Media Failure And A Lack Of Common Facts

RCMP Coverage Taeks

I am not someone who equates criticism of the Liberal Party of Canada with criticism of Canada.

I am not someone who thinks that Justin Trudeau is infallible, or even all that particularly impressive as either a politician or a leader. My faith that he would be elected again after SNC and WE was never about being a particular fan of his, but having such little faith in the Conservative Party that his election seemed an inevitability. That is still the current basis for my expectation that he – or Chrystia Freeland – will win the next election – it’s very little about Trudeau for me.

All of this is a preface for the conversation that this column is actually about, which is that the Canadian media is a cesspool and it is actively making our brains rot. Almost every major problem identified by the press, from polarization to division to left and right living in entirely different eco-systems of what they believe to be true, stems from one very basic place – the Canadian media is institutionally broken.

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Let’s start with Monday’s idiocy on stilts, Steve Paikin writing an entire column about whether Michael Ford’s appointment to the Ontario cabinet was nepotism or not which starts with Paikin conceding if his last name was Smith, he likely wouldn’t be in cabinet. For reasons unclear, the column did not end with this concession.

Today, a letter from Lia Scanlan, who headed the communications effort in Nova Scotia for the RCMP during and after the tragedy in 2020, came out, and amongst other things, she accused the RCMP Commissioner of political interference, and in her conversation with investigators, admitted to making her office a news free zone after then-Premier Stephen McNeil openly questioned the fact that no emergency alert was sent out. She said the media “revictimized” the families of the dead, called the media “disgusting”, and presided over a culture that would be described as secretive by someone with a much greater taste for understatement than yours truly.

Her letter – which has drawn denials from both the Commissioner and Bill Blair – is not what I care about. Scanlan is clearly not a sensible human, saying she was “proud” of the force’s efforts to communicate with the public and that there was nothing she would have done differently – despite the fact that a coherent, transparent comms policy might have seen some number of people not fucking die. Either she believes this fucking nonsense she says, in which case someone needs to get her help to properly process the trauma of what happened and her role in the events thereof, or she’s lying through her teeth to protect her reputation and the NS RCMP, who nobody in NS seems to have any trust in (for obvious reasons) and is likely getting replaced by a provincial police force.

If she’s a liar, then her word should count for nothing and the lead story should be the unhinged conspiracy about how the media shouldn’t be asking questions of people who knew the gunman before he committed the rampage, but if she genuinely believes what she is saying, it’s worth pointing this out in the stories reporting the allegations – not separating it out to (well written) columns on the side that probably get 1/3rd of the traffic.

It is neither left nor right wing to write about the totality of this story – the Liberals have form with messing about in investigations to gain outcomes they find preferable, and the NS RCMP have exactly as much credibility as I would if I announced I was marrying … I was gonna say Taylor Swift, but I think she’s married (or seeing someone? I don’t know), so insert any woman here, given I’m gay. Those two things are very clearly relevant to a public understanding of the likelihood of who is telling the truth.

Other things of note at this: the fact that the RCMP Commissioner had to tell the press herself how many people were dead in the immediate aftermath because the RCMP disobeyed a direct order and gave a vague “at least 10” when they knew it was 17 at least, the fact that the Liberals never actually said which guns were used in the shooting (the information they allegedly needed out there to sell the gun control bill to the public), and the fact that the Lia Scanlan had been accusing Blair and Trudeau of direct interference in comms policy right from the start are all relevant facts. It would be very good to have this all out there, but we don’t, at least not in one place.

We have some pieces from some people telling us about the RCMP officers’ claims with no pushback, we have Stephen Maher, who started this tragic period writing compellingly about RCMP failure now condemning Lucki for being “hard-hearted” for yelling at RCMP staff in the aftermath of the failures he helped to illuminate the depths of, and we have others solely focused on the fact that the NS RCMP are crooks and liars, and with social media and echo chambers, those articles get sent around the bubble that prefers them.

The reason I prefaced all of this with the fact that I think WE and SNC are bad and are the reasons I didn’t vote Liberal in 2019 or 2021 is that I need to have some credibility to those who think I’m just some Liberal shill here. If he did what he’s accused of, Bill Blair should resign. I don’t think this is even a reasonable argument. But nobody has worked through what the motive here would have been, because I can’t find it.

The motive starts with “The RCMP releasing the information creates an upcry for gun control”, to make selling the gun control Order In Council easier politically. Why the specifics of which guns mattered is never made clear – it’s not like if the scumbag shooter used one type of gun over another that people would have any different of a reaction – but we’re just seeing plenty of media breathlessly report her letter as fact, despite the self serving nature of it and her proven record of insanity and lies.

Why is it a systemic problem, and not just about this? Because think back to, I don’t know, Chrystia Freeland being asked why Justin Trudeau was in Europe during a European war, or why CTV kept tweeting out their story on the 2 crank MEPs who called Justin Trudeau a dictator for COVID restrictions, or coverage of the Convoy in Ottawa? The only reporter to ask Erin O’Toole why he was willing to meet with people and groups with fascist elements was Justin Ling, and then the rest of the press core was shocked and appalled that first weekend when Nazi flags and Confederate flags showed up?

Why does the Canadian media allow Conservative politicians to lie and call the NDP-Liberal deal a “Coalition”, when “Coalition” has a specific meaning – Ministers in Cabinet and those Ministers bound by Collective Responsibility? Why does the media spend so much time covering Conservatives who have fallen out of the Conservative Party on the left of its party – Marjory LeBreton this weekend on CTV – and not those who considered a PPC vote in 2021?

The answer to all of this is simple – the media is collectively unwilling to take flack for being seen to be biased, so telling a Conservative MP that they’re not correct in calling it a coalition is out of bounds. They want the clicks of those right wingers who want to hear people say mean things about Trudeau, so they promote the MEPs without calling them far right cranks, and then have Stephen Poloz on Question Period to dismantle Poilievre’s economic agenda.

The other media bias is towards the people they know, so Marjory LeBreton and socially liberal Tories are much more natural stories to tell than PPC-CPC swing voters, because the central Canadian Laurentian elite know way more of the former. Why did PJ Fournier think that National Post columnist turned Charest spokesperson with a penchant for making an ass out of herself could give Poilievre a run? Because his social circles are full of Conservatives who think like that. Why does the commentariat pine for a centrist party? Because that’s all they hear about from their normie friends.

Clickbait and the economics of news have destroyed journalism, not just here but everywhere, because what is sensationalist is also what matters. Why did I write about the politics of Dobbs this week for TheLines? Because I know how fucking SEO works and I knew my bosses would want an article about the biggest political news of the year. I know how the game fucking works. I’m not making out like I’m some moral or ethical player in this – I work for a site trying to grow, so I have to play the clicks game. I know how the take economy works, having lived this. I know how to entice an audience with one sentence in a nuanced piece to get traction on Twitter. I get all of this.

What I also get is that the media’s most fundamental role is not to be judge and jury, but to be impartial arbiters of information. They’re not. Incentives and corporate takeovers have meant that too often, the media defaults to what is easy, not what is good writing. Nobody has been able to convince me – in a week of take after take – of a very basic question about the RCMP “scandal”, which is why the specific gun names mattered to the government. That’s a failure of the press to have hyped a story without even explaining what they’re supposedly so outraged by.

Maybe the Liberals did something wrong, maybe they didn’t. Maybe I’m being too harsh on the NS RCMP, although I highly, highly doubt it. But the fact that we are on week 2 of this and the coverage is still this sloppy – of a story supposedly so important – is a disgrace.

We need a strong media, and when I say strong I don’t mean “good at attacking the Liberals.” I appreciate the role Bob Fife played in exposing big stories about both Trudeau and Harper. I get that a strong media will sometimes help elect a government you don’t like by exposing things bad things a government you do like did wrong. Accountability – in government, and in general life, is key. But this isn’t a strong media.

A recommitment to reporting and not takery is the only way forward at a time when budgets are spread thin and the impulse to gravitate to the takes business has never been stronger. I get the appeal – hot takes do good business, if they hit Twitter right. But they’re killing this country slowly.

A strong, independent media is essential to democracy. Lazy reporting is what kills it. At a time when the commentariat bemoans division, maybe a return to the actual job of reporting and not opinions from the fourth estate might allow us a common set of facts again.