Peter Menzies

Plus! How Canadian Press is priming the pumps for billionaires and hedge funds to get even more taxpayer money and how our press just ignored – en masse – the Arab League’s call for Hamas to surrender

If journalism is to be useful in defending democracy, those involved in it need to be intellectually equipped to understand the stakes

Whew! Take a couple of weeks off to attend a Clan Gathering and there’s a lot of hanky panky to catch up on. Peter Stockland has already performed the heavy lifting on how journalists struggle covering the conflict in Gaza, so I’m going to offer a quick round up of deeds that caught the eye. Let’s go.

There will always be conflicts between collective rights and individual liberties. One is valuable in ensuring there is order in society, which is important. The other is necessary to maintain freedom, which lots of people live without but is nevertheless desirable. When there’s too much freedom, people look for politicians who will restore order. When there is too much order, people rebel and demand freedom (see everything from the French Revolution to the Freedom Convoy).

Traditionally, those inclined to the order side if the ledger have been viewed as conservatives while “liberals” have led the fight for individual freedom manifest in the civil rights movement, the emancipation and advancement of women, freedom of speech, etc. that are now viewed as fundamental to the maintenance of a modern, liberal democracy.

But as Pete Townsend wrote a little more than half a century ago, the parting on the left is now the parting on the right (and the beards have all grown longer overnight). Journalists tend to lean left, which means their traditional opposition to the imposition of order has been replaced by a collectivist tendency to sympathize with those imposing it. It is left to the newsroom minorities on the right to carry the torch for individual liberties.

To wit, this CBC story on Nova Scotia’s wild fire-induced ban – enforced with a $25,000 fine until Oct. 15 – on walking anywhere in the woods was oblivious to the impact on personal freedom. Never crossed their minds. When the issue was raised on social media, Twitter journos took up the cause. Stephen Maher dismissed individual liberty concerns as fringe views and maintained that the restrictions could be justified as “reasonable” limitations of Charter rights. While the Globe and Mail’s editorial board called the Nova Scotia move “draconian,” Globe columnist Andrew Coyne nevertheless wondered “How the hell did the right to walk in the woods of Nova Scotia during a forest fire emergency get elevated into the right’s latest cultural obsession?”

It was left to commentators such as Marco Navarro-Genie to point out the intellectual flaccidity fueling parts of the collectivist argument when New Brunswick followed Nova Scotia’s lead and NB Premier Susan Holt said this:

“Me going for a walk in the woods is gonna cause a fire. I can understand why people, uh, think that that’s, that’s. That’s ridiculous. But the reality is, it’s not that you might cause a fire, it’s that if you’re out there walking in the woods and you break your leg, we’re not gonna come and get you because we have emergency responders that are out focused on a fire that is, uh, threatening the lives of New Brunswickers.”

That, believe it or not, was a good enough explanation for the collectivist thinking in most mainstream newsrooms.

If journalism is to be useful in defending democracy, those involved in it need to be intellectually equipped to understand the stakes. And their first instinct must be to treat the suppression of liberty as a serious issue whenever the powerful indulge in it at the expense of the powerless. That doesn’t mean liberty should always trump order (traffic lights are eminently reasonable). But it does mean that journos should demand that politicians justify their actions rather than simply helping them explain them to the Great Unwashed. To do otherwise is to fail.

Mainstream media may not be very good at publishing details of their subsidization, but they can be all over news that promotes the need for more taxpayer loot.

In this Canadian Press story carried by CTV, there’s word of a new Public Policy Forum report that carries a poll showing people didn’t feel fully informed during last spring’s federal election. The authors – wait for it – “suggest a permanent non-partisan election fund could help media outlets better cover political races.”

The news report contained no comment from anyone (I’m right here!) who may have offered an alternative perspective, making the line between news and self-serving propaganda increasingly misty.

A couple of weeks ago, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Canada would recognize a Palestinian state if the terrorist organization that has been running it – Hamas – gave its cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die word it would stop being a terrorist organization dedicated to killing every Jew it can find. Just before that, the Arab League, which includes Palestine among its 22 members, unanimously called for Hamas to lay down its weapons, release all the hostages it took in its Oct. 7, 2023 assault on Israel and end its rule in Gaza. Other than a CTV online pickup of an Agence France-Presse wire report, this story was ignored by Canadian media. I await an explanation, but it is worth noting that bias is often most vigorously displayed in the news that organizations choose to suppress.

One of the great weaknesses of media is that while an incorrect report may get massive, screaming headlines, the correction that follows gets buried.

The most recent high profile example of this occurred last month when the New York Times and many other organizations, posted a photo of Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child in Gaza who was reported to be suffering from malnutrition. Turns out the photo op was a set up and the poor wretch had other health conditions. The Times posted to that effect once it became aware but, as Eyal Yakoby noted on Twitter, the account used to issue the clarification has 40,000 followers while the one that carried the original story has 50 million.

That’s not trust-building behaviour.

Photo – Global News image of Maritime wild fire

Congrats to Jeff Elgie and the team at Village Media on their continued growth and their latest new launch, Dundas Today. Also kudos to The Line for bringing on Rob Breakenridge, launching an Alberta bureau and publishing my piece on the impact of AI on journalism.

Western Standard’s opinion editor Nigel Hannaford has retired at the spritely age of 77, marking the end of full time work in a career that included the Alaska Highway News, Alberni Valley News, Calgary Herald and eight years as Stephen Harper’s speech writer. It was a privilege to be a guest on his final podcast.

A shoutout also to Todayville.com, which began carrying The Rewrite columns a couple of weeks ago and to my friends at The Hub where my regular column for them resumes Aug. 26 and I have an extra offering coming up tomorrow, Aug. 18. Last week’s Full Press podcast can be found here. Oh, and I’m in the market for sponsors, so if you know anyone feel free to send along any tips.

(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, a former vice chair of the CRTC and a National Newspaper Award winner.)