Opinion | Carol Off: I hosted one of Canada’s most popular radio shows for 16 years. I’ve watched us descend into conflicting realities — here’s how we get out
Updated 6 hrs ago
Sept. 19, 2024
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Carol Off’s new book is “At a Loss for Words.”
Paige Taylor White The Canadian
By Carol Off, Contributor
Carol Off is a veteran journalist and for sixteen years was the host of CBC Radio’s As it Happens. Her latest book is "At A Loss For Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage."
In all my years as a journalist, and then as the longtime host of CBC’s As It Happens, where my job was to talk nightly to the people making the news or caught up in its repercussions, I’ve never experienced a time in which the notion of truth has been so mistrusted. Yet reaching a shared understanding of the truth of any situation is fundamental to our security, our politics, our trust in our neighbours. Not surprisingly, the ancient Greeks and Romans had both a word for and a profound grasp of the concept of truth, to go along with their unique understanding of democracy and freedom. The Greek goddess Aletheia, whose name means truth, represented the word’s merits as the Greeks saw them. The Romans had Veritas, also a female divinity, the daughter of Saturn. In fact, every ancient language had a word for truth, if not a deity to represent it. Truth has long been regarded as a guiding principle of both societies and individuals. We are political animals, with virtues such as honesty as parts of our social survival gear, and so truth is essential.??
Truth is also the foundation of our social relationships. Children are punished for lying; we swear to tell the truth in court; we marry our loved ones, vowing to be true. On the other hand, deceit has traditionally been grounds for divorce. Lying is regarded as a betrayal that will end friendships. People lose their careers if they are not truthful. Truth matters to us profoundly, because without an agreed-upon truth, we sink into conflicting realities and lose the ability to trust each other. Without trust, we become irrational, and our societies tend toward chaos, the precondition for despots.??
“Just think what Goebbels could have done with Facebook,” Sacha Baron Cohen quipped in a speech to the Anti-Defamation League’s Never Is Now summit in 2019. The British actor and comedian is best known for his ferocious satiresand his mockumentaries. As the title character in his film “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” Cohen poked fun at people he met in the United States and lampooned the country’s lack of understanding of the outside world. But in this speech, Cohen played himself, a Jew who is deeply worried about the disinformation infecting the media. “On the internet, everything can appear equally legitimate,” he said. “Breitbart resembles the BBC. The fictitious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” look as valid as an ADL [Anti-Defamation League] report. And the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.”?
Perhaps the most insidious effect, or perhaps the goal, of the fake news industry isn’t just that we no longer know what is true or whom to trust. The message throughout the new media landscape is that the elites and the deep state are preventing you from knowing what’s really going on; the real truth is being hidden and so you shouldn’t trust anything you hear from journalists or the government.??
As we deal with the existential crisis of climate change, the breakdown in trust is destined to have devastating consequences. Without agreed upon facts, we don’t have truth; without agreed upon truth, we don’t have trust. We should pay close attention to whose interests might be served if we lose that all-important bond of trust with each other.??
Though you can make the case, easily, that the social media giants and their algorithms are a root cause of our suspicion of any version of reality purporting to be the truth, these days even Mark Zuckerberg admits that Meta has a problem. Google is studying its business model and has said it’s looking for ways to prevent disinformationfrom spreading on its platforms. Elon Musk at X? Not so much. Musk seems to thrive on the chaos.
Lawmakers in the US, Canada and Europe have attempted to control and mitigate the effects of social media both on the personal lives of people and on the body politic. But the profiteers of big tech know and rely on the fact that governments are limited in what they can do. Free speech is paramount in democracies and, paradoxically, every effort to contain the damage disinformation does to our democratic system is met with arguments about the dangers of impinging on rights and freedoms.
American mainstream media is still robust but in Canada, the picture is bleak: dozens of local newspapers and radio stations have been shuttered in recent years. In 2024, Bell Media, one of Canada’s most important sources of news, made its largest number of job cuts in thirty years. Foreign hedge funds hoover up the country’s smaller outlets, squeezing them for whatever profits might remain, while a US equity firm has a major stake in Postmedia, owner of the National Post.
Does anyone care? Canadians get more and more of their information from social media, where big tech companies feed them what their algorithms say they want, creating the illusion that they are receiving reliable news, which may or may not be true. Few people bother to check the source or even know that they should. Meanwhile, in our communities, local planning decisions, city council meetings and school board elections all drift by largely unnoticed. Big national stories are covered by the few news agencies that that can still afford to send reporters to cover them.
The ravaged media landscape is a populist politician’s wet dream — there’s hardly anyone there to challenge their claims or question their announcements. It’s interesting to note how much time and energy Pierre Poilievre spends on disparaging and insulting the journalists who do attend his rare press conferences. He’s also made it clear that he’ll dismantle CBC News, Canada’s largest independent and publicly funded news provider, should he become prime minister.
Words matter. Truth matters. It’s foundational for our lives as social beings, because without it, we can’t trust each other. But currently there are more regulations in place when it comes to the safe operation of your microwave oven than to govern a technology that has hacked into the central core of humanity — its language, its storytelling. How does the news media regain the attention and trust of the public?
Beyond the need for better regulation around Big Tech, it will take a whole society’s effort. Journalism needs to take the lead in resetting conversation. Legitimate and impartial media may still have a hold on the facts, but we inhabit a place where people no longer go. By striving to be painstakingly neutral, mainstream media has become banal; we’ve been pushed out of the public sphere by those peddling a more exciting product — fear and anger. Covering the news, fact-checking our stories, quoting the newsmakers: it’s all important. At the end of the day, the facts might create a picture of what’s true, but it’s a technical truth, a superficial truth — something that’s often soulless.
I think that the truth can recapture the public imagination if it’s aspirational, if it gives us some reason to hope, some sense that we have a future. If it allows people to take part in the conversation not as tweeters or Facebook friends or Redditers, but as citizens, as members of a community with shared values that we agree on, values meant to improve all our lives. A number of small, upstart news producers are doing just that, in a mini-revolution of online media, much of its content tested and reliable. They need subscribers, tax breaks, public support.
But it won’t be enough. The worst consequence of the failure of truth and trust isn’t that journalists are spurned or that elections are doubted. The existential threat we face is climate change, and we’re going to need a leap of faith to accept what science tells us about what to expect; we will need to rely on institutions and experts to help us avert the pending catastrophe. The agents of chaos, who tell us to pay no heed to those gatekeepers and proxies of the deep state, are wilfully fuelling and funding our breakdown in trust. We need to start asking ourselves why they’re doing that.
In their book “Surviving Autocracy,” Masha Gessen describes the post-Trumpist era they see in the future. Gessen writes, “When the time for recovery comes, as it inevitably will, we will need to do the work of rebuilding a sense of shared reality.” That will require a new focus on using words intentionally, which “anodyne headlines, equivocal statements and the style of extreme restraint have helped avoid. To state directly what they are seeing, journalists will have to reveal where they stand.” It is only possible to reclaim our political language if we infuse it with meaning, and that will be the job of political leaders. But, as Gessen writes, “It will be the job of journalists to embody and enforce the expectation of meaning. It will be the job of journalists to create a communication sphere in which people feel not like spectators to a disaster that defies understanding but like participants in creating a common future with their fellow citizens. This is the fundamental project of democracy, and the reason it requires media.”
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