Catching Up on MediaPolicy.ca – The Smear Jobs – Meta blocking wildfire news – Amazon funding competition law debate

August 19, 2023

Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre’s testy relationship with journalists, and his campaign team’s best efforts to portray it as a grudge match, re-emerged this week. 

Poilievre was challenged by a CBC reporter on why he has revived conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum during his summer campaign tour. He refused to answer the question and instead demanded the CBC reporter cite the source of the allegations. When she stumbled, he dismissed her questions as “another CBC smear job.” Other news organizations reported on the story, so Poilievre followed up the attack on the public broadcaster in a tweet claiming that “CBC’s news service CP [Canadian Press] wrote a hit piece on me because I dared criticize the World Economic Forum.” (The news agency Canadian Press is owned by three private news organizations, not the CBC).

When the Canadian Press story was carried online by several news sources, with the CP-supplied headline intact on all platforms as is often the case, Conservative MP Andrew Scheer alleged “media collusion.” (See above).

A number of journalists condemned the opportunism. On Canadaland, Jesse Brown’s guest Nora Loreto suggested the press could do better than re-hashing a stale story about Poilievre peddling conspiracy theories and should have focussed on a different angle, perhaps that the Conservative leader’s economic program is likely to be aligned with views expressed by ‘globalist’ participants in the WEF. Or maybe journalists ought to focus on his recent ‘make-over’ bid that includes losing the glasses and struggling into an undersized T-Shirt (on the latter point, recall former leader Erin O’Toole’s 2021 campaign photos).

On the other hand, the conspiracy story is fresh and not stale if it focusses on Poilievre continuing to dip into the well of antisemitic far-right anthems while simultaneously trying to broaden his appeal through the make-over.

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The wildfire-induced evacuation of the city of Yellowknife is in the news as was a similar tragedy in Fort McMurray in 2016 and Lytton in 2021. 

Updated news journalism about the wildfire’s threat to life and property was not available on Facebook or Instagram because of the Meta news throttle in retaliation against Bill C-18. Unlike Facebook’s Australian news throttle in 2021, this time the social media giant is not blocking official emergency information distributed by government agencies. 

The Liberals were immediately on it, condemning Meta for the news throttle and raising the question why it didn’t temporarily rescind the block on news sites. This touched off another round of the blame-game about whether the federal government or Meta is responsible for the throttle. Expect this to continue indefinitely.

If anything helpful can come out of this argument about assigning responsibility, it would be a discussion of Facebook’s market power over news distribution, something along the lines offered by news sources in this Canadian Press story. (no Mr. Poilievre, not the one owned by CBC, the other one). 

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The Logic did some good work this week in publishing Martin Patriquin’s investigation of Amazon’s $600,000 donation to the University of Toronto Faculty of Law to influence debate about Canadian competition law reform. The story offers some disturbing revelations about administrative secrecy and torquing the debate in favour of maintaining Canada’s status quo of how it polices the market power of companies like Amazon. As an alumnus, I found it especially upsetting.

(The story is paywalled but if you surrender your e-mail address you can access it, a small price to pay given the quality of the stuff you can read on The Logic).

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