On her recent podcast at “Lean Out,” journalist Tara Henley interviewed Holly Doan, who has done traditional meticulous self-critical reporting in Canada for decades.

Holly Doan: It’s embarrassing for us.. . . I think the media has not done itself any favors by so much navel gazing, and so much self absorption. Wake up. Pay attention to your readers! I think the journalists have forgotten who their readers are. They don’t even know who they’re writing for anymore. I’m not going to say. Are they ready for the government? Are they ready for each other? I don’t know. But as someone else said recently, it’s uncomfortable to watch this suicide because it is industry self-immolation. I think that is media waking up. I don’t know. I guess you’ll see if there is a difference in the content. That’s how you will judge if media is waking up. . . .

I’ve been asked to give a number of talks on this subject to different groups, some private think tanks recently. And everyone has the same question. What the hell’s wrong with media tell us all like what’s wrong with media? You know, are they are they lazy? Are they stupid? Are they woke? Or is it all narratives? Is it activist journalism? What happened?

I actually have a perspective that’s a little bit different. And that I think that it has to do with the skill set. When I was a young journalist, I started at a very small television station, and part of my job was to twice a week get into the company Pinto, and bumped across snowy roads to cover town council in places you’ve never heard of, like boys, Vane and Verdun. And from there, you might cover the this was in the city of small City of Brandon, Manitoba, and you’ve covered the school board and you cover the University Board of Governors meetings, and then you move to Saskatoon and you covers city city council. And then you move to Alberta and you cover the legislature and maybe some courts. And through that decade’s long process of learning a craft, you start to understand how government works, how different levels of government relief journalism is not taught in universities. It’s something you can’t learn in universities. It’s an apprenticeship. You have to apprentice to make your mistakes and learn so that by the time you arrive in Ottawa–so 11 years after all of that I arrived in Ottawa, still feeling quite incompetent, and not even ready for what is arguably the biggest story now in the country.

Well, that doesn’t happen anymore. Now you have journalists who go to journalism school, where they’re not taught anything about covering courts or local council, because it’s apprenticeship system, remember? And they go straight to their first jobs on Parliament Hill. Well, how can you know anything about how to cover a farm subsidy program, you might not even know a farmer? How do you cover a business loan program you might even not even know a small business owner. So that’s one thing. That’s the reporters….

The reporters are no longer telling the desk what the story is because the reporters aren’t on the ground and the ones who are on the ground, the few of them that are left, graduated Carlton three years ago. It’s a little bit like the analogy I like to use is, you know, when when Mao took over after the revolution in China in 1949, the first thing he did was kill all the tailors because they were a bad class background. And after 25 years, if you looked at images of China on TV, you could tell that no one knew how to make a suit anymore. The tailors were gone. That’s a little bit like what’s happened to journalism. The skills are gone. Journalism isn’t dying. On the ground level, it’s dead.

Next, you’re gonna ask me how do we get it back? I’m not really sure, Tara I’m not really sure. All I know is that you try to focus on Thomas Blackhawks, old timey journalism where we just look at the documents and cover committees and hope that that resonates enough. That Canadians will demand that kind of work. And they are.

Tara Henley 5:15
I mean, what you just said it makes the hair on my arms stand up, because I just think it’s so important that we have kind of detailed holding of all levels of government to account and that we have an informed citizenry.

Holly Doan 5:30
Well, . . . accountability and transparency. And we believe that by reporting not only the fine details of committee work and how we’re governed, but reporting audits, waste, incompetence, even sometimes corruption, we do not believe that those things undermine public institutions. We genuinely believe that that makes our public institutions stronger, because by exposing missteps mistakes, then those will be corrected.

Tara Henley’s journalism career is noteworthy too. She was driven out of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

When I started at the national public broadcaster in 2013, the network produced some of the best journalism in the country. By the time I resigned last month, it embodied some of the worst trends in mainstream media. In a short period of time, the CBC went from being a trusted source of news to churning out clickbait that reads like a parody of the student press.

It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.

To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity.