I went off news for Lent. When I emerged the big story was this: Poilievre fighting for a “state-affiliated” Twitter designation for the CBC. You spend 40 days and nights off this stuff, and when you come back it looks pretty godawful petty. What is click-bait today is gone tomorrow. Look on the increasingly poisonous, snarky and cacophonic world of Youtube: it's Poilievre holding up 1984 in the House of Commons!.Is this really where we're at?.Poilievre's pitch to Elon Musk is a response to Twitter's recent decision to label the American NPR (National Public Radio) as 'state-affiliated,' which it later changed to 'government-funded.' Truth be told, NPR receives less than one percent of its regular funding from the feds..The CBC and the BBC both receive about 71% from government sources. As Twitter itself explains, the BBC is not labeled 'state-affiliated.'.For Twitter it's not just the funding. “State-affiliated media,” they explain, “is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.”.State exercising control? Of course we applaud Poilievre's gritty determination to be a thorn in the CBC's side, but the term “state-affiliated” assumes there is actually some distance between the media and the state..But the rabbit hole goes down pretty far. From the start of the pandemic we learned that among our “experts,” bureaucrats, Trudeau, Singh or any of the big banks, no one had to communicate overtly with members within the other institutions to know what the others wanted done. They impeccably appeared at an arm's distance, while the banks, for example, with no dictum from Trudeau whatsoever did exactly what suited him: they froze bank accounts. Universities chose the harshest of vaccine mandates, despite the health authorities giving other options on paper. Google posted the locations of key donors to the convoy. The CBC phoned up donors wondering how they felt about being outed..The lines are all blurred. It's a collective. Planned leaks are sent to certain affiliates. Special treatment is given to mainstream reporters and softball questions at press conferences. Select news agencies are allowed in election debates. Activist banking institutions now lobby the government for their causes and CBC journalists give medical advice and promote an apparently safe, effective, and necessary COVID treatment as if they were health experts..What are the limits of the state in this self-referential monolyth? Is the state really separate from anything?.Journalism — and our constitution — is supposed to protect us from this. Journalists are supposed to question institutions and to be distanced from them. As Corey Pein put it: “News media exist, in part, to check government claims against reality. But when reporters don't bother to look for answers beyond the press conference, they can turn an official fiction into a documented 'fact.'”.Here's an example of what we should expect. It's 20-year veteran journalist Rodney Palmer's testimony at the Citizen's Inquiry and his claim the CBC promoted both propaganda and hate against “anti-vaxxers” during the pandemic. He also shows key photos that turned the tide of public opinion on the Freedom Convoy. For some reason, this journalist can recognize major ethical breaches. Photos should not be chosen that deliberately mislead the public. These pics — and that powerful tool of inference — made the situation look far different than it was, as if there were Confederate and Nazi flags everywhere. He even goes into the particulars of how the angle and the context were far from what the average person could have and would have observed at the protest..Were the photographers of these pictures being fair? Were they suspending judgment until all the facts were in? Not even close. They were trying to shape perception..But the CBC didn't care, nor did most Canadians..Why?.Answer: The CBC is a government-subsidized communications firm that affirms the brand and image of Canadians we all love. The CBC supports the popular myth Canadians are nice. We read it and watch it to feel good about ourselves, not to be challenged, not to have our minds changed, not to question those in leadership and certainly not to empathize with our enemies..Truth comes at a cost to our identity and Canadians, it seems, would rather pay to have our assumptions confirmed. We don't want journalism. We want our smug identity to be placated. We're more diverse and democratic than that big brother to the south who gives us the luxury of playing princess on the global schoolyard, while he fends off all of our bullies. We love to hear “The majority of Canadians stepped up and did the right thing.”.The CBC and its activist journalism makes us feel like we're all activists, too. So we can sit our fat and frozen asses like prim and proper religious gossips in the corner at the church pot-luck, wagging our finger with words like “lawlessness” and “justice” and “stay safe” while having no problem with a protesting woman getting trampled to the ground, thousands losing their jobs for a medical decision, or committing suicide ... as long as the CBC says its OK..Wrap us all up in our cozy Hudson's Bay blanket..To be fair, though, you and I, readers of the Western Standard, also turn to our news for a feeling, hoping for our ideas to be affirmed. I might click on my faves looking for articles that will call Trudeau a fart face (as if that is any better than me being called a misogynist and a homophobe). Then I close my laptop and feel good about myself..But we have got to do better than the CBC. We've got to scour the landscape for journalists who carefully and rigorously examine issues from various angles (and not just by using a strawman quotation either,) that do not select facts for the proverbial team, and that — please God! — recognize life is complex. Woke, unwoke, Ukrainian, Russian, Liberal, Conservative — we've all got lots of good and bad, rational and irrational in us. If the CBC can't cover news that way, we've got to build and monetarily support the plethora of emerging news agencies that can..And when the ones we like opt for the cheap in order to get clicks — we've got to call them out on it. So much depends on them taking the high road..Due to a high level of spam content being posted in our comment section below, all comments undergo manual approval by a staff member during regular business hours (Monday - Friday). Your patience is appreciated.
