Journalism in the Age of Polarization

Résumé analytique

Erica Ifill examines how political polarization, democratic backsliding, and the economics of digital media have eroded journalism's role in Canadian democracy. Uprisings such as the Ottawa Convoy occupation, the 2022 German coup d'état plot, and the 2023 Brazil Congress attack reflect a political culture that is oppositional, sensationalized, and rife with misinformation, driven by political disaffection and animus toward the democratic state. As journalism faces layoffs, cutbacks, disappearing local news, and growing reliance on freelancers, a relevance gap has opened between the profession and the public it is meant to serve, a gap that misinformation and bad-faith actors are filling.

This erosion of relevance is compounded by a persistent lack of diversity in Canadian newsrooms: a Canadian Association of Journalists survey found 82.9 percent of supervisors are white against 50.6 percent of interns, about 80 percent of newsrooms have zero Black or Indigenous reporters on staff, and 77 percent have no visible minorities or Indigenous people in top leadership roles, even as Statistics Canada forecasts the racialized population could reach 43 percent of Canada's population by 2041, up from 22 percent in 2016.

The essay also points to a media environment where reliable reporting sits behind paywalls while misinformation circulates freely, and cites Reboot Foundation survey findings that people more engaged in their communities have more faith in elections and their own ability to spot misinformation, though high engagers were 67 percent more likely to report having encountered election misinformation than low engagers. Ifill argues that community-engaged, locally-rooted journalism, exemplified in part by movements like Black Twitter challenging traditional media's coverage of police brutality and racism, offers a path toward rebuilding trust and countering polarization.