Dawna Friesen and Kris Reyes say reporters must hold the line against intimidation, falsehoods and shrinking foreign-reporting resources.
Canadian journalists covering the United States said a turbulent political climate is forcing newsrooms to make sharper choices about what matters to audiences at home and what merely adds to the noise.
Dawna Friesen, anchor and executive editor of Global National, and Kris Reyes, a CBC/Radio-Canada foreign correspondent based in New York, said Canadian reporters have a distinct role in explaining the United States to Canadians at a time when U.S. decisions on trade, tariffs and the Canada-U.S. relationship can quickly spill across the border.
“I think Canadians deserve to be getting their international news from Canadian journalists,” Reyes said. “There is a built-in desire for us to try to cover international news with Canadians in mind.”
They said Canadian journalists bring a practical lens to U.S. stories because the consequences often land directly in Canada. Canadian audiences can easily watch American networks and read American news sites, but Friesen and Reyes said Canadian reporters still have to answer a different question: why does this matter here?
Friesen said that task has become harder during U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, not only because of the stakes, but because of the volume.
“We’re faced with a fire hose of information every single day coming at us fast and furious,” Friesen said. “We have to try to distill what out of that is going to be most relevant to Canadians and most important to Canadians.”
That distillation happens under severe time pressure, she said. A national newscast has roughly 21 and a half minutes after commercials to cover the major national and international events of the day. Much of what journalists monitor never makes air.
“There’s more that we leave out than we would like to put in,” Friesen said.
A relationship under pressure
Friesen placed the current strain in a longer history of Canadian dependence on, and anxiety about, the United States. She cited former Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s 1969 observation that living next to the U.S. was like “sleeping with an elephant,” where Canada feels every “twitch and grunt.”
More than five decades later, she said, Canada is still managing the same forces: economic dominance, trade dependence, cultural influence and the imbalance of living beside a superpower.
“The moment we’re in is going to change our relationship with the United States,” Friesen said, “but it’s not going to fatally wound it.”
Reyes said U.S. citizens, by contrast, often do not register Canada in the same way. After a decade living in the United States, she said she has come to see that U.S. citizens are not always indifferent to the rest of the world so much as overwhelmed by the intensity of their own domestic politics.
“It’s one thing to watch a storm from inside your house through the window,” Reyes said, “and it’s another to be at the center of that storm.”
Still, she said the current administration’s treatment of Canada has begun to cut through, at least in some places.
“More New Yorkers have been apologizing to me personally in recent months than they ever have,” Reyes said.
Friesen said the asymmetry is built into the media landscape. Canadians consume American news constantly, while most people who live in the United States do not do the same with Canadian news.
That affects not only public understanding, she said, but also the work of Canadian journalists in Washington, where potential sources may not always see why they should speak to a Canadian outlet.
Staying focused under attack
The discussion turned sharply to Trump’s treatment of reporters, particularly women journalists. Moderator Mi-Jung Lee, anchor of CTV News Vancouver, asked how reporters should respond when the president insults them instead of answering questions.
Reyes said journalists must resist being drawn into a personal confrontation.
“You have to remember that you’re engaging not with Donald Trump, you’re engaging with the President of the United States, and you have a role to play when you’re questioning him,” she said.
Her approach, she said, is to “stay the course” and “hold the line.” The reporter’s job is not to win the exchange, but to keep pursuing the answer.
Friesen said the insults serve a purpose.
“It’s a tactic to intimidate and try to silence and keep you from asking another question,” she said. “Once you see it as that and you know that’s what it is, just don’t let it work.”
The larger problem, Friesen said, is that attacks on reporters often prevent accountability. When a politician responds with insult rather than substance, the public is still left without an answer.
“So many things are happening without accountability and without answers in the United States,” she said.
Reyes said the treatment of female journalists deserves sustained attention, but not necessarily in the moment when a reporter is trying to question the president. That conversation, she said, belongs in newsrooms, journalism organizations and public forums where the pattern can be examined directly.
Sorting signal from noise
The panelists said one of the hardest editorial challenges is deciding which presidential statements or posts deserve attention and which merely amplify distraction.
Friesen pointed to Trump’s late-night posting habits, including an episode she described as containing “a lot of demonstrably false things.” In previous administrations, she said, a single extraordinary statement might have driven a major news cycle. Now, the volume itself has changed how journalists respond.
Journalists cannot ignore the posts, Friesen said, because one may contain a policy shift or a signal that affects Canada, particularly on trade. But they also cannot chase every claim.
Reyes said the only answer is disciplined reporting, repeated daily.
“I try to bring those principles where I’m trying to deepen understanding more than I’m trying to increase divide or polarization,” she said. “The best I can do is keep showing up.”
She described herself as a “ground soldier of journalism,” filing daily across platforms and relying on the craft itself, verification, context and clarity, to separate what matters from what merely makes noise.
That work, she said, cannot be done by one reporter alone. It depends on a broader industry still committed to fact-checking, verification and public understanding.
Foreign reporting with fewer resources
Both journalists warned that shrinking foreign bureaus have weakened Canadian journalism’s ability to explain the world.
Reyes said it used to be normal for major newsrooms to maintain local, national and international correspondents. Now, she said, journalists often have to defend the value of international reporting itself.
“What do you lose when you don’t have resources?” she said. “You don’t get to cover the place as much. You don’t get to deepen your understanding of a region.”
Friesen, who worked for NBC News as a foreign correspondent before joining Global, said earlier generations of correspondents were often posted abroad for years, learned languages and built deep regional knowledge. Those models have been cut back across Canadian and American networks, she said.
But Friesen also warned against nostalgia. Digital tools have opened access to material that was once impossible to obtain quickly: livestreams, satellite images, user-generated video and real-time posts from conflict zones or disaster scenes.
The journalist’s job, she said, is to verify before publishing or broadcasting. That means checking who posted footage, securing permission, confirming locations and using verification services when needed.
Reyes said legacy journalists should not see citizen journalists, freelancers or people on the ground with phones as competitors. They are part of the same information ecosystem.
“It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment that we’re living in,” Reyes said. “There’s value in the seasoned journalists watching that video and explaining it to the audience. There’s value in the different individuals that are operating in between.”
A guarded optimism
Despite the challenges, the panel ended with a defence of journalism’s future.
Reyes said journalism organizations still have to do more to explain their value to audiences, especially as newsrooms shrink and foreign bureaus become harder to sustain. She said engagement with audiences could help rebuild support for international reporting in new forms.
Friesen urged journalism students in the room to stay with the profession, even as they face shrinking resources and public hostility.
“If we don’t have you kind of being the first line of defence, if you like, for holding democracy, for holding power to account, for telling stories, then we’re lost,” she said.
The panel, “Decoding America: Understanding the U.S. from Canada,” was moderated by CTV News Vancouver anchor Mi-Jung Lee at the University of British Columbia’s Future of Journalism summit on May 13, 2026.
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