The Media, the State and the Freedom Convoy
Government Documents from the Rouleau Emergency Inquiry show collusion between the media and politicians to frame the story against the protesters. The days of Woodward and Bernstein are long over.
Last year’s Freedom Convoy has given us a snapshot of the state’s decision-making in a time of crisis. The Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC) into the Trudeau Government’s reaction to the Freedom Convoy has put many documents online. While these documents themselves are not new, they illustrate, in the unguarded texts left unredacted, how the official mind works. The documents are here; scroll down for the search capability.
The POEC documents also illustrate how the state talks to the supposedly oppositional media. This is my point here: that ministerial staff and media come from the same class and share the same attitudes. Formally the government and the media are in opposed roles, with the media skeptical of official narratives, but in practice they often pull in the same direction. A threat from outsiders like the truckers put them rapidly into order.
I have on several occasions tweeted the following text at press organizations pretending to be independent. The first segment shows Althia Raj, a prominent Toronto Star writer and CBC commentator, highlighting a comment from a chat room where someone wanted “our own January 6 event” in Canada. People bather in chatrooms all the time, and here some idiot fantasized what the state wanted to hear. A narrative of insurrection and danger to democracy already existed in the collective minds of the state and the media.
The text then shows Alexander Cohen, a senior Liberal aide to Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino, saying that he had directed Marie Woolf, then of Global News and now of the Globe and Mail, on how to cover the Trucker Convoy1:
“I’ve been encouraging journalists,” says the Liberal aide Cohen, as though journalists would generally accept suggestions to investigate the government’s critics from a political aide. “I’ve put Marie Woolf onto it,” implies that journalists as a matter of course take his direction. And “She’s obsessed,” makes it clear that the journalist is being steered in a direction she wanted to go. Cohen and Woolf are obviously familiar with each other and agree about the direction of coverage. They are on the same side. The other side, of course, is the working class protest.
Two days later, the Prime Minister’s aide Mary-Liz Power says that Global is working on a story:2
It is normal, or so it would seem, for the Prime Minister’s office to know in some detail what the media are working on. We also learn that Mendicino wanted to find “crazies” among the protesters, and that this was a good fit with the expected media stories. Again, the government and the media were on the same side.
These messages are dated January 25, so 3 days prior to the first Freedom Convoy vehicle arriving. The lawyers for the Freedom Convoy organizers pointed out at the POEC that the government had a narrative arranged before the truckers even got to Ottawa. The Liberal government, like its allies in the mainstream media, had a narrative as prefabricated as a double-wide.
Rather than questioning the official narrative, journalists were helping to propound it, working at the direction of state officials. We have travelled some distance from Woodward and Bernstein.
The reasons for this long but often unnoticed voyage are to be found in the realm of class: the state is the central institution in our society, and those who work in and around it have similar interests. Those who would like the state to be smaller or less intrusive have opposed interests.
While there are exceptions to any generalization, political aides and journalists are members of the same professional class. They belong to the intelligentsia, which is to say those who make their living through cultural or symbolic activity: by writing, speaking and creating or distributing ideas. They went to the same schools and share the same (narrowing) range of ideologies tenable in academic and journalistic environments. The speak the same argot of social justice, equity, diversity, etc., and share the same concerns.
Given the capture of universities and journalism schools, and now many newsrooms, by the more extreme elements of the “woke” left, many journalists have become committed partisans of political causes, further eroding the boundaries between reporting and advocacy, and making the step from reporting to activism seem natural, even virtuous.
Most significantly, journalists and politicians (and the large crowd of operators who surround the latter) inhabit the same state-centric universe. Journalists observe, report on, criticize, and hope to influence the state. If there is a social problem, the solution will inevitably be state action. The solution may involve fine-tuning state policy, even changing state policy, or on fortunate occasions inventing whole new fields of state action; it will rarely involve a shrinkage of the state. Ideologies work quite as much by what they exclude as by what they prescribe.
None of this means that members of the intelligentsia always agree with each other, or that Global News and other mainstream media organizations are simple stenographers, parroting the press releases of power. They need conflict, and they will report stories of scandal, of process, or of personality. They will attack with a vengeance the police and the security state when it confronts left-wing, which is to say statist, protest. But the established classes put aside internecine squabbles when faced with an external threat.
Few journalists and few politicians have significant private sector experience. Those that do will likely have spent their time in the private sector managing relations with the bureaucratic state. They will have little experience, except perhaps in summer jobs or youthful romps, of blue collar work, or of dealing with private sector clients. We have increasingly an intelligentsia, and a left, unfamiliar with the private sector and the people who work in it.
Sympathy for the working class is reduced to an abstract consequence of receding theoretical commitments. Workers are viewed not as citizens with their own lives and views, but as objects of bureaucratic management.
When working people appeared in the streets of the capital in their boisterous thousands demanding that the state get out of their underwear, the reaction of the statist intelligentsia was one of incomprehension and fear. Fear became anger, and it was the vengeful anger reserved for the apostate, for the renegade who betrays his proper allegiance. The intelligentsia believes with ideological certainty that the state serves, or should serve, the true interests of the subaltern classes, the quiet part being that those true interests are best known to the statist intelligentsia. Those who protest not for an expansion of the state (that is expected, even welcomed) but for its contraction, are class traitors. They do not know their own interests, and must as a matter of dogmatic necessity be “crazies”, or be motivated by racism, or have been bought by dark money, or organized by the Russians.
The alternative — that working people are agents in their own right, who do not much like being bossed around by the bureaucratic state — would refute the self-conception of the managing intelligentsia. As the persistent media lies about the Freedom Convoy demonstrate, Marie Woolf is not the only one “obsessed by this stuff.”
The 'working class' is a bit broader than defined here. Many people who work at ordinary jobs and make average or less than average income, nonetheless lined up to get vaccinated, expected others to do the same, and accepted that it should be mandatory for certain groups, like hospital staff. Whatever collusion between leftist journalists and politicians, none of it would have happened without broad support from just plain folks. And whatever the justification for the convoy, most people agree that the right to protest is not limitless. One can complain that the government does not apply the same standard to all groups of protesters, and if it had been First Nations or BLM protestors the reaction would likely have been different, but this doesn't mean the convoy hadn't gone right to the limit, or beyond, of what should be tolerated.