Okay. Thank you. Please interrupt me if you can't hear.
Thank you again for inviting us here, Madam Chair and everyone in the hearing.
My name is Michelle Shephard. I’m here with my co-president, Carol Off, to represent Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. We are also both long-time journalists in Canada. I spent 21 years at the Toronto Star before leaving in 2018 to work independently. I continue to work with media organizations and to produce documentaries. Carol Off, as I’m sure a lot of you know, was with CBC for 40 years, most recently at the helm of As It Happens. She has just returned from a book tour for her best-selling book At a Loss for Words.
I know there are a few Canadian journalism organizations, so just to be clear, CJFE is the oldest in Canada. We've been in existence for more than 40 years. We’re an independent charity. At present, we're completely run by volunteers, which includes both of us and our board of directors.
What we hope to provide here is a perspective from the front lines of journalism. I can’t overstate just how dire it feels. Simply put, journalists are continually asked to do more with less.
Carol will talk about the news deserts we have in Canada, but I can speak from personal experience about the decline in newsgathering internationally. The beat I enjoyed for so many years with the Star, bringing stories of significance to Canadians from such places as Guantanamo Bay and throughout Africa and the Middle East, just doesn’t exist in the same way today. CBC is now often the sole media outlet reporting from abroad.
Trust in the media is at an all-time low, as we know. We can all criticize the media. As journalists, we do this often. But this loss of trust in legitimate news reporting is not entirely because of the media's failing. It has been engineered. Independent media has been targeted by those who benefit from breaking the public's faith in facts and the truth. That's not just south of the border. It's here in Canada too.
I’ll be honest; we’re both journalists who have reported from conflicts and wars abroad, but we actually had to think long and hard before appearing here today. We passionately believe in a free press, and that it benefits all of us in society, but this issue has become so toxic and partisan that it has become difficult to discuss responsibly. That’s a problem.
One last concern I have, which I know you share on the committee, is how news is disseminated and the prevalence of disinformation. The Media Ecosystem Observatory found in a study that in the year since Meta banned news on its platforms, it’s estimated that there has been a reduction of 11 million news views per day across Instagram and Facebook. That same study found that only 22% of Canadians even realize that legitimate Canadian news has been banned on those platforms. This same group is among the people who say they're still getting their news from Facebook and Instagram.
I'd like Carol to now continue.