Raymond J. de Souza: CBC bias on full display in coverage of Freedom Convoy, Coastal GasLink protests

Article content

I staged a personal boycott of the Beijing Olympics, resolving not to watch any coverage, in solidarity with the Uyghurs interned in prison camps and Catholic leaders imprisoned in Hong Kong. It turned out that was not hard to do, as CBC was the Canadian broadcaster, and almost nobody under 60 ever watches it.

Generally, there is nothing newsworthy about the CBC: how it covers the news is as predictable as its vanishing ratings. Yet a faithful reader sent along a CBC News story, which he thought bears comment. It does.

“Two key organizers of the so-called Freedom Convoy, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, have been arrested in Ottawa,” reported the CBC on Thursday. “The two have been described as key leaders of the occupation in Ottawa.”

According to the author, the Freedom Convoy is “so-called,” but there is nothing “so-called” about the “occupation.” I don’t demur from calling it an occupation, but the “so-called” business really ought to cut both ways in news reporting.

Why does it matter? Because as the CBC and many other formerly venerable news outlets decried the trucker occupation, they failed to recognize their own role in it. Amongst the multifarious grievances that the truckers brought to Ottawa, they complained that their voices were never heard, their stories never told by the “so-called” mainstream media. They appeared only as objects of disparagement.

A grievance is not justified, much less true, simply for being aired, but over the past three weeks, it was certainly the case that the establishment organs of our national media took a decidedly negative view of the truckers and their supporters. The operating editorial position was to find reasons to discredit them and to highlight discordant notes.

It’s not a novel, nor uniquely Canadian, phenomenon. But the hostility of many in the media is a significant part of what is driving the estrangement that the protesters on the streets of Ottawa feel. When freedom gets modified as “so-called” but occupation does not, there is more than a disagreement at play. Add in other terms presented straight up recently — “sedition,” “treason,” “insurrection” — and you see why so many conclude that the deck is stacked against them.

I wrote earlier in the week that when the Indigenous blockades of February 2020 were rewarded with wholesale concessions by government authorities, many who would come to sympathize with the truckers took note. It turned out that opponents of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in northern British Columbia were also watching the truckers this week.

After three weeks of examining how the media covered people it did not agree with and did not like, someone calculated that it would be a good time to get violent at the pipeline site. Sympathetic to the cause if not the tactics, the CBC and others would see that it did not become too hot of an issue.

In the early hours of Thursday, some 20 assailants wielding axes and metal grinders overturned heavy equipment and destroyed construction trailers. Millions of dollars in destruction was done, and the workers were terrorized, including an attempt to “set a vehicle on fire while workers were inside,” according to the company.

After three weeks of lamentations about blocked roads, blaring air horns and bouncy castles in broad daylight, what would the national broadcaster have to say about broken bulldozers, barricaded workers and barriers set for police, all done under the cover of night? Nothing.

All day Thursday passed without the story making the CBC’s national website. Late Thursday night, a B.C. bureau story went up, but until late Friday morning, the main CBC news site completely ignored the story. When it finally posted a story about the attack, the quotation marks were back: “acts of violence” were said to have taken place.

You might think that given the remoteness of the area, in contrast to the proximity of the trucker convoy to the organic salad bars where CBC producers lobby government ministers for a bigger grant, it was difficult to get the story. Not so, as the National Post had the story within hours.

The CBC’s website even had a story on climate change in Nunavut up and ready to go before the one about the confrontation over the pipeline. Apparently, the news from the north moves faster when it confirms the political positions of the producers.

Blaming the messenger is often a technique of distraction. But the messengers here are a part of the story, and they too must account for their part. It is the responsibility that come with freedom of the press. Or should that be the “so-called” freedom of the press?

National Post

The big issues are far from settled. Sign up for the NP Comment newsletter, NP Platformed.