Media in peril and the threat to world democracy
What has been fascinating about Barack Obama’s high-profile book tour this week is that he seems more anxious to talk about today’s fraught political environment than the earlier period covered in the first volume of his newly released memoirs. It’s as if he’s focused on his next book.
Obama’s warning to the world — to Americans but also to the rest of us — has been that today’s weakened and divided news media landscape is “the single biggest threat to our democracy.
“If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work,” Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. “And by definition, our democracy doesn’t work.”
This was the theme the former president kept emphasizing to both American and international interviewers this week as he began promoting the release of “A Promised Land,” which covers the period from his childhood to the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden.
In this volume, Donald Trump doesn’t play a major role, but his presence foreshadows what is to come.
In 2011, Trump promoted the racist “birther” fantasy that Obama was born in Kenya, confident that this nonsense would take hold. As Obama writes: “For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”
But what surprised him most, Obama adds, was the media’s reaction to Trump:
“The degree to which the line between news and entertainment had become so blurred, and the competition for ratings so fierce, that outlets eagerly lined up to offer a platform for a baseless claim.”
In his interviews this week, Obama cited Fox News and other right-wing media outlets as the most dishonest, but was also critical of the enormous social media companies who falsely claim they are simply “like a phone company.”
Obama lamented the collapse of local news reporting, the layoffs of so many journalists and the tendency of many mainstream media organizations to exaggerate division and conflict: “I come out of this book very worried about the degree to which we do not have a common baseline of fact and a common story.”
He said that this decline in the strength and integrity of the news media isn’t strictly an American phenomenon. Instead, it undermined the future of democracy worldwide.
On this issue, Obama is right — and his warning certainly resonates in Canada.
In recent weeks, dozens of Canadian
journalists have been laid off as part of an unrelenting shrinking of the news media industry. Without intervention of some kind, these trends have raised the spectre of an impoverished media landscape in Canada within the next five years or so.
It would be a Canada without viable daily newspapers, with no effective local news coverage and with increasing dependence on American commercial media companies.
As for the CBC, Canada’s already weakened and underfunded public broadcaster — mismanaged from within and neglected by the government — runs the risk, as a recent book on the CBC described it, of dying “a slow death on the outskirts of the media world, (fading) into a kind of zombielike half-life.”
However, there have been developments in recent days that show that the battle for public broadcasting in Canada is not yet lost.
There has been a rebellion among hundreds of current and former CBC staff against a management effort, called “Tandem,” to expand the use of advertising disguised as news — in other words, paid content — to increase com
mercial dollars.
Exploiting the reputation of CBC news and current affairs, it involves the creation of what appears to be news items or features, sometimes presented by CBC personalities, that are paid for by companies or interest groups as a form of public relations.
CBC senior management prefers to call it “branded content” and insist that these items are described as such on air or on the CBC’s website. But the fact is that research shows that these distinctions or labels are not noticed by many viewers.
Dozens of former employees have sent a letter to the CRTC, Canada’s broadcast regulator, stating that the Tandem paidcontent division “blurs the lines between advertising and news” and “marks a clear departure from the mission of
Canada’s public broadcaster.”
The letter asks the CRTC to investigate the CBC initiative, noting that the CBC made no mention of branded content in its 2019 licence renewal.
Among those who have signed the letter include Adrienne Clarkson, Peter Mansbridge, Elizabeth Gray, Linden McIntyre and Brian Stewart, as well as former CBC presidents Tony Manera and Robert Rabinovitch. (Full disclosure: I have also signed the letter.)
While we’re at it, and speaking personally, I would encourage the CRTC to put three more questions to CBC senior management about how they are running the public broadcaster:
Why haven’t you come to us with a plan to get out of advertising and commercials entirely?
In an age when high-quality information is eagerly sought by audiences — look at the success of the New York Times — why aren’t you following their lead and hiring more journalists, not laying them off?
And in these desperate times, why are you competing with local newspapers and commercial news operations instead of co-operating with them to keep the industry alive?
In the spirit of Barack Obama's warnings, it’s time for CBC senior management to remind themselves why Canadians created a public broadcaster in the first place — and have spent so much public money to keep it alive.