common good, a basis of shared reality,” she says. This perspective is almost completely lost in the United States. »
Who says what to whom?
The decline in trust in the media seems all the more real as citizens express it openly and clearly. In the past, when a listener didn’t agree with a broadcast, they changed positions. Today, the disgruntled can go online and yell loudly.
“We hear that people don’t know the difference between a report and an opinion piece. I don’t think that’s the problem, adds Mr. de Grosbois, citing the simple example of the incessant attacks by certain columnists against the artist Safia Nolin, her weight, her clothes, her statements.
“Obviously, they can say whatever they want about her. But do these attacks demonstrate a healthy media ecosystem that enriches public debate? I feel like people disagree with certain opinions and find that certain opinions don’t belong in overabundance. What, moreover, is the point of receiving the opinion of the same panel day after day, which allows itself to intervene on the strike in progress in Quebec, then in the same breath on Gaza? In France, we speak of “toutologues” to describe these people who know so little about an infinite number of things while we have access to an infinite number of expertise. »
Mme Stewart observes that anti-democratic movements try to discredit the media, democratic governance, experts, academia, doctors, etc. “The problem no longer concerns the multiplication of information, but rather the consolidation of certain discourses that can be said to be anti-government, anti-systems,” she said. This consolidation can even take place without coordination between the different ideological trends. »
For her either, the difficulty does not come from the democratization of speech, but from the feeling that one in particular, that of the “journalistic code”, no longer carries. “That’s been broken for quite a long time and what’s more, we can have a multitude of points of view on the same subject,” she says. We have lost a sense of the importance of the journalistic code, of what news media like the New York Times have to offer. »
Mr. de Grosbois responds in reverse by criticizing the epistemological model, so to speak, of the journalistic media. “Targeting disinformation and false information on the Internet is practical for journalists who can then avoid examining their practice,” he says. When we just stick to the distinctions between true, false, true, false news, we miss a certain number of things, including the central question of framing. It’s not just YouTubers who lie. States too. »
It recalls investigative journalist IF Stone’s infamous statement that all governments lie. “It is in the interest of all places of power to present reality in a certain way,” concludes Philippe de Grosbois. Ideally, the journalist’s job would be to deconstruct the official way of presenting and twisting reality and not just to pretend to relay the truth all the time with the standard model found in news agencies. »