Why I don't believe the Mainstream Media

Woke ideology overpowers the basic journalistic duty of getting the facts right: three personal experiences. (1000 words, 5 minutes)

The Globe and Mail is the paper of record, Canada’s national fish wrap, Yorkville’s national newspaper, The Old and Male: the range of mockery points to its central position in the national discourse. This makes The Globe useful as an articulation of what power believes, written in the self-serious tones of the intellectually respectable broadsheet, and sometimes with the odd fact or two scattered about for good measure.

It has long been obvious that the media is driven by an ideology dictating what issues are covered, how they are covered, and whose voices are treated as serious and worthy of journalistic attention. We all have an ideology, which is to say a worldview that tells us what and who is important and worthy of respect, or at any rate attention. Editors and journalists being human beings — if I may be permitted a hypothesis — they too are unavoidably influenced by ideology.

As one of life’s natural-born Tories, my ideology is deeply out of sympathy with the wokeness that fills the pages of The Globe. But, as a respecter of persons and institutions, for many years I credited their basic honesty. While in graduate school, admittedly some time ago, I did some writing for both major Canadian national papers (The National Post and The Globe and Mail), and that experience reinforced my view that the mainstream media, however often wrong-headed, was at least trying to be honest and fair-minded.

I have changed my mind. As the chiché has it, my view of the elite media’s honesty changed slowly, and then all at once. It has become obvious that for the elite or mainstream media, ideology prevails over accuracy: they report what is narrative-compliant, and discount or simply fail to mention what is not.

Here are three issues of which I have personal knowledge that drove me to change my view:

• The Freedom Convoy: I live and work in downtown Ottawa, on one of the streets mentioned in testimony at the subsequent judicial inquiry (the Public Order Emergencies Commission) into the Emergencies Act. I was not a vaccine skeptic, and was not paying great attention to current events when I heard honking in the street, and going outside found a joyful crowd of people and some really cool trucks. The Globe and the rest of the mainstream media, by contrast, told me that the Confederate Army was pillaging the streets of Ottawa (to summarize, but not by much). I found the convoy participants to be entirely friendly, and after the first few days not even that loud.

• Twitter/X: I read about once a week in The Globe and other elite media that Elon Musk is a bad man and Twitter/X a “hellscape” (the word seems to come up a lot) infested with Nazis. This is not my experience. I have seen very few Nazis on Twitter (though now, post-October 7, quite a few antisemites). Many of the previously banned accounts that Musk has let back on, including those of the satire site Babylon Bee, the feminists Meghan Murphy, Mia Ashton, and Amy Hamm, and the ever-voluble Jordan Peterson, are well worth following. The idea that any of them is “hate speech” is absurd.

• Protest against Gender Ideology: In Ottawa on 9 June 2023, there was a protest against gender ideology in schools organized by Chris Elston, better known as “Billboard Chris.” The Globe’s report announced, “Schools become targets for backlash against LGBTQ rights,” said nothing about the Antifa presence or Antifa violence, and only interviewed people supporting the pro-gender ideology side of the protests. Cognates of “hate” featured prominently in Globe and MSM coverage, when to my observation that emotion came exclusively from the gender ideology side. And, of course, Chris Elston is anything but anti-gay.

Symbols of the far-left terrorist group Antifa are seen here, at that Ottawa demonstration, on the black umbrellas. I saw these and many like them myself. Apparently, The Globe did not.

I attended the June gender ideology protest out of sociological interest, and deliberately wore nothing indicating allegiance to either side. I attempted to speak to people on the pro-gender ideology side, but was met with hostile stares. By contrast, Chris Elston was entirely friendly, as were other prominent critics of gender ideology like Zachary Tisdale and the invaluable Chanel Pfahl (whom I did not then know.)

I made similar observations at the large “Million March for Children” on Parliament Hill in September.

The ideological bias in the mainstream media’s coverage of emotive cultural topics, and of anything related to President Trump or Tucker Carlson, has long been obvious. But it is more jarring when concrete events, not in Washington or on the other side of the world but right in front of my lying eyes, are directly misrepresented.

It would be conceptually possible for a journalist to believe that the Freedom Convoy protesters were wrong about vaccine mandates, or that anti-gender ideology protesters were wrong about transgenderism, or that Musk was taking Twitter in the wrong direction, without flatly making things up, without ignoring inconvenient facts, and without refusing to interview people the journalist disagreed with. But this is not any longer the mainstream media’s practice.

Covering both sides is now denounced as “both-sidesism”, because the media already knows who is right, with a dogmatism secure and undoubted. This decision to abandon any attempt at objectivity or fair-mindedness has been a long time coming. The mainstream media has long been on the left. This is not new: the Nixon campaign complained about it in 1960; Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush chided them for it. But the media decided at some point in the last decade or two to abandon any attempt at fair-mindedness, and to forego skepticism for dogma. That decision is now seriously damaging the credibility of the media, and the damage to their reputation is well-deserved. But it also undermines social comity, and will do much collateral harm, even as it provokes the rise of alternate voices and venues.

For now, nothing they say can be trusted. The mainstream media can only be read as an articulation of power, telling you what power believes, or at any rate what power would like you to believe. This can be quite informative, but it cannot be read naively.