Journalism, Ideology and the Mainstream Media

Journalists think they speak truth to power, when in fact they are controlled opposition, pushing power in the direction it wants to go (1,000 words, 5 minutes).

The Globe and Mail carried a report yesterday and an op-ed today denouncing with a degree of theatrically (“free press under threat!”) the arrest of a leftwing journalist, Brandi Morin, during the Edmonton police clearance of crime and drug-infested encampments. The attitude of The Globe, in common with a large collection of NGOs, to the arrest of a left-wing journalist stands in telling contrast to their attitude to the arrest of Rebel News’ David Menzies, whom they denied was a journalist at all.

It would be easy to accuse the Globe and the others of hypocrisy, but that isn’t really the problem. A hypocrite fails to live up to his principles; the problem here is that The Globe’s position is fully in accord with its real principles, if not quite the ones a naive reader might attribute to them. Their real position is that journalists must be somewhere on the left, working for progressive change. Those who fail to conform are right-wing rage merchants, undeserving of the respect and certification due to journalists.

This insertion of a demand for ideological conformity into journalism is not peculiar to The Globe. The presumption that ideological allegiance is a necessary part of the profession is pretty standard at the party training school once known as Ryerson. It is reflected in the silence on Menzie’s arrest from those who now step forward to denounce that of Morin, including Amnesty International, Journalists [do they mean Reporters?] without Borders, PEN Canada, and the Canadian Association of Journalists.

The establishment looks a long way down its nose at the always fund-raising reader-supported Rebel News. The Globe’s claim that Rebel News journalists are not journalists rested on the assertion that they are not asking questions or seeking information, a strange reaction to an arrest immediately preceded by Menzies’ asking Freeland a pointed question about Canada’s policy towards Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. As I argue here, The Globe’s real problem was that Rebel News covers important cultural issues The Globe would prefer not to discuss:

The problem was one of boundaries, and Rebel News transgresses (and not in a good way) too often.

Ms. Morin is indigenous, and this clearly forms a large part of her identity. It certainly formed a central part of The Globe’s story. For the hegemonic ideology, our society consists of a diversity of oppressed groups, and respect is awarded on the basis of one’s place in a complex hierarchy of intersecting oppressions. But even here ideology rules: indigeneity has not earned Tamara Lich any slack from the mainstream media, nor has her skin colour helped Leslyn Lewis. On the contrary, dissenters are seen as aiding the oppressor, and are treated with particular reprobation.

Ricochet, the progressive and supposedly oppositional magazine for which Ms. Morin works, is (inevitably) government-funded. Like a host of leftwing sites — The Tyee, The National Observer, Rabble.ca — Ricochet is in the contradictory position of claiming to be scrappy, independent and oppositional, while in reality subsisting at the pleasure of the state, and on the taxpayer. That reality is not entirely integrated into the self-image of these journals. It is not that they think anything wrong with being on the public payroll (their sense of entitlement is authentically held), it is that they do not see, indeed cannot see, that they serve a purpose within the larger complex of institutions dependent upon the bureaucratic state. They are oppositional, but only up to a point, as Waugh’s Lord Copper might say.

Ricochet claims to be “public interest journalism,” and I don’t doubt that Rebel News sees itself in the same light. Both are activist organizations, which does not necessarily preclude useful journalism. The Economist began as an offshoot of the Anti-Corn Law League, and it would be easy to give more (if less august) examples of journals that pursue a political purpose. A sense of crusading purpose can be motivating.

It used to be possible to pick up a serious paper of record with some confidence that, human foibles and editorial quiffs aside, it would present some kind of credible summary of the state of the world this morning. Those days are over: I still see nothing in The Globe about the protests of European farmers, though they are very keen to tell us about those (less widespread) against the German AfD. We have come back to a situation resembling that of the nineteenth century, when journals had explicit political commitments, and they need to be read in that light.

But the situation contains a structural asymmetry: the left speaks from a position both hegemonic and state-funded; the right is entirely outside the institutions, self-funded, and reliant on the kindness of devotees. Both sides imagine themselves oppositional, the difference being that the right actually is oppositional, while the journals of the left function as farm teams for the mainstream media. Claims to oppressed status are validated by the occasional arrest, admittedly not a pleasant experience however brief, after which the leftist journalist goes back to work somewhere in a large universe of state-adjacent and usually state-funded organizations that produce credentialized journalism.

There is a central and resolved contradiction, an element of false consciousness, within the minds of the leftist media. They think themselves oppositional, speaking truth to power (an inevitable cliché), when in fact they are controlled opposition, telling the state stories it is ready to hear, making demands power regards as legitimate, demands power is often not unhappy to accede to. After all, most of the left’s demands seek an expansion of the state, and the state bureaucrats who run granting agencies find such demands to be entirely reasonable.

By contrast, Rebel News and other populist sites and independent journalists raise issues the establishment wishes to keep closed. They often tell the state that it should shrink, which is definitely beyond bounds. The basic asymmetry, the essential difference, between right and left, populist and para-Marxist, is the contrast between real opposition and controlled opposition. The real opposition will never be Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations, will never get state funding, and when they get arrested, the hegemonic institutions will turn up their noses. But we know who they are, and respect them for it.