Poilievre can merrily school journalists to the roar of the crowd because media just don’t matter like they used to

It’s been obvious for years that good relations with the press are no longer required to communicate messages to voters. Plus! Brickbats for the Mounties and bouquets for the Globe

Photo by Marek Pospíšil on Unsplash

Like most people, journalists want to feel appreciated and important.

Many want to believe democracy depends upon them. That’s a discussion for another day, but suffice to say these are difficult times for those in the craft. Public trust is low and their work is constantly subject to public criticism and mockery.

Never before have their mistakes been so easily recorded and amplified as they are these days on social media. X/Twitter, TikTok and other platforms make it remarkably easy for the public to hold reporters accountable for what might be perceived as stupid questions (for perspective, I was taught as a young journalist that the only dumb question is the one you fail to ask) or a line of inquiry that reveals an adversarial bias.

Given that a significant portion of the younger generation of journalists has abandoned objectivity at the same time as surveys show the public wants its news without bias, this conflict is only going to get worse.

And when it comes to politics, that same generation of journos has to deal with another new reality: politicians don’t need to pretend to like them anymore.

This has been obvious to people outside the news business since Hillary Clinton announced, on April 12, 2015, that she would run for the U.S. presidency. She didn’t do it in front of a gathering of journalists at a press conference the way it used to be done; she did it with a YouTube video and her website. That was the day it should have become clear to everyone in the craft that the jig was up - that politicians could directly communicate their messages to the electorate without going through a press that all of a sudden wasn’t as important or appreciated as it used to be. Worse for the journos, politicians discovered they could even build support by aggressively pushing back, as Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre has done to the delight of many on his side of the partisan fence.

Here are a couple of examples. In one exchange, Poilievre replies to a question with a question, prompting a reporter to correct him with, “We ask the questions. We’re the journalists here. This is democracy. We asked the questions.”

To which Poilievre swiftly responds, “I have the freedom to ask questions if I want to and I’ve just answered. I’ve been answering questions all week,”

In the second example, the Conservative leader belittles the accuracy of Canadian Press’s (CP) work when one of its reporters asks a question straight from the Liberal government’s talking points.

“CP, just for everyone’s knowledge, did have to make three corrections for falsehoods that they put into a single article,” he said. “I think that might be unprecedented.”

The lessons here for journos? Show up prepared, develop your own line of questions so you don’t look like a partisan hack and be aware that the public is primed and ready to cast judgment on you and not just the politician you are questioning. You aren’t nearly as important as you used to be or think you are, but you are part of the show. Deal with it.

Oh, and for those who see Poilievre as a unique user of these tactics, he’s not the only one putting journalists in their place.

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A couple of bouquets this week for the Globe and Mail.

The first is for a fine editorial speaking up in defence of freedom of speech and chiding Toronto police for taking New Brunswick politician Dominic Cardy into custody for exercising that right when he launched a solo counter protest against a group of pro Hamas/Gaza demonstrators.

“The officers on the scene had a choice. They could have made sure that Mr. Cardy could speak unaccosted. Instead, they decided to bundle him off to jail.”

Freedom of speech is required if modern, liberal democracy is to survive. Far too many commentators have been sympathetic to government and police attempts to suppress it rather than defend it. The Globe sent a clear and long overdue message.

The next chapeau goes to Robyn Urback for her column on what could be viewed as media’s race-based bias in not covering the story of a Halifax lesbian couple beaten by a group of men they identified as being of Middle Eastern origin.

Urback called out her industry for hesitating to bring profile to a story that, had the accused been identified as skinheads, they would have been all over.

“It is reasonable to presume that the mere mention of their background effectively silenced any public response to the attack,” she wrote. “That’s not fair to Ms. MacLean and her girlfriend, and not fair to Canadians who deserve to know what’s happening, good and bad, in their country.”

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Quote of the week goes to Sean Speer of The Hub:

“The CBC doesn’t do public interest local journalism anymore. It does identity politics. And that will ultimately be its downfall.”

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Edmonton lost another legend of its local broadcasting industry recently with the passing of Gordon Skutle, long time chief engineer at CJCA, which was first licensed in 1922. He was 104 years old and had a career that went back to the days of broadcasting live big band shows and church services on radio.

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There’s a lot of talk these days about how quickly #fakenews travels on social media and why (of course) governments say they need to crack down on it.

What you won’t hear from governments or their agents is the role they play in it.

The riots currently tearing England apart began when a false rumour was spread that the killer of three little girls was a Muslim migrant. That happened because the identity of the accused, who when charged was a couple of weeks shy of his 18th birthday, was kept secret.

Nature abhors an information vacuum - particularly when such a heinous crime is involved - so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the void got filled with rumour and speculation that led to chaos.

In a similar vein, RCMP in Strathmore, AB, appear to have prioritized political correctness over public safety when they issued an emergency alert for local residents to shelter in place following a murder and attempted murder.

The warning, to the consternation of many, contained no descriptions of the suspects’ gender, race or other identifying characteristics. Nor was there any mention of the vehicle they were driving.

Residents of the area, which is largely rural, then turned to sharing whatever information they had on Facebook.

There, people posted photos of what they assumed were the suspects driving a vehicle through fields.

As Cory Morgan put it in his column for Epoch Times Canada:

“People were quickly realizing they could learn more about what was happening on Facebook than they could from the RCMP. More dangerously though, rumours about the incident and description of the suspects were spreading on social media that haven’t been confirmed. People in a panic could have targeted other people and caused serious harm to them. The way to prevent such panic would have been for the RCMP to update citizens on the situation, but the silence continued.”

And that, this week, is the last word.

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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).