The Carney-Trump meeting and life in the disinformation economy

Last week's meeting between Canada's new prime minister and his counterpart in Washington was, by recent standards, civil and non-confrontational. Mark Carney was firm in his dismissal of the 51st state rhetoric, and Trump was mostly accepting of that reality. Broadly speaking, nothing much happened, though it was good to hear a simple, "No. Never," from Canada's leader.

But if you happened upon social media in the hours following the summit, that's likely not what you saw. Depending on your platform and feed, Carney was either a Canadian hero slapping down a bully, or a pathetic clown who was "owned" and "humiliated". 

Canada gets vast majority of its media from the United States. And that media, especially the social kind, has become increasingly distorted and unreliable. Meanwhile, our own media struggles with resources and—increasingly—public distrust. How can we protect our citizens from the distortions they're exposed to every time they—by accident or necessity—venture beyond a handful of reliable Canadian sources?

After Jordan and Laura break down the Oval Office meeting, Jordan speaks to Taylor Owen, the Chair in Media, Ethics and Communication at McGill University, the founding Director of The Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy and principal investigator at the Media Ecosystem Observatory, to try to get a handle on the firehose of falsehoods we're blasted with today.

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