One Simplified Truth: Canadian MSM spreads disinformation, attacks independent journalists, to 'fight disinformation'
Editor’s note: The Canada Files’ is re-publishing Peter Biesterfeld’s two-part series, ‘One Simplified Truth’ originally released on his Substack, with updated titles and some small adjustments. This is part one.
Written by: Peter Biesterfeld
“Today’s mainstream media are the single largest barrier to understanding the world we live in, and where it and humanity are heading”
- Jan Oberg, founder Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research (TTF)
Jan Oberg’s claim bears repeating for as long as MSM-Canada journalists misreport what’s going on in the world. In a Transnational Foundation research paper titled, Smokescreen - An analysis of the west’s destructive cold war agenda and why it must stop, Oberg writes:
“Over the last 20 or so years, a tremendous effort has been directed at the mainstream, private and public service media to hammer out only one simplified truth about hugely complex international matters. Hardly by coincidence, they are always compatible with the foreign – normally interventionist – policies of the U.S. and NATO allies.”
Oberg’s assessment is alarmingly true when applied to Canadian mainstream news media. The corporate press in Canada today is mostly a pro-war press whose reporters are manufacturing consent for Canada’s belligerent US-influenced foreign policy.
Canadian journalists who are filing and publishing international affairs content for establishment news outlets, are misinforming news audiences with every news cycle. Uncritical MSM reporting of only approved narratives supplied by official sources amounts to press release journalism which indeed, packages international affairs into ‘one simplified truth’ - the ‘truth’ according to the US-led, and cited ad nauseam, ‘international rules-based order’.
Balanced insight and reliable analyses of geopolitical affairs and Canada’s role in them are sparse on the Canadian news landscape. Foreign affairs reporting by MSM-Canada reporters is sharply biased in favour of establishment interests and its power structures, the ultimate stakeholders in the military-industrial-media-complex, as coined by Helen Johnson in The Miscellany News a series of 2021 articles:
“The potential for those who hold power within the military-industrial complex to use the media to influence public opinion, either intentionally or indirectly, is extraordinary…the concentration of power within the corporate media and the MIC (Military Industrial Complex), along with the intersections of these industries, can influence the messaging we receive on a daily basis. This can have devastating implications for democracy.”
The aim of this paper is to illuminate how Canadian foreign affairs journalism in the main is focused largely through a military and state security lens. The pages that follow reveal how establishment bias in Canadian global affairs journalism ‘hardly happens by coincidence’ and that MSM-Canada journalists who warn the loudest against disinformation about Russia and China and Gaza and Syria and Iran are the very ink-stained wretches who are publishing most of it.
‘Reporting in a house of mirrors’ reads the entry on the campus events calendar.
Last March one of the most prestigious journalism schools in the country, the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) at the University of Western Ontario in London invited investigative reporter Justin Ling to give a talk on safeguarding Canadian news consumers from disinformation.
Montreal-based, award-winning author Ling penned Missing from the village (2020), a critical analysis of Toronto Police Services’ investigation of Bruce McArthur, the serial killer who murdered seven men in Toronto’s Gay Village between 2010 and 2017. Ling spotlights his crime and justice beat on his Muckrack profile, but these days Ling’s journalistic output, which is published widely across a spectrum of news media outlets, is preoccupied with ‘keeping tabs on extremism.’
Ling’s work serves as an eye-opening case study for this report which argues that disinformation has become the ‘news normal’ in Canadian foreign affairs journalism as more establishment journalists like Ling are misinforming news consumers daily about global affairs, world events and Canada’s function and responsibilities on the international stage.
Ling tells his FIMS audience: “I’ve been covering the problem of misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, political polarization, some cases of outright extremism for the last several years, and I think I'm starting to get an appreciation for the fact that we might not be doing a great job of dealing with it.”
In the abstract, posted on line to promote his talk Ling sets up “the problem of misinformation” as he sees it:
These days, it feels like we don't even know what we're arguing about anymore. Our society has been riven by political polarization, paranoid populism, even extremism, brought on by a deluge of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Our collective conversation has been warped, skewed, stretched, and shrunk beyond recognition, making it harder and harder to see what's right in front of our faces. Journalists have rushed around, trying to correct all the distortion — often to little avail. Our body politic has suffered as a result, with crises and critical policy questions being ignored in favour of ideological crusades and small grievances made to look massive. If we are ever to face the myriad of problems facing us, we will need to return to some kind of collective reality. To get there, journalists will need to take the lead.
Ling laments how bad the disinformation problem is and that “there should be no great surprise the problem is getting worse”. The diligent disinformation warrior who has written prolifically on the topic for the Globe and Mail, Politico, CBC, Buzzfeed, and many other outlets, captures the attention of his impressionable audience:
“I want to tell you a little story,” Ling begins. “It's a story of how I became friends with a Russian spy.
Ling’s yarn about his relationship with a ‘disinformation-peddling’ intelligence source at the Russian embassy in Ottawa is worth retelling for its alarming falsehoods which Ling glibly presents as facts to FIMS students and faculty. To illustrate how pervasive and sinister the Russian disinformation threat is Ling recalls how over beers then embassy press secretary Kirill Kalinin tried to impress upon him the Russian perspective of events regarding Ukraine.
Ling’s tone is dismissive:
“What's becoming increasingly clear over the course of our conversation is that a lot of those disinformation narratives the ones that Russia has been sort of peddling, that aren't working all that well, they come like second nature to Kalinin: Canada, oh, it's full of russophobic people who want to revive the Cold War, naturally, right? Russia, well, it didn't mean to invade Crimea, you know. Ukraine, oh it's full of neo-nazis that are being led around by the CIA right? So, over the course of the conversation it's getting increasingly unreal, right? We're just living, in some ways, two fundamentally different realities.”
Ling’s incredulity at Kalinin’s attempt to explain Russia’s position on Ukraine comes from the same mistrust expressed by MSM reporters in their coverage of the Kremlin’s ‘information warfare’ – any information from Russian sources can’t be trusted, it’s all propaganda. By publicly dismissing Kalinin’s arguments as ‘unreal’ Ling exposes himself as the ‘disinformer’ who indeed, is living in a disturbingly ‘different reality’, a reality void of context, history and root causes.
The public record shows that the ‘disinformation narratives’ Ling says Kalinin was peddling are actually based in fact. A critical review of Ling’s derisive talking points, taken one at a time, might be instructive, beginning with Ling’s attempt to sweep under the rug Kalinin’s concern for anti-Russia sentiments in Canada.
You don’t have to be a history scholar to appreciate that current Russophobia in the West didn’t suddenly sprout up in February 2022 with Russia’s overt military action in Ukraine. A thumbnail history of anti-Kremlin thought in the West including in Canada, shows how mainstream news outlets got here from there:
Way back when professional journalism was still in diapers, Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), the American media critic and scholarly journalist who coined the term ‘cold war’, gave the New York Times a failing grade in a 1920 news analysis for ‘short changing the public in its systemically biased and incomplete reporting of the Russian Revolution.” The report titled, Testing the News was co-authored by Charles Merz (1893-1977) who at the time reported for the then progressive New Republic but who would go on to become the New York Times’ long-serving Editorial Page Editor (1938 to 1961).
Lippmann and Merz conclude in Testing the News: “In the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing, not what was but what men wanted to see. From the point of view of professional journalism, the reporting of the Russian revolution is nothing short of a disaster…They were performing the supreme duty in a democracy of supplying the information on which public opinion feeds, and they were derelict in their duty.”
Columnist and award-winning author Patrick Lawrence (NYT, Counterpunch, Consortium News, et al) traces the roots of Russophobia in Anglo-western journalism back to Lippman and Merz in his 2023 work, Journalists and their Shadows which according to political writer Diane Johnstone’s cover blurb is “an eloquent plea for the revival of honest journalism”.
Referencing Merz and Lipmann’s assessment of NYT’s biased anti-Russia reporting, Lawrence writes in Shadows:
“So long as there was a chance Russia would continue fighting Germany, the newspaper of record (NYT) offered readers a positive picture of the October revolution. When it became clear that the Bolsheviks would pull the new Soviet Union out of the war ‘The Red Peril’ theme appeared in the Times foreign report, and organized propaganda for US intervention penetrated the news. One could carry these judgments forward to the post-Roosevelt half of the 1940s, and indeed to our age of raging Russophobia, without altering a syllable.”
Independent Canadian journalist and author Yves Engler who hosts a weekly podcast ‘Canadian Foreign Policy Hour’, contradicts Ling’s repudiation of made-in-Canada Russophobia.
In a September, 2023 blogpost titled, Russophobia a 150-year-old official Canadian passion Engler explains:
“Russophobia in Canada is largely an outgrowth of the country’s relationship to the British and US Empires, which have viewed Russia as an imperial competitor… As part of its ties to the British empire, Ottawa has been in a near state of war with Russia for over a century and a half.”
Engler’s summary of Canada’s historical involvement in Russian affairs includes references to early Canadian military history: Canadians volunteer for British units fighting Russia in the 1853 Crimean war; during WWI, six thousand Canadians fought alongside British forces against Russia between 1917 and 1920.
Writes Engler:
“Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Ottawa worked to isolate Moscow. Canada opposed a treaty to guarantee Russia’s pre-World War I frontiers, and for most of that period had no diplomatic relations with Moscow.”
When Ling dismisses Russophobia in Canada he is outing himself as a careless researcher at best or at worst as a fraud who knows the background, but neglects to inform his audience to maintain his establishment bias..
Canada’s enthusiastic anti-Russia position alongside the US state department’s was revealed in WikiLeaks’ 2010 ‘cablegate’ releases. Since the USSR fell apart in 1991 Canada has worked the diplomatic circuit on behalf of the US and NATO to promote NATO expansion eastward including a NATO Membership Action Plan for Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.
Justin Ling and his MSM-Canada colleagues will have their audiences believe that any narrative that promotes Russia’s decades-long concern about NATO encroachment and western belligerence on its borders, is promoting Russian propaganda. However, the public record, including explicit diplomatic correspondence, chronicled over time, illustrates the full extent of the Kremlin’s vehement concern. News consumers wouldn’t know this from reading Ling’s ‘investigative reports’.
Published previously in Facts are Subversive #3:
In a diplomatic memo (June 9, 2008) titled “Volker consults with Canadians on NATO”, Kurt Volker, US ambassador to the UN under Bush and later Donald Trump’s special representative for Ukraine, writes a summary of his visit to Ottawa. Some excerpts:
- Ottawa wants to collaborate with the U.S. in an effort to face the range of Russian challenges, to make MAP available to Ukraine and Georgia, and to counter German efforts to steer NATO policy in unhelpful directions.
- (Canadian PM) Harper pressed his Italian, German, French, and British counterparts for the quick extension of MAP (NATO Membership Action Plan) to Ukraine and Georgia, (Acting Foreign and Defense Policy Adviser) Sinclair said. Canada's bottom-line, she added, is that MAP is "imperative for Ukraine...but Georgia too."
In another cable dated June 6, 2008 two German foreign affairs diplomats Norman Walter and Rolf Nikel raise concerns with US counterpart David Merkel “that if MAP were pushed forward too quickly in Ukraine, where public opinion is bitterly divided on the issue of NATO membership, it could prove destabilizing and "split" the country.”
It doesn’t get much more anti-Russia than Global Affairs minister Melanie Joly’s explanation to a Canadian Press reporter in the National Post the reason for Canada’s 2023 sanctions on Russia:
“We’re able to see how much we’re isolating the Russian regime right now — because we need to do so economically, politically and diplomatically — and what are the impacts also on society, and how much we’re seeing potential regime change in Russia.”
With language straight out of U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s playbook Joly calls for regime change in Moscow, the ‘forcible or coercive replacement of one government regime with another’ – surely the ultimate ‘foreign interference’.
Not one interference-obsessed MSM-Canada journalist challenges the Trudeau government’s US go-along policy. The National Post, uncritically reprints Ukrainian Canadian Congress president Alexandra Chyczij’s approval of Joly’s sanctions announcement:
‘Chyczij said the group would continue calling for a full trade embargo against Russia by Canada and its allies, along with the designation of Russia as a state supporter of terrorism, the expulsion of all Russian diplomats from Canada, and more effective enforcement of sanctions that have already been imposed.
“Russia — a genocidal, terrorist state — must be treated as a pariah and isolated entirely from the international community,” she said in a statement.’
Up and down the corridors of Canadian power a culture of Russophobia has infected decision makers, think tankers and media commentators.
No CDN MSM journalist has publicly challenged government security institutions about the details of Russia’s ‘security threat’; not one reporter has expressed concern over Melanie Joly unflinchingly riding shotgun to a belligerent US foreign policy.
Justin Ling - Canadian Clown Prince of Disinformation
In his talk Ling continues to scoff at Kalinin’s claims, “Russia didn’t mean to invade Crimea…”
The throwaway paraphrasing and dismissive tone towards his source’s Russian version of things diminishes the ramifications of an important historical building block in the Ukraine conflict. What happened in Crimea in 2014 is a critical causal piece in the evolution of the Ukrainian civil war, that deserves overdue and unbiased media attention.
Unless Ling’s audience of young journalists did their own research, they will have come away from the disinformation warrior’s talk with the same false ‘Russia’s unprovoked invasion’ narrative that Ling’s MSM colleagues have been reporting during ten years of their Crimea ‘coverage’.
The independent press, which according to Ling, ‘exists in a totally alternate reality’, contradicts MSM-Canada on all things Crimea.
The late Robert Parry, former investigative reporter with Newsweek, AP and PBS who in 1995 founded the first US independent online news outlet, Consortium News, unpacks the background to what happened in Crimea in a 2015 article:
“A central piece of the West’s false narrative on the Ukraine crisis has been that Russian President Vladimir Putin “invaded” Crimea and then staged a “sham” referendum purporting to show 96 percent support for leaving Ukraine and rejoining Russia. More recently, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland claimed that Putin has subjected Crimea to a “reign of terror.”
Both elements have been part of the “group think” that dominates U.S. political and media circles, but this propagandistic storyline simply isn’t true, especially the part about the Crimeans being subjugated by Russia.”
The public record, independent reporting and even some Western establishment news outlets reported at the time that referendum results expressed the legitimate will of the majority of the Crimean people.
In a March 2015 report on polling results titled, One Year After Russia Annexed Crimea, Locals Prefer Moscow To Kiev, Kenneth Rapoza writes in Forbes Magazine:
“One year after the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea, poll after poll shows that the locals there -- be they Ukrainians, ethnic Russians or Tatars are mostly all in agreement: life with Russia is better than life with Ukraine.
Little has changed over the last 12 months. Despite huge efforts on the part of Kiev, Brussels, Washington and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the bulk of humanity living on the Black Sea peninsula believe the referendum to secede from Ukraine was legit.”
From behind his podium at FIMS Ling characterizes independent and anti-imperialist coverage of Ukraine as ‘Putin’s lies’, including the ones about ‘a Nazi problem in Ukraine.’ Ling scorns at the thought: “Ukraine, oh it's full of neo-nazis that are being led around by the CIA, right?” Nothing to see here, Ling suggests to his audience, it’s all Moscow propaganda.
The historical record differs. Independent journalism about Ukraine’s ultra-right elements make the mocking ‘analysis’ coming from Ling and other establishment-biased commentators sound like simplistic drivel.
Long before Putin raised it as an issue of concern, before his 2022 military intervention into Donbass, traditional news outlets of note were reporting Ukrainian nationalist extremist involvement in the Maidan protests and Neo-Nazi factions operating in governance and military structures inside Ukraine.
In an August 2014 Foreign Policy piece titled, Preparing for War With Ukraine’s Fascist Defenders of Freedom, Alec Luhn reports on ‘the new offensive in Eastern Ukraine’ near Mariupol:
“The Azov Battalion — so named for the Sea of Azov on which this industrial city is located — is one of dozens of volunteer battalions fighting alongside pro-government forces in eastern Ukraine. After separatist troops and armor attacked from the nearby Russian border and took the neighboring town of Novoazovsk, this openly neo-Nazi unit has suddenly found itself defending the city against what Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called a Russian invasion.”
In a September 2014 Guardian report titled, Azov fighters are Ukraine’s greatest weapon and may be its greatest threat, Shaun Walker writes:
“… there is an increasing worry that while the Azov and other volunteer battalions might be Ukraine's most potent and reliable force on the battlefield against the separatists, they also pose the most serious threat to the Ukrainian government, and perhaps even the state, when the conflict in the east is over. The Azov causes particular concern due to the far right, even neo-Nazi, leanings of many of its members.”
Since these 10-year-old reports were published, social media platforms and independent news outlets on all sides of the political divide have curated, amplified and posted audio-visual ‘evidence’ of a Nazi factor in Ukraine – evidence that suggests there is a good deal to see here.
Via The Grayzone
Journalism Fraud - Erasing Unapproved Narratives
The Ukrainian civil war context i.e., the history of pro-Ukraine military versus Donbass/Luhansk separatist forces, eight years before “Russia’s unprovoked, full-scale invasion” goes unreported in the mainstream Canadian press. Ling and his pack of disinformation watchdogs are erasing vital milestones from recent history and flattening the discourse to ensure only approved narratives get out.
Anyone who does independent research will find that what Ling’s source, the ‘Russian spy’ Kalinin had to say about root causes of the Ukraine conflict to be entirely correct. For Ling and his fellow stenographers in the mainstream media to misrepresent and attempt to erase historical context amounts to journalism fraud.
Ling’s most unforgivable act of dishonest journalism is his zealous frenzy to erase, discredit and smear the important work of the alternative press. According to Ling, news outlets who publish narratives not approved by the NATO and Five Eyes media complex “carry water for despots who we know…committed war crimes.”
The anti-war and anti-imperialist reporters Justin Ling wants to suppress include some of the most respected independent voices doing accountability journalism in the progressive news media.
In an email exchange for this paper, Ling characterized the work of independent reporters including Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté and Canadian freelancer Eva K. Bartlett as “junk reporting and propaganda.” According to Ling independent news outlets like Consortium News, the Grayzone, Telesur et al, are “more driven by cheering for the ‘home team’ than the legacy press”:
The so-called independent journalists you keep referencing are getting paid by oppressive regimes to deny war crimes, be it via state broadcasters or the regimes themselves. They are not independent at all. Max Blumenthal and the Grayzone have tried to cover up chemical weapons war crimes in Syria, ethnic cleansing of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang, and deflected Russian imperial aggression in Ukraine. Bartlett has done much of the same.
Ling suggests independent journalism of seasoned reporters like Chris Hedges are contentious and that not enough stock is put into the journalism of his preferred indie outlets. He writes in an email:
“The issue I take with Hedges — or, more often, people who put too much stock into Hedges' analysis — is that you're not listening to all independent, progressive outlets, just the ones who confirm your worldview. In this instance, outlets like The Counteroffensive, Meduza, The Kyiv Independent are both critical of the major outlets,and often doing a better job. Why do they never factor into your commentary?”
In my email response to Ling I include many of the same arguments I’ve made to other Canadian journalists and editors whose journalism is littered with the same establishment-biases. Please allow me to share:
“To suggest 'you're not listening to all independent, progressive outlets, just the ones who confirm your worldview' is a deflection from my true research interest which is to get at the facts of what is going on in foreign affairs regardless of the outlet doing the reporting, progressive or traditional media. So, when MSM Canada, Buzzfeed-affiliated Meduza or Global Affairs Canada-funded Kyiv Independent make claims about Syria, China, Russia etc. I prefer to verify their claims and allegations against what's actually going on and reported elsewhere before I bite and swallow. What MSM never reports, including yourself, is that there are actually 'alternative facts' claimed by other sources. Facts that fly against prevailing narratives.
The most reliable sources in foreign affairs reporting that I've found are the ones independents go to for long-form investigative reporting and long sit-down interviews that don't necessarily spare the 'home team.' The public record helps; "read before you write" is not what MSM journous do. If they do, they prefer to read and regurgitate their own stuff, as you are confirming in our exchanges. When I stop finding examples of blatant violations of journalistic principles (unsubstantiated & establishment biased reporting like yours) in the corporate and mainstream press I will report that.
When MSM shit all over Tucker Carlson for interviewing Putin we know MSM has lost not only its curiosity about what's going on but have decided that news consumers should pay no attention. That's censorship management. It wasn't a great interview from the interviewer's perspective but hell, news consumers finally heard from 'the enemy'. I learned a bucket load. Putin's explainers made what comes out of the mouths of Western leaders sound like kindergarten gibberish.
The fact that your reportage, and that of others, continues to accommodate and amplify long-debunked MSM claims such as Russiagate for example, gives considerable urgency to my feeble corrective attempts, to keep yelling at the emperor and his stenographer court-jesters for wearing nothing but officially approved narratives.
The Twitter Files are a must read for any journalist wishing to hold power to account or do the kind of journalism that serves the public's right to know. The Grayzone's investigative work that leveraged Israeli media's own reporting is what accountability journalism looks like.
My research shows that journalists like yourself are not doing that kind of journalism. Your reporting and that of most MSM-Canada reporters, is not only establishment-biased but inaccurate and blocks the understanding of Canadian news consumers, and any impressionable unwashed j-school audiences, of the true state of global affairs.“
In July 2022, CBC-The National gave Ling a 10-minute window, complete with a documentary video package, to explain to CBC audiences that independent news outlets and journalists like Eva Bartlett have a history of peddling pro-Russian information, propaganda and conspiracy theories.
Ling’s maligning analysis of Bartlett’s vital eye-witness reporting on Ukraine and Syria, and CBC’s careless amplification of Ling’s slanderous claims didn’t go unnoticed by Global Research reporter Karin Brothers who holds the public broadcaster to account for publishing Ling’s context-free and ‘defamatory’ report.
Writes Brothers:
“Implying that those who call out US responsibility for fomenting the Ukrainian conflict are Russian pawns is cover for those propagating western propaganda — propaganda that:
· ignores the US-backed 2014 coup against the democratically- elected Ukrainian president;
· ignores Zelensky’s landslide victory on the platform of making peace with Russia;
· ignores the U.S. undermining of the Minsk Accords that would have enabled that peace;
· ignores the Kiev government’s ongoing attacks on Donbass civilians [now with the use of new U.S.weaponry!] that have killed over 15,000 Ukrainians since 2014; and that
· even ignores the now-public evidence that the US motive in training tens of thousands of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi soldiers for the last eight years was to prepare them for this proxy war that would weaken Russia and get rid of Putin.
In just a few bullet points Brothers summarizes the pathological ignorance in MSM reporting on Ukraine.
When I asked Ling to point out any inaccuracies in the reporting of The Grayzone, Bartlett and the other independents we were referencing in our email exchange, the Canadian clown prince of disinformation stopped responding.
Defactualization
Patrick Lawrence calls it POLO, journalism that exercises the ‘power of leaving out’, the kind of journalism that according to Lawrence was common practice 75 years ago:
“One could find lies in the major dailies during the Cold War – as one can now, indeed. But published untruths and distortion risk revelation. Lies of omission, trafficking in selective facts while leaving unmentioned those that would make a given story genuinely accurate – leave nothing on paper and can be just as effective when the intent is to mislead. To insulate Americans from reality became the work of media altogether during the Cold War decades.” Journalists and their Shadows (2023 – Clarity Press).
In his 150-pager Lawrence takes a deep dive into root causes for what political theorist Hannah Arendt once called, ‘defactualization’.
To compare the “departure from reason, from factual assessment” in the journalism during the cold war to the reporting of today Lawrence references Arendt’s 1971 analysis, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” published in the New York Review of Books.
Lawrence contends in Shadows that compromises in journalism then and now are rooted in what he calls ‘certain malign practices.’ Chief among them is what Lawrence calls ‘the access game’: “There is one rule – Write to reflect well on your sources if you want to keep those sources, even if they are in ‘defactualization’ mode.”
Reliable and honest journalism writes Lawrence, “requires reporters to accept the risk of falling out of favour among their sources. Implicit in this are assumptions of equity and a proper distance between reporter and reported upon.”
In Canadian establishment and corporate journalism that distance doesn’t exist. Mainstream Canadian reporters covering international, security affairs, and imparting analysis of Canada’s role in global events, are effectively embedded with their sources.
Embedded
Compromised foreign affairs journalism in the US legacy press inevitably spills over into Canadian mainstream coverage – a decades old and inevitable tradition when American and Canadian foreign policies are joined at the hip. ‘When Washington sneezes Ottawa catches cold.’
When Canadian news media parrot US perspectives we get disinformation - which Oxford defines as: false information which is intended to mislead, especially propaganda issued by a government organization to a rival power or the media.
When Googling “disinformation” very high up on the response page is a Canada.ca link titled, Online Disinformation - The gateway page links to everything the government of Canada wants citizens to know about disinformation, who’s doing it, why, and how to fight it.
The government site alerts Canadians that, “disinformation damages the pillars of our democracy”, and reserves its most dire warning for Russia’s “dissemination of lies”:
“Sometimes state actors spread disinformation to support a specific agenda, such as the Kremlin’s use of disinformation in the invasion of Ukraine. Other times, the goal is to amplify divisions in our society by stirring up hot-button issues. If enough people react to a post, the disinformation takes on a life of its own.”
The reason for bringing up the state’s official position and strategies around disinformation is to point out how closely the perspectives and concerns of the government of Canada’s security and military institutions are mirrored in the reporting of domestic mainstream journalists.
Many of the widely read A-listers in the Canadian Anglo-establishment press are shoulder to shoulder with Ling on the front lines of the disinformation / propaganda wars.
In central Canada, where I get my mainstream news, Steven Chase, Robert Fife, Andrew Coyne, Adrienne Arseneault, Rosemary Barton, Murray Brewster, Johnathan Kay, Chris Brown and Paul Wells come to mind. There are many other ‘disinformation warriors’ of course, like Evan Solomon, Warren Kinsella, Vassy Kapelos, John Ivison, the late Rex Murphy, Terry Glavin, John Ibbitson and Rosie DiManno.
What they all have in common is that their foreign affairs reporting and analyses are sharply focused through an establishment, military and state security lens.
Reportage from this cohort of Canadian MSM journalists on China, the Global South in general, Russia, and the Middle East is mostly uncritical of Canada’s lockstep relationship with US foreign policy. Should Global Affairs Canada fall out of step and not top up Canada’s defense budget to US or NATO expectations, Ling and his comrades in the NATO-aligned press will wag their collective finger and report accordingly.
Accountability journalism as practiced by the Canadian establishment press means accountability to the self-appointed ‘international rules-based order’ of the US-led collective west.
In a December 2021 MacLean’s article, titled, ‘Will Canada help save Ukraine?’ Ling writes: “In recent years, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s foreign policy posture has been a slouch.”
Two months before Russia launched its 2022 military operations into Donbass, Ling warned against weak Canadian leadership in the face of Russian aggression: “Sending American and Canadian troops to fight in Ukraine is almost unimaginable. So, if we’re not prepared to engage militarily, we had better double-down on a diversity of other tactics. To do that, all of NATO will need to get involved — both operating independently and together — that we make clear the consequences of breaking the international order to steamroll a democratically-elected government in Europe.”
Ling and many of his Canadian sabre-rattling MSM colleagues come by their vigilance over Beijing and Kremlin ‘threats’ legitimately. Many of the best and brightest Canadian establishment reporters are virtually embedded by the very military-industrial-complex the Fourth Estate is traditionally meant to hold to account.
“Embedded journalism came into being as an experiment of the US military to provide the media on-ground access, but do so with utmost military control.” The Pangean
Embedded journalism in 2024 still means ‘on-ground access.’ However, control over what gets reported and what doesn’t no longer requires overt military or any other official approval. The process of manufacturing consent for US and NATO-led wars in the Canadian mainstream press is more nuanced than that.
What follows in the remaining pages of this paper is detailed scrutiny, in the Canadian context, of Jan Oberg’s claim that it is “hardly by coincidence” that establishment reporters in their foreign affairs journalism hammer out only one simplified truth, which is inevitably “compatible with the foreign policies of the U.S. and NATO allies.”
Peter Biesterfeld is a freelance writer, independent documentary maker and educator based in Toronto. He writes and makes films about social justice and mediawatch issues. He has written for NOW magazine, Common Ground, The Dominion and Videomaker.
Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.
Please consider setting up a monthly or annual donation through Donorbox.
More Articles
