The state of news media in Newfoundland and Labrador - 1988 #nlpoli

Some observations on the state of the news media in Newfoundland and Labrador, circa 1988, from Dr. Susan McCorquodale,  "Newfoundland:  personality, party, and politics" in Gary Levy and Graham White, editors, Provincial and territorial legislatures in Canada, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1989)

Those who write about the relationship between politics and the press worry about such things as ownership concentration, or about the tendency of reporters to end up in comfortable public relations jobs with government.  For many years St John's was one of the few cities of its size to have two daily newspapers, both largely locally owned and operated. Today there is one daily, and it has been owned by the Thomson chain since 1970. It has become a newspaper which has gradually lost its 'bustle, resources and guts.'  Ironically, the author of this judgment, Michael Harris, is today editor-in-chief of a new weekly newspaper, locally owned, which has become a thorn in the side of the Peckford  administration to such a degree that the government has withdrawn all public advertisements from the paper and generally attempts to deny access to its reporters. In recent years regional weeklies have appeared, generally printed by one firm with feeds from the Telegram. For most of the media, news originates with the press release, the press conference, or the daily sittings of the House of Assembly. Generally, owners have not made the resources available for any sort of investigative reporting, and most journalists lack training and experience.

...

 As we have already noted, some twelve or thirteen of the cabinet ministers are authorized to hire press secretaries. The pay range is good, between $30,000 and $40,000*. Many of them are just out of journalism schools, and a few have been attracted away from the local media. The fear is that if the links become too close, the independence of the reporters is compromised by the possibility of civil service jobs. Added to this is some concern about the balance between the skills and resources of government and those of the local media. The journalists would seem to be on the weaker side.

-srbp-

*Roughly equivalent to $52,000 to $74,000 in 2020.  In 2019,  departmental directors of communication (comparable to 1980s-era press secretaries) earned between $78,000 and $102,000 with the Premier's Director of Communications drawing a salary of $121,000.

The New Colonialists #nlpoli

The New Colonialists
don't look like the old ones

The last day of September is known as Orange Shirt Day.

It is a day to remember residential schools for Indigenous people, which, as the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission said in its final report, “were a systematic, government-sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples.”

Across Newfoundland and Labrador, schools featured special events to tell the story of residential schools in Canada. CBC Newfoundland and Labrador ran two stories, one of which was written by a young journalist from Labrador whose grandmothers attended a residential school. His first sentence is both evocative and typical of the emotion that accompanies stories of residential schools.

“For years, the Lockwood School in Cartwright housed Indigenous children taken from their homes all in the name of "killing the Indian within the child."

Another of these “localizer” pieces – ones that give a local angle to a national or international story – explained that “[r]residential schools were established by the Canadian government in the 1800s, with a guiding policy that has been called ‘aggressive assimilation.’ The federal government sought to teach Indigenous children English and have them adopt Christianity and Canadian customs, and pass that — rather than Indigenous culture — down to their children.”  That one was written by a journalist from northern Ontario now living in St. John’s.

In 2017,  CBC reported on Justin Trudeau’s apology to Indigenous people in Labrador for the treatment they received in residential schools.   The CBC story at the time explained that “[b]etween 1949 and 1979, thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their communities to attend five residential schools that were run by the International Grenfell Association or Moravians.”

There’s only one problem with these stories: they aren’t about residential schools in Newfoundland and Labrador.

These stories about Canadian residential schools are imposed on something different, namely the schools in Newfoundland and Labrador, without acknowledging the meaningful difference.

The two are distinctly different.

All the news the mob will let us print #nlpoli

Saltwire laid off a hundred or so people last week, 25 of them in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The most recent cuts are the result of revenue drops due to COVID but Saltwire has been hacking and slashing at its operations across the region since buying up a raft of dailies and weeklies from TransCon a few years ago.   In Newfoundland and Labrador, The Telegram is the only daily left.  The rest - more than 15 dailies and weeklies – have been closed.  Their replacements are a couple of weekly freebie mailbox-stuffers.  Editorially, Saltwire is now well on the way to becoming the same thing: a generic content generator with a local label slapped on it. 

To appreciate what is going on here, you only have to look at The Telegram’s circulation.  The public only has ready access to data for about a decade  - 2008-2016  and  2015 – 2018 -  but that, coupled with a bit of recollection from a veteran observer of local news media, gives an idea of the dramatic decline of print media.

The Telegram’s paid circulation dropped about 60% to 65% between 2008 and 2018, the last year for which we have figures.  Monday to Friday, the paper has dropped from between 25,000 daily subscribers on average to about 10,000 in 2018.   The weekend edition is currently around 14,000 paid down from 41,000 in 2008. 

Trends #nlpoli

How do you keep in place the very necessary and successful restrictions on public life needed to combat the spread of CVD19 when the success of those measures reduces the local daily number of active cases either to zero or to a handful and hence the threat appears to have passed?

In the 15 years I’ve been writing SRBP, the one enduring feature of public discussion about my writing happened again this week, in spades.

People come at me on social media about what is going on in their own heads and attribute that to me.

They don’t deal with the point I was actually making.  They deal with whatever they imagine I said.  And no amount of explanation will dissuade them from their crusade to shut me up or take me down or do whatever it is they are hell-bent on doing besides understanding my point and then having a productive conversation.

On Monday and Tuesday, I wrote about the very real political dilemma facing the current government.  It’s the one spelled out in the first sentence of this post.  I thought it would come in a couple weeks.  It appears to have arrived Tuesday.

So much for forecasts.

John Haggie is already frustrated that people are not listening.  On Tuesday, I told him the government need to ditch the current daily briefing format and messaging for something else that was less patronizing.  In the Tuesday briefing, Haggie delivered his stock message but did it for merely 53-odd seconds before taking questions.

Not really the point, but if the current trends continue, as they seem likely to do, then we will likely also see the mounting public pressure to ease restrictions on life in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The federal government is already talking to the provinces about the return to something approaching normal with the mention of re-opening the economy.  The economy never shut so what they are using is a code word for easing up the limitations on the public.  Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island and some others will undoubtedly do so by the end of this month or early next month.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, though we will have to think twice about that.  Our two bordering provinces – Nova Scotia and Quebec – are still fighting a hot war against the spread of the disease.  The risk of infection across the border is real.  New Brunswick will face the same challenge.

The challenge for the - quite literally – two or three people effectively running the government in Newfoundland and Labrador will be holding off that political pressure and sustaining restrictions because the threat of disease will remain.  The situation of needing to do something unpopular will not be unprecedented.  We have lots of experience recently with it. Every time, the politicians have failed.

Will the trend continue?

Time will tell.

-srbp-

Unformation #nlpoli

Changes in the news media,  changes in the audience, and changes in what information organizations provide to the pubic have created the Unformation Age.  Information  -  facts, figures, data - is less important than unsubstantiated opinion assembled to serve a temporary purpose and often lacking coherence over time. This is the abandonment of  a common means of assembling information coherently that affects all aspects of society.  

"Deep Dive" is the name that Saltwire gives to its new series that is supposed to give readers more information on specific topics that are of concern across the Atlantic Canada.  

The series gives Saltwire a way to produce unique content using all its resources in Atlantic Canada, thereby lowering the burden on any one newsroom.  Saltwire hopes the Deep Dives will generate new income for the chain. In future, Deep Dives will be accessible only to subscribers.  The rest of us will be blocked by a paywall.  

It's a business model that has worked successfully at major newspapers, which have either halted declining revenue from subscriptions using paywalls or seen revenue growth to offset the losses from the old cash-cow advertising.

It might work.  The real question is whether Saltwire will produce the content that will make readers dig into their pockets.

So that makes you wonder how deep is the deep dive?

Spin, bias, or just wrong? #nlpoli

If four media outlets all reported a story in precisely the same way despite some fairly obvious factual problems with their interpretation,  is it spin, bias, or just a mistake?

That's the logical question out of last week's post on the way local newsrooms had reported a recent political poll about premiers and popularity.

The answer is that it is more than a mistake.  It is less than spin.  There doesn't appear to be a deliberate misinterpretation.

Yet what happened is a form of bias, in the same sense that a research firm would look at bias as a source of error. 

The causes are not partisan.

They are systemic,  identifiable, and correctable.

But the story presented is incomplete and  therefore inaccurately describes what the poll results show.

Conventional media bias #nlpoli

You know what "spin" is, right?

Spin is a biased interpretation of something to favour one side or the other.

You get spin when someone uses an interpretation of an event or information in order to modify the perception of an issue or event, particularly to either increase or decrease any negative impact on opinion.

Some people think it is only comes from public relations people.

Or maybe politicians.

But never the news media.

Spin happens in many places since you can find all sorts of people interpreting things in a way that favours their pet position or that harms an opponent.

Tek, for example the number of people - especially in politics - who have been running around the past few weeks saying that Dwight Ball is the third most popular premier in Canada. They are mostly Liberals and they have been furiously retweeting that idea.

But that's spin.  Pure and simple.

Except it didn't come from the Liberal Party.

Well, where did it come from then?

Well, there's a tale.

The information the idea is based on came from an Angus Reid poll.  The opinion research company asked a sample of Canadians in every province except Prince Edward Island what they thought about the local Premier.

In Newfoundland and Labrador,  42% gave Dwight Ball a favourable rating.  In a chart Angus Reid used to illustrate the story,  they showed the approval ratings from highest to lowest,  left to right.  

There's Dwight Ball,  third from the left, which is third from the top.

Third most popular.

Well,  no.

Angus Reid was careful to describe their results fairly and accurately.  After noting that only two Premiers actually had the support of a majority of those polled in their province,  Angus Reid said this about Dwight Ball and the rest of the Premiers who - take note - had a majority who *dis*-approved of their performance.

In a pack where the premiers with the best approval ratings aren’t exactly overwhelmingly endorsed by people in their respective provinces, the story for the rest of Canada’s premiers, even those with positive momentum, is hardly jubilant.

Just over two-in-five (42%) are pleased with the job Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Dwight Ball is doing. This represents a seven point increase for Ball, as his government announces plans for a new public health act in the forthcoming budget and implements a new policy to take on workplace harassment. This, in addition to the government’s inquiry into Nalcor Energy’s unpopular Muskrat Falls project, may be playing in Ball’s favour, as he rises for the second consecutive quarter.

Out of every five people surveyed by Angus Reid,  two approved of Dwight Ball's performance as Premier.

Only two.

Three did not. 

In fact, if you click on the link to get the full results from Angus Reid,  you find that 49% of respondents disapproved of Ball's performance and only 10% had no answer.

So where did this "third most popular" idea come from?

Conventional news media.

CBC ran a story that had as its headline "Dwight Ball 3rd most popular premier in Angus Reid poll."  The front end of the story focused on the change in Ball's approval over the past year, which is accurate,  but ended up with the "third-most-popular" claim. 

At the end of the story,  CBC tossed in a completely unrelated fact that in a Corporate Research Poll 41% of respondents said they would vote Liberal, as if the similarity of the two numbers was enough to connect two different questions (job approval versus party support).

In Newfoundland and Labrador, they are two very different questions, as CRA's polling has shown.  Support for Ball and the Liberals has not been tracking the same over time.  Ball's actually been behind his party in popular support for a chunk of the past year.  Didn't like the leader.  Would vote for the party.  Not an unusual response at all,  but the two things are not synchronised.  The leader and party questions are separate.  That's why it was a problem for CBC to muddle the two together.

Saltwire - that is, the Telegram and its family of papers - ran a headline that Ball had seen a jump in his approval, which is true,  and used the "third-most popular premier" as it's sub-head. The story quoted Angus Reid word-for-word on the bit about two-in-five respondents but you had to read down a way to get to that.  

NTV's story referred to Ball as the premier with the third-best rating.  Their report on the previous Angus Reid poll, in which Ball's position relative to other Premiers was identical,  notes merely that his position improved over time.  That poll-over-poll improvement is noted in all the stories and it is probably the most accurate way to describe the results.

VOCM also reported Ball was the "third most popular" Premier in the country. 

No one in either of the four newsrooms checked the full poll result. None of them even did the simple logical inference that if 42% approved of Ball,  then the rest didn't.  They certainly didn't notice that 42% was less than half.  

Instead, they just looked at the same chart they saw the last time from Angus Reid (below) and picked the "third-most popular" as their headline.

They also didn't notice the size of Dwight Ball's change is quite large and that it was large for the second time in a row.  look at Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and you will see similar big jumps in a relatively short span.  A 15 point jump in six months is pretty steep in a province where there's been no similar major shift in public opinion detected by any other polling firm.

Might be a problem with the poll.

Nope.

Ball is third most popular.

Except Ball isn't popular.

Only two Premiers had a majority support and could be reasonably considered popular.

Seven Premiers all had more residents who didn't approve of their performance, which seems to be a bigger part of the overall story.  Angus Reid presented its information that way.

You could have reasonably focused on the fact Ball's rating had jumped again by a fairly hefty amount even if the back to back big jumps look dodgy.

But to say he is the third most popular is... well... wrong.

If you want to know how people are misinformed, there's a really fine case study.  No conspiracy.  No collusion.  Apparently, not even an organised effort by the government officials of the type we used to see in this province between 2003 and 2010 to control the flow of information, to influence media stories, and manipulate public opinion. 

Nope.

Just a bunch of people who all got the story wrong in exactly the same way.

Some might would argue that spin has to be a deliberate choice but frankly, that's just spin. Truth is that spin is a form of bias.  There are all sorts of biases.  Something like a shared perspective among people doing the same sort of work in a small place can cause a wrong interpretation of events to reinforce itself.  After all, the folks in the local newsrooms all keep an eye on each other during the day. They talk among themselves.  Once the first story hit the air and the others heard the same general line, they would inevitably confirm their interpretation and get on to the next task.

Except, they all got it wrong.

-srbp-

*Revised 11:00 AM 02 Apr 18 to clarify sentences in the introduction

Don't blame me (-dia) #nlpoli

Now that Muskrat Falls is officially a boondoggle,  all sorts of people are rushing forward to criticise it.

Others are also rushing forward to ensure we all know that they were on the side of the angels back in the day and so, as Brian Jones pleads this weekend in the Telegram, we shouldn’t “blame the media for Muskrat Falls.”

For the past year and a half,  Brian tells us,  people whom he calls “trolls” have been writing and calling him to ask why the local media did not reveal all the details about Muskrat Falls as the thing was unfolding.

“I always point out a basic fact,”  Brian says,  that “ the Newfoundland media, not just The Telegram, have covered every aspect of Muskrat Falls since at least 2010.”

Wonderful if it was a fact, but no.

Not a fact.

Junk reporting of medical research

The Telegraph is a major conventional newspaper in the United Kingdom.

And it spreads fake news.

There's nothing surprising in that. Most conventional news organisations produce some amount of pure nonsense in the course of a year.  The crap content level varies from outlet to outlet and the people who work hard in pretty well every conventional news outlet also work diligently to get stories right.

But excrement seeps through.

It's a Law of Averages thing.

Anyway...

A week and a verdict later #nlpoli

Last Saturday, this headline (left) in the Telegram prompted a storm of outrage from people who thought that it placed the blame for a sexual assault on the victim.

The words were essentially what the victim had said during her testimony in the trial.  They were also a more blunt version of what both the Telegram story and CBC's story said.

If the victim had been too drunk to recall details of what had happened the night of the assault, then logically she was too drunk to consent.

The jury of five women and six men delivered their verdict Friday.  They found accused attacker - a police officer, on duty at the time of the assault - to be not guilty of the assault.  A group gathered on the steps of the courthouse on Friday night protesting the verdict.

One of them carried a sign that was astonishing in light of the screams of outrage the week before at the Telegram headline.  The sign read "Too drunk to consent."

The headline and the subsequent controversy didn't have an impact on the verdict but the headline and the sign make an interesting contradiction.

-srbp-

The Mythical Golden Age of Newfoundland News #nlpoli

Ray Guy, on the endless search for truth in local newsrooms (circa 1974):

Sometimes you get the feeling that the newsrooms of the city are as divorced from reality as the earth is distant from the sun. Their almost exclusive stock-in-trade has become the reports of speeches, seminars, election campaigns, council meetings, legislative shenanigans, endless press releases…  All that is planned news, programmed news, bloodless mimeographed news, which touches not at all on the endless swirl of the sometimes-grubby, sometimes-heartening day-to-day life in the streets outside.

-srbp- 

S'truth and consequences #nlpoli

Truth and something else was clearly in the atmosphere this week as the Telegram's Russell Wangersky offered a few thoughts on the subject in his Tuesday column.

But if we reach a point where anything true can be discounted, and anything false can be announced as true, where do we go to ensure that we’re making the best decisions on everything from voting to retirement savings to whether our school system is working?

"If we reach a point."

Seriously.

As if in Newfoundland and Labrador, that point remains somewhere in the future.

As if the point  - where false is true and truth is not merely discounted but savagely attacked  - was not already a receding dot in the rearview mirror.

And, for the record, what Russell calls "the weakening, cash-strapped traditional media" played an essential role in pressing the heavy foot of government excess even harder on the accelerator in order to make the dot smaller.

Trust, facts, and truth #nlpoli

Trust is the foundation of any strong relationship.  That's why a great many journalists, troubled at the decline of their industry, emphasise the importance of trust in re-establishing a solid relationship between the news media and the folks who used to be their captive market.

Canadian and American news media are in a comparable position of trust with their respective audiences.  A 2016 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 22% of Americans have a lot of trust in local news organizations and 60% said they had some trust. (82% total) National media fared a little worse:  only 18% of respondents trusted them a lot while 59% had some trust in national media. (77%)

In its 2016 survey on Canadians and trust, Environics found that 44% of respondents trust Canada's conventional news media as an industry. About 50% said that editorial content - either major conventional media or online news sites - was their first choice as a source of information. Fully 53% picked the websites of major conventional news media as their first choice for information online.

Neither Canadians nor Americans are particularly inclined to trust social media. Pew found that only four percent of Americans trusted social media a lot. 30% trusted social media somewhat as a source of information.  Environics found that 31% of Canadians used their Facebook news feed as the first, second, or third preferred source for current news.  Only eight percent of that was as a first choice.  Bloggers: 14% in total and only three percent as a first choice for current news.

Conventional news media:  69% of Canadians want their news from them, with 38% ranking it as their first choice for current news.

So there you have it, journalists. The numbers aren't directly comparable but there's enough pf a similarity to come to the conclusion that Captain Sweatpants is not eating your lunch on either side of the border.

Captain Sweatpants and the future of news media #nlpoli

The numbers are so large they take your breath away.

In a poll conducted for The Public Policy Forum for its recent report on Canadian news media, eight "out of 10 respondents said they actively follow the news (with education, not age, being the main determinant)."  As pollster Allan Gregg noted in an article for Policy Options, 93% of respondents to that poll said people get "more news today, more quickly and frequently than we ever have in the past."

And yet half of them had no idea that conventional media was facing a financial crisis so severe that many current media outlets are likely to vanish in the months and years ahead.

Doesn't fit together.  Doesn't make sense.  You just can't have all those people wired in and miss a story that was quite literally in all the newspapers,  on radio, and on television.

Doesn't make sense unless people aren't paying as much attention as they say.

The Classroom Jungle #nlpoli

CBC aired the first  of three half hour programs on Monday night featuring a bunch of teachers talking about problems in the Newfoundland and Labrador school system.  The rest will come along over the next couple of weeks.

To be perfectly clear, CBC claims ownership of the programs but, by the looks of things, CBC had very little to do with the program content, at least in the first one. The provincial teachers union picked the people to appear and covered their travel, meals, and accommodations for one Saturday to record the three 30-minute programs.

It's an absolute fascinating insight into how news media have changed in a very short space of time. 

What is it about Quebec and mass killings? #nlpoli

Compared to the United States, there haven't been a lot of mass killings in Canada.

Period.  Full stop.

Canada is predominantly white and Christian and researchers tell us that across the world, men are usually the perpetrators of mass killings.  That's why what CBC's Neil Macdonald calls an inconvenient truth is really a penetrating insight into the obvious. Telling us that Canadian mass killers are white, male, and Christian is like saying that in Sweden, the mass killers are usually male blond protestants or that in China they are unlikely to be Africans.

Local news media in the post-factual world #nlpoli

Chris O'Neill-Yates is a veteran CBC journalist.  Like most people in her line of work,  Chris is on Twitter plugging both her own work and commenting on events in the world around her.

Not surprisingly, Chris has been fascinated  - appalled might be a better word for it - by events in the United States over the past year.  "Global media will face [a] credibility challenge in the next four years,"  O'Neill-Yates tweeted one day around Christmas. "There'll be those who report facts and those who report nonsense."

A Telegram editorial last week also chimed in on the issue of facts, in the way of even more recent events in the United States.

The message is clear: the media is now dealing with a situation where some believe they can simply make things up. 

We have to be more careful than ever to be accurate. We also have to be ready to clearly identify and call out both mistakes and lies for what they are, when they occur. 

We want you to consider the source, and not find us wanting.

Oh dear.

Ratings trump truth: Justified edition #nlpoli

Updated (scroll to the -srbp-)

Someone in Gander Bay has been catching and selling quantities of smelt.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans received complaints,  conducted in investigation, and laid charges against an adult who they caught in the act of selling fish to a fellow who turned out to be an undercover fisheries officer.  The basis of the charge is that it is illegal to catch and sell fish without a licence.

Now that you have those simple facts , take a look at the way CBC presented the story.

Ratings trump truth #nlpoli

Sometimes the universe delivers you the magical set of circumstances you just can't ignore.

Danny Williams turned up at the St. John's Board of Trade luncheon on Thursday to deliver a speech the day before Donald Trump's inauguration as president.  As much as people might like to forget,  this was a great reminder of just how much Williams and Trump are the same kind of politician.

The board of trade booked Williams because he will sell tickets.  And in the same way, the local media turned out in droves for Williams.  They treated him just as they have always treated him and that's our story for today.

Williams delivers to electronic news media what Trump does: ratings. Fox and CNN adore Trump just like VOCM and CBC television followed every one of Williams' gaseous emissions.  He drew the audience.

The difference is that while CNN news anchors are routinely critical of Trump and even Fox might take the odd poke at the president-elect, the local media have typically  handled Williams and his most ludicrous claims as if they were holy writ.  Folks who think the Canadian media would fact-check a Trumpish politician out of office can look no further than the way the locals recited Danny's lines almost verbatim.

The real news in one sentence #nlpoli

According to its supporters, we need to have a special office for search and rescue in St. John's because Newfoundlanders spoke English so poorly that no one could understand us.

Lives would be in jeopardy because Merv Wiseman lost his job. Wiseman was one of the loudest critics of the federal government's 2013 decision to close the Maritime Rescue Sub-Centre.

That's the full extent of the argument advanced by Wiseman,  then-member of parliament Jack Harris, and a raft of others.  There were all sorts of hysterical claims about the decision, including the old chestnut that the evil Stephen Harper Conservatives were punishing the people of the province for something or other.

Well, the federal Liberals have promised to put the office back.  It will take them another two eyars, meaning that we will have a total of five years without it.