The Nieman Foundation was established at Harvard University to elevate the standards of journalism and improve the education of journalists. Writing for Nieman Lab, Gideon Lichfield, former Editor-in-chief of Wired and now publisher of Futurepolis, says accountability journalism is broken.

…Politicians no longer answer to voters, since virtually all votes are guaranteed by tribal loyalty; instead they answer to big donors… Shaming politicians has become next to impossible. Thanks to the internet, pols no longer need the traditional media to broadcast their views.

The message we [journalists] are giving them is: “Things just keep getting worse, and there’s nothing you or anybody else can do about it.”

So what is the media’s job? The prevailing doctrine is that it’s simply to report the truth. That’s wrong. Our job is to empower people to hold power to account. Reporting the truth is just a means to that end, and achieves it only when accountability exists. Otherwise, reporting the truth is necessary but not sufficient. Something more is required.

Democrats would have us believe Trump voters don’t care about democracy. I think many do — they just don’t believe the United States is one. And frankly, they’re right, not in the sense that elections are rigged, but that the whole system is an elite power game with a fig leaf of universal suffrage. Which is why warning them that democracy was under threat didn’t work: From their point of view, it never existed in the first place. What would it look like for the media to take that view seriously, to interrogate what democracy should be, instead of taking for granted that it’s what exists now?

Reporting on threats to democracy does not empower the public unless you also give them ideas about how to counter those threats. What would it look like to provide those ideas, and inspire them to act?

If some of this looks to you like crossing the line from journalism into activism, you’re right. We cannot be neutral about this, by definition. A free press that doesn’t agitate for democracy is an oxymoron...

Do Lichfield’s words apply in Canada? Indeed, they do. Postmedia, Canada’s largest newspaper chain, belongs to New Jersey-based Chatham Asset Management, a hedge fund that controls numerous American newspapers. (In 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Chatham Asset Management and Founder Anthony Melchiorre for improper fixed-income securities trading.)

Many of Canada’s other mainstream media properties are controlled by the nation’s wealthiest citizens. As in other countries, the super-rich acquire media to influence public opinion and affect government policies.

According to Nick Fillmore’s 2011 article in Canadian Dimension Magazine:

Denying the public access to vital information has a strong negative impact on the democratic process in Canada, just as it does in any country in the world.

Unfortunately, nearly all of Canada’s mainstream political and economic journalists are forbidden from focusing on the fundamental flaws in our system.

Instead, corporate media owners make sure that these journalists adhere to the screwball-but-powerful ideology that is responsible for many of our problems: neoliberalism. Under neoliberalism, capitalism has nearly unrestricted control over our society.

Big mass-media corporations, such as CTVglobemedia, Postmedia Network, and Woodbridge Company, which owns The Globe and Mail, have aligned themselves with the right-wing of the business community and Stephen Harper’s government. While the CBC still has many excellent, independently-minded programs, its bosses, concerned with trying to protect Mother Corp’s funding, try their hardest to avoid controversy, let alone think about whether capitalism is good for us.