MediaPolicy.ca

June 23, 2026

The 2026 Reuters Oxford Digital News report says we’ve hit a new low in public trust in Canadian journalism at 37%. Only ten years ago it was 55%.

That number might leave you with a lump in your throat. Canadian journalist Tara Henley is just as alarmed. She is about to publish The Trust Spiral: Why the Media Needs Objectivity on July 28th.

Henley sees a problematic spread of woke progressive culture in US and Canadian newsrooms over the last decade or so, careening out of control during the Covid Pandemic years that were marked in the United States by the popular outrage at the police murder of George Floyd and in Canada by the Convoy Occupation of downtown Ottawa.

Her 90-page book will draw comparisons to the American writer Batya Ungar-Sargon’s Bad News: How the Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (2023). That book is a wide-ranging indictment of the US “liberal elite,” the Democratic Party, and the class privileged members of the national media. As an English lit PhD born into a privileged class position herself, Ungar-Sargon describes herself as a “MAGA leftist” and is particularly scathing in her disdain for the New York Times which she portrays as something like the media anti-Christ. 

Henley not so much. Unlike Ungar-Sargon, she’s a career working journalist who has practised the discipline: gathering and reporting the facts of what has happened in public life. Listen to her podcasts on Lean Out or Full Press and you’ll form an impression of her, and it won’t be that of a MAGA leftist.

There are no Bad Guys in The Trust Spiral and no demonized news institutions. How grounded. How Canadian.

But there’s a problem, says Henley. It’s the steady drop, nay a nose-dive spiral, in the public’s trust in “mainstream” news journalism (keeping mind that “mainstream” is a label affixed indiscriminately by others to a diverse assembly of established news outlets and it’s usually not a complement).

And while Henley is careful not to lay all of the blame at the door of newsrooms and journalists —she offers nuance and context about the complex roots of this decline in trust–  she is calling for mainstream journalism to serve its audience better, with more accurate news reporting and fewer manipulative story narratives. 

I will say parenthetically that the dreadful 37% figure for public trust is from a polling response to the question “how much do you trust the news as a whole within your country?” The related figures for “trust in brands” of leading Canadian news sources are a great deal higher, in the 50% to 60% range (higher in Quebec), while the “don’t trust” percentages are in the teens (and lower in Quebec).

This gap between 37% trust in overall news and the higher ratings for specific news outlets suggests Canadians are worrying a bit too much about untrusted news that other people are consuming. As well, the meagre 37% thumbs up for “news as a whole” is likely weighed down by the dim view Canadians take of news accessed on social media, search engines, and AI chatbots.

To close the bracket on this parenthetic thought, whether or not we are living in an existential moment for public trust in mainstream media is something you can decide for yourself at the end of the book. But I do share Henley’s alarm.

The mainstream media leans left, says Henley, continuing the analysis.  When American journalists confronted Donald Trump’s upset victory in the 2016 election they grappled with a crucial choice between sticking to the classic role of detached reporting of facts or becoming activist-journalists in countervail to the new President’s MAGA agenda, his vilification of the media, and his peerless ability to by-pass journalists and project his message directly to Americans through social media.

Journalism leaders like New York University’s Jay Rosen endorsed a departure from the sedate rules of detachment reporting on Trump in favour of “resistance” to “the erosion of democratic institutions and a common world of fact,” stopping short of recommending political “opposition.” Others like the Washington Post’s Marty Baron advised reporters to just “go to work” and report facts. 

Even though Trump lost the November 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, activist journalism didn’t release its grip on newsrooms, says Henley. 

A cultural cocktail brewed from a concoction of controversial public health measures, the April 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, the reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement and the street violence associated with BLM protests. Together they provided US and Canadian journalism with one opportunity after another to choose between old-school detachment and the moral certainty of activist reporting. 

In US newsrooms, the most notorious incident was the newsroom revolt at the New York Times after Opinion Editor James Bennet green-lit a guest column “Send in the Troops” written by Senator Tom Cotton. The Republican legislator advocated domestic deployment of the military to suppress street violence and looting associated with BLM protests. 

The Times newsroom roiled. A rank-and-file petition demanded editorial management’s disavowal of Cotton’s op ed (promptly delivered by publisher A.G. Sulzberger). The heated environment caused staff editor Barri Weiss to opine that “showing up as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.” (An aside: Weiss thinks she was a centrist?)

Accused of enabling racism and the reckless endangerment of his African-American colleagues reporting on the protests, editor Bennet was drummed out of the New York Times by the end of June.

Henley brings the focus back to Canada, recounting an incident the same month in which one of the country’s most famous journalists Wendy Mesley was suspended by the public broadcaster CBC from her host duties (and retired a year later) after a complaint that she used the N-word during a prep meeting for a segment focussed on a news subject who also spoke the slur aloud.

June 2020 was perhaps the high point of “the great awokening” or (Henley’s alternative descriptive) “identitarian moralism” over issues of race and gender. My own view is that the accelerant to this moralizing was the Covid lockdown that fuelled intemperate statements on social media, unrestrained by the grounding of a common workplace and face to face engagement between long time colleagues.

But all of that is just flavour for the central narrative. Henley has a bigger issue and that is the mainstream media’s coverage of public health measures such as mandatory masking and vaccine mandates during the pandemic and, related, the convoy occupation of downtown Ottawa in February 2022.

Not alone in this view, Henley maintains that mainstream Canadian media fell well short of its duty to report on public health measures, and the science behind it, with the required professional skepticism. 

When the Convoy protest entrenched itself for three weeks in protest of the same public health measures, Henley says that mainstream media unfairly and inaccurately portrayed those Canadians as kooks, dangerous insurrectionists, and trailer-park riff raff. Henley suggests a class bias on the part of the better educated, urban-dwelling, and affluent national press corps, something she sees as evidence of a fundamental issue to be addressed by Canadian news organizations throughout their news coverage of current affairs. 

This is the same point made by Ungar-Sargon in Bad News where the focus is on the demographic profile of an urban, secular and affluent US national media (alas, there is very little Canadian data available to confirm or refute that profile. Both class status and class-viewpoint would require a great many data markers).

Whether or not we can lay the accusation of class bias at the feet of the press corps may not be as important as resolving the question of the mainstream media having internalized a deep-seeded ideological agenda, call it left-wing, progressive or woke (presumably the National Post and the Western Standard are excused).

The activist retort to that accusation is either (a) it’s a right-wing smear of honest journalists, or (b) it’s an appeal to the false god of “objective reporting” when there is no such thing as “objectivity,” either as an epistemological truth or a journalistic practice. 

What has been set up rhetorically as a binary choice between “objectivity” in news reporting versus “activism journalism” is a false dualism that does not serve us well.

As Henley and many others point out, journalistic objectivity is a straw man and an euphemism for the pursuit of truth, both as a human aspiration and a professional discipline. 

Writes Henley, historically “the journalistic method of objectivity —a set of practices designed to separate facts from value judgments —arose in distinction to a press dominated by both commercial and political interests.” 

She delves into a brief account of the 19^th century partisan press, the robber baron press, the populist penny press, and the supine wartime press of the next century. 

In reaction, says Henley, the “pursuit of truth” philosophy that is operationalized by a professional standard of journalistic detachment was the news industry’s dialectical evolution from the bought-and-paid-for press dominated by partisan political parties and the rich. 

Still, you can find plenty of evidence of left-leaning activist journalists portraying “objectivity” as ideological cover for the stranglehold of the rich and privileged, including the racially privileged, over news reporting. As a kind of bookend, the right-leaning activist press thinks professional standards only obscure a different chokepoint over news reporting, one that favours the Big State and the suppression of liberty. 

A plague on both your houses, I say. 

What doesn’t get much oxygen in this debate is the dominant ideology of news journalism. And no, this ideology’s name is neither Woke nor Right.

It’s the creed of “Watchdog” journalism founded on a moral certainty that powerful people in government and big business are presumed to be up to no good, or at least seriously considering it, and it is the vocational calling of journalists to fearlessly expose it with factual reporting even if the underlying assumption of the unchecked abuse of power is itself a bias. The point is, it’s a consensus bias both in journalism and society at large (except among the powerful I suppose). This watchdog journalism has a long and venerable history. You could even label it activist. 

Once journalists of all stripes acknowledge they share something very important, reversing the downward spiral of public trust should just be a matter of being fastidious in their devotion to professional standards, not wedging the moral of the story into news reports, and leaving moral certainty to the opinion writers. 

No matter the best efforts of journalists, if the social currents that batter public trust in all public institutions continue to drag down the media, journalists can take pride in having worked hard to earn it back.

***

(An earlier version of this review inaccurately identified Wesley Lowery as a leader of the newsroom petition at the New York Times in the Cotton incident. Lowery was not employed by the Times or involved in the petition).

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This post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.