Former B.C. premier and CTV News executive say shrinking newsrooms, social media and controlled interview settings are changing how politicians face questions.
Political leaders are increasingly able to avoid sustained questioning from journalists, a shift former B.C. premier Christy Clark warned is weakening one of the press’s central democratic roles.
Clark, speaking with Richard Gray, vice-president of CTV News at Bell Media, said the decline of professional news coverage, especially local reporting, gives politicians more room to control their message and makes it harder for the public to hold them to account.
“Political accountability doesn’t exist in the absence of a media,” Clark said. “Making politicians talk about things is what we call accountability, and accountability is profoundly important for democracy to survive.”
The warning came during a panel on politics, power and the press at the Future of Journalism conference at the University of British Columbia. Moderated by Simi Sara, host of Mornings with Simi, the discussion examined how political leaders, news organizations and audiences are navigating a fragmented media environment.
Clark said the biggest change is not simply that there are more platforms. It is that the broader information ecosystem no longer treats truth as its gold standard.
“Truth is no longer the gold standard,” Clark said. “And it’s mostly opinion.”
Opinion may sometimes be true, she said, but it is not the same as truth. In an environment shaped by Reddit threads, social platforms, podcasts and partisan commentary, Clark said many people still turn to established news organizations to check whether what they have seen online is accurate.
Thinner form of access
Gray pushed back against the idea that established news organizations have lost their relevance. He said CTV News reaches 11.3 million Canadians each week. He also cited figures showing 57 per cent of Canadians still rely on television news, and said CTV’s digital platforms reach 46 per cent of Canadians in a month.
Still, Gray said political access has changed. Leaders may still appear in daily scrums, he said, but they are less available for longer interviews where journalists can press for detail and follow-up answers.
“What is not happening are lengthy, in-depth interviews,” Gray said.
Instead, he said, political communication increasingly comes through social media posts and controlled statements.
The result, as Gray described it, is not a complete absence of access, but a thinner form of it: shorter exchanges, fewer extended interviews and more opportunities for politicians to speak without being challenged.
Clark said the appeal for politicians is obvious.
“Every time you talk to a member of the media, what you do is you put your message in someone else’s hands,” she said.
That makes a friendly hour-long podcast or a self-produced video more attractive than a short interview with a reporter who may ask about a subject the politician would rather avoid.
“Most politicians will always go for the hour if they can with the person who they know is going to be friendly,” Clark said.
But she said elected officials cannot treat tough questioning as optional. Answering uncomfortable questions, she said, is part of the job.
“I do think it’s an obligation if you’re a politician,” Clark said. “It’s a democratic obligation to talk about why you’re doing things with the public, and the way that you do that is through the media.”
Gray took a slightly different view. No one, he said, is legally required to speak to journalists. But political leaders should understand why it matters.
“No one is obligated to speak to the media, but a political leader should want to and they should feel they need to,” Gray said.
Fewer resources for journalism
He also said the strained relationship between politicians and journalists is not entirely the fault of political leaders. News organizations have fewer resources than they once did, Gray said, making it harder to cover government announcements, particularly in smaller communities.
“Some of what is happening, we as an industry have brought on ourselves,” he said.
That decline in local coverage was one of Clark’s sharpest concerns. She said the disappearance of newspapers and radio newsrooms in smaller communities leaves municipal councils and other local institutions with less scrutiny.
“The absence or the diminishment of local news is a threat to democracy,” Clark said.
Without reporters at council meetings, she said, residents may have fewer independent accounts of decisions made in their communities. Local journalism, she argued, is often the way the public learns what elected officials are doing.
Gray said CTV has had to shift resources as audience behaviour changes. The network cancelled weekend newscasts in every Canadian market except Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, and replaced noon-hour local newscasts with national news channel programming. Recalling the figures from memory, he said audiences for weekend newscasts had fallen 38 per cent over five years, while noon newscasts had dropped 43 per cent.
At the national level, Gray said, CTV closed foreign bureaus in Los Angeles and London so it could move staff into four provinces where it did not have national news reporters: Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Prince Edward Island.
Gray described the financial pressure behind those decisions as intense. Advertising dollars that once supported Canadian journalism, he said, are moving to foreign platforms, including streaming services, Meta and Google.
“I spend more time focused on the business of journalism than the journalism of journalism on a daily basis,” he said.
The panel also turned to what journalists should do when politicians refuse to answer questions or provide only written responses. Clark said news organizations should make that refusal visible.
“The only thing you can do is criticize them publicly,” she said.
Seeking youth audiences
The discussion ended with younger audiences and the future of the profession. Gray said the traditional career path into journalism still exists, but the number of young people applying for jobs has changed sharply over his career. Families no longer gather around radio and television news in the same way, he said, and that has changed how young people think about journalism as a career.
The answer, he said, is not to expect audiences to return to old habits.
“We can’t just create a newscast and expect people to show up at 6 o’clock or 11 o’clock anymore,” Gray said. “Those days are long, long gone.”
For news organizations, Gray said, the task is to be available wherever audiences are looking for news. For politicians, Clark argued, the obligation is more basic: face questions, explain decisions and accept that scrutiny is part of democratic life.
The panel, “Politics, Power and the Press: How audiences navigate a fractured political reality,” was part of UBC’s Future of Journalism summit on May 13, 2026. It featured Clark, a former premier and broadcaster, and Gray, who oversees editorial and business operations across CTV News platforms.
The summit was presented by Global Journalism Innovation Lab, the UBC School of Journalism, Writing, and Media and Canadian Journalism Foundation, and supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Photos: Reilly Brady