2019/2021 Canadian Election Interference by China

It’s hard to know who to believe anymore. My cousin, John Miller, is a respected journalist. He has a blog page called The Journalism Doctor. You should read it sometime. He laments the laziness that has entered into the world of newspapers and other news outlets. He wonders if we will ever return to how things used to be when he was in the business of disseminating news.

I started this blog in February 2008 with “The case against Maclean’s,” a challenge to the mainstream media who were supporting the magazine for printing a series of inflammatory attacks on Muslims.

One of the articles, by Mark Stein, claimed that Muslims in the West were poised to take over entire societies and “the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.” Without documenting his claims, Steyn wrote that enough Muslims are terrorists to make the religion a global threat, and they will subject us all to rigid Muslim laws when the takeover is achieved.

Critics took the magazine to the Ontario, B.C. and federal Human Rights Commissions after the magazine refused a request for a more balanced article about Islam. The legacy media, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, leapt to the defence of the magazine. Freedom of expression and the press must be defended at all costs, they said.

I said they were wrong. The issue wasn’t freedom of expression or the press at all. The issue was inaccurate stereotyping based on race and religion. In other words, bad journalism. 

But that’s me: The fly in the ointment. The  gadfly who stands up for responsible reporting, calls out its sloppier failures and takes pleasure in puncturing the pinata of self-righteousness that is driving legacy media to its grave.

In the 15 years since then, my blog has called out plagiarists, unpacked management decisions that deviate from commonly accepted journalistic norms, shone the light on irresponsible reporting on race and gender, identified white privilege and systemic racism in news organizations and schools of journalism, and drawn attention to many other blind spots in journalism.

What I Do (May 28, 2022)

I reviewed his book, “Yesterday’s News”, eight years ago, here. We would do well to remember that not all news stories are the Truth. Sometimes that are Weapons of Mass Destruction intended to mislead their readers (and anyone else who jumps down an internet rabbit hole). Such may be the case of the alleged Chinese interference in our most recent elections. The Conservatives did not achieve the results they expected, so the suggestion now is that somehow the Liberals benefitted from outside influences. This comes down to us as an echo of Trump’s “Stop the Steal”. Canada’s Parliament now wants answers.

This all seems like “Chinese whispers” to me. Does it seem so to you?