My indoctrination into the liberal media elite started at my very first Journalism 100 class at Carleton University in Ottawa.
The dean congratulated the 250 students in the lecture hall and told us we were the “crème de la crème” of the Canadian education system because we were the chosen ones from 2,500 applicants across the country.
That made me quite uncomfortable because it was a mistake by the registrar’s office that got me into the Carleton j-school. In April of my Grade 12 year, they sent me a letter, informing me that I had been accepted into the journalism program and if I worked hard in my first year, they would consider transferring me into the arts program for second year.
I called the registrar’s office for an explanation and a student working there for the summer answered. He gave me some devious advice.
“Somebody made a mistake, so if you really want to be in the journalism program, sign that acceptance letter and send it back here as fast as you can, before they figure it out.”
Three weeks later, I received another letter, where the registrar admitted a mistake had been made and informed me that I would have to take an extra French course in my first year and maintain a B average.
Much later, I learned the exact same thing happened to a classmate from New Brunswick. We graduated together, in a class of 95 from the original 250, two chunks of Velveeta amongst the crème de la crème.
As many conservatives and political moderates have pointed out, academia has become incredibly elitist and out-of-touch with the majority of the population it professes to serve especially over the past 20 years, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, where journalism and communication programs reside.
It wasn’t always this way as Batya Ungar-Sargon, a senior editor at Newsweek, points out in her excellent book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. Journalism was once a trade, a working-class profession made up of people who walked into their local radio station or newspaper looking for a job and then apprenticed under mentors. The work was dirty then. The fingers of reporters were stained by nicotine and ink from typewriter ribbons. Photographers walked around in stained shirts and pants, smelling like darkroom chemicals.
Higher education made journalism better but it came at a horrible cost, Ungar-Sargon argues, because now journalists were part of the professional class, they didn’t talk to their audience anymore, they talked at them and the liberal bias took hold. The poor, the uneducated, the working class, the trades people and the unionized employees – the citizens' journalists once fought the rich and powerful to defend because that’s where they came from – were left behind.
Newsrooms today are much better educated than the general population. Almost everyone has a bachelor’s degree and an increasing number of journalists have master’s degrees. We reach out to public relations professionals who graduated from the same schools we did for official comment. We call academic experts to explain complex social issues because those are the people we trusted with our formal education. We strive to win industry awards that are not judged by our audiences but by industry professionals like ourselves.
The result is a vicious cycle where the more our audience criticizes us for our work, the more we reject our readers, because they just don’t get it, unlike our newsroom colleagues and other working journalists. That’s why journalists love Twitter so much because they get to talk to each other, share war stories and pump air into each other’s tires.
What does all this mean for The Citizen and me as editor? In the past two years, when reporting has been largely restricted to phone calls, e-mails and Zoom meetings, boots on the ground journalism decreased a lot. We covered several protests opposed to vaccine mandates but declined to cover more after members of our staff were verbally and physically harassed. That hardened my opposition to the trucker convoy and to its local supporters and their public events.
In hindsight, I should have reached out to several of the supporters I knew to start a discussion and find a way for my staff to cover these events without having to worry about their safety, while also listening more about why they were so opposed to the mandates and what they hoped to achieve with their protests. I know better because I have been better. Being the Velveeta among the crème de la crème in journalism school (and at media conferences during my career) has been a regular reminder to seek out different perspectives and take difficult and unpopular editorial stances to provoke local debate.
Going forward, I can only pledge to be more open to stories and sources from other viewpoints and to challenge my reporters to do the same. What exactly does that look like? I’ll flesh that out in Friday’s editorial.
