What’s been going on up there in Canada with the Media?!!

Have newspapers been relegated to the recycle bin of history?

Old news

The Freedom Convoy 2022 in Canada got worldwide attention last month and it is interesting the various reactions it has gotten: from governments, media, and average folks. After seeing the legacy media and independent media reports of the truckers convoy, you must be asking yourself: Are they looking at the same thing?

What you’ve heard about this protest depends entirely on what news you consume. Here is a good video review, or you can see my previous blog.

Let’s look at the media’s involvement in this whole situation. I’m focussing on Canada, but here is a good overview of the media in the UK during the pandemic. This may well apply to other democracies as well.

The protester’s primary demand was to re-open the USA the border to American and Canadian truckers and secondarily that it was time to drop all temporary Covid Mandates. The federal government didn’t budge. Canadians are well known for being easy going, polite, and peace-keepers around the world. Well, now we are realizing that we let things slip a little too much and now have to muscle up and be peacemakers as well. The way this Freedom Convoy ended revealed a potential need to step up against aggression from our own government.

The legacy media also didn’t budge in their opposition to this grassroots movement, and support for the aggressive stance of the government.

My Bias, Your Bias

So what thinking has led us to this place in the development of Canadian democracy? The current popular thinking in our culture seems to be along these lines.

• In order to truly be my authentic self, I must give free rein to all of my biases when I speak to someone, especially on social media.
• I assume everyone else does the same, so everything out there is extremely biased.
• There is no point in even trying to be unbiased, because we all have unconscious biases from our upbringing.
• These are so inextricably intertwined in our thoughts and identity that we aren’t even aware of what they are. We don’t know how extensive our own bias is.
• The degree of privilege we grew up with determines our thinking, despite our best efforts.

In all of this, there appears to be no value placed on self introspection. They have apparently forgotten Socrates warning.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

— Socrates

The social consequence of this kind of thinking is this.

• Everyone has their own truth and there is no way to determine if one version is better than another. Your truth is not my truth, so it is entirely irrelevant in my life.
• Since you are completely biased in all you say, then there is no point in even listening to you if you aren’t in my privilege group.
• Therefore, everyone stays in their own echo chamber.

This has huge implications for the news media. Up until this century, news programs would try to be objective. This ended when the big American networks started seeing their news shows as just another source of ratings. TV had already taken a great market share from newspapers and they had to follow suit to compete. As sensationalism increased, objectivity decreased. In the 2000’s, the internet as a source of information started biting into the TV news market share of viewers, as well as the newspaper market.

Media Bias

News editors used to be a firewall between the reader / viewer and the author’s biases. This was the big advantage the media had over some random blogger on the internet. You could be sure that someone had checked out his story. By now, that distinction has largely disappeared. And media has only contributed to the problem of hidden biases. So the legacy media have by and large lost their advantage over independent media. Some staff have even quit their well paying jobs to be able write their conscience, on an independent platform.

In fact, when I know a blogger’s personal life from his videos, I feel like I know him, can see his biases and can trust him more. I never even knew the name of the guy who wrote the news story script for the TV news anchor.

To any observer who has been looking at multiple sources of news, it is apparent the legacy media have been basically cheerleaders for the government throughout the pandemic and dismissing out of hand anyone who dared question the wisdom of their actions. For instance, legacy media insisted on referring to the protest as the ‘so-called Freedom Convoy’, implying that they must have some ulterior motive besides asking for their freedom back.

According to polls, almost half of Canadians sympathized with the truckers cause. So, when media denigrated supporters of this protest, it probably produced an unwanted response from the average citizen. The Covid coverage in general, culminating in the Trucker Protests has likely turned public sentiment from, ‘I don’t trust them’ to ‘I hate them and I’ll never forgive them, because they lied about ME.’ It may well spell the end of the mainstream newspaper and network TV news media.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Their credibility is being tested, not only in their words, but also in pictures. There were reports by independents of legacy media pointing their cameras away from the crowds in front of the Parliament Buildings to make it look like there was only a small crowd there. Similar tactics were used during the Covid crisis, photographing hospital wards and misusing statistics to make it look worse than it was.

We have seen photos as part of Ukraine news reports that people have recognized as a local factory fire, or explosion, in Beirut, or Fort MacMurray, or somewhere. If these reports are true, then it is obvious intentional misleading of the public. We always accused Russian state-controlled media of this sort of malfeasance, but now it seems that corruption in is the soul of man in the west as well.

Even when the photo is indeed an accurate representation of the event, it can still be spun to convince people (or perhaps themselves) of their narrative. There was a famous photo in the media widely circulated as proof that Trump was less popular than Obama, by showing the crowd at the Mall for the Inaugural Address. It was a comparison of photos taken at the same time of day from the same vantage pointing showing far fewer supporters in attendance. That’s a fair and objective comparison, right? However, what this photo actually proved was not fewer people in attendance, but that security was increased and it took people a couple hours longer to get onto the grounds for the Address. But, that’s not the official interpretation that you will see anywhere in legacy media of that photo!

What do things like that do for the credibility of legacy media? It depends how many of us look at a wide range of news sources. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, it would take more than a thousand words to explain away these sorts of activities to regain the confidence of the general public in legacy media.

These activities can do a lot to whip up a frenzy of fear in the midst of a pandemic, unexpected election, or war — which is what TV producers are supposed to do to increase their show ratings. It is NOT what responsible News Directors are supposed to do.

As a society, we are going to have to ask ourselves what role legacy media has been playing in the past few years. Some people are looking to the government to provide this editorial service so that they know for sure it is the truth, because the government has verified it for them. Do we have another pillar that can continue to support our democracy? Because history has shown us when that happens in a society, you can rest assured the opposite of truth will be dispensed. Sadly, there is no shortcut.

But, that still leaves us with the issue of how to determine the truth when reading any kind of new or old media. That will have to be a whole other article!

Part of the problem is probably just human nature that we would rather stay warm inside and listen to the government press release and write our news piece from that. It’s much quicker and easier than going out, finding and interviewing representative people, taking notes and writing our article before the deadline.

Here is another possible part of the problem that has cropped up in Canada in the last couple of years.

Media Funding

Apart from some small community broadcasters, media in Canada are primarily owned by four companies: Bell, Corus, Rogers, Quebecor and the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

Three years ago, to support legacy media struggling with the competition of the internet, the Canadian government presented a budget of $595 million over five years, for electronic and print media, known as the newspaper bailout. Of course in a democracy, the Prime Minister can’t just be seen handing out money to corporations, so his cabinet appointed a group to decide how these funds should be allocated. A Union organization who had just stated their vehement disapproval of the Opposition leader was one of the eight groups represented. I daresay it’s not likely any group who said they hated the Liberal Party was invited!

This government also handed out the $50 million Local Journalism Initiative. The $60 million pandemic-specific Emergency Support Fund was conveniently announced six weeks before calling a snap election.

And just before Christmas, the media received a government Christmas bonus of an additional $10 million “Special Measures for Journalism” top-up for 2021–22. Of course, this is in addition to provincial and federal government COVID-relief subsidies that are not specific to media companies, that were also available to them. This is also not including the annual federal funding of the CBC to the tune of about $1.4 billion.

The opposition accused the Liberals of bribing media with tax credits and incentives. That couldn’t be what was happening, could it?

Well, how did media respond ?

Freedom of Speech or Control of Speech:

Interestingly enough, as noted in a previous blog, the story coming from the legacy media and from independent YouTubers was opposite. From what I could see, the YouTubers got it right.

For example, it was widely reported in legacy media that people in the protest carried Confederate and Nazi flags. No one seems to know what the Confederate flag was all about. The legacy media made all kinds of speculation about it. To the vast majority of Canadians, it is meaningless. They are more likely to associate it with The Dukes of Hazard movie than with hate speech.

Then, there was a guy in the protest with a Nazi flag. Media jumped all over that as proof they were not to be trusted. If the legacy media had conducted a little bit of journalism, they would have discovered that this guy was trying to point out that the Trudeau government was acting like Nazis. Instead, they continued running with that story for weeks.

Another aspect to this story is that Chrystia Freeland was banned from Russia when she was named Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister, for activities with neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine. They’ve been watching her activities there, since she was 20. Media didn’t seem to bother looking into why she was banned. Last month, there was a photo that circulated briefly of her posing with the flag of the Azov Regiment. This regiment has the distinction of being the world’s only neo-Nazi formation in a national army.

In 2016, Facebook users were banned from praising this Azov regiment, as a hate group. However, on the day Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Facebook reversed its ban, saying it would allow praise for Azov.

It sounds like they can’t decide whether being associated with a neo-Nazi group is OK or not. Somebody in control seems to have changed their position on it. Whether these media corporations want neo-Nazis to be heard or not, seems to have nothing to do with freedom of speech. Rather, it has more to do with what they can use to smear somebody with and silence them. It’s almost as if their (post modernist) ideology doesn’t even believe that freedom of speech is possible or desirable.

Where does that leave media?!

Media’s Role to Play

Freedom of speech is key in a democracy. In an empire or monarchy you get what you get. In a democracy, we use it or lose it. It is our responsibility to choose our leader. In order to do that, we must first inform ourselves. An independent media is an integral component of that informing process in a democracy.

It is supposed to keep an eye on our governing class for us and expose any corruption, present opposing views and give them a voice, show the options available, besides what the government is proposing. If after all that, you still choose a dictator, well, that’s on you.

Coincidentally, since the Trudeau government provided billions of dollars of bailout money to legacy media, it seems to be falling far short of doing that. This month, Prime Minister Trudeau presented a speech at the European Parliament, and was harshly criticized by some MEPs from Finland, Romania, Germany, and Croatia that went viral.

In the past, any other Prime Minister would have been raked over the coals in the media back home for getting this kind of a response from the EU. This month? Silence in legacy media! Only after millions saw it on YouTube, media responded with a short article on it. They impugned the credibility of the MEPs as a few far right antivaxxers who were claiming he violated civil rights and then defended each of the Prime Ministers actions that were criticized. So much for critical cross examination of the country’s leadership.

Fifth Estate

The spheres of influence over modern policy-making are known as the four estates.

• The first estate is the executive branch of a government. Think the president, state governor, or city mayor; in Canada, the Prime Minister’s Office.
• The second estate is the legislative branch of a government. That would be the U.S. Congress, state legislative bodies, or House of Commons, and Senate.
• The third estate is the judicial branch of a government. This is the court system.
• The fourth estate is mass and traditional media, now being referred to as ‘legacy media.’

It has long been recognized that the strength of the democracy depends on these four pillars being strong and independent, seeing their role in the big picture. In a dictatorship, on the other hand, the same small group of people control all four.

But now a fifth estate has emerged, as an alternative sphere of influence, we can define as the term for non-traditional media. And it is this fifth estate that over the past decade has started to show some cracks in the other pillars, through things like Wikileaks, independent YouTubers and smaller web-based media outlets.

Naturally, this has been noticed by government leaders who want a firmer control on their population. Prime Minister Trudeau pointed out on another recent trip to Europe how terrible it is that countries are allowing misinformation on social media. In this statement, he is implying that governments should censor social media. This is why he has introduced a bill designed to give governments control over censorship of social media, Bill C-11, to limit the fifth estate’s ability to reveal these cracks. Perhaps this fifth estate is the replacement pillar we need to continue supporting our democracy.

Digging up the Truth:

Please respond if you see any parallels in your country right now.

How do we ensure that the 5th estate stays free, and stays relevant- not just a venue for crazy conspiracy theories or repository of cat videos? We need to test everything, seek alternative sources. Check our own biases. Look for ulterior motives from the author, outlet. It is false security to just trust blindly.

The truth is out there; you just have to dig a little. I’ve heard that it’s easier than ever to find information. I’ve also heard that it’s harder than ever to find information.

In days gone by, you had to actually go to a library, or an archive somewhere and dig through a lot of paper to find it. Now there is probably more fake news out there to search through, but at least we have browsers and search engines to make it easier to sift through, and we don’t have to drive to the capital to find it. Either way, we still have to use our brain to discern truth from error.

And if the issue is not important enough to waste your time doing this, I suggest that we all hold any opinion we have on it lightly, in an open hand. And most importantly, give each other a lot of grace to make mistakes and be wrong sometimes, without thinking any less of them as a person.

If there’s demand, I’ll come up with a book or something on how this discernment process works. Follow me to see more on this subject in the near future.