The Rewrite

Peter Menzies

When the going gets tough, it seems our news organizations just run away

I am travelling this week to help my mother celebrate her 100th birthday but to ensure readers continue to be served, here’s a column I wrote for The Hub that stayed among its most read pieces for the better part of two weeks. Be assured we will be getting after the CBC/Sean Feucht debacle in due course.

There are some topics that Canada’s media are clearly very afraid to touch, leaving the public that funds them through federal subsidies not fully informed.

This, for reasons suspected but unexplained, is not good if we are to rely upon the Fourth Estate to ensure the nation’s population is equipped with the information citizens need to form perspectives and organize their lives. That, after all, is the alleged purpose of the government’s subsidization of the media in the first place.

Blind spots

Many news organizations, if not most, still haven’t come to terms with their 2021 reporting on suspected and unmarked graves at and adjacent to Indian Residential Schools, for instance. That poor performance led to headlines referencing “mass graves”—a term not used by Indigenous leaders at the time—across the country and the world. Flags were lowered, statues toppled, churches burned, demonstrations held, a new federal holiday instituted, yet no bodies have yet been discovered where it was alleged they were buried. But the old false headlines still linger (including on the New York Times), setting back—as journalist Terry Glavin and others have argued—the cause of reconciliation. Actions, or shall we say, inactions, have consequences.

I was at the abandoned cemetery at the former site of the Regina Indian Industrial School (1891-1910) when it was designated a provincial heritage site, and I am deeply conscious of the sad reality of this part of our history. All 38 graves there are now quite poignantly marked with metal feathers. The matter is a delicate one for the media, for sure. But it is one they must deal with.

As is the issue of how to treat minors struggling with gender dysphoria.

The most recent news on that front—the Supreme Court of the United States upholding a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and hormone treatments for teens—triggered a lot of coverage across the U.S. and on foreign platforms such as the BBC.

But in Canada, all I could find on the first few pages of a Google search was an Associated Press story picked up by the CBC. CTV posted a shorter version of the same story. Both platforms went with the “stunning setback to transgender rights” theme provided by the wire service. Neither made any effort to add any Canadian context or reaction. The BBC, in contrast, assigned its own reporters to the story and included something the AP story did not: quotes from the Tennessee attorney general who called the decision a “big win for evidence-based medicine.”

The Canadian media’s timidness on this topic is not new. A similar pattern of behaviour was evident in the recent decision by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom that—at least when it comes to the 2010 Equality Act—the term “woman” relates to the biological sex assigned to a person when they are born, and not to an individual’s self-understood gender identity.

Much the same can be said regarding the U.K.’s Cass Review, initiated when medical professionals noticed an unexplained increase in the number of teen girls reporting gender identity issues. Its findings led to several countries slamming the brakes on surgeries and other therapies for gender dysphoric minors.

Yes, Robyn Urback of the Globe and Mailand Rosie DiManno of the Toronto Starwrote thoughtful columns in the wake of that report, and Sharon Kirkey of the National Post reported on it in depth. The deafening silence from Canadian journalists was covered in The Hub. But other than that, the approach was ever so much akin to “nothing to see here, folks, move along.”

It’s fair to conclude that our newsrooms struggle with complexity. And when terms such as “denialists” and “transphobic” are applied to those who simply ask questions that challenge the assumed verities of the day, it appears that some sort of moral panic is triggered. We are, after all, still emerging from the terrors of cancel culture and woke extremism that many newsrooms chose to embrace rather than fight. The Globe and Mail, for instance, recently posted a morning briefing that caught the eye of Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) senior fellow Mia Hughes, an expert in the field.¹

Hughes told me that she “objected to the article’s repetition of discredited claims—that puberty blockers are reversible, that they ‘buy time to think,’ and that denying access could lead to suicide—all assertions that have been thoroughly debunked in recent years.”

We will get into this at length in the future, but suffice to say, Hughes found the Globe’s response unsatisfactory. Near as I could discern from what Hughes shared with me, the Globe appears either unaware or unwilling to concede that these matters are contentious and that it might have been spreading what Hughes considers misinformation.

The gatekeepers are losing their grip

This forum isn’t the place to debate the issues described. But what is passing strange about much of Canada’s news industry is that it thinks it can still get away with this sort of gatekeeping and still maintain public trust.

With or without our media culture’s approval, the internet gives people access to this information. It comes not just via alternative, unsubsidized media, but from the Guardian and the New York Times. Little wonder, then, that according to the latest Reuters report, Canadians are enthusiastic subscribers to foreign news platforms.

It appears they have a need for truth that—thanks to those who fear it—isn’t being fulfilled at home.

(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, a former vice chair of the CRTC and a National Newspaper Award winner.)

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