Smart piece by @AGMacDougall. It led me to decide to do something I first chose not to — I'm gonna comment on the controversy over that Harper clip bemoaning media. My short version (thread below) is that the reaction brought out the stupid in everyone. https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/stephen-harper-vs-the-media-round-infinity-plus-two/

I have a Zoom call in 12 minutes so I'm not going to waste time linking to examples of this, but if you care enough about the issue to be reading this thread, you'll know what I mean when I break down the response into two broad categories: Harper is RIGHT and Harper is WRONG.

The Harper is RIGHT camp asserts that there is a baked-in left-leaning bias in Canadian media that, consciously or not, skews news coverage in ways not to the CPC's advantage. And this camp will have plenty of examples bookmarked in their browser for INSTANT tweeting.

The Harper is WRONG camp has a spreadsheet noting how newspaper editorial board endorsements actually broke down in the last few major election cycles, and it shows that the endorsements overwhelmingly favoured the CPC, therefore there is no media bias against the CPC, morons.

Both of these camps are guilty of stupidity and should be flogged.

I can't believe I have to explain this to all the idiots out there, but it is possible for a media outlet to have a left-leaning newsroom and a conservative-leaning editorial board at the same time.

Ditto, it is possible for the newsroom to have a left-leaning bias and for a paper's entire crop of columnists to be cranky conservatives.

So does that news organizatio lean left, or does it lean right?

The answer is yes.

As MacDougall notes (and this is bang on), the problem isn't, per se, that newsrooms are just a bunch of self-identified NDPers or Grits all gathering in one place to advance a vast left-wing conspiracy. It's way more mundane than that. It's that newsrooms are tiny and urban.

The reasons for this are complicated, and my Zoom call is now in four minutes, so I'm gonna skip over some stuff, but the problem is basically economics. As the news industry rapidly (!) contracts, it's contracting into the cities. Especially the big ones, especially Toronto.

This is unavoidable, given the industry-wide problems, but it creates other problems. I don't think anyone would deny that dense urban areas generally skew to the left politically. And that's where the reporters come from.

To be clear, I think most reporters do great work, ...

... and do not in any way deliberately or sneakily insert bias into their reporting. But I think we're all products of our environment and our lived experiences and our socio-economic bubbles, and the perspective of urban newsrooms won't reflect the reality across a country.

Now, in fairness, columnists (raises hand) are not immune from this. I don't know if there's any industry-wide data on this, but I'd feel pretty safe asserting that columnists are generally older and wealthier than reporters, so they bring their own biases to the table.

(Not breaking out editorialists separately because the concept of editorial boards is pretty wildly in flux right now and I'm not sure the conventional meaning has much value for our discussion here, but I'd say they're more like columnists than reporters, for what it's worth.)

Anyway, the other problem is something that every journalist in this country will grasp: you are whatever the person who's angry at you thinks you are. It's routine for me to be called a conservative hack and a left-wing shill at the same time for the same column.

So angry righties who think the media is a cesspool of left-wing bias look for proof and find it. Angry lefties who are convinced the media is basically one gigantic conservative plot look for proof and find it.

But the angry righties don't see anything noteworthy about columns and editorials agreeing with them, so it doesn't lodge in their brain in a way that challenges their impression of the press as being rabidly left-wing.

The angry lefties, meanwhile, get so incensed about the wrongthink in the latest effort from their favourite, never-miss hate-read columnist that the fact that much of the news coverage is unobjectionable to them also fails to register in the brain.

Thus armed with appropriate anecdotes and with their biases helpfully confirmed, the two camps wage war on each other on social media, each convinced of the rightness of their own case and oblivious to the damage they're collectively doing to our society.

Oh well.

One last note. I was pretty disappointed in how many of my colleagues INSIDE the news media felt the urge to race to the battlements without admitting, at least publicly, that the above issues are for real, and that it explains a lot of the anger from both sides ...

... and is one of the issues that our industry on the whole is grappling with, and that I don't think we're doing a particularly job (as individuals and institutions) addressing.

I am now late for my Zoom.

-30-