Those who control the language control the narrative and those who own the narrative rule the world

In Canada, that's Canadian Press, which shapes the dialectic that dominates most of our media. And guess what? It leans kinda leftish. Plus! CBC loves the West!

Image of Vladimir Putin and the 10 Commandments generated by Meta AI

Words are powerful weapons.

As American science fiction writer Philip K Dick put it “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.”

Or, in a phrase often attributed to either one of two guys named Joe - Stalin or Goebbels - “he who controls the language rules the world.”

So, who controls the language in Canadian media? There is definitely someone in most major newsrooms who keeps an eye on these things, but the one most turn to is Canadian Press (CP). Its CP Style Guide, regularly updated, is a bit of a Bible for journalists and editors.

Readers may find its “guidance for writing about sensitive subject areas” of interest because most of the terminology, you may discern, represents a Left-leaning worldview and very little of it is the sort of talk you’d hear from, say, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation or the guys (oops! people) chatting over a beer after a round of golf.

Here are some examples from the 2022 updates that included a brand new section on sexual misconduct.

CP cautions against “sanitizing stories with phrases like ‘womanizing’ or ‘sex scandal’” and in another new section - “Substance abuse, addiction and dependence” - points out that “pejoratives like ‘junkie,’ ‘crackhead’ or ‘drunk’ should be avoided.”

Words such as “heavy, excessive, unhealthy, and risky are permissible.” Additions to the section on disabilities note the need for using “person-forward language” while emphasizing that “if someone refers to themselves with an outdated term such as ‘cripple,’ that must be explained to readers.” Not all self-identification, in other words, is intrinsically acceptable.

I don’t want to “other” CP - you all know what that means, right? And the editor of the edition of the Style Guide I am quoting - James McCarten - was not masterminding some sort of conscious conspiracy here. Most of the updates, I expect, have been accomplished by activists working to change the world on behalf of their constituents with support from reporters and CP’s equity, diversity and inclusion committee. I do not know if conservatives similarly lobby and fail but some would certainly argue that they are inherently less likely to be pushing for social revolution or to push back against it for fear of being accused of harbouring one of many modern phobias. Anyway, last June McCarten left CP, where he had served as Washington correspondent, went straight (as they used to say in the trade) and became a vice-president at ManuLife.

My beef is that journalists, the majority of whom lean to the Left, cave far too quickly to pressure to change terminology that, while pleasing to “allies,” creates distance between those who deliver the news and those expected to consume it. In doing so, they prioritize the relationship with their sources over the more important one with their readers, viewers and listeners. I remain convinced that most people (not all of course) have no real idea what “racialized” means. Ditto for National Aboriginal Day becoming National Indigenous Persons Day. Everyone goes along to get along but very few have any idea why. And the world changes.

How does one keep up? I remember the term “deaf” being replaced with “hearing impaired” before it was replaced by “deaf” which was pejorative but isn’t anymore because “hearing impaired” is now pejorative and used only by people who “haven’t been educated.”

Tara Henley, Harrison Lowman and I had a good discussion on how media readily adopt the language and definitions of the Left on The Full Press podcast last week. And remember: Those who control the language, control the world, which might explain why influential commentator Chantal Hebert was expressing concerns last week about Canadian Conservatives using the darkly suspicious term “Common Sense” while AT THE SAME TIME so were Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin!

No conspiracy there - that’s just barefaced defamation by implication. Classic Twitter. Vintage manipulation of words. At a Grade 8 level.

Finally, don’t forget that every time you hear or read the term “progressive” that means that if you aren’t one of those you must be regressive and if you don’t subscribe to “moderate” views you must be immoderate. And that’s how words are manipulated to control how you view the world.

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Thanks to the revival of manifest destiny south of the border, I have recently spent more time watching CBCNN. But I don’t usually catch its featured program - Power & Politics - because it is on, in my time zone, between 2 pm and 4 pm and that’s when I play Pickleball (much better for the blood pressure btw). On the west coast, P&P is unwatchable unless you are taking siesta. I always assumed this was because CBC just didn’t care whether anyone beyond Upper Canada and Lower Canada had reasonable access to its most important programming because, seriously, who cares what those Rupert’s Land rubes think?

But it turns out they do care! They really, really do! Recognizing that prime time in Vancouver is not from 1 pm to 3 pm, CBC last week announced a new program - Prime Time with Ian Hanomansing - that will run from 4 pm to 6 pm Pacific time.

Hanomansing declared his delight in a CBC news release, that it is “important to have a daily show from Western Canada” where - my words, not his - almost 13 million people, close to one in three Canadians, live. What a revelation!

The show launches tomorrow - Feb. 18. Who knows - they might even talk about salmon, lentils, pipelines, cattle, canola and other cute western stuff.

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Rogers has given the old heave ho to the careers of CityTV Breakfast Television (BT) hosts Sid Seixeiro and Meredith Shaw, who each Tweeted the sad news while surviving BT personality Devo Brown made the announcement on air with the usual cheerful corporate banter and best wishes on finding another job in a vertically integrated broadcast world. OK, I made that last part up, but you take my point. Maybe the CBC is hiring.

Anyway, Brown said Toronto viewers should “stay tuned, we have some exciting plans in the works that we’ll share with you very, very soon.” Can’t wait.

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A couple of #chapeaus this week: One goes to The Free Press, which is lighting up the journalism world by hiring great writers who are smart and think independently (yes, it’s kind of that simple).

Their scoop on how PBS attempted to hide its two Diversity, Equity and Inclusion staffers from Trump’s executive order was quite the eye-catcher but was nowhere near as big as some of the work being done by Sam Cooper in his The Bureau where revelations on the shabby state of Canadian security institutions are astounding.

Unfortunately, those don’t get much pickup in legacy media, probably because so many of his sources are unnamed. What else could it be?

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Thanks to Alberta Views for engaging me in a friendly debate with journalism prof and former CBCer Jeffrey Dvorkin regarding the future of the CBC. That exchange should be posted on their site in the coming days. On that topic, I hope to have a new policy paper on the future of CBC/Radio Canada published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute early in March. And a special thanks to readers for the warm response to last week’s Full Press column in The Hub, the 10,000-plus of you watching our podcasts and the response to my lament for a lost friend posted a week ago. It is now among The Rewrite’s most warmly received posts.

The Full Press podcast team of Harrison Lowman, left, Tara Henley and yours truly

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(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald and a former vice chair of the CRTC)