← Outrage Overload: Rethinking politics, division, and media
Outrage Overload: Rethinking politics, division, and media
79. When We Stop Sharing the Same Reality – Stephen Maher
00:28:53
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to Outrage Overload, a science podcast about outrage and lowering the temperature. This is episode 79. When Stephen Maher recently described the state of journalism in Canada, he painted a stark picture. As social media platforms siphoned away advertising dollars and readership, the traditional media, once a shared civic forum, began to crumble. What replaced it, he argues, are algorithm driven outlets that prioritize emotional content and anger over sober reporting, intensifying what scholars call affective polarization. Maher warns that journalism itself is being sorted into camps. Reporters cover radically different stories for sharply separated audiences. Even as the industry shrinks, local papers vanish, news deserts spread, and only a shrinking number of outlets remain to hold power to account. But often they reach only those already paying attention. As we begin our conversation today, those dynamics in Canada feel uncomfortably familiar to what many see unfolding here in the United States, where trust in media is fracturing, local news is dying, and social media filters shape what millions see as truth. And that's what we're going to talk about on this episode of the Outrage Overload podcast. I'm your host, David Beckmeier. And the question we're exploring is what can Marr's diagnosis of Canadian journalism, its collapse, fragmentation, and the rise of polarized media silos teach us about the risks and stakes for American journalism and democracy now? Stephen Maher has covered Canadian politics since 1989 as a columnist and investigative journalist. His work has shaped national conversations on political corruption, electoral misconduct, misinformation, and human rights. Over the years, he's earned some of the country's highest journalism honors. Stay with us. You won't want to miss what's ahead. Stephen Barr, thank you so much for making time for our little program.
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B
It's my pleasure.
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A
So I read this article. You did? I think it was in the cbc, if I got that right.
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B
Yeah, it was. CBC website.
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A
Yeah. And one. So I was going to cover some of the things you talked about in there. It rang a lot of the things I read there rang with a lot of the things that we talk about on this show. So I thought that was. And it was interesting and I would. It would be interesting to compare sort of what you're seeing in Canada and what you may also know about the US and some of those compare and contrast there as well. But I was going to start off with something we have talked about a fair bit on this show and that's kind of the loss of the small town newspapers. And I think it even goes beyond small towns. It's like anything less than the, you know, 17 biggest cities have sort of lost a lot of this local reporting, you know, and I think what worries me somewhat about this is that I'm not sure we'll really appreciate what we lost, especially if for generations that maybe never had it. But I'm curious what you think, you know, what do we lose, you know, sort of culturally, maybe democratically, when we lose those local outlets.
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B
So I did my interview with the CBC to tee up a lecture that I did at the University of Victoria, the Harvey Southam an annual lecture on journalism. And I started by telling the students that about the beginning of my career. I started working in 1989 in Grand Falls, Newfoundland, a pulp mill town in central Newfoundland. And I eventually ended up in, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which, where I'm from. The first six newspapers where I worked have all closed. So I feel that that's dramatic when you think about what's lost in those communities. This sort of ongoing record and shared common space where people can talk about things. I went into the business, you know, sort of with heroic journalism in mind, Woodward and Bernstein, that, that I'm of. I'm old enough to have been inspired by those guys. And I found that a lot of what I was doing was just sort of reporting on meetings and hockey games and upcoming events and that kind of thing. And you start to see the value of that in doing it. And so I think that, yeah, it's left a massive hole and it's led to the polarization, I think, in our society because all of that was replaced by algorithmic social media and the division of people into information silos. So that in the old days, if everyone's reading the same newspaper and watching news broadcasts that are influenced by sort of wire service style reporting. So everyone's following a similar ethic. They might disagree greatly about the issues of the day, but they agree on what the issues of the day are. And now we're in a space where our, you know, we have these constituencies where they really don't even agree on that. And I think it's making it harder to, to, to govern ourselves.
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A
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the idea of the algorithmic public square. I haven't really heard that language used a lot. We, we do talk a lot about, you know, sort of impact of social media. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit more on, on how do you think that's changed the way the, these communities maybe understand, you know, how, how we understand ourselves.
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B
So a couple years ago, I think it was after the 2021 federal election in Canada, I interviewed, I Connected with a guy who I'd covered over the years, a member of Parliament, like a congressman from that very area of northern Newfoundland who had lost. And he said, you know, as politicians often say, well, I, I don't really mind losing. It's time for me to do something else. But, but what I don't like is how angry people have become since I first started getting into the business. And he described incidents where he'd be knocking on people's doors and having to hot foot it for the car because they're threatening him with violence. And he attributed that to a change in the Facebook algorithm around that era, which sort of increased in a. Out of a desire to increase engagement. They cranked up the emotional quality of what they were steering people to. I don't know if you could prove that that's what caused it, but certainly the what, what he was encountering were people who believed that he was basically in a criminal conspiracy with other members of the government and, you know, covering up terrible crimes and that kind of thing. So even having some percentage of your society that believes that has a sort of destabilizing and it makes everything nastier. The politicians all have to have more security, they're more defensive, they're less able to go out and mix with people. So to me, that's a sort of extreme example of the kind of thing that we're seeing. And when I sort of first became aware of, oh, we're into a new era here.
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A
Yeah, right. And some of the researchers that I've spoken with have sort of talked about this idea that years ago, you know, we, when we. Before social media and these kind of nationwide and worldwide platforms, you know, we mostly interacted with people near us and we might get a mix of views. There was less kind of ideological conformity. It was, you know, and people didn't mind that, like, that was okay. And, and you got, you got a view sort of from the street, I guess you could say a little bit more. Right. And, and I mean, did you sense that when you were working at these, at some of these local newspapers?
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B
Yeah, very much. There were the, the newspaper. What was in the newspaper resembled more what people were talking about, I think in, in that time. And we all subscribed to a sort of worldview that was, I think, influenced by a sort of dominant broadsheet culture. Most cities had one big broadsheet, you know, the Boston Globe or the, you know, my, in my, in my home city, it was a Halifax Chronicle, Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer. And that, in contrast to an earlier period where the newspaper market was more chaotic. There sort of developed after the war or some, in some cities before the war, one big newspaper that had a lot of money and sort of dominated the conversation. And the people running those papers basically decided normally to cover the news in such a way that it wouldn't be terribly aggravating for conservatives or for liberals that they would all sort of agree. These are the topics we're going to cover in a certain style and that helped produce a sort of common sense of facts. And that's, I think one of the things now is we no longer share the same set of facts.
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A
Yeah, yeah. And then that quickly translates into trust issues. And you've talked about that some too. So I definitely want to pursue that some more. You know, we've talked a fair bit on this show or a few times on this show on sort of some of the uniformity within academia and some of the left leaning bias. Not necessarily in a nefarious way. You know, it's just those disciplines tend to attract folks, you know, that are more left leaning. And if I think someone more conservative is looking at which career path that they're a young person going to school, they're probably less likely to pick those, those paths as a career path as you just end up with this larger percentage of left leaning stuff. And then that kind of fills into the whole academic kind of peer review process and all that. And I've seen a lot of studies about this about, you know, how there's just a lot of uniformity and not much diversity in how things are taught across all these universities. So they're all kind of based on the same, you know, four or five, you know, all the syllabi is all the same kind of thing. Right. And you kind of talk about that in the end that, that obviously works its way. Folks in school end up, you know, at these, at these institutions. And I don't think, you know, I don't really find that a lot of them are kind of nefarious and they're trying to preach, preach a message, you know, and I think it often gets exaggerated. But you know, you can't not have your, your biases if you kind of live in that world and you're even to what, what you're exposed to, you know, what, what have you observed in that kind of issue of like there's polarization among, you know, the institutions themselves and then, and then how have you seen any, did you, did your, when you're smaller towns, did you see more diversity and do you see any sort of paths toward maybe bringing in more diversity?
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B
Well, the thing that I find worrying about journalism is I think that while we are becoming more diverse, newsrooms are, at least in Canada, it's long overdue that they become more ethnically diverse. For various historical reasons. The industry was shrinking at a time when the population was changing and becoming more cultural, more multicultural, and the newsrooms were lagging. So I think it's, you know, the newsroom should resemble the society that's serving, but it's become less diverse in terms of worldview, I think. And I wonder if it's also becoming less diverse in terms of social class. Journalism is not as appealing a career as it once was. And I'm wondering if, if that's kind of affecting the kind of people who end up doing it. So that increasingly, and I see this particularly in freelance journalism, the people who are able to do it are either nepo babies or spouses of people with good incomes. So it becomes a sort of, I don't want to say a hobby job, but it's not, it's a sort of secondary element in the family income. And so I think that that may make it somewhat, that may influence the kind of people who are doing it and mean that you're not likely to get the sort of working class driver with a sense of street, you know, and, and somebody who's ambitious and hoping to make their way in a competitive business. So that, and, and also when I was coming up, I'm old enough to have worked with people, a fair number of people who did not come out of the journalism schools who came in through the back door in some way they knew somebody or then they start to discover that they like the work. And so the other thing that's is as the sort of composition of the newsroom has changed and become, you know, maybe you've lost some of the working class people. The other thing that's happened is some of the old gumshoe reporters are gone, have aged out. And you have a lot of young people who are maybe going to be doing it for a year or two until they go to work for public relations and get benefits and so on and a better life. And they, so they are kind of, and they are often quite influenced by university culture. And so the old job, the old idea of you should find out what's happening on the street and explain that to people, I think that they're maybe not as good at that.
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A
Interesting. You know, I've been taking some journalism school courses at university online and it's funny that every course has, like, a segment in it about, like, the career options, you know, and might need a second job and stuff like that. Right. I mean, it's pretty sad that that's kind of what we're looking at. Yeah. So that actually is probably very real. And I bet that's not something a lot of people consider when they think about this. But we talked, we briefly mentioned this idea of, you know, sort of the trust in these institutions. And particularly, I think you mentioned, you mentioned, I believe that these grassroots conservatives in particular feel kind of unheard, particularly you mentioned with institutions like the cbc. And I think we see that with things like PBS and NPR here. So, like what. I mean, it's probably pretty systemic, but I mean, what's the failure there? And maybe how can they restore some of that trust?
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B
Well, I think there's sort of two potential answers there, and I don't have a PhD in sociology, so I don't want to get too far over my skis. But I think that there's two things that are happening. One is that through the sort of internal newsroom processes that I was describing, there's been a sort of culture shift where some of these news organizations become more heavily influenced by the university and less influenced by the street. But at the same time, there is the people who do have PhDs in sociology have observed a very emotional cultural backlash is underway in the population that has to do with changes in social values in a way that most people in the university think has been good. Right. You know, feminism, gay rights, greater equality of opportunity for people from different racial backgrounds. At some point or other, we reach a tipping point where a sufficient number of people feel threatened or angered by this and left out of the conversation. And this has led to a populist backlash channeled in Italy by Silvio Berlusconi, in the United States by Donald Trump. We're seeing it in England now with Farage, and you see a similar sort of set of issues and techniques that all of these leaders are using. And at the same time, the rise of algorithmic social media and all kinds of mysterious messages where you don't know who's paying for them. So I hesitate to blame the news organizations too much because some of this, it looks like it was just going to happen anyway. But nonetheless, I think that news organizations like. I'm particularly concerned about the cbc. I see that as a very important institution for Canadian national sovereignty and the leader of the opposition would like to get rid of. So we have a, you know, I hope the CBC is asking how they've lost trust with so many conservative minded Canadians and are going to be questioning some of their sacred cows.
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A
Yeah, so, so tell me about that a little more or tell, tell us, tell all of us about that a little bit more. Like you said, the CBC is like critical to democracy and so on. And, and you know, here in the US we've had this idea and I'm sure it propagates this idea of the sort of the fourth estate, right, that the press is supposed to take this role of reporting and being one of the indicators and keeping the people informed and that kind of thing about what is happening with their leaders and with the government, you know, and people are feeling like that is being let down. And we, you know, you probably are aware here that the Trump administration has, you know, removed funding for a lot of the public media here. So tell us what, you know, that important role of the CBC in Canada.
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B
Well, I think it's, I listen to NPR fairly often and admire it. I think that in Canada we have a special problem, unique in the world maybe in that because we have a massive neighbor that speaks the same language and in whom we are very interested, like we have to pay attention to what's happening south of the border. It's not really optional at the moment. And so this poses a sort of business challenge for Canadian media. And it's something that I think all of the world is interested in America and a lot of countries decide that they'd better subsidize their own media in one way or another. Their film industry or publishing, you know, that's in order to compete with American, this amazing, creative, extremely well funded American broadcasting and publishing industry. But it's, I think it's much tougher in Canada because we're so close and we speak the same, same language. So that means that CBC ends up doing a lot of things that nobody else would do because it would be too hard to make a dollar at it. Right. So it's a kind of national, a long ago decision brought in by a conservative prime minister. Well, we'd better, if we want to maintain our national identity, we better subsidize it. And the idea what, what we're seeing now, which I think is a direct result of effective polarization of the leader of the opposition of Canada saying he wants to get rid of it, that if you had accused a conservative leader in Canada 20 years ago of wanting to get rid of the CBC, they'd have said, how dare you say such a thing? Do you know What I mean, we've come a long way in a short time in a way that I find worrying because I love American culture, I consume it all the time. But I also, as a Canadian, I want to have our own stuff there, even if I don't listen to it.
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Well, you know, and, and, you know, and for, for Trump here, you could say, I think it's fair to say that, that a lot of that is driven, a lot of him wanting to cut back that funding is kind of driven by cultural issues. And, and, and some of these sentiments about how they're, you know, they're, they're only, they're, they're, they're partisan and they're against conservatives or whatever. And, and that's, but that's a lot of that is kind of on cultural issues. This, where, where, and is that similar to the reasons they want to shut it down or what do you think the reasons are?
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B
Well, it's. So I think they want to remake the, the media landscape so that the CBC isn't as helpful to left wing parties in elections. In part, you know, that's my cynical, political, cold calculating view of it. But the majority of conservative voters don't want to get rid of the CBC. But Mr. Pollyv, our Conservative leader, comes from the more conservative, culturally conservative part of the party and part of his political strategy has been to stay close to the anti vaxxers and the minority of Canadians who like Donald Trump. And so it jazzes up his base right when he, it's an applause line for. So the people who feel angriest about this sort of liberal monolith that's often running Canada feel offended by the CBC and insulted by it.
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A
Yeah, I mean it's, I see so many parallels in some ways, but also there's kind of a unique Canadian, distinctively Canadian story to it as well. So. All right, so let's, we've talked about a lot of sort of negatives here. What, what gives you some hope that journalism can renew some of the civic function that we're talking about?
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B
Well, I mean we, we are seeing that it still matters. You know, I'm watching what's happening in the United States with concern, you know, like, because it, it appears at times that the, the current government in the United States is open to authoritarian options in a way that was not true of earlier governments. But we see like today I'm noticing Tom Holman is struggling to deal with questions around this payment. 50, 000 cash payment. So he's not blowing it off. Right. The, the US Government is not blowing it off and saying they're. They're trying, but it's not working. Right. Like, so you can see that they're obviously concerned by the result of investigative journalism. So it's, you know, it's not like that shows that it still has power. And the First Amendment, we don't have a First Amendment in Canada. Our laws around this are not quite as powerful, I don't think so. That's a very fundamentally powerful part of the American Constitution. And I thought that when Disney walked back on the Kimmel decision, that showed that the battle has not been lost. The free media in the United States might be losing some battles, but they haven't lost the war. And gosh, there's an awful lot of very good people working at your news organizations and well funded and very experienced and tough minded.
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A
Mm. I'm gonna throw you one that I get asked all the time and, you know, my answer is kind of like, there's no easy answer to this question. But, you know, people are always asking me for, you know, what's the best way to be informed? Like, you know, and what they often want is like, what's the one source I could turn to to always be, you know, get the right facts and all that. And I tell them there's not really such a thing. But. But maybe you have some advice for folks like, what is a tactic or something that you'd recommend for people.
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B
Well, I regularly read the British media. I find that the BBC and the economists tend to have a broader view than North American media. And it's sort of helpful to me to see how they're covering things, you know, but I'm. I'm probably a poor person to ask in a way because I'm living in the media 24 hours a day and constantly consuming media from all sorts of different sources. I think that the hometown paper, these things are still slugging it out. And a lot of times they are not what they were, but they're still the people going to the meetings and covering stuff. They need subscriptions, right?
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A
Yeah, yeah. If you have one near you, definitely support them because a lot of us have lost them. Like, there's nothing around anymore. Everything is just consolidated media. Well, is there anything else I know that I would love? I've gotten a lot of your time already. Is there anything else you'd like to cover that you think we didn't touch on?
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B
I'm trying to think. I was talking about the cultural backlash idea. Anyone who's interested in that, there's A book by Pippa Norris and Ronald, the late Ronald Englehart that I found very helpful called Cultural Backlash, Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism. And I found that, you know, I explained very briefly what my understanding of the idea is, but to see the meticulous care with which they've come to this conclusion, like they, the social science research, some of it can seem kind of fuzzy. This is not fuzzy. Do you know what I mean? They've been working and testing ideas against other ideas, and I think that they make a very compelling case. And once you think about that struggle and the, the way that a large number of people feel threatened and upset by the way society has changed so quickly over the last 20 years, I find that's like a useful thing to keep in the back of your mind when you're trying to understand what you hear, what you see on Fox, or, you know, the issues that the GOP is trying to promote and the way that Democrats often seem to be struggling, you know, around trans issues, for instance. I think that the world has changed hugely in ways that a lot of people are not comfortable with. And in our divided within the academy, those people just look like backward looking knuckle draggers. And I don't think that that's a helpful, entirely helpful view. Just to think, well, you just should ignore them and they'll go away. They're not going away.
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A
No. Yeah, not a good strategy. Not helpful strategy. Well, Stephen, Mara, thank you so much for making time for our little program. I hope to have you back again sometime.
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B
My pleasure. Thank you, sir.
- [28:03]
A
That is it for this episode of the Out Outrage Overload podcast. For links to everything we talked about on this episode, go to outrageoverload.net if something in this episode sparked a thought or maybe even lit a fire, I'd love to hear from you. You can leave a voice message or even Schedule a quick one on one chat right from our contact page at outrageoverload.net contact if you found this episode valuable, please share it or leave a review. It really helps. Thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time.
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B
Time.