Lack of justification for loose “far-right" labeling will continue to destroy public trust in journalism
Plus! Ex-Tory candidate wins $250,000 settlement, politicians show new zest for banning films and will AI anchors be all the rage?
This week we ponder the adjectival use of the term “far right” by a national content provider, take a look at who is standing up against government censorship, update the latest financial hit to progressive media and wonder how long it will be before all news anchors are replaced by AI.
There is not a shadow of doubt that many Canadians perceive Ezra Levant’s Rebel News as “far-right.” Just as certain is the fact that many others see it as a common sense champion of the little guy sticking up against oppressive, authoritarian overlords in government and who bristle when the term - and all it implies - is weaponized against them.
About Rebel News and its owner (pictured above), it is fair to say, Canadians have a variety of opinions.
It was startling, therefore, to read last week that the national content creator and distributor, Canadian Press, had taken a firm position, chosen a side and then spread it like a virus in a story picked up by its subscribers from coast to coast to coast.
This is the version picked up by CBC. CTV and a great many others ran the same story from the agency that describes itself as “Canada’s Trusted News Leader.” Its lede paragraph reads as follows:
“A Federal Court judge has upheld the federal government's decision that far-right media outlet Rebel News doesn't qualify for journalism tax credits because it doesn't produce enough original news content.”
Fourteen more paragraphs follow. They contain standard, perfectly professional reporting on the matter at hand. But there is no attempt whatsoever to source, justify or explain the “far-right” label used in the opening paragraph. Nothing. “Far right” is left to stand as the opinion of the reporter - Maura Forrest - stated as fact. As there is no evidence that her editors found the unsupported, unexplained use of a pejorative term problematic, many people will assume her view is shared by her employer.
Others will assume that every news organization that published the story as written shares Forrest’s and Canadian Press’s view concerning the nature of Rebel News.
After all, the headline supplied with the story “Far-right Rebel News not eligible for journalism tax credits, Federal Court rules” appeared on multiple platforms ranging from the St. Albert Gazette to the Globe and Mail. It is unclear if this means they also agree Rebel News meets this definition of “far right” found in Wikipedia.
“Historically, "far-right politics" has been used to describe the experiences of fascism, Nazism, and Falangism. Contemporary definitions now include neo-fascism, neo-Nazism, the Third Position, the alt-right, racial supremacism and other ideologies or organizations that feature aspects of authoritarian, ultra-nationalist, chauvinist, xenophobic, theocratic, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or reactionary views.”
We have been through this before, but this is Journalism 101 stuff. If reporters are going to use adjectives to describe something, they need to source it or justify it. So, for example, write it like this:
“A Federal Court judge has upheld the federal government's decision that a media outlet journalism experts describe as far-right - Rebel News - doesn't qualify for tax credits because it doesn't produce enough original news content.”
The story would then at a minimum contain a paragraph or two quoting the journalism experts referenced and whether or not Rebel News agrees.
A good editor might even asked why it was necessary to reference Rebel News’s ideological nature at all, given it doesn’t appear to have been something the judge was concerned with.
This X-post is an example of how some members of the public responded to the story:
“The news media have claimed that they don't use terms like "terrorist" because it's an opinion and it's subjective (even when it's clearly not). But "far-right" is off-handedly presented by them as if it's objective, manifest, fact, and truth. It's not.”
Sloppy negligence or a naked display of bias - both will continue to undermine the public’s trust in the nation’s media and journalism at large.
Caylan Ford appeared to be a bright, well-educated woman destined for political success in 2019 as a candidate for Alberta’s United Conservative Party.
A story by the Broadbent Institute’s Press Progress put an end to that. It also resulted in a $7.6 million lawsuit against multiple parties, including the Alberta NDP (whose new leader, Naheed Nenshi, was among those who denounced Ford at the time).
Five and a half years after the original story, Ford posted an update on social media in which she announced:
“I've accepted an offer of $250,000 from @duncankinney and @ProgressAlberta to settle a defamation claim arising from the 2019 provincial election.
“Litigation is ongoing against the remaining 12 defendants, including @pressprogress, @albertaNDP, @CBCNews and @TorontoStar. . . .
“In the weeks prior to the election, Progress Alberta and Duncan Kinney published a series of false and inflammatory statements (about) me. Among other things, they called me a white supremacist, hateful, racist, Islamophobic, and extremist. They drew an association between me and the Christchurch Mosque shooter who had killed 50 people, and misrepresented statements made in a private conversation to attribute to me views I did not have….
“Following my resignation as a candidate, I appeared on the radio show of now-Premier @ABDanielleSmith to defend myself against defamatory accusations. Progress Alberta launched a petition campaign against Smith, claiming that she had given “a platform to [a] white supremacist,” and threatening to target her advertisers as retribution (I understand @nenshi also called for a boycott of her program). The radio interview was later pulled offline.”
It has long been rumoured that Danielle Smith’s decision to give Ford air time to defend herself was a tipping point in Corus’s decision to push Smith out the door at CHQR.
Smith, today, is Premier of Alberta. Corus is a penny stock. And I have no idea at this stage whether Kinney’s Progress Alberta, which, according to its website, “stays afloat by patching together funding from a variety of sources like foundations, unions and our own supporters” will continue to publish its weekly Progress Report.
And while every provincial and national media reported on the original allegations against Ford and her resignation, I have not - so far - found a news story by any of them regarding this settlement.
Last week, I lamented the lack of reaction in the nation’s newsrooms to Liberal MP and Parliamentary Secretary for Heritage Taleeb Noormohamed’s intimidation of the National Post’s Terry Newman, reminding her that her employment depends on government subsidies.
But then Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and other politicians, bullied the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), (which, like the news industry, depends heavily on government funding) into cancelling screening of the documentary film, Russians at War.
Having initially pretended to have some spine, TIFF folded faster than Superman on laundry day, coughing up something something security concerns, about which Toronto police were unaware.
Why the Canada Media Fund is financing what are essentially foreign films is a topic for another day. But I thought it only fair to offer tips of the hat to National Post’s Chris Selley, the Globe and Mail’s Marsha Lederman and the Toronto Star’s Andrew Phillips who, along with Rosie DiManno, stood up for freedom of expression and helped convince TIFF to reconsider and eventually screen the film.
As Phillips put it, these days “trying to ban what you don’t like unfortunately seems all too Canadian.”
Hopefully, we will all remember that.
Time was when television news anchors - aka “presenters” - hauled in the big bucks.
While that still applies in many US markets, the bucks were downgraded here years ago. Now it might not be long, it appears, before people still holding those roles are replaced by virtual robots.
It’s happening in other countries and now, according to The Byte, the trend has landed in the USA where The Garden Island newspaper in Hawaii is employing an AI anchor to read its news.
While that experiment is getting poor reviews, there are examples such as this one at India Today (frame grab below) or this one in Kuwait of a more effective use of AI, which China’s Xinhua was the first to use as a substitute for news people in 2018. Perhaps herein lies a solution to the sustainability of broadcast news in Canada. Why waste money on people who read the news, weather and sports when you could spend it on actually reporters? Or shareholders?
Activist Kristopher Wells (Alberta) was welcomed into the Senate last week along with former broadcaster and ideological dualist Charles Adler and a couple others.
Which provides the opportunity to add further clarity to a post by Wells which I previously referenced. The original of this illustration showed a Nazi killing a Jew and an equivalent ISIS terrorist murdering a Christian, something that was actually happening. Wells turned that around to show an imaginary Christian about to murder a gay person, reversing the role of Christians from victims to genocidal monsters. And in Justin Trudeau’s world that, friends, gets Wells - who is in his early fifties - a base salary of $178,000 plus committee and other earnings, travel, staff and perks from now until he turns 75. Keep your heads up, Christians.
Wells, btw, has his fans. Former talk show host and podcaster Ryan Jespersen calls him “a fierce advocate for the LGBTQ2S+ community, and a steady voice of reason.”
This is what reason looks like in 2024.
The Local Journalism Initiative (LJI) is one of the current government’s newspaper subsidy initiatives and its most direct. It funds the entire salaries of reporters so that publications can “increase local civic journalism (town hall, courts, school boards, etc) in underserved communities.”
Initially a five year program at $10 million a year, LJI is now offering a shorter three year leash but for $58.8 million.
So I was surprised to see it being used to subsidize commentary/opinion content at the Quebec Chronicle Telegraph in this piece by Peter Black concerning possible privatization of Canada Post.
The work itself is inoffensive. What is deeply so, however, is the very idea that citizens pay taxes to cover the entire salary of someone to promote a worldview their funders may not share. The sense of entitlement that allows those news organizations that drink from the public trough while thinking this is OK is breathtaking.
That’s all I had room for this week. Thanks to all the new subscribers who’ve signed up. It’s very encouraging. Feel free to spread the word!
Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a former publisher of the Calgary Herald and a previous vice-chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
Far right and far left are both overused and often pejorative. So are misinformation and disinformation. You could probably make a long list of such emotional trigger words.
I was unhappy at the “cancelling” of Russians at War, having the same thoughts as you. I’ve changed my mind.
I’ve watched as much of it as has been made available for public viewing, her personal interviews with documentary film critics, read the film-maker’s history, and reviews of the film by journalists whose opinions I respect. I’m now convinced the film is not a piece of ART that’s been canceled by malcontents, but in fact propaganda poorly disguised as art. I’m not ok with it being “featured” at tiff as a proud Canadian production, in fact it’s embarrassing.