Canadian Media's India Calamity
On Media Failure
Let’s play a game, shall we? Given the events of the last 27 hours, let’s play a game, predicting what certain people would say about different events.
Let’s start with a columnist who always rails against the Liberals for ignoring human rights, ignoring minority interests abroad in the name of the almighty dollar, and who has made a career preening as a moral arbiter in a world of amoral capitalists who only care about the almighty dollar. Well, word that India has in some way caused the killing of a Canadian citizen advocating for minority rights would presumably greatly upset him, right?
What if you’re a former National Co-Chair of Huawei lobbyist Jean Charest’s Conservative Leadership campaign who wrote a National Post column calling on the NDP to bring down the Liberals under the banner of Country Over Party in the spring over Chinese interference? You’d think this person would be calling on all conservatives and Conservatives to back the Government – Country Over Party after all, right?
Now let’s imagine how Terry Glavin and Tasha Kheiriddin would react if the Liberals had covered up India’s involvement. Glavin would call Trudeau all kinds of profanity for being unable to stand up for Canada against foreign aggression, a weak and unprincipled leader who can be bullied. Tasha would use this as yet another opportunity to endorse the CPC for office, saying that this heinous breach of principle should force the NDP’s hand to end the tenure of a government that needs to be beaten.
Instead? Both have managed to find themselves indifferent to India killing a Canadian citizen, all because it was Trudeau who announced it. And once again I’m forced to ask why the media in this country is so fucking pathetic.
…
Does anyone, any single human being alive right now, believe that if Trudeau had covered this up and the story had broken via Bob Fife the National Post wouldn’t have run a front page with the headline Trudeau Sells Out Canada? When the Government doesn’t disclose (much less substantiated) claims that nobody has really ever been able to prove reached the PMO, it’s a National crisis. Now they do, the timing is “cynical” (per Tasha), as if Fife hasn’t said he’d publish. If you’re Glavin, it’s Canada taking sides in, essentially, something that’s not its business.
This would be shocking if we expected anything different from these people, but of course we don’t, because our media ecosystem is full of people for whom the very basic notion of intellectual honesty is as foreign as winning F1 races is to Lando Norris. It’s a pathetic state of affairs for people who really ought to know better, because the honest truth is that there is no reason to believe that they do know better because if they do, how do they sleep at night.
What Postmedia is doing is laundering baseless accusations of some form of malpractice at the PM, which makes sense as a business model but is as morally decrepit as what Glavin rails against – chasing the almighty dollar at the expense of principle. The truth is that there are things at which partisanship is secondary, and you know who understood that? Stephen fucking Harper.
When the Ottawa shooting happened in 2014, he finished his speech the next day, walked down the House benches to Kevin Vickers, and then as he walked back, he hugged both Trudeau and Mulcair before heading back to his seat. He hates Trudeau, and did at the time. The condescension he would reserve for him was immense every time he had to listen to Justin. I have seen the eyerolls Harper would do while Justin would ask his questions in QP with my own eyes. And even then, Harper could put that animus aside for a display of fucking unity.
What some in this country cannot do right now is get on board with a very basic notion that the PM is the PM, but he’s not the enemy. Nor, by the way, is Poilievre. We have become too comfortable, in part because of Sam Cooper’s bullshit, throwing around notions of treason or what might be called behaviours that are tantamount to treason. The problem? There’s no evidence for it. I think Poilievre would be a bad Prime Minister and do bad things. Plenty of people think the same about our current incumbents. That’s fine, and in a democracy, sometimes the other side wins. But neither Trudeau nor Poilievre are traitors.
What so many are doing, including the only major newspaper chain left in this country, is playing politics with a human tragedy and an international attack. We know the Post are insane partisans – Trudeau appointing a handful of judges with Liberal donation records led the website but you had to scroll 5 sections to get to any coverage of the AG’s report on Doug Ford’s Greenbelt scheme – and that coverage was an Op-Ed from Ford and a column from a former Ontario PC candidate.
Postmedia let Brian Lilley fuck Doug Ford’s Comms Director without disclosing it ever, and now we have them running concern trolling pieces about the economic damage this might cause, after repeatedly bashing the government for being too friendly with China (including many a Glavin column doing so). Apparently, realpolitik is weakness when it’s China killing Uyghurs but when it’s India killing a leader in the Sikh community, fuck ‘em, can’t lose some grain exports.
We cannot continue to act like the Post and the gaggle of pseudo-literate fake intellectuals who line its pages and the broader right wing media ecosystem give a single, solitary fuck about reporting the news. They are propagandists, combatants on the field and not stenographers of events. Which, for what it’s worth, so am I. But nobody comes to fucking ScrimshawUnscripted under any fucking pretenses that what you’re getting is stenography, and the standards for great papers like the Gazette or the Citizen are different.
At the end of the day, you don’t get to pick and choose when it’s Country Over Party and when it’s Party Over Everything, and so much of our right wing media has decided it’s Party Over Everything. And accordingly, it’s Fuck Postmedia, Fuck Tasha, Fuck Glavin, and Fuck everyone who cannot see them for the cancers they are to this country.
It isn’t a big surprise that partisan journalists like Fife, Cooper and Galvin suddenly don’t care about foreign interference because it was only about the killing of a Canadian citizen this time and not about the interest of the conservatives
Every accusation is an admission.
When Fife and Cooper torqued a bunch of leaked half truths and complete lies, the Conservatives were ready to pounce (you wonder if they knew in advance). Not only was Trudeau utterly incompetent, he was deliberately incompetent to advance Liberal party interests. They accused him, without any evidence other than conjecture on the basis of the Fife/Cooper BS, of putting the Liberal party’s and his own political interests above the interests of the country.
I kept wondering why it was not enough to claim that Trudeau was wrong, too weak or whatever. Why did the Conservatives immediately jump to the conclusion that this is part of a scheme to give the Liberal party some kind of political advantage. The only reason I can think of is that it is what they would do in the same situation (and likely have done when they were in government).
Now, with this latest much more bloody example of foreign interference, the Conservatives don’t know what to do. Today they tried several things (for example victim was not a real Canadian, as if that matters and actually he was), but they now seem to have settled Trudeau was too quick in making this public, but at the same time needs to make more details public. Incredibly weak tea, but that is what you get when your entire platform consists of one item: “Trudeau bad”.
Finally, as a footnote, for the first 12 hours Poilievre had the right approach in condemning the murder and alleged involvement of the Indian government. Next morning he changes his tune. Did he get a call from Modi’s best friend in Canada, Stephen Harper?