To save journalism and democracy, we must replace liberal media and liberal democracy

(my losing entry to the 2021 Dalton Camp Award on the relationship between media and democracy. No offense but this essay actually rules).

At the start of 2020, there was deep anxiety among many global leaders that liberal democracy was, at best, broken and at worst, on the brink of collapse. Many have concluded that polarization is chipping away at liberalism — an order that became the status quo after the destruction and widespread death of the first 45 years of the century. As Chrystia Freeland told the Daily Hive, “liberal democracies … are becoming totally polarized societies, divided into these hostile — even warring — tribes who can’t talk to each other, and societies that have been hijacked by angry populist politicians.[i]” But, is it really angry populists hijacking society, or is it simply that liberal democracy is losing its grip?

Just as cracks are showing in liberal democracy, the liberal media is facing an existential crisis of its own. Unsurprisingly, both crises are deeply entwined. These conjoined twins of modern Western civilization grew up together. They are codependent. As liberal democracy falters and fails to serve the needs of Canadians, Canadians are moving towards different extremes of the political spectrum that liberal democracy was previously able to obscure. At the same time liberal media has atrophied, retreating into an ultra-defensive posture with uniform focus on the defense of liberal democracy. This, while Canadians gravitate towards new forms of politics and media.

Both liberal media and liberal democracy are at a crossroads and there are two radically different, and hotly debated directions to go. The more conservative option is to save both liberal democracy and liberal media by saving it as it is. The second is transformational, starting with deep restructuring of Canadian media, from its funding to its methods of democratic engagement. Choosing this path would mean that outlets express biases and political ideologies up front, rather than remaining part of a consensus that defends the governing status quo.

The Problem
Liberal media underpins liberal democracy. Modern liberal media emerged in the post-war period as a watchdog of democracy, through which politicians were held to account. Key to this position was the understanding that liberal media should be unbiased non-partisan. The incorruptible journalist reflected the voice of the everyman — nonpartisan, bias-free, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.

But liberal media needs liberal democracy and vice versa, and as one has atrophied, so has the other. Liberal democracy was most successful expressed as a welfare state where capitalism’s ravages were mitigated by robust social programs. These social programs gave Canadians leisure time to read newspapers, and participate in community organizations and democracy. Critically, social programs also gave people disposable income, which allowed them to purchase local media, and the goods and services that advertised through their channels. Canada’s welfare state also relied on the presence of a clear racial and gender hierarchy. The struggle throughout the 1960s and 1970s for civil rights would be followed by a neoliberal wave starting in the 1980s and 1990s by an attack from the right, in the form of neoliberal economic policy: deregulation, outsourcing, attacks to working conditions and wages, and selling off Crown corporations. Journalism was structured similarly: thanks to the capitalist model of profit made from selling ads and subscriptions, they could offer journalists good union jobs. This was supposed to be enough to give journalists the resources to hold power to account. It worked very well, until it didn’t and the bubble burst. Like liberal democracy, the racial hierarchy maintained by Canadian media started to crumble too, when racialized Canadians demanded better coverage of their issues and as racialized journalists demanded more access to mainstream tribunes.

Forty years after the neoliberal experiment started, the impact of hollowing out the welfare state is clear: household debt is 158 per cent of household income[ii] and wealth inequality has grown so high that it threatens the social fabric of Canadian society[iii]. The material impact that this has had on average peoples’ lives cannot be overstated: Statistics Canada reports that, before the pandemic, 48% of Canadians reported that they have had trouble sleeping due to financial stress, and 47% said that it their paycheque was delayed, they would have trouble paying their bills.[iv] Even still, voters consistently choose politicians who promise to cut the welfare state even more, whether they be Blue and do it explicitly, or they be Red and do it quietly. Newspapers routinely endorse these candidates. Election after election of constrained political choices has fed widespread disengagement and frustration, and resulted in the kind of lashing out that fueled the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

At the same time, the greatest individualizing force in the history of humankind took over our lives. The Internet reconceptualized how we understand ourselves in relation to others. With our interactions with others increasingly outsourced to technological platforms, the promise of neoliberalism — to obliterate real-life community — was almost complete.
The Internet, and these for-profit vulture platforms are usually thrown around as the primary reason for why liberal media is collapsing. Except, that isn’t entirely true. The CBC is far more threatened by state funding cuts than it is by the existence of Facebook, especially when that very same state refuses to collect any meaningful taxes from these corporations. What the Internet has taketh away from media companies (especially in advertising and monetizing their content), it has also giveth: it allows for innovative storytelling, reaching people in a way that has never before been possible and, paradoxically, it has become one location for verified accurate reporting that should be able to challenge the status quo (and in so doing, encourage citizens to think critically). Is it the Internet’s fault that there are no national columnists in Canada who are left-wing? Is it the Internet’s fault that editorial decisions are routinely made that de facto defend power rather than challenging it?

The answer to these questions is both yes and no: yes, in that increasing media concentration has a conservatizing and Conservatizing effect on Canada’s media landscape. With fewer resources, fewer workers, less money and less stability, managers in any industry become conservative as a means of self preservation. But no, it is not only the fault of the Internet that liberal media is struggling, or that liberal democracy is threatened by increased polarization. This is good news, because if we are going to examine solutions, none of them require that the Internet disappear.

Path one: save liberal media? Re-create but refresh the past.
The first path to save liberal media is also the one that has been most favoured by media owners, politicians and unions. If the current model is threatened by underfunding, goes the logic, then pouring money into the industry is the way to save it. That is the impetus behind the federal government’s Local Journalism Initiative — it’s rooted in the belief that liberal democracy depends on a strong liberal media, as it currently exists, to survive. With more money, paywalls, subscriptions that offer options like newsletters, access to cruises, panel discussions, and reader communities, the industry might be saved. But the canary in the coalmine is on life support: mainstream news organizations have low to no risk tolerance to explore truly critical issues. They aggressively squeeze out critical voices. This low risk tolerance is borne from the fact that any loss of funding threatens the existence of nearly all Canadian media, which has an important conservativizing impact on coverage. Diversity of opinion has been narrowed, from critique that bounces between the Conservatives and Liberals, with a thriving far-right comment section in Canada’s largest national newspaper chain, and a rare comment here and there from journalists identified as left of the NDP. It would be impossible to imagine a modern Malcolm X appear on a modern Front Page Challenge, for example.

The fundamental problem with this approach is that it does not solve the destructive nature of media concentration. It believes that there is a future for profit-driven liberal media to continue to be norm, even though the writing is on the wall for the survival of both liberal democracy and liberal media. Where Liberals want to defend, Conservatives are approaching the demise of liberal democracy by trying to pivot. Erin O’Toole’s attempt to build Made-in-Canada-MAGA might seem ridiculous, but the groundwork laid by Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party, and the role that it has had on politics, can be seen everywhere, from anti-mask rallies, the rise of the far right to rhetoric coming from the Conservative Party itself about migrants. Rather than find a way to challenge this, journalists have far too often reported on them giving them outsized influence and wall-to-wall coverage, even if there is a consensus that a story is mostly a PR stunt (as is the case with the Etobicoke barbeque incident). Journalists cover these events in such a way that fails to understand that their own establishment needs to both exploit these events for clicks, but also to ridicule them as they pose a threat to liberal democracy, in an attempt to render them less effective.

The antics of the far right do pose an existential threat to liberal democracy, as it was exactly this political tendency that ravaged Europe as fascism rose and devoured the older established orders of Europe. Liberal democracy requires that there is a pact, a centrist equilibrium, that allows the extremes to be glossed over. Citizens are rewarded for shunning the extremes through social programs and services. When these are insufficient, attacked, underfunded or undone, and when a generalized memory of the horrors of war fall away from public consciousness, of course fascism would make a comeback. The good news is that there is also renewed excitement about socialism. The political ideologies that are extreme in relation to the centre created by a liberal order, would of course rise as the liberal order’s crack grew larger. And if that’s true, then the path to saving journalism or democracy cannot pass through simply doubling down on liberalism.

Path two: democratize media, democratize government
There is another option. Rather than trying to hold onto things as they were in the post-war period, Canadians have an incredible moment to upend the status quo and build structures that fit the world that we live in today, both for politics and journalism. New models of journalism are emerging, where journalists don’t need to hide their biases, and in fact, the connection that they have to community makes their journalism stronger and more engaging.

We need media models that have steady funding that allows for journalists to take risks, produce critical content and be rooted within a community that can support that work. This means removing the profit motive from making news for most organizations, funding the CBC to massively boost its local news coverage outside of major broadcast centres and decentralize decision-making and programming, and exploring ways to fund media in the same way we fund public utilities. If the Internet will always threaten the money that media organizations rely on to create media, then money that goes to these organizations must be stable, even if users access the information for free.
If liberal media is going to survive, it has to untie itself from the project of liberal democracy. This means refusing to uphold certain lies on which Canada is built and honestly engaging with colonialism, racism, ableism and income inequality. It means understanding that there is a range of political opinion far outside of the Liberals and Conservatives, and finally giving airtime to critical, left wing perspectives. When Canadians can truly feel like they are reflected by their news organizations, they will support their content and defend their work, and the impact on democracy will be obvious.

[i] Zimmer, Eric. October 2, 2019. “Chrystia Freeland: Liberal democracies are being ‘hijacked by angry populist politicians’” Daily Hive. <dailyhive.com/vancouver/chrystia-freeland-minister-foreign-affairs-canada>

[ii] Alini, Erica. September 11, 2020. “Household debt ratio drops to 158% of disposable income, down from 175%.” Global News. <globalnews.ca/news/7328674/canada-household-debt-ratio-drops-1–58-per-dollar-disposable-income>

[iii] “Hot Topics: Canadian Income Inequality.” Conference Board of Canada. <conferenceboard.ca/hcp/hot-topics/canInequality.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1>

[iv] “Financial stress and its impacts.” Financial Consumer Agency of Canada. <canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/financial-wellness-work/stress-impacts.html>