The news for the news media isn’t great.
A steady stream of surveys are finding that public trust in news outlets is on the decline. A recent report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, for example, found that only 37 per cent of Canadians trust the news overall, which was down from 55 per cent a decade ago.
Many of the news media’s problems are self-inflicted, but some of them are also the product of forces we talk a lot about here – corporatization, consolidation and, yes, enshittification. It’s just another industry that has problems stemming from giant companies extracting profits at the expense of everything else.
Tara Henley is a journalist who went viral in 2022 after she left CBC and criticized the institution for how far it had strayed from objectivity. She has spent the past few years focusing on these issues through her Substack, Lean Out.
Now, she has focused all of that research and commentary into a new book, The Trust Spiral: Why the Media Needs Objectivity, which covers both the internal and external failures that are showing up as these concerning survey statistics.
Her book is a sober diagnosis of what has gone wrong, as well as a plain prescription for how the news media can restore the public’s faith in it. She joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to talk about the trust spiral and how to reverse it.
Check out Tara’s Substack here and her new book here.
