It was a week of good news and bad
news.
First came the good, and
surprising, news that singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel prize
for literature. Dylan’s songs changed popular culture. His lyrics became hymns
for the civil rights and anti-war movements.
The bad, and also surprising, news
was that yet another fine journalist is out of a job. Lee-Anne Goodman, a
reporter who epitomizes bartender Dooley’s famous quote - “The job of the newspaper is to comfort
the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” - is out at The Canadian Press, the country’s venerable
news service.
Thousands of journalists have lost
their jobs in recent years. The reason I mention Ms. Goodman is that I worked
with her for a number of years and respect her work. She reports stories that
we all need to know in these complicated times, eschewing the easy bubbles and
fluff crap that we see too much of these days.
When excellent journalists are
pushed aside, society as a whole suffers. Excellent journalism truly is a
pillar of democracy and when journalism is
eroded, so is democracy.
What’s happening in journalism is
more than erosion. It is disintegration.
In the United States 25,000
journalists have been laid off since 2005 while digital publishers have created
only 7,000 jobs. Those figures come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Canadian Media
Guild reports 10,000 jobs cut from the print and broadcast industries between
2008 and 2013. The Guelph Mercury and Nanaimo
Free Press dailies were shuttered earlier this year.
Postmedia, which owns two daily
newspapers in several cities has combined staffs in Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and
Vancouver for a loss of 90 jobs.
The Toronto Star cut 52 journalism
positions in August. Rogers Media has said it will print Maclean’s magazine
only once a month, and an online version once a week. It is closing some other
titles.
Fewer journalists means less
poking and probing, uncovering and reporting information that citizens need to
know. Like when Chad Ingram of this newspaper fought for and won access to the
multi-million dollar contract between the province and Carillion Canada Inc.,
which county residents believe has provided sub-standard winter highway maintenance.
As news outlets and journalists
disappear, journalism retracts into the tight, homogenous thinking of big
cities, like Toronto, Canada’s centre of journalism elitism. Toronto journalism
knows little and cares little about anything beyond the metro area borders.
People in Guelph and Nanaimo and
many other places like them are being deprived of information and viewpoints
they must have to tell them what is happening and to form ideas on how to fix
problems.
News media black holes are
widening across the country. We hear and read less from other parts of our
country and what problems they face, what successes they enjoy.
News executives, panicked by the
ascent of digital news and the advertising it is drawing away from them, are
dumping journalists to save money. The more they cut, the further the dumbing
down of their news reports.
They are focused on ways to regain
lost revenues. What they need to focus on is providing stories so important, so
compelling, so well reported and written that people are willing to pay for
them. That type of thinking is beginning in other parts of the world, but
regrettably not in Canada.
The collapse of journalism and its
weakening of democracy has caught the attention of government. The House of
Commons heritage committee is studying the news media crisis and is expected to
make some recommendations this fall. Other government studies – the Kent Royal
Commission on Newspapers and the Davey Special Committee on Mass Media – have
done nothing but collect dust.
Meanwhile, astute observers of the
news industry expect that most printed daily newspapers will be gone within the
next 10 years.
While politicians ponder their
belly buttons and news executives panic, questions go unanswered.
Like, how many injustices
exist out there with too few journalists to see? The answer is same one Bob Dylan wrote four decades ago.
“The answer my friend is blowin’
in the wind.
The answer is blowin’ in the
wind.”
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