It has become almost a cliché to talk about the crisis of confidence in the media. We did it so much during the pandemic. Conspiracy is on the rise, the leaders of digital platforms are not doing enough to combat disinformation, the blocking of news sites by Meta is a new blow to information, populist elected officials are encouraging their troops to disdain for journalism and falling revenues have led to significant layoffs among various industry players.
Any group of humans under attack will tend to stick together, and for very good reasons. With all these dangers facing Canadian journalism, it is more important than ever to defend it and take the time to reiterate its value. Except that, sometimes, these essential defensive reflexes end up giving rise to a form of caution – even reluctance – which can transform into additional danger.
Our newsrooms are even more homogenous than the population they serve. If we still need to be convinced, a simple look at the survey on diversity in newsrooms from the Canadian Association of Journalists will dispel any doubts. The statistics made public there relate to racial and gender diversity, but to provide a complete portrait of this homogeneity, we would still need to talk about the social, economic and geographic origins, the type of training, the networks and communities in which media professionals fit in or not.
The impression that the environment forms a “bubble” is often greatly exaggerated by conspiracy theorists, but it is not without foundation either. And any “bubble” of humans will have its blind spots.
One of the important aspects of news prioritization is the very subjective feeling of proximity or distance to the subject. We saw it when violence shook France, the war in Ukraine shook Europe and the United States entered yet another political crisis. When elsewhere sounds close to “us”, the processing of information alters. I say “we” in quotation marks, because this “we” is that of the bubble.
The more the country’s population diversifies, the smaller the planet becomes. We saw it perhaps better than ever this fall: what is happening thousands of kilometers away is preventing thousands of people here from sleeping at night. When we carry diasporic identities — or simply when the destiny of our friends, our relatives, our neighbors, our colleagues are altered by events happening on the other side of the world — this end of the world seems suddenly very close. And since young people, regardless of their origins, are more likely to have been socialized in a deeply mixed Quebec, this perception of the relative smallness of the planet also tends to vary depending on the generation.
This fundamental interconnection of human destinies will be felt less viscerally in the middle of a homogeneous bubble than when our personal networks reflect the cosmopolitan metropolises in which most Canadian media content is produced. What follows is a gap between the “topics of the day” in political bulletins and what more and more people — particularly younger people — are deciding to discuss themselves on their digital platforms. From the discrepancy arises a breach which risks widening into a fissure.
This risk of cracking has never worried me more than this fall. I am surrounded by educated, politicized, literate people with a critical mind, who, in bursts of frustration, tell me that they are deeply fed up with “the media”. The media as a whole, therefore. All. Something is happening.
At journalism schools, professors have reported increasingly difficult questions from their students about the merits of a career in the industry. Aspiring journalists from underrepresented groups wonder if they will be able to evolve there without the pressure to conform to the perspectives and cultural norms that serve as “common sense” in the bubble transforming into incessant questioning of their objectivity or professionalism. This generation too often leaves the field after one or two difficult years in Montreal, Ottawa or Toronto. The risk of cracking increases another notch.
And even if certain efforts have been made in recent years to diversify Quebec television – as a result of activism that has nevertheless been heavily stigmatized – it seems that we have acted too cautiously and too late to hang up the news generations to content that does not yet resemble them enough. Even if we must continue our efforts, and also point out the culpability of the digital giants in the problem, it is clear that the generational renewal of media membership is becoming a business problem. serious. The recent cuts at Quebecor are just one example among others.
I know that it is difficult to produce — especially in the ridiculously short deadlines that characterize the profession — powerful analyzes of wars in the world, of the various effects of the climate crisis, of the breakdowns in our economic system, of growing social inequalities. It’s easier to quickly comment on which political party had a good week and why, or the latest public figure to put their foot in their mouth.
But if the share of “easy” in the media space continues to be as great, and the challenges of the 21ste century continues to become more complex, I sincerely fear for “us”, the media, and our bond of trust with our audiences — in the plural. The breach widens.
Anthropologist, Emilie Nicolas is a columnist at Duty and to Release. She hosts the podcast Detours for Canadaland.