CTV News made a seemingly necessary decision Thursday afternoon in the aftermath of one of the craziest Canadian network-journalism fiascos in recent memory: After an internal investigation, it says it discovered two video editors were involved in “altering a video clip” — which is to say doctoring, truncating and taking entirely out of context a quote from federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre about an urgent need to bring down the government.
CTV announced Thursday that it has now parted ways with those editors.
The issue, in brief: In a Sept. 18 scrum with reporters in Ottawa, Poilievre said a non-confidence motion in the House of Commons was necessary to trigger a “carbon tax election.” CTV repurposed the quote entirely to have Poilievre argue an election is needed to prevent adults from becoming eligible for the federal dental-care program on Jan. 1. That topic hadn’t even come up in the scrum.
Assuming these video editors were indeed responsible, CTV is well rid of them. But the damage is done. Poilievre hasn’t reversed his ban on Conservative MPs speaking with CTV News, which he imposed earlier in the week.
And the pink slips look a lot less impressive considering the network’s initial response to the scandal made no mention of any forthcoming investigation: “A misunderstanding during the editing process resulted in this misrepresentation,” CTV’s original statement read. Not only was that woefully insufficient, it’s not clear now whether it was even true.
So as is so common in Canadian politics, we have arrived at a sort of worst-of-all-worlds situation. The Conservatives have perhaps their most compelling single data point to support their contention that the mainstream media are biased against them. CTV arguably looks like it didn’t take the matter seriously enough to begin with, and then caved under Conservative pressure. Caving is alway better than notcaving when, like CTV, you’re 100 per cent in the wrong, but it’s a hell of a lot worse than not having to cave in the first place.
Anything CTV does now to make amends will be seen by its detractors as transactional
CTV News can’t do its job without access to Conservatives. Anything it does now to make amends will be seen by its detractors as transactional.
Some have even suggested this is simply a matter of Poilievre being thin-skinned toward journalists — as if other party leaders would just shrug off such a flamboyant manipulation. (The Liberals sure weren’t happy back in 2008 when CTV broadcast the disastrous false starts to Stéphane Dion’s interview with anchor Steve Murphy.)
This week, Liberal strategist Sarbjit Kaur declared herself aghast that two people actually got fired, dismissing the admitted manipulation as no big deal. “When media are caving to angry partisan mobs … we’re in big trouble.”
Immigration Minister Marc Miller had earlier waved the controversy away as “another Pierre Poilievre hissy fit against the media.”
“So Mr. Freedom … orders his MPs not to talk to news orgs that won’t parrot Conservative talking points,” sneered Taleeb Noormohamed, parliamentary secretary to Heritage Minister Pascal St-Onge, who claims to cherish and wish to support good-quality journalism in Canada.
And here’s St-Onge herself, putting that misapprehension to bed: “(Poilievre’s) hidden agenda: to not have journalists ask him difficult questions.”
To my astonishment, some journalists, former and even current, took against CTV’s actions or partially defended its reporting. Adam Vaughan, a former City TV journalist and Liberal MP, added a typically unique twist to the affair: “Re-arranging and deliberately fabricating a quote is wrong,” he wrote on X, “but … would dental care survive a non-confidence vote?”
“Bad journalism,” Vaughan conceded, “but is it inaccurate?”
Then there was the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt. “I think this is CTV saying they fired the people who offended a politician,” she ventured. Her Friday column cited “what (Poilievre) saw as a ‘malicious’ editing job on some of his recent remarks, implying he was trying to bring down the government over dental care instead of the carbon levy” — without even mentioning CTV’s admission of wrongdoing.
Dismal.
One thing we can definitely take away from all this: Liberals do not, in fact, actually care about good journalism — or at least they don’t care about it enough not to support bad journalism when they think it helps them, which is a distinction without a difference.
And having said we’ve arrived at the worst of all worlds, all this presents an obvious chance for things to get much worse indeed. The Liberal government provides robust taxpayer subsidies to the media — some more directly, as with newspaper publishers like Postmedia (which owns National Post), and some of it more indirectly to broadcasters like CTV, through program funding, licences, and market protection.
A bare minimum for supporting those subsidies is that your government shouldn’t play favourites with the media according to ideological leanings. (Or at least you should cloak such decisions in the language of not meeting “journalistic standards.”) And yet, Noorhamed in particular — who, remember, is parliamentary secretary to the minister responsible for these handouts — is always eager to criticize Postmedia for criticizing the Liberal government … because Postmedia collects government subsidy.
“Your paper wouldn’t be in business were it not for the subsidies that the government that you hate put in place — the same subsidies your Trump-adjacent foreign hedge fund owners gladly take to pay your salary,” Noormohamed chided National Post columnist Terry Newman earlier this month — not for the first time.
Noorhamed and other Liberals often sound like they absolutely hate their own media-subsidy programs, precisely because they contribute to what they consider “bad” journalism — i.e., journalism that criticizes them, focuses on their idea of “the wrong things,” spreads their idea of “misinformation.” It’s not hard to imagine the Liberals altering the “standards” for subsidies in the future to more shamelessly suit their purposes (or it wouldn’t be hard to imagine that, if political oblivion weren’t stalking the Liberals like a leopard does a particularly succulent antelope).
And while one can take a certain ice-cold comfort in the idea of Poilievre axing media subsidies across the board — at least it’s consistent! — Conservative MP Michelle Ferrari chimed in Thursday evening with this downright North Korean social-media post: “Pierre Poilievre will restore journalistic ethics and integrity.”
No politician should covet that job. Anyone that does, from any party, should be looked on with the most extreme suspicion.
National Post
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