Hard to imagine a better way to show us why Canadian news media is dead.
Her Tweet said it all.
Above a link to her op-ed for last Friday’s Globe and Mail on the state of Canadian news media, former CBC reporter and news anchor Wendy Mesley added merely two sentences
I hate the picture! And it was really hard to write.
Nothing about the piece itself other than the little bit of text on the picture Mesley hated: “I was a broadcast journalist. Now TV is the last place I go for news.”
Mesley’s opinion got enormous play on social media over the weekend. Lots of folks chiming in to agree with her and thank her for sharing her version of their story. Used to watch the news and now we don’t.
If you haven’t read Mesley’s piece, take a few seconds and skim it. Not long. The words are simple and the content itself is very familiar. “The current model is not working. I don’t have a magic solution, but it seems there are a few basic considerations.”
Mesley then talks about her own life since leaving CBC in 2021 following a controversy over the corporate management insistence on promoting racism over substantive journalism. The Ceeb disciplined Mesley for using the title of an influential Canadian book that included a word one of the junior staffers on the call considered offensive even though Mesley clearly did not use the word as the epithet it can sometimes be.
The incident was but another example of the legendary shallowness of CBC corporate management, now totally wedded to the American racist thinking that had long ago invaded Canadian campuses. It wasn’t much of a stretch for a corporation that enabled abusive “talent” to now enable different abuse in the guise of being progressive.
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But Mesley didn’t talk about of that even though the CBC’s corporate culture is part of the story. Take a look at the local Ceeb to see the difference up close. English-language news is dictated by Toronto sensibilities if not Toronto edict. Thus radio has turned two of its three current affairs programs to bastions of fluff. The third will go the same way once Anthony Germain retires in a few days’ time.
Their headspace shows in the programming. A former Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador who became a national figure sparring with the late Brian Mulroney over Meech Lake among other things offered some memories of Mulroney. Important on many levels, including the new information Clyde Wells shared about his first meeting with Mulroney 65 years ago. Aside from the interviewer merely ploughing through questions on a sheet instead of having a more revealing and engaging conversation (from the audience’s perspective, the interview aired in the dead zone of the morning, at ten minutes to nine.
The headspace shows when Radio-Canada’s lone reporter in Newfoundland and Labrador routinely breaks more hard news about this province - lack of adequate daycare for francophone parents, *anything* about energy - than the newsroom full of folks with ears cocked to Toronto for what’s important on Danforth. Their best recent offering? A couple of government emails show that the Germans asked about re-starting low-level flight training in Goose Bay but nothing ever came of it.
That story made news *solely* because there as an Indigenous angle, not because of an actual controversy. Not so long ago, something that superficial would have been at the back end of a long string of genuine news stories rooted out by informants and questions and actual sweat rather than an email request for whatever records government officials would get around to letting them have.
And even then, the locals aren’t chasing real news. CBC didn’t break a story about possible fraud in contracts involving the regional health authorities in Newfoundland and Labrador despite having a public warning from the local nurses’ union a year and half earlier. The Globe and Mail did using what it called the best access to information laws in the country.
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What’s most striking about Wendy Mesley’s op-ed is that she tells us there’s a problem with Canadian conventional media but she doesn’t tell us anything about how to fix it. Well, unless you consider “put our energy into a product that people want and need” more than a blinding glimpse of the obvious.
And she found that hard to write.
Wendy might have had an easier time if she’d started with her own attitude as a guide to what the Canadian audience is doing. Wendy tells us she reads the New York Times, the Guardian, Al Jazeera, and the Globe and hours on blogs, newsletters and other sites “recommended by smart people.” She wants to be informed.
She might have found helpful a recent piece in this corner - Fragmented Attention - that describes the connection between audience fragmentation and wider shifts in society. It also covers the time when Mesley was a working journalist so she lived the shifts and changes.
Two key things to remember from that column:
The discussion should be about the competition for attention, not the challenge of news- or information-related attention.
And to get a proper handle on the whole picture, we need to go back to 1979, not 2009.
Audience fragmentation started 40 years ago. People have lots of things that consume their attention. Most aren’t as interested in hard news as Mesley is. Nor are CBC and CTV, either, which is why they are chasing attention and giving audiences an avatar - Max Headroom anyone? - in place of a woman with grey hair whose name most likely cannot recall even if they watched her at all. It’s Lisa LaFlamme, by the way.
But there is an audience for hard news and informed commentary, an audience abandoned by corporate news management. Technology makes it easier to produce columns, podcasts, and video programs that people can consume when *they* want to. That's what those news-oriented audiences are turning to. That’s why journalists like Mesley can turn to podcasting in their retirement or like Paul Wells who makes a living with his Substack or who likes others cannot make a living at it but keep plugging away anyway.
In the corporate offices of the conventional media, there’s no interest in relinquishing control and letting the audience decide. They are stuck not merely in “legacy” formats - we need something to fill a time slot or a few column inches - but in all the assumptions of control that went with it. News media used to pick what people knew and it is hard psychologically to shift away from a world in which people can make their own choices.
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Those are the same assumptions of control by the way that allowed CBC corporately to pillory Mesley or for CTV to swap out one avatar for another. The only difference is the motivation. For CTV, it is chasing eyeballs as a source of revenue. It has space to fill and any content will do. By the same way of thinking, any avatar presenting the content will do as well. After all, news anchors no longer occupy the exalted social space that people like Barbara Walters in the States or Barbara Frum once did in Canada. Thus, their heirs are as expendable as the content they intro.
Indeed, we are not likely far away from a time when broadcasters like CTV will use computer-generated images with computer-generated voices to be the “skin” of a content package that varies with the audience according to whatever data indicates motivates whatever market segment they are targeting for ad revenue.
Thus in the same way ads for things you’ve searched about online will turn up in Facebook or Google the next time you log on, the day is coming when your neighbour will see a different image presenting news from the one you see on CTV, CBC, Global or whatever news feed you are linking to. Same content but the face of it will be something that tweaks your sensibilities.
For CBC, the Mesley episode reflected the corporation’s culture and the dominant ideology currently in it. But it also reflected the corporation’s disinterest in news as news, which is confirmed by Mesley herself. After all, if CBC was immune from the evil market forces that drive its competitors, there’d be no reason for CBC to change what it broadcasts and how it does so. And she’d still be watching it. Yet Mesley made a point of mentioning both CTV and CBC news programs she no longer watches. The two corporations have equally abandoned news.
There’d also be no difference between Radio-Canada and CBC in how it responds to its audience. After all, the Broadcasting Act says that CBC must “provide a wide range of programming that informs, enlightens and entertains”and that in doing so, the Corporation must be “distinctly Canadian,” reflect “Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions, “strive to be of equivalent quality” in both official languages, and reflect the “multicultural and multiracial nature” of the country. Yet there’s a huge difference between the two corporations.
There’d also be a greater interest at CBC to embrace new forms of news delivery. The private sector news media long ago began incorporating new content producers - blogs and podcasts - into their out in different ways. CBC steadfastly refuses. Ceeb execs had no trouble, however, licensing the American syndicated program Family Feud as a vehicle for one of its comedy stars and elevating it to the status of mainstream content rather than the syndicated fodder it is. The reason is about bureaucratic control not chasing an audience. And that's how two different organizations can deliver the same outcome despite supposedly operating with different motives. The differences in the two are superficial. At their core, both are bureaucracies, which mesns their business is power and control, not newd.
If she really wanted to know what’s wrong with Canadian media, Wendy Mesley need only look at the light-weight few words she slapped together Globe and Mail. By comparison, she was tougher on CTV over the Lisa LaFlamme firing but even then she fell back on a superficial and old line - it’s the “patriarchy” - rather than look hard at what’s been going on around her for the last two decades of her career inside Canadian media. And when it came to her own personal situation two years ago, Mesley sided with the Ceeb’s management rather than really confront the corporation’s internal culture.
We need a conversation in this country about news media. But as long as current and former news media people write drivel and avoid any genuinely difficult notions, then we won’t get anywhere. As for the conventional media, the slide to irrelevance will continue unabated. Canadians will turn away from the conventional news media to find out what’s going on in their communities.
If Wendy is looking for answers, she can just look in the mirror the next time before she writes anything for the Globe. *That* would be genuinely tough though, so no one should hold their breath. They can just read more of the deep insights into the nakedly obvious from one old conventional reporter in Toronto’s national newspaper.