Diversity remains a problem in Canada’s news. Indigenous people, women, racialised people, and divergent opinions are underrepresented in Canada’s news, and Canadian newsrooms remain disproportionately white. Women of colour and Indigenous women, in particular, remain seriously underrepresented in the production of Canadian media (Golick & Daniels, 2019). Even at Canada’s public broadcaster, only 12 per cent of staff is a visible minority (CBC, 2018). The Global Media Monitoring Project reported that women are systematically underrepresented and stereotyped in Canadian news (Sikka, 2015), and recent media monitoring also shows that women tend to be quoted significantly less than men in Canada’s news media (Informed Opinions, 2021).
The lack of diversity in Canada’s news media is well documented. Tolley (2016) starkly concludes that systematic assumptions about visible minorities decidedly shape negative news coverage of Canada’s minorities. The problems are not new. In 2010, a content analysis conducted for CBC News found that its radio and television news underrepresented the voices of women and visible minorities (Spears et al., 2010). Similarly, Clark’s (2014a) analysis of Canada’s major television broadcasters, for instance, found that Indigenous people are often invisible in news broadcasts and that longstanding colonial stereotypes connected to Indigenous people persist in the broadcaster’s coverage. In a similar vein, Clark (2014b) concluded that Canadian news organisations still face considerable challenges to better representing the diversity of Canada’s Indigenous and growing multicultural population, because white mainstream news editors tend to frame news from dominant perspectives. For instance, DeCillia (2018) shows that because Canadian journalists overwhelmingly indexed their coverage to officials, the coverage of Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan lacked diversity of opinion and critical appraisal of the mission.
The number of Canadian eyes and ears around the world has decreased over the last decade: “We have almost no foreign correspondents reporting back to Canada anymore”, observed one long-time journalist and former news executive. Increasingly, Canadian news organisations rely on wire services or stringers to report news from around the world. CBC News has shut bureaus in the last decade or so in Cape Town, South Africa, Mexico City, Jerusalem, Nairobi, Kenya, and Bangkok. Canadian news executives have suggested in recent years that they can cover the world more economically by occasionally sending their reporters abroad, parachuting them into hot zones or big stories, or setting up so-called short-term “pocket bureaus” around the world when news warrants the demand for Canadian eyes and ears abroad. The Canadian journalists interviewed for this research are not so sure, expressing concern that generic wire stories cannot replace having Canadians around the world reporting home.
Diversity of options and sources is also a repercussion of newsroom job losses and budget cuts. One journalist worried about the lack of coverage of municipal issues, noting that “the number of reporters at city hall has really, really been radically reduced over the last decade or so”. Postmedia, owner of a national newspaper and chain of daily newspapers across the country, is doing less enterprising reporting. Moreover, the news organisation merged newsrooms in cities where it owned both the broadsheet and tabloid newspaper. As well, daily newspapers are increasingly using Canadian Press wire stories instead of assigning its own reporters, to save costs. Plus, the national newspaper chain requires its newspapers to run national editorials and endorse conservative parties at the federal and provincial level, undermining the local independence that daily newspapers had to make their own endorsements. Clearly, diversity of news sources remains a problem for Canadian journalism.
