Speaking Of News Media Malfeasance. . .
More on fraud, fakery, fooling around and finding out.
I’ve been busy with inquiries related to the Iranian revolution this week and after my column’s out I’ll have some hair-raising backstory for subscribers, but right now I must immediately return to the matter of frauds and fakes and f*cking around that I was on about in my last newsletter. There have been developments.
And there’s just a tinge of schadenfreude going on here, I swear. Only a tinge.
Now, remember, we must think of the prominent and hyperpartisan Alberta pamphleteer Duncan Kinney as innocent until proven guilty even though that’s a courtesy you’d be a fool to expect from him. Kinney is the “journalist” in this headline: Alberta journalist charged with mischief in vandalism of controversial statue.
The charges against Kinney involve a story his pseudo-sort-of-news platform Progress Alberta purported to break in August last year involving the vandalism of a statue of the Second World War Ukrainian nationalist Roman Shukhevych, at the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex in Edmonton. Someone had spraypainted “Actual Nazi” on the statue.
A photograph of the defaced statue straight away and fortuitously came into Kinney’s possession. Edmonton police now say Kinney’s scoop was fraudulent on account of it being Kinney himself who defaced the statue. So now Kinney is charged with mischief under $5,000.
As if my opinion matters, I’d say it is not unfair to describe Shukhevych as an actual Nazi, although it’s also my opinion that Kinney is pretty creepy too. The schadenfreude comes into it because Kinney once described me as “truly one of the most rotten people in a Canadian media landscape full of awful folks.”
My rottenness was the impudence of having exposed the defrocked United Church minister Kevin Annett as the deranged QAnon-style fabulist behind crazy stories of a vast archipelago of secret mass graves containing the bones of thousands of Indigenous children murdered by priests in a vast genocide and pedophile-ring conspiracy involving First Nations leaders, prime ministers and the pope. Echoes of a Satanic Panic were really loud back then and they were deafening during its recrudescence in the news media’s Year of the Graves malfeasance last year. It became impossible to tell the difference between fact and lurid fantasy, and between what we could say we knew and what we were instructed to believe.
Of particular interest to the Real Story today is that Kinney also happens to be a principal defendant in a massive $7 million defamation suit you’ve probably never heard about. So far as I can tell no respectable news organization is covering the proceedings before Alberta’s Court of King’s Bench. At all.
That may be simply because of an old and innocent journalistic convention: You generally don’t cover lawsuits that might implicate yourself or your colleagues or your boss. A huge swathe of news media real estate is implicated in the lawsuit, either as Kinney’s co-defendants or as tangential parties in some way.
The defendants: The Toronto Star, the CBC, the New Democrats of Canada Association, Kinney’s Progress Alberta, the NDP-affilated Broadbent Institute (where Kinney serves as a Fellow), the Broadbent Institute’s Press Progress pamphlet machine, former premier Rachel Notley’s chief of staff Jeremy Nolais, Alberta Liberal Party leader David Khan, and others. Including, most importantly, the notably unpleasant Conservative Party hopeful Karim Jivraj. Hell of a thing, which I’ll get into in just a sec.
I’m going to put a great deal of this newsletter’s content on the far side of the paywall below because if I’m going to put up with any more grief and abuse for pointing out these things I’m going to insist on getting paid for my trouble. Journalism isn’t free, especially journalism of the kind that discloses just how profitable fake journalism can be. People get mad at you.
Maybe “fake journalism” isn’t quite the right term. You decide.
The plaintiff in the $7-million multi-defendant lawsuit, Caylan Ford, was a star candidate for the United Conservative Party of Alberta (not my kind of people, I might point out here) back in 2019. Ford was lynched in the press for saying ugly things she never said and doing things she never did and harbouring ugly ideas she never even contemplated.
Duncan Kinney was party to all this.
The free ride ends here. Paying customers only below this line.