Ottawa occupation shows Canadian media has the ‘Trump disease’
Jim Sheppard is the former executive editor of globeandmail.com. Prior to that, he held senior newsroom management positions at The Washington Post and ABCNEWS.
The “Trump disease” of polarization and rabid political partisanship has been slowly poisoning Canada for some time now. Sadly, in recent weeks, it claimed another victim – a significant chunk of our mainstream media.
It may be difficult to remember better times but think back just slightly more than two years, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Canada, and riddle me this.
What would you have thought then – and what kind of media coverage would you have expected – if a group calling itself a “Freedom Convoy” staged a week-long occupation and siege (it’s no longer a mere protest) of Parliament Hill where people:
blockaded streets in the city centre, creating a deafening cacophony with their horns that frightened residents and closed businesses;
urinated on the National War Memorial;
defaced a statue of a true Canadian hero, Terry Fox
carried Nazi swastikas and Confederate flags;
took food from the homeless at a shelter;
frightened women who fled domestic abuse at a different shelter in the area;
forced the closure of at least one shop by yelling racial insults at non-white staff.
closed the Rideau Centre by swarming it mask-less, and;
last but not least, circulated a document calling for the overthrow of our democratically elected government.
Right. Most of us would have laughed and said it was not possible in Canada, even as we tut-tutted about scary scenes unfolding in the U.S. on our TV screens.
We would have expected universal Canadian media condemnation of those responsible, not excuses for their behaviour. But that’s not what we’ve seen.
While many of the above disgraceful incidents have been reported, it has too often been on inside pages, or deep in newscasts, in the context of a “few bad apples” while the front pages and the top of the newscasts have given uncritical blow-by-blow coverage to the tiny minority of Canadians conducting the occupation. Columnists and commentators have done a generally good job of keeping their perspective. But much of the “reporting” has not.
Sadly, it’s not just the right-wing Postmedia and Sun chains that are falling all over themselves to back the occupiers in Ottawa, and protesters in other cities, too. Sadly, the mainstream media as a whole has been derelict in its duties to fully inform Canadians about what is happening – and the long-term threat it poses to our democracy and our social fabric.
Let’s start with the most basic issue of all. The protesters say they want “freedom” from vaccine mandates and public health measures, which many of them claim are being imposed as part of a plot to further government control over individual citizens.
OK, they certainly have the right to say that. However, when was the last time you saw a major media outlet immediately call them out on that? Not very often.
The facts are this: Vaccine mandates and public health measures are based on science and are the best way to save lives and end the pandemic. There’s no serious doubt about that. There’s also no evil cabal of elites planning to destroy freedom in Canada and around the world in furtherance of some nefarious goals. Does that really still need to be said? Apparently, it does. But don’t count on our media to do that.
Why aren’t those basic facts being repeated in every story you see, hear or read? Because the mainstream media has been — at least inadvertently — fully supportive of the occupation, or simply unable to adjust to the new world of the far-right where truth are lies and lies are truth..
Of course, all Canadians have the right to protest peacefully. Many protesters in Ottawa and other cities are undoubtedly serious in their beliefs, even if most Canadians think they are wrong. But the truckers’ convoy was co-opted along its route by ultra-right idiots and what is happening now in Ottawa is – as a Globe and Mail OpEd noted this past week -- “an assault on democracy.”
Key Conservative MPs, including presumptive leadership favourite, the acid-tongued and overly partisan Pierre Poilievre, whose announcement of his bid for the top Tory job used the word “freedom” multiple times, actually praised the leaders of the truckers’ protest and joined them. Former Tory leader Andrew Scheer called Prime Minister Trudeau “the greatest threat to freedom” in Canada.
To be clear, they are saying that the prime minister, by following science and trying to end the pandemic, is a greater threat than the pandemic itself which has killed almost 35,000 Canadians and infected more than three million. Did any media outlet report that AND call them out? Not many. Not in those words.
That’s bad enough at the political level. But when comments like these are quoted in the MSM without challenge, that normalizes the worst of the worst. That’s one of the main factors fueling the hyper-partisanship and violence in the U.S. — the normalization by constant repetition of lies designed to paint the other side as an enemy to be defeated at all costs, not as fellow citizens with whom we should compromise.
That Trump disease has clearly slithered across the border recently and is now spewing its venom here.
Yes, most columnists and commentators have been clear in pointing out the dark side of the occupation and many of its leaders. Yes, the tone of the coverage has changed to more critical in the past few days. However, certainly in the early going, and through Saturday when the truckers arrived, most “news” stories were (a) rah-rah (b) uncritical and/or (c) disgraceful.
For some, such as Postmedia and the Sun chain, this was to be expected because the protests play into their pro-Conservative and/or anti-Trudeau phobia. For others that are supposed to be more even-handed, such as The Globe, there were significant lapses, especially as the convoy moved across the country and arrived last Saturday in Ottawa. TV gave wall-to-wall video coverage, even if it did have talking heads denouncing the shenanigans. Some radio reports quoted occupation supporters as saying that vaccines, not COVID, are causing the illnesses jamming our hospitals. No rebuttal offered.
Part of the problem is that way too many Canadian journalists are now falling into the same trap that snared so many American journalists in their coverage of Trump’s 2016 presidential election and his antics since then. They remain unable to think outside the traditional box of he said/he said or she said/she said – in other words, both sides need to be quoted and treated as equal, even if one side is clearly unhinged, saying dangerous things and/or outright lying.
Look at it this way. If one side says it’s a bright, sunny day and the other side says it’s pouring rain, the job of a journalist is not to simply report both sides uncritically. The reporter should look outside the window and tell readers/viewers/listeners what is actually happening.
The formerly admirable approach of uncritically quoting both sides — aimed at eliminating bias — worked for decades and remains a praiseworthy goal for some point in the future when sane political discourse resumes.
But for now, It has been destroyed by Trump, and his allies in Canada. (The occupiers have obtained funding and support from the U.S. far right and even from Trump himself.) Attempting to stick with this approach today, without adding the necessary context, is making things worse.
Yes, It can be difficult to report fairly and honestly in this environment, especially given the massive cutbacks in newsrooms across the country and the threats to reporters covering the convoy and the occupation.
But in the early days of the protest, reporters and editors followed their old ways, and reported (often breathlessly) about the “hundreds” of people turning out along the route, or the flags and displays, their minute-by-minute updates without facts or context. They thus — at least inadvertently — lent credence and their organization’s good name to the far-right in the same way that American networks in 2016 that live-streamed Trump’s crazed rallies did.
What this kind of reporting does is to normalize behaviour that previously would have been unthinkable. When we see it in on TV, hear it on radio, and read it in newspapers every day, it becomes part of the white noise in the background, which some people begin to ignore but which many people slowly absorb as “fact,” when instead the lies should be denounced to the heavens.
Journalists and their supervising editors must take a new approach if we are to reverse this dangerous trend and preserve our democracy and social structure against those that would cripple or replace it.
What we need today is what several American professors call the “truth sandwich” approach to journalism.
Here’s one way to describe it:
Start with the truth. State it clearly and unequivocally.
Indicate the lie but don’t quote or repeat it directly.
Return to the truth. Always repeat the truth more often than the lies.
So, let’s put this in the context of the Ottawa occupation.
The Ottawa protesters represent a tiny minority of Canadians because about 80 per cent of us are fully vaccinated. Vaccines, masking and physical distancing have saved tens of thousands of lives. They have prevented hundreds of thousands of cases of serious illness. They are the only way to end the pandemic, unless you want to go Quebec Premier François Legault’s abandoned route of a vaccine tax, which some experts argue should have been implemented.
When the protesters shout “freedom,” journalists should report that, but they must also tell readers/viewers that there simply is no plot by the Trudeau government or unnamed elites to take away freedom. The media should also report that the occupiers’ freedom to remain unvaccinated is also their freedom to potentially spread the disease and possibly kill others, including the most vulnerable in our society, and to have their bodies potentially act as incubators for new variants of COVID-19.
Everyone wants to go back to life as it was before COVID. But the pandemic still represents a danger. Vaccines, masking and physical distancing have saved tens of thousands of lives. Trust the science, not the occupiers, about when to remove those restrictions. Report the facts.
One last word about the media’s complicity here. Does anyone seriously think that the coverage of the Ottawa protest would have been so neutral, let alone de facto cheerleading in some cases, if instead of white, male truckers, the core group was made of Black Lives Matter protesters, Indigenous land defenders, Muslims marking the anniversary of the Quebec City mosque massacre, women protesting sexual harassment in the military, backed by Liberal, NDP, Bloc or Green MPs?
It would not have been. Therein, lies the one of the many ways the Trump disease has taken hold in Canada and in our media.
Only the senior leaders of the mainstream media can stop this before it’s too late. They should act now.
