Poilievre And The Media

Pierre Poilievre's war on the media tells us who and what he is. Robin Sears writes:

A universal tool of demagogues is to demonize and threaten journalists. It’s an effective tactic, especially when aligned with a parallel campaign to create their own controlled media.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been revealed by Florida media and Harvard’s Nieman Lab as the latest threat to an independent media, seeking legislation to intimidate independent journalists by setting minimal requirements to suing them for libel.

At the same time, he encourages his base to support a growing network of hyperpartisan media he helped nourish. He has yet to reach the next plateau of anti-journalism: singling out individual reporters for attack, attempting to ban them from news conferences and encouraging his fans to attack them on social media.

Poilievre has taken a page from the DeSantis playbook:

Pierre Poilievre took a step toward that unacceptable behaviour last week, attacking a CBC reporter publicly and refusing to answer questions put to him because they worked for Canada’s public broadcaster. Like Trump and DeSantis, Poilievre uses his media-bashing to scoop hundreds of thousands dollars through hateful social media appeals using the CBC as his whipping boy.

This is a very dark hole that Poilievre is taking his party down. Threats and even attacks on journalists are on the rise in many countries. Mexico set up special protection for some famous journalists as a result of its epidemic of murdered reporters. Nine of those journalists, under the protection of the state, were murdered last year.

Independent media is a favourite target for conservatives around the world. It consoles them in defeat that it was not their message that failed to appeal, but the “corrupt media” aligned against them. U.S. President Richard Nixon indulged in it 50 years ago. It has become a necessary proof that you are a real conservative. Conservatives’ increasingly hostile behaviour today moves from being merely pitiable, to the edge of threatening democracy.

Poilievre’s boast that, if elected, one of his first acts will be to abolish the CBC, but not Radio/Canada — a hypocritical appeal to Quebec voters — should ring loud alarms. Tory spinners claim they don’t intend to get rid of the CBC, merely to privatize it. This is a nonsense.

The meaning of this planned destruction of our public broadcaster offers a more troubling insight into Poilievre’s soul. Most of his base-inciting gambits — he’s going to run the Bank of Canada — are nonsense and he knows it. On the media, however, one increasingly gets the sense that it is unsavoury demagogues that are his guides to a media-choking strategy. Their strategies usually also include secrecy in governing and deliberately divisive policy. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s excessively partisan rhetoric and lack of transparency might look timid by comparison.

A recent poll suggests that Poilievre is leading Trudeau by seven points.

Caveat emptor.

Image: The Toronto Star