- Reaction score
- 5,484
- Points
- 1,260
George Wallace said:
On this topic, Unifor, a trade union representing 2,600 journalists and other media workers at 35 media outlets including the Toronto Sun, Toronto Star and Globe and Mail, was part of the 2014 Ontario Election, campaigning, actively, against Tim Hudak as Lorrie Goldstein Explains in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Toronto Sun:
http://www.torontosun.com/2015/08/19/why-voters-distrust-the-media-party
Why voters distrust the media party
BY LORRIE GOLDSTEIN, TORONTO SUN
FIRST POSTED: WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2015
One thing journalists never like to be reminded of -- especially during a federal election campaign -- is that the public doesn’t trust us.
In fact, they trust us only slightly more than the politicians we cover.
An Ipsos Reid poll last September found the Canadian media is only considered “extremely trustworthy” by 18% of the public, in the same league as lawyers (16%), auto mechanics (16%) and airport baggage handlers (12%).
Our only saving grace, and it’s nothing to be proud of, is that the public trusts politicians even less, with only 6% considering them “extremely trustworthy”, in the same league as bloggers (6%), car salespeople (5%) and telemarketers (4%).
Indeed, the public’s attitude to elections, in which journalists pursue politicians, can best be described by Oscar Wilde’s famous contemptuous quip about fox hunts as, “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”.
It’s not hard to see why the public holds journalists and politicians in low esteem.
Unlike professions Canadians consider extremely trustworthy like firefighters (77%), paramedics (74%) and pharmacists (70%), politicians and journalists spend an inordinate amount of time not helping people, as the above professions do, but telling them what to think and how to live.
And yet journalists and politicians constantly reveal themselves to have feet of clay.
For example, the biggest story so far in this election campaign is the ongoing criminal trial of a former prominent journalist (Mike Duffy) turned politician (Conservative senator) on 31 counts of bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
Similarly, Pamela Wallin, another prominent former journalist and Conservative senator, is under investigation by the RCMP for fraud and breach of trust.
(No charges have been laid, the allegations have not been tested in court and Wallin denies wrongdoing. Almost 30% of the Senate, including Conservatives and Liberals, have had their expenses flagged for review by the RCMP.)
But there are other reasons for the public to distrust the media, especially during elections.
Increasingly journalists, through their trade unions, are not just covering elections, but attempting to influence their outcomes.
The Canadian Media Guild (CMG), a union representing 6,000 workers in the Canadian media including the CBC, recently registered as a “third party” with Elections Canada, so it can advocate and advertise for more funding for the CBC during the election.
As CMG President Carmel Smyth explains the decision on its website: “As a media union we are non-partisan, and do not support or give money to any political party. But we have a responsibility to let Canadians know how destructive and unnecessary the recent (CBC) cuts have been, and to encourage CBC supporters to share their belief CBC should be funded to produce original Canadian content in both official languages and local news across the country.”
Despite Smyth’s claim of non-partisanship, in the world of realpolitik -- practical versus theoretical politics -- the CMG will effectively be campaigning against the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, since it is the one which imposed what it describes as the “destructive and unnecessary ... recent (CBC) cuts.”
Journalists shouldn’t be surprised then (the CMG also represents workers for The Canadian Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, TVO, TFO, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, ZoomerMedia and Shaw Media), if many Canadians, especially Conservative voters, question their objectivity in their coverage of this campaign.
In the Ontario election last year, Unifor, a trade union representing 2,600 journalists and other media workers at 35 media outlets including the Toronto Sun, Toronto Star and Globe and Mail, went further than the CMG, noting it was “breaking its traditional silence” during elections.
Unifor openly campaigned against the Progressive Conservative Party and its then-leader Tim Hudak, urging its members not to support, as Unifor Local 87-M President Paul Morse put it, “Hudak and his circle of Tea Party groupies”.
Given such highly-charged, partisan rhetoric, it’s hard to argue with the tweet from federal Conservative cabinet minister Jason Kenney at the time that: “Journalists’ union picks sides in ON election... but we’re told to believe there’s no such thing as liberal media bias.”
Of course the sword cuts both ways.
Just as journalists are accused of having an anti-Conservative bias, so the owners of many media outlets -- as well as journalists and commentators -- are accused of having an anti-NDP and anti-Liberal bias, including the Sun papers for which I work.
The larger point is that when it comes to the public’s distrust of journalists, it’s not as if we haven’t given them good reason to be distrustful.
Following that same meme, Jeffrey Simpson, discusses Stephen Harper's "war on the media," without ever once mentioning the unions which represent the media in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Glkobe and Mail:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/how-the-tories-war-on-media-fills-party-coffers/article26023945/
How the Tories’ ‘war on the media’ fills party coffers
JEFFREY SIMPSON
The Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2015
That Conservative Leader Stephen Harper dislikes the media is well known.
Perhaps less well known, except to hard-core Conservative supporters, is how his party beats up on the press to raise money and how successful this appeal has been.
For example, before the Aug. 6 leaders’ debate, the party sent a letter to its supporters urging contributions. “Why?” asked party president John Walsh in the letter. “Because already you’re seeing the professional Harper critics and left-wing press pundits striving to pre-dispose public opinion and shape the post-debate public reaction their way – long before the first word is spoken!”
Phrases such as the “chattering class” and “anti-Conservative media bubble” and “media pundits on the left” adorn the letter. But Mr. Walsh likes variations on the theme of “liberal media,” as in the “liberal media filter” and “liberals in the Canadian media,” people presumably working assiduously and deliberately to “risk Canada’s future to the left, far left or extreme left zealots.”
To help the beleaguered Mr. Harper withstand these media assaults, Mr. Walsh urged recipients of the letter not just to send money to the party but to write letters to the editor, and to post comments on Facebook and Twitter to “balance out the biased opinion columnists who oppose a Conservative Majority Government.” Please send a special $100 (or more) donation, Mr. Walsh said, to help launch a “pro Conservative media blitz immediately after the debate,” because Conservatives cannot allow opponents to “dominate the airwaves.”
Speaking of dominating the airwaves, which party spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars advertising its policies such as those loosely associated with the Economic Action Plan? Which one began before the election campaign a radio and television campaign denigrating Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau? And which party called an early election so that it could spend more money than the others, especially during the final week of the campaign with an unprecedented media buy?
All these efforts were from Mr. Walsh’s party, but to read his letter the untutored might believe the Conservatives are indeed being outspent by their opponents. Worse, they are being done in by “liberal media” whose tentacles have wrapped themselves around the country’s collective brain and warped it against the Conservatives.
All is fair, one might say, in love, war and elections, so this sort of Walshian hyperbole might be expected. As, perhaps, also might be the photographs in the letter of Mr. Harper smiling, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair looking like the devil possessed and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau sporting a moustache and looking like a cross between Zorro and Lothario.
New Democrats and Liberals send messages to their supporters warning about Mr. Harper, even demonizing him, and of course rounding on his government’s policies. They, too, entreat their supporters to send more money because, contrary to Conservative claims of being outspent, they know the Conservatives do indeed have more money.
What differentiates the Conservative appeals is not attacking the other parties and warning of their nefarious policies, but the idea that there are other institutions, elitist ones such as the “liberal media,” that are out to undermine the Conservative Party and conservatism. The fight is therefore not merely partisan politics, but against wider forces.
Of course, political parties have been known to spar with, and even dislike, the media. Liberals under prime minister Pierre Trudeau thought their party got a raw deal, especially after all but two newspapers in English-speaking Canada endorsed the Conservatives in the 1980 election – which the Liberals then won.
New Democrats historically considered the media hostile, owned by capitalists who decried socialism of every hue. Take The Toronto Star, a defiantly Liberal newspaper, out of the picture, and it’s hard to see a print media conspiracy against the Conservatives. But that’s the way they see the world, facts notwithstanding.
As for private television, it’s difficult to discern any pro- or anti-Conservative bias in a systematic way, although as everyone in the media knows, bias is often in the eye of the beholder. AM radio is overwhelmingly conservative, as any consumer of open-line shows knows. As for social media, from which many younger people now get their information, it’s all over the map politically speaking.
But conjuring up the enemy of the “liberal media” has worked for the Harper Conservatives, so to that well they return.
I know I'm repeating myself, but, I expect the media to be biased. Journalists are, by and large, smart, well educated people who are in the infotainment industry and they would not be human if they didn'r have biases. Owners and publishers of newspapers are supposed to have biases, in some cases (e.g. the Toronto Star with its (in)famous Atkinson Principles, which, long after the author's death, still guide that newspaper today and make it a reliable Liberal (and liberal) organ) the bias is formal, even institutionalized. I hope that journalists will confine their biases to opinion pieces and try to report hard political news in a straight forward, factual basis... my hopes are, more often than not, unfulfilled.
I expect to see Jeffrey Simpson, who takes journalism, and himself, very seriously ~ far more seriously than I think is necessary ~ mount an implicit defence of the media against CPC attacks, but, equally, I am heartened to read Lorrie Goldstein's article which acknowledges that the media is anything but the paragon Mr Simpson imagines.
