As I'm sure you know, I have long complained about the growing influence of our ratty Con media, and the way it has helped turn our politics into a sewer, ever more grubby, ever more American.
It hasn't been easy trying to convince people that the way our shabby media speaks with one right-wing voice threatens our democracy.
A lot of people can't see the forest for the trees. And even some of my friends believed that I was exaggerating.
But not any longer.
For in the heat of the pandemic, the mask has fallen off the right-wing media.
And after bombarding us with a million one-sided stories on the WE fake scandal, the grotesque Con bias in this story is only too obvious.
The spouse of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff took part in a meeting with the Crown corporation responsible for the government’s commercial rent-relief program after the company where he works was awarded the contract to administer the program, and before the contract was extended.
Not only is it a drive-by smear on an innocent couple, and a crass attempt to get at Justin Trudeau again.
It buries the fact that Telford behaved in a most honourable manner.
This story brings "scandal journalism" to a new low.
— Bryan Leblanc (@bryan_leblanc) August 8, 2020
Telford asked for guidance from the Ethics Commissioner, who advised that she did not have to implement any additional compliance measures.
But she implemented a screen anyway.
Did the reporter miss that? pic.twitter.com/zQcVThFmOV
Which is not just disgraceful, it's also scary, because it makes a scandal out of nothing, in the middle of a pandemic.
As well as being a travesty of justice.
But that's what the Cons and their shabby media have done to Canada.The story about @RobSilver & @telfordk should probably have been headlined "No One Does Anything Wrong, And Everyone Did What They Should Have Done" but I guess that's not how it works.
— Bruce Anderson (@bruceanderson) August 8, 2020
And so is this...
And when is enough ENOUGH?
The way our shabby shuffling media speaks with one right-wing voice is nothing less than a totalitarian threat to our democracy. But the decent people of this country can also speak with one voice. By boycotting them until they scream for mercy. #cdnpoli
— ๐จ๐ฆ Simon ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ ๐๐ (@montrealsimon) August 8, 2020
It's time to fight back against the ratty Con media...
And teach it a lesson it will never forget.
The media needs to mend its ways and better reflect this country, which is mostly centre-left not right-wing.
And we deserve better...
9 comments:
Love your blog & JB's comments. Please investigate the real reason(s) why Poil de Liรจvre backed out of the Reformacon race. TY
OK, but what is there to do? Even a boycott or cancellation of the bailout won't stop them from being propped up by hedge fund managers, and now that the last bastion of relative Liberal sanity has turned into the "ToryStar," all is Murdoch and Sinclair in the world of Canada's yellow journalism. It's only marginally better in the U.S. The NYT won't admit their complicity in electing Trump with their obsessive hatewank over Hillary's Emails. But at least Trump gets challenged from time to time. Nobody in Canada ever challenges the Cons at any level of government.
I'm partially heartened by, if you go on Twitter and search hashtag #mediapetition you'll find there's a woman who organized a proposal being offered by Hedy Fry once Parliament reconvenes in September. The petition is to limit the bailout to Canadian-owned newspapers only, which would exclude Postmedia. But I think the bailout should be cancelled altogether. At the very least, taxpayer dollars shouldn't be underwriting this crap.
I don't know how you can pressure, say, Edgar Bronfman or Galen Weston to buy Thomson-Reuters and Liberalize CTV and the Globe, but something needs to be done to shut all of Con media out. And either fix the CBC or kill it. Vassy is useless, Coyne needs to retire, and all the "pundit panels" just keep recycling the same old Cons. Teneycke, Byrne, Curran, they're all Harper mouthpieces with nothing to offer, or whiny Dippers brought on board to split the vote. No Liberals on any of these shows, it's totally biased. These people need to go #LearnToCode or bag groceries. They're not journalists, they're propagandists and they're trying to take this government down by uncritically parroting lies from the right-wing rags. At the very least, I want to see them all get sued. Especially if Silver loses his job over this. What bullshit!
There used to be a mechanism to govern jouralism, pity its now gutterism
What about McKenna and how the media is riling up hate against her. Adam van Kayaker (I can't spell his last name) was on P&P today (much better when Catherine Cullen or David Cochrane host instead of Vichy) to duke it out with Skippy, and Skippy got mad when Adam connected the smear campaign against Katie & Rob with the kind of unhinged hate attack that the guy pulled at McKenna's office. Skippy got mad because Adam was right.
The fact is the guy was spouting lies direct from Con talking points parroted uncritically by MSM. Saying Trudeau is corrupt, Trudeau stole money from a kid's charity to enrich his mother, then he went on QAnon business saying Trudeau is a pedophile and McKenna was one of the "corrupt Liberals" protecting him. Scheer, I had mentioned, was dog-whistling to QAnon when he said on P&P that Trudeau's benefit at WE events is his "access to youth." It's a pattern with him going back to his smear of Lorne Nystrom. He floated that Kinsella garbage during the campaign, and Marieke lent it credibility asking Trudeau about an NDA at a campaign stop. I can't recall the exact wording but believe she said something like "there are rumors going around the press." The Globe should be sued out of existence. Fife is a liar. He should have been barred from writing so much as a classified ad after what he did to Mahar Arar.
Now Martin Patriquin saying that the guy at McKenna's office couldn't have been misogynistic because the Rideau Hall guy wasn't, therefore this is just generally divisive politics and it's impossible to be misogynistic against males anyway. Er, except homophobia, which comprises the bulk of Trudeau hate including the QAnon business, literally is male-directed misogyny. Trudeau being married and heterosexual doesn't mean that the torrent of homophobic vitriol he gets over and over again isn't a hate crime writ large.
For that matter, it's just as misogynistic why his false allegations of "corruption" are more amplified than Kenney's or Ford's or the rest of the rotten CPC: I have said repeatedly he is the male edition of "Crooked Hillary." Media ignores malfeasance from cons like Trump while overamplifying or outright manufacturing it about Hillary and Trudeau, because they identify with and circle the wagons around the masculine elements of the RepubliCon party. They know Hillary and Trudeau aren't corrupt. They just need something palatable to damage them, so they go with "corruption," because they can't outright call Hillary a C word or Trudeau a f*g*t.
It's not just social media trolls doing this or fringe blogs like Rebel but mainstream cons and media. MacKay with his "I like hockey, he likes yoga" comment. Rona called JT the first female PM. It started with Harper and the comments about his hair, the "Justin Over His Head" ad with the sparkly letters. Then there was Don Martin during SNC saying Trudeau had been impaled by his own unicorn. Social media feeds this and cons say nothing. Mainstream media feeds social media and cons say nothing. All over online, he gets called Justine, Fairy Princess, Tinker Bell, Fruity Trudy, TruPaul, and the "drama teacher" insult which is a dog whistle for drama queen.
Heck, I still remember when the troll farm unloaded their bile on Didi for his Paw Patrol costume. He was 3. Anti-Trudeau hatred even extends to the kids. And MSM just whistles past the graveyard like nothing's going on. For Patriquin to say that Trudeau haters aren't misogynistic is the absolute lowest form of male-privilege bullshit. Another garbage "pundit" who needs to shut up and go away.
Why won't somebody address the misogyny in media and all these dirty old men giving their silent, complicit blessing to hatred of the PM and cabinet ministers?
Hi Unknown...We have a full investigation unit working to try to determine how the grubby Poilievre became a millionaire, as well as digging up his Reform roots, and other dirty little scandals. And they don't have much time because they have to start working on the sleazy record of Peter MacKay. But I'll pass on your request and see if they can help you...
Hi Jackie...I realize taking on the Con media may seem like a hopeless task, but remember they are weaker than most people imagine. So even the threat of a boycott can do amazing damage. As for your observation that misogyny is why so many Canadian men hate Justin Trudeau I completely agree with you. In a country full of Con kooks and incels I truly believe that explains why Trudeau hate is so toxic. They hate him because he stands up for the rights of women and gay people, and it's so pathetic...
Hi Simon
I think at the very least it's time to have the Sun criminally charged. Brian Lilley is stalking Justin on vacation. They need to be stopped by the authorities before Canada ends up with the same result as the British tabloids relentlessly pursuing Princess Diana. Skippy posting satellite photos of Harrington Lake to Twitter that then get picked up by the Sun papers, is only going to spur on more sausage makers. One of these days they're going to be successful.
I had a bad dream last night where the guy from the McKenna video phoned a bomb threat to the school where the Trudeau kids attend. It was kind of a weird dream because Stephen Colbert was their teacher, and he was sitting at the desk at the front of the classroom with Canadian flags behind him like those press conferences, next to Dr. Tam and Dr. Fauci. But I could hear the guy's voice out of view, saying "I am going to blow up this school if Justin Trudeau doesn't stop stealing money for those three kids." Now the Colbert/Tam/Fauci part is implausible, but if the press doesn't stop riling up these sausage makers, the more serious part is definitely in the cards. This needs to stop NOW.
The Liberal polls are going back up, nobody cares about WE anymore, the Cons overplayed their hand attacking Rob and Katie, neither Chrystia Freeland nor Mark Carney are going to foment a leadership coup, and new polling shows that both MacKay and O'Toole would actually do worse than Scheer. So now they're back to realizing their only hope of toppling Justin is if he's dead.
I read the Great Gatsby a long time ago in high school. I may have to read it again. But what I'm getting at is that's a disturbing reference that Brian gave, because I believe Gatsby gets murdered. Remember when he wrote that weird fanfic about what Justin was wearing on his Christmas holiday in Costa Rica? I guess he wasn't turned on by the thought of Brian Pallister in an open-collar shirt and a Speedo. All kidding aside though, these people are dangerous, considering how Sue-Anne Levy's screed prompted someone to set fire to a hotel where refugees were staying. Their "readership" if you can call it that, are dangerous and violent and ripe for being riled up by populist animosity. They need to be stopped before Justin or someone in his family gets hurt or killed.
I would add that stochastic terrorism needs to be added to the Criminal Code. Postmedia is a criminal outfit run by a criminal con man who got "pardoned" by another criminal con man. It is posing harm to elected officials in Canada and the prime minister in particular. This is not journalism. It's Murdoch-style celebrity harassment, the likes of which killed one British royal and chased another out of the continent. It needs to be shut down by the law.
Only about 30% of Canadians are Conservative. At least that is what the last 50 years of elections have said. So the media turning to that 30% while turning their backs on the other 70% is not a strategy for long-term success. Give it time, either someone in our media will realize their error and turn back or the media will fail completely. Either way, nothing needs to be done that they are not doing themselves. The transition will be infuriating but in the end it will work itself out.
Good article, but don't forget that it was the Trudeau government that bailed out the Ratty Con Media and they whiffed at the opportunity to buy the country's largest newspaper, the Toronto Star, which instead fell into the hands of more Cons.
They consistently keep biting the hand that feeds them, so ... stop tossing money at them!!
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