Opinion: The slow death of Canadian local news | Mathew Embry
A nation that stops producing and consuming its own media isn't just losing an industry. It's quietly outsourcing its own sense of self.
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| Photo by Supplied photo /Postmedia Network |
The news that Corus is centralizing its Calgary and Edmonton news production in Toronto, cutting dozens of local jobs in the process, was disappointing but not surprising.
What I’ve wondered since is how much longer Global News itself can survive without public support, given that its own ratings, while technically above zero, aren’t much healthier. This follows Rogers’ closing of Fan 960 and, given current Canadian viewing habits, I doubt it will be the last.
At this rate, CBC may end up being the only broadcaster left standing in local news.
Whatever your politics, a country left with a government-funded, single surviving news outlet is not a healthy democracy.
How did we get here? The slow deterioration of Canadian media didn’t happen overnight. It happened one remote control click at a time, as Canadians traded local and national coverage for American networks, and increasingly for social media platforms that distribute almost no Canadian journalism at all.
The result is a public that can often speak more fluently about the workings of American politics and culture than about their own country’s.
Media isn’t a side industry we can afford to let wither. It’s called the Fourth Estate for a reason: alongside the legislature, the executive and the courts, a free press is one of the pillars that keeps power accountable. When local newsrooms disappear, so does the reporter who shows up to city council meetings, who files the freedom-of-information request, who notices when a local hospital or school board is quietly failing.
Nobody replaces that function. It just goes dark, market by market.
And influence today doesn’t require tanks or treaties. A country’s culture, values and even its politics can be absorbed simply through what shows up on a screen. Streaming platforms and social media algorithms are just as capable of nation-building, or nation-erasing, as any army, because they decide what stories, accents and perspectives fill a population’s daily attention.
A nation that stops producing and consuming its own media isn’t just losing an industry. It’s quietly outsourcing its own sense of self to whoever is left creating and supplying the content.
And yet we call ourselves proudly Canadian. “Elbows up” has become the rallying cry of the moment. But what does it actually mean when so much of daily life says otherwise?
We watch American content by default. We follow American politics and celebrities more closely than our own. We dress like Americans, talk like Americans and differ mainly in health-care policy and the size of our military.
Culturally, we are already closer to being the 51st state than most of us are willing to admit.
If we want that to change, it can’t just be a slogan on a placard. It has to start with actually watching, reading and paying for Canadian journalism. Because right now, we are demonstrating, market by market, that we don’t value it enough to keep it alive.
Losing local newsrooms in Calgary and Edmonton isn’t a footnote. It’s a preview of what’s left when nobody is watching.
Mathew Embry is an Alberta filmmaker and president of Muster Point Productions.
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