You Don’t Need a Degree to Tell the Truth: Journalism Was Never Meant to Serve Power
You do not need a degree to be a journalist. You do not need permission from an editor, a press gallery, or a media conglomerate. What you need is a backbone, a working brain, and the willingness to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it’s uncomfortable.
Because truth-telling and holding power to account are not things you’re taught in a classroom. They’re instincts. They’re values. They’re the product of lived experience and moral clarity, not a certificate hanging on the wall.
Throughout history, the most courageous journalists weren’t propped up by legacy media, they were pushed out by it. They didn’t get Sunday panels or six-figure column deals. They got threats, exile, discrediting. Why? Because they told the truth when the gatekeepers didn’t want it told.
Do you think the legacy media in Canada upheld integrity in the early 1900s? They ignored or outright justified the abuse, starvation, and deaths of Indigenous children in residential schools. Survivors spoke out. Whistleblowers warned them. The government had the numbers. And the press looked away.
Fast forward to today: has mainstream media done a good job covering the atrocities in Gaza? Or have they presented a sanitized, ahistorical version of events? One where children dying under rubble is presented with the same weight as military statements from a nuclear-armed state?
Journalism is not supposed to be neutral, it is supposed to be truthful. And sometimes the truth is ugly. Sometimes it’s political. But that doesn’t make it partisan. That makes it real.
Let’s be clear:
Climate change is real.
Residential schools were tools of cultural genocide.
The earth is round.
Donald Trump is a sexual abuser.
These are not debates. These are facts. And pretending there’s another “side” is not balance, it’s an omission of the truth. A lie by omission.
If someone says it’s raining and someone else says it’s dry, journalism isn’t quoting them both like it’s a philosophical exercise. Journalism is opening the damn window and telling people what’s actually happening.
But legacy media? They’ve become terrified. Not of the government. Not of misinformation. They’re terrified of losing control, of no longer being the singular voice of record. Because if they can’t control the narrative, they can’t control what you focus on. They can’t keep you distracted by a circus over there while ignoring the fire happening here.
And let’s not pretend neutrality isn’t profitable. Staying “neutral” allows mainstream media to take money from all sides, governments, corporations, lobbyists, billionaires. To write glowing profiles of politicians they once skewered, or destroy the ones that threaten their boardroom alliances.
They speculate. They sensationalize. They inflate whispers into scandals and bury war crimes in press releases.
They are not scared of being wrong. They are scared of being irrelevant.
And I don’t need their permission to shine a light on the truth. I don’t work for them. I work for the people who follow me, support me, and hold me accountable, you. That’s who I answer to. Not editors. Not politicians. Not shareholders.
Journalism belongs to all of us. Especially now.
We appreciate the fact checking required by good journalism. But we feel very let down by legacy media, as a whole. In ON they allow Doug Ford to comment on stories related to racism without noting that he happily posed with a white nationalist early in his first term. They allowed him to get away with blatantly interfering in municipal elections with only perfunctory references to the fact that this was an assault on democracy. When his staffers started clapping out press conferences to drown out questions, they shrugged. In fact, for the last 10 years or so when the rise of right wing extremism was THE story of our era (second to climate change), they were asleep at the switch and insisted that CDNs aren’t interested in democracy. We would counter that it’s the job of the media in a democracy to make people care. We don’t care about professional sports at Woodrow EU but that doesn’t stop the MSM from enthusiastically reporting on it constantly.
In a recent meeting with MP (where I raised my concern about disinformation) he noted that there is a distinct difference between news and journalism. News is a for-profit business and journalism is about reporting the truth.
It is important to identify this difference as we take in videos and articles. It is sad that we cannot trust “the news” anymore. Legacy media has gone the way of bothsidesism and this is disturbing and destructive. I hope there are enough people looking for truth rather than echo chambers to be able to strengthen the independent truth-based user-supported media. It is encouraging to see true journalists leaving legacy media to continue to pursue the truth and report the facts. When Jim Acosta signed off from CNN, he said “Don’t give in to the lies. Don’t give into the fear. Hold onto the truth.” 💪