WE ARE OUT OF TIME
Journalism's oldsters need to speak out, now.
Demolishing the Old CBC Radio Building in Toronto
I live in midtown Toronto and today I saw from afar, a former CBC radio colleague having a coffee at the little cafe outside the gym where I work out. He is retired now but used to host a major show on which I had a cherished gig as a science/medicine reporter. Back then, I traveled the world alone, with my trusty Sony recorder and Electro-Voice microphone to environmental hotspots like Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez oil spill and Yakima, Washington, home of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which harbours radiation left from the Hiroshima bomb. I will never forget Grassy Narrows. Not to mention my first encounters with the one and only Tony Fauci — back in the 1980s.
It was always a heart-pounding privilege to arrive like the informational cavalry to help rescue people by telling their stories of catastrophe. I would return home, edit the tape and appear on air with my friend, tell him all about what I’d learned and play for the world, the voices I had recorded on the road.
We had a great on-air rapport and until I left — when office politics got in the way — a mutual appreciation for each other’s intellect and reporting chops. He is the possessor of an agile mind and we were both devoted to elevating average citizens being screwed over by rapacious corporations and corrupt government agencies running amok.
I suspect I am still persona non-grata at the Mothercorp so I didn’t approach him. When CBC turns on you there is a certain amount of professional shunning required by staff and I didn’t force the issue even though he is a decent chap. I suspect he might be troubled by what has become of both CBC and the rest of our legacy media. Has he figured out that the institutions we both loved, including the one he draws a pension from, have become dangerous to our mental and physical health and indeed to our very democracy?
I realized as I slipped into my gym, unnoticed by my former colleague, that whatever he now believes is crucial. Why? Because the older generation of journalists might be the only ones who can save us from the current generation of legacy media trolls. We are the last practitioners of the old-school reporting that kept the wheels of democracy turning.
J-schools are into a third decade of teaching advocacy, activism and so-called social justice instead of the finer points of weighing information and telling a story clearly but with flair, no matter who comes out the winner. In other words, objectively. In a terrifying article, Stanford University Emeritus Professor Ted Glasser stated;
Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity, said Ted Glasser, communications professor at Stanford, in an interview with The Daily.
The murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning that followed have opened a conversation around journalistic objectivity. Glasser believes journalists must step away from the blanket idea of objectivity to achieve social change — but not everyone agrees with him.
In a second interview, Glasser defended this position with a statement so shocking I could only shiver at the thought of how many students passed through his classes and brought this distorted view to their newsrooms.
He explained that the concept of objectivity is a barrier to achieving social progress, and claimed that "objective truth" doesn’t actually exist.
I’m not a big fan of the term ‘objectivity’ or ‘objective truth’ because it gets us talking about all the wrong things, Glasser explained.
I like to view journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality, Glasser added.
The argument against objectivity is that reporters are reduced to giving equal weight to both sides of an issue. One the one hand this — on the other hand that. But journos have always weighed credibility based on fact collection and made value judgements on how they will tell a story. The sleight-of-hand that has infected J-schools in the West is that only through the lens of left-wing ideology can a story be framed. Postmodernism denies even the existence of actual facts. Truth is a construct and feelings are all that matters.
If you think I’m picking on American J-schools, the website for Ryerson in Toronto is a nightmare of groupthink, ideologically focussed language, critical race theory and social justice warrioring. It includes a Diversity Self ID Report Card. And this: Providing journalism-focused equity training to faculty, staff and instructors.
In Spring 2021, the School of Journalism took an important step toward strengthening its commitment to diversity and inclusion with the launch of its Action Plan. Crafted in response to pressing equity-related concerns highlighted by journalism students and alumni, the plan calls for change in five critical areas:
Student collaboration: Supporting the establishment of a permanent four-member student equity task force at the School of Journalism.
Transforming curriculum: Re-examining and re-designing our curriculum to incorporate critical content that draws from experiences of historically marginalized communities, including but not limited to Queer, Indigenous and Black communities.
Hiring: Over the next two years, hiring at least two faculty members who reflect the School of Journalism’s changing student demographics and offer a diversity of experiences and perspectives on journalism and its practice.
Equity training: Providing journalism-focused equity training to faculty, staff and instructors.
Diverse course offerings: Offering more frequently existing School of Journalism courses that take critical approaches to these issues – Reporting on Race, Reporting on Indigenous Issues, Reporting on Religion and Queer Media.
As part of the School’s continuing efforts toward transformation, we are committed to collaborating on new and ongoing initiatives that will put equity, inclusion and support for students at the heart of what we do and how we communicate with one another.
Racialized students comprised 41 per cent of the student body in 2018-19, up from about 30 per cent two years earlier. While the School’s student population is starting to reflect the diversity of the community, according to the university’s Diversity Self ID Report Card, there is more work to be done to increase support for students from diverse backgrounds.
This is how phrases designed to punish, based on indoctrination at uni, become the norm in mainstream media. Anti-vaxxer. Far-right wing. Conspiracy theorist. Trans-phobic. White-supremacist. Election-denier. All are words laden with accusation, hurled about in newspaper copy and broadcast media, almost always without reporting to back up the claim. Never in a million years would any of the old-timers I know resort to using canned phrases.
In the meantime, a few indy journos are holding the fort. We saw a massive effort at a takedown last week, but they prevailed.
This week’s show features an interview with David Zweig, one of the Twitterfiles journos who is blowing the lid on government C-19 censorship. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were roasted by Congress last week but Democrats attacking them only burned themselves, exposing how little respect they have for anyone who doesn’t toe their narrative line. It was shocking for me to witness — I was shaken and feeling somewhat tearful watching the blitz and realizing legacy media really is dead. Not just failing. But caput. And we have to totally pivot to ingesting information from various indy purveyors we will curate ourselves. Here is Matt’s opening statement.
Democrats going after Matt and Michael made absolute fools of themselves proving they can’t cope outside mollycoddling by legacy media who have become the Dems’ Comms Department. Leighton Woodhouse, Michael Shellenberger’s reporting partner, created a great summary of the inquisition.
The other side of censorship is the smearing of legitimate reporting. This has become an industry full of grifters who are paid to support THE CURRENT THING, whether it be Fauci’s latest emission, the War in Ukraine or twisting themselves in knots to justify the sexual assault of women in their own designated spaces. Matt and Michael called these well-funded organizations the Censorship Industrial Complex — something we should all fear.
Paul Thacker has made exposing this perfidy part of his mission and runs a great newsletter call the Disinformation Chronicle. I’ve interviewed him a number of times and he is the real deal. Paul was the journo who worked with whistleblower Brook Jackson to expose the Pfizer clinical trials fraud at Ventavier where she used to work.
Do wish a long life on oldsters like Sy Hersh (who knocked it out of the park on Nord Stream) — because there aren’t too many of his kind left. Paul, Matt, Michael, Leighton, Bari, David and Glenn Greenwald give us hope — but we need more.
I hope my old friend from CBC looks up the next time I pass on my way to work out. Perhaps we could have an important chat.
Coming soon on the pod: an acclaimed propaganda expert from London explains why we all feel a bit crazy and Billboard Chris on his lonely obsession to push back on transing kids.
Stay Critical.
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You're my hero! I worry, too, what will happen when we are gone. We have to work really hard to ensure the great stories aren't forgotten. Watching that grilling of Taibbi and Schellenberger was chilling. Sit a small-minded person in a chair slightly higher than everyone else, give them a wee bit of power, and watch them turn into authoritarian monsters. I recently checked out the website of the creative writing nonprofit I founded for incarcerated youth in 1996 and was kicked out of in 2006 by the Hollywood elite. They now use words like inclusion, equity, trans rights. It gives me some peace in an odd sort of way, knowing I never would have lasted there anyway.
Thanks Trish for all you have done