However gratifying, no amount of speechifying about how journalism serves the public interest will save the profession and the business if the public isn’t interested.
A functioning democracy requires a functioning media. The government has the power, and the media is supposed to keep them to account. but when the media gets their paycheque from the government and they stop reporting anything negative about the government anymore... that's not a functioning democracy.
In public, I've had many conversations with people, they very much care, but they don't care for the viewpoint pushed. Journalism 101 means you report on everything with as much neutrality as possible. Sometimes your team looks bad.
But it's problematic when that stops happening. The media who skews 1 way for a little too long will inevitably lose the audience or worse those people refuse to speak to the journalists. Those journalists suddenly never hear the viewpoint they have been losing and thus lose them even more.
So the most fundamental problem facing journalism is that much of the public does not see the value of what the profession and the industry has to offer, and an election year bump will not dispel this existential challenge.
We definitely see the value of good journalism. We don't see the value in biased news. This is why the CBC will be defunded within the next 2 years pretty much guaranteed.
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A functioning democracy requires a functioning media. The government has the power, and the media is supposed to keep them to account. but when the media gets their paycheque from the government and they stop reporting anything negative about the government anymore... that's not a functioning democracy.
In public, I've had many conversations with people, they very much care, but they don't care for the viewpoint pushed. Journalism 101 means you report on everything with as much neutrality as possible. Sometimes your team looks bad.
But it's problematic when that stops happening. The media who skews 1 way for a little too long will inevitably lose the audience or worse those people refuse to speak to the journalists. Those journalists suddenly never hear the viewpoint they have been losing and thus lose them even more.
We definitely see the value of good journalism. We don't see the value in biased news. This is why the CBC will be defunded within the next 2 years pretty much guaranteed.