Media has been suffering from a trust crisis for years, yet Kirk LaPointe’s effort does nothing to solve this problem.
One of the longstanding problems for mainstream media is the fact that trust in them continues to hit rock bottom. This isn’t just my own opinion or the opinion of a particular political party. This has been repeatedly been the findings with study after study after study.
One of the big reasons why I have long believed that trust in the media is because the content the mainstream media produces regularly is absolute garbage packed full of misinformation, disinformation, and otherwise working to distort reality rather than offer a clear reflection of it. If you can regularly demonstrate that a news article produced by a mainstream media source, then, at minimum, the perception of the mainstream media is that they have hidden agendas, have axes to grind, and otherwise no better than your average random person writing random posts on Facebook. That’s simply the harsh reality of it all.
Now, trying to restore that trust is going to be a monumental and difficult task. It’s going to take a long time for that to happen and it would require a full reset mainstream media has with the public at large. This includes dropping the attitude that the mainstream media knows everything and the audience, the plebs, know nothing. After all, the mainstream media doesn’t have the level of exclusivity of knowledge they once had. It also includes not trying to provide political cover for right wing politicians (i.e. the famous efforts to sanewash Donald Trump). I really could go on.
Well, apparently, Kirk LaPointe of Business Intelligence tried taking a crack at restoring trust in the mainstream media. So, what did LaPointe try to do in this monumental task of restoring trust in the mainstream media? Simply put, he apparently decided that it’s clearly the audience who is wrong on this whole issue and that all that is needed is to rewrite the journalism code of ethics. No really, that’s what his approach was:
But never has journalism been more on the defensive, never has trust in them been so low, and never have misconceptions about the craft so contributed to a disconnection between newsmaker and newsbearer. The B.C. election was frustrating for reporters on both major campaigns.
For the consumption of the politician seeking office, the entrepreneur seeking riches, the athlete seeking admiration or the artist seeking acclaim, I’d like to present a few tips from the standpoint of the reporter, derived from our codes of ethics and guidelines. (Yes, we have them.)
I think this really highlights, yet again, the level of arrogance that the mainstream media has towards everything. As I’ve noted for many months now, the problem here is that the mainstream media honestly believes that they are perfect in every way. They do no wrong. As such, if the public doesn’t trust the mainstream media, then it’s clearly the public who are in the wrong, not the mainstream media. After all, you can’t fault the perfect in every way journalists that work at mainstream media outlets (or the structure they work under) because they aren’t the ones in the wrong. It’s clearly the audience’s fault for failing to trust them in every way.
Fundamentally, the problem isn’t that the public doesn’t understand that the journalists that write the stories work under a set of rules. The problem is that the public understands that the journalists in question work under a set of rules, but choose to throw that rule book in the trash. That is a fundamental difference that LaPointe is failing to acknowledge here.
A great example of the mainstream media breaking the rules is Big Lie 1.0. The lie the mainstream media told at the time was distilled down to this (yes, this is a direct quote from one of the mainstream media outlets):
Bill C-18 is designed to require web giants to compensate journalism publications for reposting their content.
There are, of course, variations of this lie. This includes the accusation that platforms “scrape” whole news articles from publishers websites without permission. Another variation is that platforms take whole articles, slap ads on them, and repost those articles onto their platforms without permission. One more example was the notorious poster that the lobbying organization that represents mainstream media released at the time:
Regardless of the variation, they all have one thing in common: it was all a lie. It wasn’t a lie produced by one outlet or maybe two or three, but rather, almost every mainstream media outlet was pushing this exact same lie – and blasting it in their respective megaphones nearly constantly during the Bill C-18 debate (and even after the law was passed). Perhaps the most egregious part about this lie is the fact that it was very obvious that the mainstream media outlets knew full well that this was a lie. They intentionally lied to the public for their own perceived financial gain. Further, not one source that pushed this lie backed it up by evidence of any kind.
So, the question is, how do I know that they knew they were lying about all of this? For one, this is their business. Journalists know full well the value of having links to their content shared on social media (it brings in audiences for one).
For another, countless transparency reports on Meta show that mainstream media outlets, prior to the Online News Act becoming law, took out advertising. In other words, in the warped and distorted variation of how the world works, mainstream media outlets were literally paying Meta to “steal” their content. It makes absolutely no sense, yet a look at, say, the National Post and their transparency report clearly shows that they are paying Meta to “steal” their content. Even if you somehow subscribe to the notion that linking is stealing (seriously, what is wrong with you if you think that?), don’t you think that such activity is rather curious?
Now, you tell me where it says in the journalism code of ethics that it is permissible to knowingly lie to the public. I doubt that’s in there.
I could go on and one about other examples, such as the sane washing (or otherwise providing political cover) of Donald Trump, the blaming of social media for, well, everything, attacking video games as being the devil, or how millennial’s have killed everything, but re-litigating the past isn’t necessarily the point of this article. Instead, I’m merely providing examples of how the rules surrounding journalists have effectively been ignored and readers end up getting highly distorted views of reality as a result of this activity.
LaPointe went on in his article to basically “mansplain” how their code of ethics work. Here’s a sample of that:
1. A responsible reporter is here as the public’s surrogate, neither a person with an axe to grind nor an extension of your publicity arm, and is expected to pose questions the public would want answered. These questions may not be the questions you wanted, but if you seek publicity, you have to accept the publicity others will provide you. It’s too bad for you if the questions are about something else. At times these questions are offside or inappropriate, but in my experience much more often than not the difficulties in handling them have to do with the newsmaker’s ill-preparedness or evasiveness than with the underlying attitude of the journalist.
2. You may believe you’re in charge of the encounter, but you’re not. The line of questioning is the choice of the journalist, not yours, and your refusal to answer questions is perceived (usually correctly) as dodginess that you can expect to be reported. Admittedly, this is often where both parties – the reluctant subject and the persistent interrogator – lose points with audiences on either side of an issue.
3. If you choose to provide an interview or present a news conference, don’t simply rehearse the messages you want to transmit. Anticipate your vulnerabilities and have answers for the most uncomfortable of them.
4. It’s fine when you’re asked a question to say you don’t know the answer, that you’ll try to find it if the reporter would like you to, and get back by the deadline. It’s fine to say you choose not to comment if asked, but explain why. It’s not fine to not respond.
It’s fine and dandy to point out how journalism should work, but the problem is that it’s increasingly clear that this is not how mainstream media journalism works today. More often, we, the public, see examples of how the media is choosing to tell you how to think rather than explaining the facts. When politicians the mainstream media clearly support speak, the ensuing report afterwards is increasingly telling the public how the politician wants you to think. Same goes for businesses.
Just look at the mainstream media’s coverage of strikes, for instance. How often is it what the employer wants you to think (disruptions to the economy) and not what the issues the employees are fighting for (wages, benefits, working conditions, economic realities, etc.). I can’t even recall a time when I saw a mainstream media report delved into the economic reasons why employees are demanding what they are demanding. If anything, I hear about how the employees are being “greedy” or how the demands are “unfair” more than anything else. Mainstream media has plenty of opportunities to go into what the issues are about and the thinking on both sides, yet mysteriously, they repeatedly fail to do so.
If all of this wasn’t enough, another thing to watch out for is the heavy handed influence of corporate owners of mainstream media outlets. That was fully laid bare late last month when editorial boards and journalists were gearing up to showcase their endorsement to presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. In response, the ownership of those media outlets vetoed that effort, silencing the journalists in question. This sparked resignations and waves of subscription cancellations. The situation was so nuclear, Jeff Bezos got a piece published trying to defend those actions.
The story echoes the 2022 controversy when mainstream media outlets were vetoing editorials that happened to be critical towards Bill C-18. This despite getting editorial approval.
Both of these scandals showcased to a brilliant degree that corporate ownership does influence the coverage of the respective newspapers. This isn’t just the general speculation that right wing billionaires are buying up and reshaping the coverage (though there is some pretty compelling evidence of that), but rather, definitive proof that this is really happening.
The image of a mega millionaire sitting behind the curtain vetoing coverage he or she doesn’t happen to like is extremely corrosive to public trust in media in general. Point to the rules that journalists should follow all you like, that’s not going to do a damn thing to counter what the public have already witnessed going on in news rooms.
To trivialize the issue of trust in the media as the public simply not understanding what rules are in place for journalists completely misses the point of why the public has lost trust in the mainstream media. If anything, it insults their intelligence. If someone walks up to a journalist and says, “I can’t trust your coverage anymore”, and the journalist responds by saying, “Well, you’re just too stupid to understand journalism then”, how is that person going suddenly trust that journalist afterwards? It makes no sense at all.
LaPointe ultimately concludes with this paragraph:
I could go on, but I hope these points help dispel some myths and set some records straight. At least I’ve tried.
To that, I say that no, you’re not helping. You tried and you failed pretty spectacularly. If anything, you confirmed why people don’t trust the mainstream media. You misdiagnosed the cause of a lack of trust in the mainstream media, blamed your audience, and showed how much the mainstream media ultimately lives in its own world where facts hardly matter when personal ego and the corporate finances reigns supreme.
