CBC Response: It’s Not Our Job to Fact Check

The CBC has responded to my ombudsman complaint and concluded that it’s not up to them to question the World Happiness Report.

There are a number of ways you can mislead your average reader. Some ways are intentional while others are unintentional. This might include manufacturing consent, omitting critical information, pushing logical fallacies, or publishing content that is outright wrong among other ways. Really, the methods of misleading readers are quite endless.

In this case, it is taking something that is very unscientific and reporting it as fact while conveniently not publishing actual research that might call the report into question. That’s exactly what happened with the World Happiness Report that was “covered” by the CBC. Last month, I published a report about both the coverage and the contents of that report which tried to blame social media for a decline in world happiness. The World Happiness Report itself was very sloppily put together and designed more to fool mainstream media outlets into believing some of the most outrageous lies about our digital world. Since the mainstream media were already prone to believing those lies, it seemed like a con that would be very easy to pull off.

Naturally, the CBC fell for it hook line and sinker. They published their report basically saying that social media causes world happiness to sink – even implying that heavy social media use in Canada is responsible for the countries decline in the report (which I could not find any such claim in the report itself). This is by no means the first time that the CBC was basically caught publishing such disinformation on the internet (for example, trying to blame social media for human smuggling), but at this point, I had enough of the CBC’s low quality because people are continuing to be misled about the affects of social media.

So, I went ahead and put my money where my mouth was and filed a complaint with the CBC ombudsman. You can read the whole complaint in that article, but generally speaking, I laid out why the reporting was misleading, what the actual scientific research says about the impacts of social media on mental health (while referencing the 7 scientific studies that back my claims up), why Jonathan Haidt is not exactly a very credible person in these debates, and pointing out that, at minimum, the other side of the story should have been included in the reporting (ala referencing such scientific studies that dispute the findings).

I wasn’t honestly expecting much of a response. Just a boiler plate response that basically said, “nah, bro” and leaving it at that. What I ended up getting, however, was something different that was somehow worse. It truly is a response that has to be read to be believed. So, here it is:

Thank you for your email to the CBC Ombud (copied below) regarding recent coverage of the 2026 World Happiness report that was published on CBCNews.ca.

I am the Senior Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust for CBC News, responding on behalf of General Manager and Editor in Chief Brodie Fenlon. I appreciate that you have taken the time to express your concerns about our journalism and I welcome the opportunity to address them.

After reviewing the coverage in question, I believe our reporting met the requirements of our Journalistic Standards and Practices (JSP).

The purpose of this coverage was to report on the release and findings of the World Happiness Report itself, a significant annual publication from the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. When CBC News reports on such a matter, our duty is to fairly and accurately report the conclusions reached by the authors of the study. In this instance, the report’s authors identified a decline in youth happiness in North America and pointed toward social media and increased social isolation as significant contributing factors. These were the findings of the study’s authors, as reported, not conclusions endorsed by CBC News.

Regarding your concerns about the methodology of the World Happiness Report and its reliance on the work of Jonathan Haidt, it is important to distinguish between reporting a news event and conducting a comprehensive scientific review of that study’s citations and conclusions. Our reporting does not imply that the CBC has conducted an independent peer-review of the hundreds of pages of research. Rather, it signifies that the report’s release is a matter of significant public interest that warrants coverage.

Thank you again for your feedback, which has been shared with CBC News editorial leaders, and for your engagement with our journalism.

Sincerely,

Basem Boshra
Senior Director
Journalistic Standards and Public Trust
CBC News

Like, what the actual fuck? To put it another way, this is a CBC senior director saying that it is not the job of the CBC to do fact checking at all. Something got published and we’ll just take what it says as fact as-is. For one, this is just peak journalistic laziness. For another, it’s extremely asinine to basically defend the practice of being extremely lazy in the process.

I mean, this is coming from a news organization that has absolutely no problem screaming until they are blue in the face that they are the ones who ensure that all of their material is properly fact-checked. They basically say that they are an island of actual properly researched journalism and, without them, misinformation spreads. Yet, when presented with actual facts on a story they clearly fumbled hard on, their response is “Our reporting does not imply that the CBC has conducted an independent peer-review of the hundreds of pages of research”. The amount of bad here is amazing.

First of all, I never implied that I expected them to be science researchers who are experts in the field. That was never my expectation. Instead, I was simply pointing out that the methodology in the World Happiness Report was flawed and, as a result, the CBC may be spreading disinformation (something I thought the CBC treats seriously, but apparently not in practice). Instead of looking into the matter and seeing if there is some validity to my claims, it was met with a giant shrug.

Now, if I submitted this complaint with no actual research to back my claims up, sure, a collective shrug might have been warranted. The thing is, that’s not what I did. I presented what amounts to a giant buffet of facts on this matter. What would the CBC like? Do they want the fact roast, the fact lasagne, or perhaps the fact club sandwich? Literally, they could’ve picked anything on this topic and their response from the starving individual was, “nah, journalists don’t need facts.”

This leads me to another way in which the CBC whiffed hard here. Whenever people jump into my comments section and presents me with something valid, I at least make an effort to try and look into it. Since I am just one person, sometimes I just run into limitations with my resources and I’m unable to pursue that lead. Other times, however, I look into what was said and I end up turning it into a story. There were even instances where I had to tweak the wording of an article because there was something I misread somewhere along the line. I own up to that flaw and I correct the record. I never claim to be perfect and anyone who says they are are liars because sooner or later, when you publish as much as I have, there is going to be something that ended up slipping through the cracks. It’s not a matter of “if”, but “when” that happens. That’s not an excuse of pushing poor quality content, that’s just the practical reality of the situation journalists frequently face.

That’s not what the CBC did here. The CBC is, at minimum, a multi-million dollar publicly funded corporation. They have an insane amount of resources at their disposal to look into news stories. At minimum, you’d think they would have the resources to see the report and conduct a basic surface level amount of research into the topic. Is there credibility to the claims being made by Haidt (the answer is no by the way)? What does the science say about social media and mental health? I’m not asking them to conduct a peer reviewed paper on the topic, but at the very least, the CBC probably has a number of psychologists on speed dial so they can ask their opinions on the matter (hopefully, that doesn’t result on “expert shopping” to get the answer the CBC wants as opposed to what the actual research has to say on the matter). At minimum, just that basic level of picking up the proverbial phone to ask would’ve yielded the result of how Haidt is a controversial figure.

Post-complaint filing and I can confidently say that the CBC was pretty much handed at least three or four stories. As a journalist myself, it felt like I was sitting next to the CBC in class and because what the CBC was doing was so egregiously embarrassing, I handed the CBC the answer key. The response was basically, “I know what I’m talking about! I don’t need no stinking answer key!” Like, seriously, they could’ve looked at the studies and contacted the authors. They could’ve looked at the links I provided and contacted the people criticizing Haidt. I’m sure a number of them would’ve been happy to respond to such a call. At the very least, maybe the CBC senior director would’ve thanked me and said that they would be happy to look into the resources I provided them to get a better understanding of this very topic. I mean, there is a whole range of good responses that could’ve been made.

The problem is that the CBC chose none of the above. Did they address the contents of those studies? Not really. Did they acknowledge that there might, at the very least, be a debate on this subject? Not really. If anything, their response implies that they are just not serious about reporting the news in this area. I’m not saying that talking about mental health and social media is not a matter of public interest, I’m saying that it is a matter of public interest that deserves to be reported on with the facts – not some wild conspiracy theories of some random dude with an axe to grind against social media.

Simply shrugging all of this off with, “These were the findings of the study’s authors, as reported, not conclusions endorsed by CBC News” really screams to me that they just didn’t care about their audience. The job of a responsible news organization is to present the facts to their readers as best as can be reasonably be expected. As many other journalists out there have no problem saying, their role is to act as a filter for their audience. Whatever the journalist finds out gets verified. Sometimes it makes sense to simply say someone neither confirmed nor denied something and that is a fair thing to report on. At the very minimum, an attempt at due diligence is all that is needed.

What the CBC told me straight up is that journalistic filter doesn’t exist with the CBC. If they are told that something is worth reporting on, they’ll run it regardless of whether it is accurate or not. Who cares about accuracy? If anyone complains about inaccurate reporting, then just respond with something that amounts to “it’s not our job to fact check”. If evidence is presented pointing out that the reporting is inaccurate, just dismiss the facts and evidence outright and say that the evidence is irrelevant. It’s just being irresponsible to the audience, plain and simple.

Look, I get it. When you are venturing into an area of coverage you are less familiar, it’s way harder to cover it. That’s why I always take a more cautious approach whenever there is something I’m covering I’m less familiar with. For instance before the Online Streaming Act received royal assent, I knew nothing about how the CRTC processes worked. If you asked me, at the time, what are the specific processes of how the CRTC implements new legislation, I would’ve thrown my hands up in the air and responded with a “pff, I don’t know. This is all new territory for me.”

To this day, I wouldn’t claim I am a total expert in the process of the CRTC implementing a newly passed law, but I can definitely say I’ve learned quite a lot in the process. I learned that, sometimes, there is a consultation phase where witnesses and stakeholders can step forward and offer their thoughts on the subject matter. I learned that you can submit a response in PDF format contrary to what the online documentation might say. What’s more, I also learned that if litigation does occur in response to that particular consultation, you can very well get e-mail notifications saying that a lawsuit has, in fact, been filed and I am able to access the court filing as well. All of the above and more are things I learned since the passage of the Online Streaming Act.

The key phrase in the above paragraph there is “learned”. As a journalist, learning is a perfectly acceptable thing to be doing. In fact, it’s kind of an expectation. No, you aren’t going to know everything, but the more you learn, the more you grow as a journalist. That’s how you get senior journalists on staff who are knowledgeable in the first place. I guarantee you that when they first started their gig decades ago, they were just as green as people who are starting out today. This is a normal process. The important thing here is that journalists can grow and learn and be able to provide higher quality news reporting. You build up that body of knowledge over time and, eventually, you are able to say, “hey, this report contradicts something I covered last year, why is that?”

This is ultimately how I get my “hundreds of pages of research”. Over time, I learn things. I didn’t learn of those 7 studies overnight. It took me time to figure out where to look – especially if I didn’t get a chance to cover it. Even I was told by readers once upon a time, ‘you can’t cover it all’, so there is no shame on relying on another source to cover some of the things I didn’t get to. That other source had the time and resources to cover it at the time. I didn’t. It happens. Still, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t at least remember what I read. If anything, it becomes another fact-based tool in my toolkit whenever I cover these things (ads the CBC clearly witnessed).

As a result, this is part of what drives me nuts about the CBC’s response here. There was no effort to learn about the issue. In fact, the response was basically an excuse to not learn about any of this at all. This is infuriating to me because it’s wilfully abandoning your duties as a journalist at that point.

This isn’t even getting into what is so fundamentally flawed about not only the report, but also the coverage of the report. I don’t think it’s necessary here to re-write that aspect of this story.

At any rate, the CBC’s response is immensely disappointing. It shows that the CBC simply isn’t serious in this whole “journalism” thing – at least when it comes to technology related issues. I not only told them to “do better”, but also offered a road map on how to do better. The CBC ultimately responded with “no”. So, I guess you can’t expect serious journalism from the CBC in the world of technology. At least readers can get that serious journalism here on Freezenet, so that’s something.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.