Peter Menzies

Misinformation is not exclusive to alternative online news organizations

The purpose of news ought to be to ensure that Canadians have a shared set of facts around which they can form their opinions and organize their lives.

In a previous world, whether they succeeded or failed at that was really no one’s business, at least provided the publisher wasn’t knowingly spreading false information intended to do harm. That is against the law, as outlined in Section 372 of the Criminal Code, which states:

“Everyone commits an offence who, with intent to injure or alarm a person, conveys information that they know is false, or causes such information to be conveyed by letter or any means of telecommunication.”

Do that, and you can be imprisoned for up to two years.

But if a publisher was simply offering poorly researched, unbalanced journalism, and wave after wave of unchallenged opinion pieces with the ability to pervert the flow of information and leave the public with false or distorted impressions of the world, he or she was free to do so. Freedom of the press and all that.

The broadcasting world has always been different. Licensed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), content produced there must, according to the Broadcasting Act, be of “high standard”—something that the CRTC ensures through its proxy content regulator, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC).

Its most recent decision, for instance, condemned Sportsnet Ontario for failing to “provide a warning before showing scenes of extraordinary violence” when it broadcast highlights of UFC mixed martial arts competitions during morning weekend hours when children could watch. If you don’t understand how a warning would have prevented whatever trauma the highlights may have caused or how that might apply to the internet, take comfort in the fact that you aren’t alone.

The same will—in my view—eventually take place regarding text news content. Since it has become a matter of public interest through subsidies, it’s inevitable that “high standard” expectations will be attached to eligibility. In other words, what once was nobody’s business is now everybody’s business. Freedom of the, er, press and all that.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith

Which raises the point: is the Canadian public well informed by the news industry, and who exactly will be the judge of that now that market forces have been, if not eliminated, at least emasculated?

For instance, as former Opposition leader Preston Manning recently wondered on Substack, how can it be that “62 per cent of Ontarians,” according to a Pollara poll, believe Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to be a separatist?

“The truth is that Premier Smith—whom I’ve known personally for a long time—is not a separatist and has made that clear on numerous occasions to the public, the media, and anyone who asks her,” he wrote.

I, too, have been acquainted for many years with the woman Globe and Mailcolumnist Andrew Coyne likes to call “Premier Loon” and have the same view as Manning, whom I have also known for many years: Smith is not a separatist.

Manning’s theory is that there are three reasons for Ontarians’ disordered view—the first two being ignorance and indifference.

The third and greatest, he wrote, is “misinformation—not so much misinformation transmitted via social media, because it is especially older Ontarians who believe the lie about Smith—but misinformation fed into the minds of Ontarians via the traditional media” which includes CBC, CTV, Global, and “the Toronto-based, legacy print media.”

No doubt, some members of those organizations would protest and claim the former Reform Party leader is the cause of all the trouble.

Such is today’s Canada, where the flying time between Calgary and Toronto is roughly the same as between London and Moscow, and the sense of east-west cultural dislocation is at times similar. As Rudyard Kipling determined, the twain shall never meet “till earth and sky stand presently at God’s great judgment seat.”

This doesn’t mean easterners and westerners can’t get along. Heavens no. But what it does illustrate is that maybe having editorial coverage decisions universally made in Hogtown about Cowtown (the author’s outdated terminology), Halifax, St John’s, Yellowknife, or Prince Rupert isn’t helping national unity. It is ridiculous, when you think about it, that anyone believes a vast nation’s residents could have compatible views when key decisions are limited to those perched six degrees south of the 49th parallel within earshot of Buffalo.

But CTV won’t change. Global can’t. The Globe is a Toronto newspaper, and most Postmedia products have become stripped-down satellites condemned to eternally orbit 365 Bloor Street East.

The CRTC is preoccupied with finding novel ways to subsidize broadcasters to maintain a status quo involving breakfast shows. So we can’t expect any changes there, nor can we from the major publishers.

Which leaves the job to the CBC, whose job it has always been to make sure the twain could meet. That makes it fair to assume Manning will be writing for many years to come about Toronto’s mainstream media and misinformation about the West.

(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.)