This is the fifth article in a five-part series on media coverage of long-term care homes in Ontario, based on an extensive analysis of news stories published in six mainstream Canadian outlets between 2017 and 2019, and a broad overview of stories published in the pandemic. Read parts one, two, three and four.
Based on my analysis of news media coverage of long-term care homes, several themes have emerged:
- Privatization was virtually never criticized or debated
- The for-profit lobby was never challenged or probed
- The broader trends of privatization (beyond for-profit ownership) were neglected
- The workforce was marginalized
But why do these trends exist? And what does it say about Canadian media and the journalists who work for it? And if all corporate media is bad, what about CBC, the public broadcaster?
Corporate media’s class interests
Greg Shupak, who teaches Media Studies at the University of Guelph, says that ideologically, private media firms have similar political and economic interests as other corporations, including those in the seniors’ care sector.
“We’re talking about companies that also want basically low taxes and limited regulation,” Shupak says. “In that regard, they have kind of inherent class interests same as those of big corporations, whether those corporations are involved in warehousing the elderly, or selling fried chicken.”
He says in that respect, there is an institutional bias because a company like Bell, which owns CTV News, does not want tax increases to pay for adequate social provision of services.
Shupak says that this institutional bias manifests in part through human resources practices whereby people with similar worldviews are promoted to senior positions in the newsroom.
“It’s not necessarily a question of ordering people who work for the media firms to not ask these [critical] questions, but it is a matter of [who they hire and promote],” he says.
But newsroom editors or managers don’t necessarily have to exert influence, when journalists do not question the status quo. Due to the broader cultural milieu encompassing a range of institutions including journalism programs at schools, Canadians largely internalize colonial, imperialist and capitalist beliefs.
In my own experience as a student at Centennial College, questioning the underlying assumptions of society was not part of the school curriculum (although my instructors always encouraged contrary viewpoints).
“People who work in journalism, whether as journalists or editors, don’t just exist in that realm discreetly,” Shupak says. “They’re part of the culture more broadly.”
“Because generally, liberal and capitalist worldviews are dominant, then it shouldn’t surprise anybody that that’s true of people who work in the media industry.”
Under-resourced newsrooms and precarious work in Canadian journalism
As the business of media has become less lucrative over the past decade or so, outlets have restructured by cutting down labour costs. Shupak says newsroom budget cuts have led to overworked staff, who are stretched too thin to do adequate research and produce good journalism.
“Budget cuts to newsrooms have consequences, making for a poorer quality product in the same way that cutting funding for education will typically lead to worse education outcomes,” he says.
One of the casualties of newsroom cuts has been the gradual demise of specialized beat reporters. Thus, there are an increasing number of general assignment reporters who don’t have time or resources to develop extensive knowledge of a particular industry.
As these reporters are forced to meet tight deadlines, they often rely on official sources (government, corporate spokespeople or association sources) – whose statements are published without critical analysis.
In the case of nursing homes, the Liberal government’s claim that they were investing $300 million over four years in nursing homes to hire registered nurses and provide four hours of care was repeatedly quoted without context.
Whereas $300 million may seem like a sizable investment, it is a meaningless number without contextualization. In a $4.2 billion sector, $75 million per year gradually going up to $300 million by year four, was actually a minimal funding increase. And it was misleading because the Liberals claimed it would help achieve a (recommended) four hour care standard.
Similarly, the Progressive Conservative government frequently boasted about its $72 million in additional funding to long-term care in 2019, even though in real dollar terms, that was an actual spending cut.
But if journalists are not familiar with the sector’s budget, how it’s allocated and spent, then they can’t possibly provide proper context. Of course, as discussed in part two, even investigative journalists don’t necessarily provide critical scrutiny, particularly when claims originate from industry sources.
“I don’t think it’s a malicious thing,” says a journalist who works for a mainstream outlet. “I think it’s a function of time, and a function of resources available to do these deep dives over many years to expose structural problems.”
True as that is, I would argue that decontextualized journalism neatly conforms to the ideological bias of media owners. For instance,lLack of time doesn’t typically lead to harsh reporting about the owners of long-term care. On the other hand, as I documented in part three, the workers are often victimized (although the pandemic has engendered a far more sympathetic view of LTC staff).
The profitability crisis in the business of journalism has also led to a tidal wave of layoffs and precarious work for journalists, which affects their autonomy and freedom of speech.
“There’s a real pressure to basically give their bosses what they feel their bosses want, or at minimum, to not stray so far from the consensus that they might be seen as wild eyed radicals,” Shupak says.
He says the general feeling of expendability thus creates an incentive for self-censorship that can manifest in terms of what’s emphasized in a given story or what is given short shrift.
Journalists then have limited freedoms; the expansion of which comes at a price.
“If you’re a star columnist at a major newspaper or a famous on-air personality, then you have more freedom,” Shupak says. “But the question is, what does it take to become that star? And I think often, it has to do with pleasing your boss. And the main way to do that is, of course, not only ideological, but probably more so to make money for them.”
He says generating revenue comes from content that is appealing to audiences, which is not necessarily the same as public service journalism. In effect, this can mean prioritizing infotainment over nuanced reporting.
Nasr Ahmed, a former CBC journalist and currently a media union organizer, sees funding shortages as a critical problem for newsrooms, hurting local news gathering and creating news desserts. He says that creates an over-reliance on news wire services, as opposed to doing on-the-ground reporting, leading to issues with the quality of the journalism.
“This is not the fault of the journalists, whose hands are tied,” he says, highlighting the structural issue. In that respect, he draws a comparison to the long-term care sector – in both cases, workers are blamed for their actions without contextualizing their decisions within the confines of a broader system.
The question of CBC
In this series, CBC News has been used as an example of corporate media, even though it is publicly-owned. Because of the process of neoliberalization of the Canadian state, CBC has faced large cuts in funding, resulting in an increasing reliance on advertising dollars – as well as precarious work.
“Outlets like CBC are not necessarily all that different, because although they are not seeking to make a profit for shareholders per se,” Shupak says. “They are beholden to advertisers and under pressure to keep costs under control.”
Shupak says CBC is somewhat distinct because of its obligation to preserve and promote Canadian culture. But within this realm, the outlet’s budgetary and programming decisions are questionable.
“Certainly, there’s good and interesting work that’s done under that rubric surrounding Indigenous issues, for example in recent years,” he says. “But there’s also the question of, how much money should be spent on, like, comedy shows that nobody watches that could probably be better spent on investigations.”
Effectively, he says, the pressure to keep costs low and attract audiences by keeping advertisers glued, means CBC isn’t functionally very different to for-profit media.
In that sense, there are parallels between publicly-funded, not-for-profit nursing homes and not-for-profit media, as both function under an austerity regime. Although nursing homes don’t have to radically alter services to compete with for-profit homes, Pat and Hugh Armstrong point to for-profit managerial strategies in public and non-profit homes.
These strategies are borrowed from the private sector, in part based on the ideological principle that government services need to be run as a business. In essence, the price of restrained budgets is paid by workers, who are exploited in the news media as they are in nursing homes.
Influence of advertising
In looking through the archives of the Toronto Star, I found 42 print advertisements by Chartwell between 2014 and 2019, many of them full-page spreads. Chartwell’s ads continue to appear in the paper in the pandemic.
Other Canadian media outlets too feature advertisements by corporations in the long-term care and retirement home sector.
The Toronto Star’s Public Editor suggested I speak with columnist and communications rep, Bob Hepburn, regarding the publication’s ad revenues from long-term care companies.
In a curt response that was probably not emblematic of the outlet’s Trust Project, Hepburn wrote, “We do not release any individual company or sector ad revenue figures.”
“There’s simply no way that they can claim that that’s not a factor in the work they do,” Shupak says. “That’s literally their revenue source.”
He says there is a body of scholarship showing the influence of advertisers on editorial coverage, including direct intervention.
This doesn’t mean there isn’t criticism of the advertisers in the media, but that it limits the parameters of the debate.
“There’s critical coverage of all kinds of different corporations,” Shupak says. “But that almost never adds up to any kind of meaningful, sustained, questioning of capitalism. That’s just way too fundamental of a challenge to every element of the news media, including the media companies themselves.”
The competitive media landscape
Due to the competitive media landscape, media outlets conduct their own investigations while being careful not to use information reported by their competitors (with some exceptions). In the case of media coverage of long-term care, there is no hint of collaboration.
Instead of a cooperative effort to investigate the problems in nursing homes in order to fight for a just system, the goal instead is to outperform others in order to expand market share.
In effect, the practices of media corporations are similar to those of for-profit long-term corporations that are incentivized to withhold proprietary information to gain a competitive edge.
But the media’s job isn’t so much to inform the public as much as it is to provide some information with the intention of promoting their own brand in a competitive market. And generally, there isn’t a lack of factual reporting, but the framing, the omission of facts, and the privileging of some voices over the others.
If the mainstream media’s job was to inform people about the long-term care system in order to foster debate and encourage democratic solutions to problems, surely they have failed in their duty.
But this is not a bug but rather a feature of the system. The underlying problems with media and nursing homes, in a predominantly for-profit system, are rooted in capitalism. And as we can witness very clearly in the case of nursing homes, Capitalism Kills.
Zaid Noorsumar, Journalist 