ADSCAM FOR ‘FAKE NEWS.’
It was just a couple weeks ago that a judge finally convicted the last of the Liberal ad-scammers, sentencing party organizer Jacques Corriveau to four years in prison for siphoning millions of dollars in federal ad spending as the central figure in the sponsorship scandal. Evidently that’s long enough for the federal Liberals to think it safe to get back into the business of using public ad dollars to reward supporters — or at least to steer the money away from nonsupporters.
Few will complain about this one, since the media organization the government ordered its ad money pulled from is the Breitbart News Network, which everyone says is a hotbed of hatred, although they don’t usually offer much decisive evidence to back the claim up. It certainly is inflammatory, often tacky, extremely alt-right and flamboyantly politically incorrect, so it’s understandable that some in politics would think it needs correcting.
The Liberals, for example, who had allowed their ads to be rotated on Breitbart.com as part of an automatic system that places ads on any number of sites that aren’t specifically blacklisted, have now blocked Breitbart from federal ad dollars after deciding its content “did not align with the Government’s Code of Value and Ethics.” When Kellogg’s did the same thing, facing pressure to cancel ads on the site from the same Breitbart- haters that presumably got to the Canadian government, Breitbart fought back by urging readers to boycott the cereal giant; Canadian readers have yet to figure out an effective way of boycotting the government.
Maybe that’s why the federal Liberals have been so liberally correcting so much media lately. Right around the time the government was confirming its boycott of Breitbart, the prime minister’s press secretary was telling Fox News it had better delete a news tweet about the Quebec City mosque murders because it was no longer accurate. Fox, like dozens of other outlets, including Reuters and La Presse, tweeted in the unclear hours after the attack that one of the suspects was a Muslim, which was apparently the case for a while. Eventually he wasn’t a suspect, but those early reports, including a Fox News tweet, lingered online as early, inaccurate reports routinely do.
Kate Purchase, the PMO communications chief, emailed Fox to say it had come to her attention that the tweet, with “false and misleading language relating to the identity of the suspect in the Quebec mosque terror attack” was not just wrong but a “dishonour ( to) the memory of the six victims and their families.” She reminded Fox of its apparent duty to “remain focused on keeping our communities safe and united instead of trying to build walls and scapegoat communities.” Purchase made sure to publicly show off her Fox letter, which was so full of longwinded sanctimony about Canada being an “open, welcoming country … of millions of immigrants and refugees, of hundreds of cultures, languages, and religions” all united in their “unshakable belief ” in the miracles of diversity that network executives might have deleted whatever it took to make it stop. But their executives also know that the regulators in Purchase’s government get to decide if Fox is even allowed on Canadian airwaves ( the network was, for many years, kept out). The prime minister said the meddling was “a question of getting the news right.” The tweet — which, in case you didn’t see it before the Canadian government had it deleted — said this: “Suspect in Quebec mosque terror attack was of Moroccan origin, reports show.”
While Purchase is busy admonishing journalists on failing in their responsibility to promote diversity, Canadians await the outcome of Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly’s “conversation” with Google and Facebook about the responsibility she wants to give them to help her government “counteract” so-called fake news.
Last year when the Liberals conversed with Google they were telling the search engine to delete dozens of pages of results linked to the Harper government. The Trudeau Liberals have enjoyed Obama-levels of fawning from Canadian and foreign press, so it’s surprising how preoccupied they seem with controlling media narratives. Maybe we should have seen it coming after Trudeau banned all reporters from the Sun news chain, back when it was owned by Quebecor, until the company apologized for one of its commentators having supposedly “crossed the line” by insulting Trudeau’s parents on TV.
Civil libertarians are known to get queasy when governments warn journalists to “get it right,” draw lines journalists can’t cross, and wield power to reward friendly media and punish hostile ones. They’re saying it’s like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty- Four down there in the States, in part because President Trump muses about suing newspapers for libel and scorns unfriendly outlets ( perhaps like Trudeau did The Sun). And just the other day Europeans were alarmed to see reporters dragged away by goonish guards after asking France’s National Front leader Marine Le Pen about an expenses scandal. But then neither Trump nor Le Pen are censoring for tolerance.
The Liberal government’s watchdogs for erroneous thoughts are launching their fight against dishonourable news in the midst of a sweeping review of how Ottawa funds and regulates media, with think tanks and established news organizations ( including Postmedia) calling for favours to help fight foreign Internet competitors. Hundreds of millions of dollars could be shuffled around, and the MP who vice-chairs the Heritage committee overseeing the review, the NDP’s Pierre Nantel, insists Ottawa needs “to intervene … to make sure these sources of information remain valid and remain in business.” He thinks one way to do it is for the government to use its substantial ad budget to support news it considers valuable. So, picture the government’s Breitbart boycott, but with dozens more media on the blacklist, and Liberal officials deciding which outlets win fat federal ad contracts because they nicely “align with the Government’s Code of Value and Ethics.” If Jacques Corriveau manages to get his conviction overturned on appeal, perhaps he can be of service.