The US News System Is in Shambles... Canada Plugs its Ears
Lessons could be learned in real time, yet no move to protect press freedom has been made
But you can unplug your ears if you become a paid supporter of The Catch!
Unsurprisingly, news this week has focused on US President Donald Trump's attacks on journalism. Last week, citing his oft-repeated refrain that critical media is "FAKE NEWS," Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO from the White House. This move came shortly after CNN revealed that generative AI chatbot concocted an "entirely false" intelligence report about a Chinese ship in the "Middle East." Trump denied the two were related.
The saga ratcheted up from there. In a surprisingly principled move, other news channels announced they would refuse to cover Trump's press pool events. This included signatories like ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC. A lawsuit was filed against Trump for violation of constitutional rights. Despite a judge ruling that the White House needed to temporarily revoke the ban, reporters from MS Now, CNN and POLITICO were still barred access. This tactic was predictable. In a less predictable development, Trumped justified the POLITICO ban using stories that cited an anonymous source, which Status News revealed was Vice President JD Vance.
In short, it's a catastrophe for freedom of the press. So why is the Canadian news ecosystem pretending it doesn't concern them?
Before going any further, it's important to note that this ban takes place among a backdrop of massive attacks on journalists and their reporting across the world. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), as of September 24, 2026, at least 247 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza, Yemen, Israel and Iran since October 7, 2023. The vast majority of which (241), have been killed by Israel. Many more have been arrested and, in disturbing accounts, physically, psychologically and sexually tortured in Israeli prisons. Little attention has been drawn to these atrocious reports by legacy news outlets both in the US and in Canada.
But even in the US contet, it's not as though Trump's attacks on the press were unprecedented or a shock in any way. Beyond the crutch attack of "fake news" that helped propel him to the oval office in the first place, Trump has explicitly attacked journalists as a part of his image. Under his administration in 2020, the CPJ notes "At least 110 journalists were arrested or criminally charged in relation to their reporting, and around 300 journalists were assaulted." In October of 2022 he threatened journalists with prison rape to a raging crowd.
US news outlets themselves are not exempt from blame in this worsening press environment. In the 2016 Presidential Campaign, Trump earned approximately $5 billion in free advertising thanks to press coverage. In 2024, The Washington Post declined to endorse a presidential candidate, reportedly under express direction from billionaire owner Jeff Bezos. Many outlets stood by while Trump called reporters (almost always women) names like "piggy."
So this act of solidarity comes after nearly a full decade of erosion, one that news outlets were all too comfortable enabling.
Scott Martin
The view from Canadian news media, meanwhile, has been... sparse. Wire stories from The Associated Press have appeared in outlets like CTV News and CBC News, with the Toronto Star running a joint report with AP. At time of writing, no editorial board has condemned the ban. None have taken the moment to refine and explain their principles to the public. It's as though the move was barely a blip on the radar. CBC triumphantly announced new international bureaus in July, including some in the US, alongside their Washington D.C. bureau. What is their stance on the President blatantly banning news orgs out of personal animosity? We can only speculate.
Beyond the silence on the actual ban, the move is revealing in that these legacy outlets have no plan for a possible similar outcome in Canada. This newsletter has written repeatedly about the overt and subtle threats to press freedom in this country. There is no appetite by the controlling interests of these organizations to head this off at the pass. Solutions like a pact to protect government access across the spectrum, updated codes of editorial conduct and ingrained admission of bias and perspectives are not even in the conversation.
Poilievre may not be long for leader of the federal Conservative party, but his rhetoric will stay. Cries to defund the CBC and moves to put news in their place are now tactics deployed by the electoral right. While the extreme version plays out in the US, Canadian outlets refuse to take lessons. In many ways, they are dominated by similar public, economic and social forces that have led to this in the US. A refusal to break with the path clearly before them should be viewed as an active choice.
There are a myriad of solutions that could be proposed, debated, discussed or dismissed in this context. Perhaps a foreign agency has more pressure on their staff to tow the US government line. If that's a problem, it should openly be discussed. But the silence that has blanketed Israel's mass killings of journalists continues to stretch over the entire industry. If you're optimistic, a backbone may eventually form; but only after it's too late to reverse it at all.
