Disastrously low trust in journalism can be fixed, there’s just no will

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Proclaiming the Canadian news industry is in a bad way is a lot like telling you the ocean is big. You know it, I know it, so saying such a thing seems unnecessary. But that also undersells the problem. You guys… the ocean is really big.

Every year the Reuters Institute releases a digital news report tracking habits of news consumers across dozens of markets. What did their 2026 report find? Overall, trust is eroding at an alarming rate. “Trust in news has fallen in 29 of our 48 markets this year,” the Executive Summary reads. “Resulting in a drop overall to the lowest level we have recorded since we started to measure trust in 2015 (37%).”

In Canada, 2026 marks the first year social media overtook other avenues for news consumption, reaching 54 per cent, compared to 44 per cent in 2025. While this is unsurprising, remember that news organizations are prohibited from posting on Meta’s Instagram and Facebook due to their refusal to adhere to Canada’s Online News Act. If you knew that fact, congratulations, you are in the minority of Canadians. As for general trust in news, 2026 continues a steady decline. Overall, our trust in news reached a low of 37 per cent. It was 52 per cent in 2019.

That’s a lot of numbers to throw at you, but you also may have noticed the quality of news itself is faltering. Canada’s public broadcaster CBC is a lightning rod for these critiques (and we’ll get to that) but they’ve done themselves no favours. In reporting on devastating wildfires, they routinely ignore the role of climate change. Bias laces other prominent national news outlets as well. Far from the exception, when it comes to the Palestinian Genocide, CBC News aligns with outlets like Global News, CTV News in a clear Israeli bias.