Journalism: A bleak wasteland, surveyed

Extinction-level events, everywhere you look.

After a couple weeks of double shifts, I’m away from the National Post these past few days to work on an extended-play piece on hidden histories that I’ve finally cleared the decks to get to work on. This newsletter’s schedule has been a bit wonky, but I’m not going anywhere for a while.

So let’s get straight into today’s business. It’s going to be very link-rich, so just read through and click for the notes and sources when you’re done.

“Probably the truth is discoverable. . .”

When I launched The Real Story on February 21, 2022, the Trudeau government had just invoked the Emergencies Act, the successor to Canada’s War Measures Act, ostensibly in response to the Truckist hullabaloo centred in the streets of downtown Ottawa.

Three days after the Real Story’s first edition appeared, with Xi Jinping’s blessing, Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, ostensibly in response to NATO’s provocation and “encirclement” of the former Soviet empire that Putin, his oligarchs and his generals are determined to restore. Fact check: There was no provocation and no encirclement.

That first edition began with a passage from an essay George Orwell wrote for the magazine Polemic, published in May, 1945: Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. . .

Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs.

The 2020s are not the 1940s, but what was true in 1945 is true again across the Anglosphere. The echoes are deafening. We are in the midst of a world war again, of a more shadowy and borderless kind, with Russia, China and Iran and their various client states and satrapies forming up the main axis of belligerents.

As was the case in the years that led inevitably to World War II and the Nazi death camps, the Anglosphere is increasingly enfeebled by a “crisis of epistemology.” This is the fancy way of describing a collapse in the broad societal consensus about how we’re supposed to go about the business of determining what’s true and what isn’t.

This crisis manifests in many ways, not least in the collapse of the standards of conventional journalism. Just pointing this out can get a fella into heaps of trouble.

The breakdown of the 20th century’s advertising business model, the coming-apart of the institutions of news gathering and news reporting, the emergence of journalistic simulacra (things that look like conventional news platforms but aren’t) and the rise of social media all track on the same arc with the global retreat of democracy, now in its 18th year.

Today’s newsletter is a deep-dive, bleak assessment. Despite my tone, I’m an optimist, at least for the long term. Sensible people will always want facts, background and analysis that makes sense of the world around them. That constituency may be shrinking, but my hope is that there will always be a “market” for the acts of journalism I insist on committing. Which, by the way, you can support.

“It is about basic facts and evidence. . . ”

My main concern, owing to the beats I’ve covered for most of my working life, arises from what Orwell called the sealing-off of one part of the world from another.

The worldwide connectivity driven by advances in digital technologies was supposed to end our sealing-off from one another. It hasn’t.

Subscribers will know that I’ve expended a great deal of effort over the years covering events in the so-called Muslim World, with side visits to Syria, Jordan, Turkey and so on. I’ve paid particularly close attention to the western media’s colossal failures in Afghanistan. I’ve also written a lot about and from Israel and about the undead beast of antisemitism, going back years.

If you think it’s only the “mainstream media” that has done a lousy job covering the agonies of last October and everything after, you’re not seeing the bigger picture. For an important analysis of the way things have gone I highly recommend John Ware’s analysis, mostly from a British perspective, in Fathom Journal, 7 October and the Alt-Media: a critical examination.

“Outright ‘Atrocity Denialism’ in the face of irrefutable facts is the latest civilisational clash between those of us struggling to maintain the norms of society – and a growing constituency who seem beyond reason,” Ware writes.

“And this clash couldn’t be more fundamental because it is about basic facts and evidence, irrespective of what one may think about Israel or the way it is conducting the war in Gaza.”

There’s that crisis of epistemology for you. There’s no sign of it letting up any time soon.

“The tyrant’s foe, the people’s friend” comes from a paraphrased remark by the Irish barman Mr. Dooley, a fictional character who first appeared in a Chicago Evening Post column by the humorist Finley Peter Dunne.

Sealing off parts of the world, piece by piece

I’ll be dealing with the Canadian terrain below. Here’s a good overview of the critically important American landscape: Is American Journalism Headed Toward an ‘Extinction-Level Event’?

By the end of this century’s first decade, only four American newspapers maintained permanent foreign news bureaus - the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and The Washington Post.

Two weeks ago, in Russia, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 years in prison after a sham trial on trumped-up espionage charges. Gershkovich was arrested and imprisoned on March 29, 2023, while on a reporting assignment in Yekaterinburg.

In Russia, accurately reporting on the Ukraine war can get you hauled away in the middle of the night, just like Soviet times. More than 100 Russian journalists have been arrested, disappeared or killed since Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022.

I’ve been officially sanctioned by Moscow and barred from returning to Russia, so a fat lot of good I can do. There would be little point, anyway. Just since the launch of the Real Story, more than 1,500 Russian journalists have fled into exile. They continue their work as best they can, mostly from Europe.

In Hong Kong, a vibrant and raucous free press flourished until the Chinese Communist Party violated its treaty with Britain and illegally imposed its National Security Law on the former British colony, four years ago, following massive pro-democracy protests. Now, journalists work in fear of violating the opaque rules and the capricious speech-police authorities. Self-censorship has become a critical element of tradecraft.

The show trial of Jimmy Lai, the 76-year-old British citizen and fearless publisher of the now-shuttered Apple Daily, proceeds in fits and starts. Lai has been held in solitary confinement for more than three years. Arrested in December, 2020 and sentenced to five years for allegedly violating a lease contract for Apple Daily’s headquarters, Lai continues to face charges of conspiracy to publish seditious material and colluding with foreign forces.

In the coming weeks, Stand News editors Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam are expected to hear their verdicts on charges of publishing seditious material. The popular digital non-profit was raided by more than 200 national security police in December, 2021. Its web site was scrubbed and deleted and its property was seized.

There’s no point here in reiterating my contempt for western democracies for the way they largely stood by while Beijing crushed Hong Kong. Don’t get me started on Canadian judge Beverley McLachlin.

I’m haunted by my own memories of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club, a welcoming, warm and lively place before 2020. Everyone I interviewed for my stories about Hongkongers and their hopes for some semblance of democratic mormalcy, during my time in Hong Kong, is now in jail or in exile.

Interviewing Hongkongers by phone or Zoom is still possible, but the self-censorship practiced by Hongkongers now extends to those of us from far away. The last thing a journalist willl want to do is put his informants and sources at risk.

I don’t know what to make of the Wall Street Journal, however, in the case of WSJ Hong Kong reporter Selina Chen. Two weeks ago, the Journal fired Chen for refusing to step down as chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association. The HKJA is a fierce advocate for Hong Kong journalists.

These are the brave young journalists on the board of the Hong Kong Journalists Association. Selina Chen, the HKJA chairperson just fired by the Wall Street Journal, stands in the centre.

Over at the China Media Project, the story is that Chen is just a canary in a coal mine. “The Journal’s decision sent shockwaves through Hong Kong, where press freedom has been pushed to a cliff-edge by an ever-widening national security crackdown that has both netted reporters and media executives and forced some of the city’s most popular news outlets to shut down. But the most concerning part of the story might in fact be how unsurprising it was.” 

When Beijing began to intensify its anti-democracy repressions in Hong Kong in 2019, the Journal and other news organizations encouraged their correspondents to join, for the meagre protections an official press card and HJKA membership provided. It would appear that the Journal now considers the HKJA’s news media advocacy too subversive. Or something.

Selina tells her story here: I pushed for press freedom in Hong Kong. The Wall Street Journal fired me.

Here’s how the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece, the Global Times, covered the story: “The HKJA, with its spotty history of colluding with separatist politicians and instigating riots in Hong Kong, is by no means a professional organization representing the Hong Kong media, some observers said. It instead serves as a base for anti-China separatist forces to disrupt Hong Kong, and a malignant tumor that harms the city's safety and stability, experts said.”

Before we look at the Canadian scene. . .

What the hell just happened in Venezuela?

Tehran, Moscow, Beijing and Cuba have congratulated Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro on his claim of victory in this past weekend’s “elections.” Syrian mass murderer Bashar Al Assad sent a warm letter to Maduro, too. Of course he did.

Here’s an Edison Research exit poll putting the opposition’s Edmundo González and the Unitary Platform in a landslide victory over Maduro. Here’s the consistently reliable Joshua Collins and Daniela Diaz: From hope to heartbreak to resistance in the streets in 24 hours. Here’s Reuters: Venezuela’s opposition says it won 73.2 percent of the vote.

The Bolivarian regime has been so successful in killing, jailing and exiling journalists, and prohibiting foreign journalists from entering the country, that there was barely a need for a major press crackdown in the runup to this past weekend’s vote. The Chavistas have shuttered 300 radio stations over the past 20 years. Good luck getting into the country to report on events. See: Foreign journalists not welcome in Venezuela.

Canada: A petri dish of journalism’s pathologies.

According to data assembled over at The Hub, it would appear that fewer than 60 full-time journalists in Canada cover “world events” and 45 of them work for the CBC. No Canadian news bureaus in the Middle East. No permanent Canadian journalists on the ground in Russia. No Canadian journalists stationed in China.

Justin Trudeau’s “post-national” Liberals have intervened in the business and the practice of journalism by enacting laws policies intended to substitute what we are allowed to know and say with what what we are instructed to believe and proclaim.

The news media has become deeply implicated in this.

The Trudeau government’s decidedly illiberal tendencies have been central to its agenda from the start, and Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly, in the matter of Beijing’s intentions for Canada, has been instructed to patch things up by rolling back the clock to 2016.

Back then, the sore point between Ottawa and Beijing was the stubbornness of Canadians in buying into Trudeau’s big plans for the Canada-China trade establishment and China’ state-owned enterprises in Canada. Beijing insisted that Ottawa should somehow turn Canadian opinion around. In 2017, the Liberals launched a two-year effort to do just that, led by the Public Policy Forum, coupled with the Canada-China Business Council and various China enthusiasts in the Global Affairs bureaucracy. It failed quite handily.

Other government initiatives aimed at forming and shaping public opinion include the Liberals’ bizarre subsidies to the so-called Canada Anti-Hate Network. Among the CAHN’s greatest hits: Convince schoolkids to rat on their classmates if they say things that would upset a Liberal, and disparage the old Canadian flag, the Red Ensign that Canadian soldiers carried onto Juno Beach in Normandy in 1944, as some sort of white supremacist hate symbol.

It was only because of the scandal that arose from the revelation that the notorious Beirut-based Syrian antisemite Laith Marouf had been awarded $133,822 in federal Anti-Racist Action Program funds that any public attention was drawn to the the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s sensitivity-training workshops for the news media. It was Marouf who’d been hired to instruct federally-regulated broadcasters in ways to be more diverse and inclusive. It later turned out that Marouf had received hundreds of thousands more in CRTC consultation dollars over the years.

It seems certain that the epoch that began with Year Zero in 2015 will come to an end next year, if Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives hold their commanding lead in voter-preference polls. Sadly, but perhaps inevitably and understandably, the Conservatives should be expected to put the torch to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The CBC bosses continue to endear themselves to the public: CBC/Radio-Canada board approves bonuses after layoffs. And this, from the Real Story newsletter last April: Something’s deeply wrong with the CBC.

Also destined for Poilievre’s chopping block: the Bill C-63 elements that are purportedly aimed at “hate speech,” along with the provisions of Bill C-18 that oblige big tech conglomerates to share revenue with news organizations, and Bill C-11, which extended the power of the CRTC to regulate the internet.

It’s not fully clear just how much of a swathe Poilievre intends his scythe to cut through Ottawa’s intrusions into the news business. But those intrusions have become ubiquitous. It’s not just the CBC’s annual $1.3 billion budget we’re talking about. There’s another $250 million or so in subsidies and tax incentives that Ottawa has begun to dole out annually private news media - including the National Post. I should mention.

Our friend Jonathan Kay’s investigation over at Quillette lays out how at least a third of the salaries of many nominally private-sector Canadian journalists are now effectively being covered by Trudeau’s government. Here: Journalists Shouldn’t Depend on the State for Their Wages.

Apart from the obvious conflict-of-interest implications, this drift in public policy only exacerbates the public’s growing distrust of conventional news sources. In Canada, that distrust tends to be concentrated among Conservative-leading voters, owing to justifiable (if sometimes over-the-top) apprehensions of a liberal bias in Canadian journalism.

This distrust has some nasty knock-on effects. As illustrated by the Disinfowatch report Canadian Vulnerability to Russian Narratives about Ukraine, published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, “conservatives” tend to be particularly susceptible to Russian propaganda.

The way ahead: There’s a lot to be said for the Ottawa Declaration on Canadian Journalism. I was invited to sign and I didn’t, but only because I’m a kind of hybrid. I’m a National Post columnist and an independent journalist, and I tend not to sign petitions anyway. I do rather favour the recommendations in the Declaration, though.

Also worth paying attention to: Peter Menzies, lifelong journalist, former CRTC vice-chair and now senior fellow over at Macdonald-Laurier. See his in-depth analysis: (Un)Breaking News, “Offering solutions for a more sustainable, independent media future that builds trust and better serves the public.”

For a lengthy and very insightful essay on the Canadian corner of contemporary journalism’s dystopian terrain, I highly recommend Tara Henley’s Massey Essay in the Literary Review of Canada: The Trust Spiral: Restoring Faith in the Media.

The Corus corporation, which owns the Global Television network, Global News and a slew of radio stations across the country, has just announced plans to ditch 25 percent of its full-time workers. That’s about 800 people. This is awful news.

Earlier this year, Bell Media announced the layoffs of 4,800 workers in its news media and telecom divisions. That meant massive cuts at BNN Bloomberg and CTV News and the shedding of 45 radio stations, and the end of CTV’s award-winning flagship W5 investigative series, after 58 seasons. It meant the end of CTV weekday noon newscasts everywhere except Toronto, and the end of evening newscasts outside Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa.

Despite what might seem like my apocalyptic tone when it comes to the state of journalism, and my dismay at the human toll taken by all the bloodletting in the journalism racket, I’m generally an optimist about these things. About the long term, anyway. It’s because smart people get bored with their information silos sooner or later. They want to know the real story.

That was another little pitch, if you didn’t notice.

Post-script

Hey. Looks who’s on this panel at the upcoming Montreal International Security Summit:

The October 16-17 conference is convened by the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. The panel I’m on: Shadow Play - Decoding Transnational Repression and Foreign Influence Operations.

Very happy to know I’ll be joining Yaqiu Wang, the Freedom House research director for China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Globe’s Bob Fife may on hand too. Hope so.

Among the many summit participants listed at the moment are some of my favorite authorities on the subject of China and the Indo-Pacific. That’s the conference theme this year. Included: Benedict Rogers (Hong Kong Watch), Sophie Richardson (Stanford University), Irwin Cotler (my lodestar at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights), Margaret McCuaig Johnson (China Strategic Risks Institute), and Jakub Janda (European Values Center for Security Policy). Rounding out the journalism contingent: Global News’ Mercedes Stephenson.

I’ll have more on this in later newsletters. About Iran too. And more about journalism.