Opinion: Liberals don’t actually care about good journalism — or at least not enough to oppose bad journalism when it helps them
CTV announced Thursday that it has now parted ways with those editors.
Assuming these video editors were indeed responsible, CTV is well rid of them. But the damage is done. Poilievre hasn’t reversed his ban on Conservative MPs speaking with CTV News, which he imposed earlier in the week.
So as is so common in Canadian politics, we have arrived at a sort of worst-of-all-worlds situation. The Conservatives have perhaps their most compelling single data point to support their contention that the mainstream media are biased against them. CTV arguably looks like it didn’t take the matter seriously enough to begin with, and then caved under Conservative pressure. Caving is alway better than notcaving when, like CTV, you’re 100 per cent in the wrong, but it’s a hell of a lot worse than not having to cave in the first place.
Anything CTV does now to make amends will be seen by its detractors as transactional
CTV News can’t do its job without access to Conservatives. Anything it does now to make amends will be seen by its detractors as transactional.
“Bad journalism,” Vaughan conceded, “but is it inaccurate?”
Dismal.
One thing we can definitely take away from all this: Liberals do not, in fact, actually care about good journalism — or at least they don’t care about it enough not to support bad journalism when they think it helps them, which is a distinction without a difference.
And having said we’ve arrived at the worst of all worlds, all this presents an obvious chance for things to get much worse indeed. The Liberal government provides robust taxpayer subsidies to the media — some more directly, as with newspaper publishers like Postmedia (which owns National Post), and some of it more indirectly to broadcasters like CTV, through program funding, licences, and market protection.
A bare minimum for supporting those subsidies is that your government shouldn’t play favourites with the media according to ideological leanings. (Or at least you should cloak such decisions in the language of not meeting “journalistic standards.”) And yet, Noorhamed in particular — who, remember, is parliamentary secretary to the minister responsible for these handouts — is always eager to criticize Postmedia for criticizing the Liberal government … because Postmedia collects government subsidy.
Noorhamed and other Liberals often sound like they absolutely hate their own media-subsidy programs, precisely because they contribute to what they consider “bad” journalism — i.e., journalism that criticizes them, focuses on their idea of “the wrong things,” spreads their idea of “misinformation.” It’s not hard to imagine the Liberals altering the “standards” for subsidies in the future to more shamelessly suit their purposes (or it wouldn’t be hard to imagine that, if political oblivion weren’t stalking the Liberals like a leopard does a particularly succulent antelope).
And while one can take a certain ice-cold comfort in the idea of Poilievre axing media subsidies across the board — at least it’s consistent! — Conservative MP Michelle Ferrari chimed in Thursday evening with this downright North Korean social-media post: “Pierre Poilievre will restore journalistic ethics and integrity.”
No politician should covet that job. Anyone that does, from any party, should be looked on with the most extreme suspicion.
National Post
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