About That Press Room Donnybrook. . .
"Citizen journalists" versus the "MSM"? Real journalists versus the Muskosphere?
Much Mischief-Making in Montreal
There was neither gunplay nor bloodshed so it’s not as amusing as it might have been, but at least one assault has been alleged, the police were called, voices were raised, names were called and many harsh words were spoken. The only thing everybody seems to agree on is that the federal Leaders Debate Commission has a lot to answer for.
Here’s the thing. There’s a federal election going on. It’s an historically important election. Thursday’s leaders debate was one of only two events during the campaign where the party leaders squared off against each other. The press room fracas caused the cancellation of the leaders’ media scrum that was supposed to follow the debate.
What’s going on with the media here is obviously not more important than the election. Anything might happen yet, but it’s shaping up to be the fourth Liberal election win in a row owing to a bizarre reversal of the Conservatives’ fortunes in light of U.S. president Donald Trump’s vulgar provocations and his decision to dynamite North America’s deeply integrated economy.
So it’s important. There is that. But this would be a hotly-contested fight even if Trump hadn’t lost his damn mind.
The Conservatives’ intention to abolish CBC News and CBC’s public affairs programming, saving Radio-Canada for its French-language service, is a very big deal in all this. The Liberals have made a loud noise about their intention to boost funding for the CBC.
This is not a healthy state of affairs to begin with, in the ordinary course of relations between politicians and the press. For my own view, I think it’s a damn tragedy, the whole thing, and you can beat up on the Conservatives as much as you want but it’s complicated. I got into it a couple of years ago in the Ottawa Citizen: The Liberals' weird fixation with the CBC is the real problem. For a deeper dive, here in The Real Story: Something’s Deeply Wrong With The CBC.
It’s in the big-picture scheme of things that it becomes clear that Thursday night’s news media rumpus was more important than anything that happened during the debate itself, as things turned out. I come to this conclusion based on concerns about the mass media’s implosion, a phenomenon that has been central to the Real Story from its founding. If you want a Real Story mission statement of some kind, read this and you’ll see what I mean.
Below I’m going to get into some background and necessary context about what happened last night, and I will be ungracious about some of the participants involved, I’m afraid.
What I’ve been up to.
As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I’ve busted my right hand.
This is a melodramatic way of describing the injury I’m nursing. I’m left-handed so it’s not a total disaster. It’s odd because chopping wood and riding my Triumph both seem to be less painful than typing.
In the hopes that I’d be on the mend soon enough I’d intended to wait for Easter Monday before sending out one of those magazine-type Real Story weekend specials I occasionally produce. I was going to focus mainly on the way Canada continues to be subsumed in the globe-encircling intentions China has laid out for itself.
On that subject, for now I’ll make one point and then get back to business.
Have I not been warning about this? Last week I was pretty specific: Beijing's gravitational pull grows stronger every day as Europe and Canada look to a world without the U.S. in the wheelhouse.
If I’ve been less than wildly enthusiastic about the big push to expand oil pipeline capacity away from the United States, this should tell you why. Bloomberg is reporting that Chinese crude imports from Vancouver reached an unprecedented 7.3 million barrels in March, while American oil exports to China have dropped almost off the charts.
In the meantime I made quite a few unflattering observations about the Liberal Party and the Liberal government in my column in Thursday’s National Post. It’s about the Liberals’ annoying habit of accusing the Conservatives of importing fashionable American nonsense into Canadian politics, when that very practice has been the Liberals’ “whole of government” organizing principle for much of the past decade.
This required getting into the meaning of “woke,” or rather the weird phenomenon the term attempts to describe, which has belatedly emerged as a matter voters should be thinking about. More about that below.
A harbinger of the bad thing that was looming
Hats off to my Post colleague Chris Selley. He saw this coming. Earlier this week Selley wrote almost in passing that nothing good would come of the Leaders Debates Commission’s inexplicable capitulation to Ezra Levant’s online Rebel News site.
The Commission ended up granting Rebel News five spots in the post-debate press scrum - something about there being five separate Rebel News divisions or something. Other accredited and longstanding news organizations got one each. The decision was “utterly ridiculous,” Selley wrote, “and guaranteed to incite a riot among competing reporters.”
Maybe no riot ensued Thursday night, exactly, but close.
It sure didn’t help that after Wednesday night’s French language debate, at the press scrum involving dozens of journalists, 17 questions were taken by the Liberals’ Mark Carney, the Conservatives’ Pierre Poilievre, New Democrat Jagmeet Singh and Bloc Québécois boss Yves-François Blanchet, and four of the questions were formulated by the Rebel News bunch.
The story is that the Rebel people barged their way to the front of the lines. And the press at Thursday night’s event was determined that a repeat of that carry-on was not going to be countenanced.
One last digression, if that’s what this is
For whatever it’s worth, and however much this leaders’ debate will matter to the way things will play out by the time polls close April 28, I’d say the Conservatives’ Pierre Poilievre “won” the debate. As usual, this just goes to show I’m a normal kind of guy, even if my “beat” and my usual interests mean that it’s the bigger-picture stuff and the more esoteric implications of the current moment that are topmost in mind in this election.
And now to the bad thing that happened
I wasn’t in Montreal last night so I’m not going to provide a narrative account of events with projectile-trajectory diagrams and chalked outlines of bodies on the floor or anything of that sort. Instead. I’ll let you in on some of the participants involved, the basis of the arguments, and the important issues that the rumpus raises.
In the foreground, going by as many first-hand accounts that I can gather, there were incidents inside the press-conference hall, where perhaps 100 journalists had been assembled for the post-debate leaders’ press conference that ended up not happening at all. There was a significantly nasty incident that reportedly occurred on the sort-of plaza outside the doors of the Radio-Canada debate venue where the CBC pundit panel was set up. And there was an implausibly alleged assault afterwards, involving a Liberal staffer.
The combatants, if I can put it that way, can be described as Ezra Levant’s Rebel News operation (1.73 million Youtube subscribers) along with a handful of other “independent” media organizations that are similarly and ordinarily described as “right-wing,” versus pretty well everybody else, including other “independent” media, which is not an especially useful term but for now it will have to do.