How legal fears kill stories before they’re told
In Canadian newsrooms, a silent force is shaping which stories get published and which ones don’t. It’s not editorial standards, audience metrics, or a lack of reporting skill—it’s fear. “The legal risk in journalism has always been a cost of doing business,” says Josh Lynn, a public relations manager at Animal Justice and a former journalist.
Lynn says there’s an attitude leaning toward avoiding the risk. That attitude lies at the heart of a phenomenon known as “chilling:” media organizations avoid or downplay certain stories, not because they’re untrue or unethical, but for fear of provoking legal pushback.
Legal threats don’t need to be valid to have an impact. In Lynn’s time as a journalist, threatening emails from lawyers—something newsrooms’ legal teams tend to brush aside when the claim has no legal basis—have had increasing power to shut down a story. “We had a lot of lawyers on staff and a lot of legal expertise, and the consensus was that this wasn’t a thing that should have a chilling effect. But suddenly, they weren’t going to touch this thing anymore.”
The suppression isn’t always linked to a fear of lawsuits, but legal sensitivity plays a major role. One Saskatchewan journalist, who requested confidentiality to avoid alienating himself in the workplace or violating his employment terms, describes having stories killed due to a “reluctance to piss off the provincial government.” He says these kinds of decisions “irritated” him. “When public institutions aren’t working the way they’re intended, people deserve to know when vulnerable people in their community are being taken advantage of.”
In recent years, high-profile defamation cases have rattled newsrooms. Global News is currently being sued by former Liberal MP Han Dong over a report alleging he advised Chinese officials during the 2021 election, allegations Dong denies. In 2022, CTV apologized and settled with Patrick Brown, and corrected the details of their sexual misconduct reports that led to his resignation as Ontario PC leader.
The pressure doesn’t need to end in litigation. Often, it’s the anticipation of backlash, or the expense of defending a story in court that makes editors hesitate. The Digital Rights Foundation also acknowledges the problem. Its 2020 report from the Global Conference for Media Freedom warns that “the fear of being subject to such practices has a chilling effect on speech and can also result in self-censorship.”
Lynn says he’s seen a gradual shift. “I noticed over the years, sometimes stories [used to be] easier to get done with less pushback.” He says it became clear over time that even legally obtained footage, like that captured during undercover investigations, was no longer enough to reassure newsrooms. Stories that would have moved forward in the past without hesitation were now being shelved because publishers didn’t want to risk additional legal expenses.
Lynn links this change to corporate decision-making. “There are some large corporations which own Canada’s major news outlets. At the end of the day, there’s a bottom line to look after.” And the result, he says, is a subtle form of self-censorship. “You learn what’s going to pass muster.”
Over time, journalists internalize what kinds of stories will raise concerns with legal or editorial colleagues without even realizing it, and will start leaving those ideas out. The Saskatchewan reporter says the pattern is familiar. “I do have a lot of freedom to write what I want, but less so when it comes to the provincial government or police,” he says.
In one case, he found the Premier of Saskatchewan, Scott Moe, had financial ties to a family member whose social media posts he says included hate speech. “His chief of staff contacted our news director and essentially said, this isn’t a story, and our news director just isn’t amenable to conflict.”
Without space for risk in investigative reporting, Lynn says, something fundamental is lost. “You lose something in the public square. That’s what journalism is supposed to do, right?”
