Dangerously obsolete notions about "the news."

Try talking about postliteracy to a conference hall full of judges & lawyers. I dare you.

I place myself at the mercy of the court

I’m pleased to report that I’ve returned from Ottawa to my heavily-armed compound hidden away in the old-growth forests of Vancouver Island. I’m embellishing, of course. I was treated respectfully and generously, and I remain mostly unarmed. But I did leave Ottawa contemplating a recklessly amusing idea. Which I will explain. . .

This is not a self portrait, I assure you.

The main reason I was in Ottawa was to give a talk to a whole lot of judges, lawyers, law professors and officials from variously relevant agencies, ministries and departments about foreign interference, disinformation and the news media. The venue was a three-day conference, Democracy, the Rule of Law, and Independence organized by the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice.

As subscribers here will know, the intertwining of these things was one of the main reasons The Real Story was launched three years ago. After reviewing the conference literature and the general tenor the CIAJ set for the event, I decided to try to impress upon the conventioneers these three points: The mass media isn’t what you think it is; China is winning, and so is Russia; It’s the epistemology, stupid.

I’ll elaborate below.

My talk and the panel I was on immediately followed a discussion with Judge Marie-Josée Hogue, chair of the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions. After 18 months of testimony and hearings, the Hogue Inquiry released its final report back in January. Not to be impudent, but the report landed with a fairly dull thud.

Readers will remember that Judge Hogue’s inquiry had to be dragged out of Justin Trudeau’s government following a series of shocking intelligence-community leaks and other bombshell revelations that a certain eminent Canadian friend of China simply could not paper over. See David Johnston the right man to whitewash Chinese interference.

It was public revulsion with the Chinese government’s effort to monkeywrench the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to the Liberal Party’s advantage, and a determined House of Commons majority, that finally got the Hogue inquiry off the ground.

One tangible result of all the public attention was Bill C-70, An Act Respecting Countering Foreign Interference. But no foreign agents registry was in place for the last federal election, and after two missed deadlines, promises to have the registry in place and a commissioner appointed by next month, will not be kept.

Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree told the Commons public safety committee earlier this month that he was still going through some sort of “process,” and there isn’t even a ballpark launch date for a registry or the appointment of a commissioner.

Anyway, before I get into the substance of today’s newsletter, this is the idea I found myself contemplating on the flight home. Maybe it’s not so reckless. The idea is to cultivate a wholly new and vaguely frightening persona for myself.

Yeah, Glavin used to be a perfectly respectable national journalist but I hear he’s some kind of unabomber character now.

What? You can’t be serious.

I’m serious. That right-wing rag The National Post publishes him every week. They say the guy’s compound is surrounded by barbed wire and human skulls on stakes.

I kid. I don’t really intend to circulate rumours of this sort about myself. But you can take my edgy humour as an indication of my post-convention mood, having been drawn from my personal newsroom where I am disturbed only occasionally by the sound of sea lions bellowing in the near distance to be stuffed into a Westjet economy flight for several hours only to be disembarked into the cold and strange capital of our declining, dysfunctional dominion.

The mass media is not what you imagine it is

While allegations of interference involving elected officials have dominated public and media discourse, the reality is that misinformation and disinformation pose an even greater threat to democracy. - The Honourable Marie-Josée Hogue, Commissioner, Public Inquiry Into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions.

I’m not going to quibble with that. It’s the premise I was working with in my speaking notes in Ottawa, although I should say that Judge Hogue also noticed that the targeting of diaspora communities by hostile foreign governments is “one of the greatest strategic challenges to Canada’s sovereignty and democracy.” Our friend Kyle Matthews elaborates on that threat here, in Autocracy Without Borders.

Words, words and more words

I’m going to focus on the mass media’s vulnerability to strategic disinformation circulated by predatory foreign powers, which is the thing I was asked to focus on. First off, sure, I’m a journalist with years of experience covering this stuff, just one reward for which was being officially sanctioned by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. But my major expertise is in words, and I’ve long held that there is usually a degree of unhelpful imprecision in the words “foreign interference.”

By that I mean active electoral assistance provided by the embassy of the People’s Republic of China and its Vancouver and Toronto consulates - interventions that were solicited and welcomed - isn’t what I would call “interference,” exactly. If you’re in a long-distance rally and your car breaks down and a support truck pulls up to change your tires and replace your sparkplugs or whatever, that’s hardly “interference.”

The world implies that it’s something the rally driver would not want. As we saw with the Trudeau government and the assistance Beijing provided his party in the federal elections of 2019 and 2021, our prime minister saw nothing wrong with it at all, and insinuated that to merely notice it was vaguely racist, and lashed out at CSIS, to the point of perjury, for having the temerity to call it what it was.

But that was the only really saucy thing I had to say for myself in Ottawa.

The bleak wasteland where actual journalism used to be.

In the United States, there were 80,000 people toiling away in newsrooms across the country in 2008. Twelve years later the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted only 31,000. On a slightly longer time scale, there was an 80 percent decline in newspaper industry jobs between 1990 and last year.

In Canada, between 2008 and last month, 603 news outlets were shuttered in 388 communities across Canada. That’s a loss of 440 were community newspapers. Each of those communities lost a newsroom. There were startups in all the gloom, but a third of them - 115 small outfits – never survived.

Nationally, last year Global TV’s parent, the Corus corporation took the axe to Global News and a whole bunch of radio stations across the country, ditching 25 percent of their full-time workers. Bell Media announced the layoff of 4,800 workers in its news and telecom divisions. There were massive cuts at BNN Bloomberg and CTV News, and 45 radio stations were shut down. CTV’s weekday noon newscasts went dark everywhere except Toronto, along with local evening newscasts outside of Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa.

Here’s something you should know. It would appear that fewer than 60 full-time journalists in Canada cover “world events” now, and 45 of those journalists work for the CBC. There are no Canadian news bureaus in the Middle East, no permanent Canadian journalists on the ground in Russia, and no Canadian journalists stationed in China.

In legacy media, layoffs from the consolidation in ownership of the local and community newspapers have left behind “ghost papers,” with hardly any locally-generated news. Dozens of formerly robust newspapers that served generations of readers have been replaced by lifeless replications of the same news package in each of the husks that remain. Postmedia dominates Canada’s newspaper market. As far as Im aware there isn’t a single physical newsroom left in the entire newspaper chain.

Sometimes, big events in the implosion of legacy media go almost unnoticed, at least partly because there’s nobody left to cover the story.

CTV’s award-winning flagship W5 investigative series – which was launched in 1966, and is said to have inspired the launch of the legendary CBS 60 Minutes program – was converted into a single investigative unit.

Macleans magazine was an indispensible weekly general-interest Canadian newsmagazine that had been around since 1905. By the first weeks of 2022 it had been reduced to a fairly typical upscale lifestyle brand product. In quick succession, Macleans editor-in-chief Alison Uncles was gone, star columnist Paul Wells was out, followed by Jason Markusoff, Marie-Danielle Smith, Philippe J. Fournier, deputy editor Colin Campbell, national editor Charlie Gillis and Ottawa bureau chief Shannon Proudfoot. Nobody seemed to know what was going on. I was a contributing editor, and one day I noticed my name was just gone from the masthead.

The public trust is falling away

This newsletter’s subscribers will know that I tend towards the school of thought that observes the decline in the public’s trust of the news media this way: It serves us right. There is a cultural subset of the management caste that tends to be wholly disconnected with the concerns and the values of ordinary, “normal” Canadians, and that subset is deeply entrenched in legacy media. I will insist, though, that this comes down from management, as well as from sideways, from the universities’ journalism faculties.

This past summer, the Reuters Institute found that only 39 percent of Canadians trust the conventional news media - that’s a 16-point decline from just a decade ago. That decline has lately run in tandem with the rise of direct and indirect federal subsidies to news organizations and news start-ups, which isn’t exactly helping. But those subsidies cannot and have not offset the decline in revenues: According to the Global Media and Internet Concentration Project (GMIC), by 2023 conventional news organizations captured only six percent of Canada’s $16.6 billion online advertising market.

So, declines in public trust, declines in profitability and staffing, the obliteration of entire media institutions of long standing, the rise in public subsidies, the proliferation of non-conventional news and information sources. . . Cause and effect lines between these phenomena run in several directions and spin around in feedback loops, all at once.

It’s a perfect storm that gives a dramatic and distinct advantage to malign foreign state actors, their propaganda machines and their influence campaigns.

The mass media today is not what it was a decade ago.

By 2023, (Google), Meta (Facebook), and Amazon controlled 89 percent of Canada’s $16.6 billion online advertising market. This is the strange new hegemony that dominates the mass media now: Elon Musk’s X, China’s Weibo and Wechat, the Kremlin’s various RT networks, a variety of Third Worldist platforms, Al Jazeera, Tiktok, the proliferation of newsroom simulacra, podcasters, Youtubers, and “influencers” of one type or another.

And almost overnight, for the first time, Chatbots and AI innovations like Google AI, Musk’s Grok and Deepseek are all being relied upon as sources of news. They are all notoriously unreliable.

Deepseek is a popular chatbot because it’s cheap, but try asking Deepseek about Taiwan or Tienanmen. You’d get a combination of blank space and the Chinese Communist Party’s point of view, because it’s Chinese. Google AI isn’t so much a propaganda device as just a profoundly untrustworthy news aggregator.

In a study coordinated with the BBC, the European Broadcasting Union reviewed the trustworthiness of ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity. Gemini was the worst, with 45 percent of query responses resulting in at least one major error, and facts conflated with opinion in 81 percent of the queries. Elon Musk’s Grok may be especially notorious for its reliance on questionable and discredited sources.

Just three weeks ago the British think tank the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) asked OpenAI, ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Musk’s Grok and Deepseek 300 questions in five languages about the war in Ukraine. All failed. ChatGPT relied on three times more Russian sources for biased or malicious prompts than for neutral questions. Musk’s Grok provided the highest number of Russian sources, even when asked neutral questions.

China is winning. So is Russia. Same thing anyway.

I’m going to skip over a lot of material covered in the Hogue Commission report and various CSIS analyses demonstrating the ubiquity and malicious effectiveness of Beijing’s network of influencers and pseudo journalists in Chinese-language media in Canada. But do look it up. Maybe especially the testimony from Victor Ho, former editor of Sing Tao daily. It will give you an idea about how much we’ve lost.

I don’t think I need to repeat what we now know about Beijing’s efforts to monkeywrench the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, and the WeChat campaigns mounted against certain Conservative candidates, and specifically against former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole.

China is winning the global culture wars. China is winning the trade wars. China is winning globally because the United States is indispensable, and Donald Trump’s White House has alienated every last one of America’s traditional allies, and in the “truce” Trump recently concluded with Xi Jinping, Beijing was left holding all the important cards.

China is winning the race against the United States in Canada - among ordinary Canadians. Only 35 percent of Canadians now see China as an enemy or a threat, new Angus Reid polling shows, compared to 45 percent of Canadians who see the United States as an enemy or a threat.

But all that’s all for another newsletter. I’m not even going to get into Trump’s latest “peace” plan with Putin, which leaves knives in the back of Ukraine and Europe. At least we can say we know now - and we don’t have to rely on conjecture or speculation - that Trump is on Putin’s side.

Final point. A time of profound epistemic incoherence

All of these upheavals in the space formerly occupied by conventional journalism are occurring during a deep crisis within the world’s liberal democracies, particularly in the Anglosphere.

Modes of thinking and reasoning that have served us well since the Dawn of the Enlightenment are giving way, on the right and on the left. They’re crumbling against the forces of post-truth Trumpism and against a postmodern “problematization” of truth. Real Story subscribers will know that an enduring concern of mine is the substitution of knowledge with belief, the replacement of what we can say we know with what we are expected to unquestionably believe.

The way I’ve tried to put it is that it’s not just that truth doesn’t seem to matter anymore, it’s that it doesn’t seem to matter that the truth doesn’t matter anymore.

To make matters worse, the impoverished state of the institutions of journalism provides a perverse incentive for journalists to hastily construe events in such a way as to uphold one or another ideologically rigid “narrative” than to go about the hard work of building true stories from the verifiable facts of the known world.

When you’re expected to churn out copy to meet deadlines for a news organization with a dramatically depleted and overworked news staff, it’s just the easier way to go. All the worst excesses of Foucauldian subjectivity and impenetrable critical-theory rationalizations are met and matched by their right-wing equivalents, which comprehend the conflation of fact and fiction to “own the libs” as a kind of post-literate innovation in political authenticity.

In the blink of an eye we’ve gone from “the facts don’t really matter” to “it doesn’t really matter that facts don’t matter.”

This is a phenomenon that is fatally corrosive to the fact-gathering and verification disciplines journalists have always relied upon to demonstrate their trustworthiness in the development of broad societal agreement about what constitutes the truth. It is fatally corrosive to journalism, and to the institutions of liberal democracy.

But no, I’m not going to retreat into some forested redoubt at the end of a dirt road in a remote valley somewhere to compose manifestos. I did that already. The manifesto is in the very first edition of the Real Story newsletter. It’s right here.