On her Instagram account, Rachel Gilmore describes herself as “your least favourite person’s least favourite journalist.”
Judging from the reactions her aggressively progressive commentary gets on the various social media platforms she uses, this is pretty much nails it.
If anyone knows how to make insecure incel brains explode or get those corporate bankrolled “weirdo quisling journalists” who nowadays inhabit the intellectual boondocks of the Canadian social media landscape to go bananas, it’s Ms. Gilmore.
And when they do, and go all misogynistic on her, they look like perfect prats. This certainly works for Ms. Gilmore, who with half a million followers on various social media platforms nowadays, is a high-profile commentator who towers over the countless Internet trolls toiling for the Maple MAGA cause in Canada’s social media ecosystem.
Nor does Ms. Gilmore particularly mind being screeched at by Pierre Poilievre Mini-Me’s, she told a breakout session at the annual Parkland Institute Conference at the University of Alberta Saturday. After all, she chuckled,* “when people leave hate comments and such, it allows me to reach a broader audience.” Remember, you’ll have to sign up to her social media accounts if you want to yell at her.
Ms. Gilmore is an experienced journalist in traditional media who has spent plenty of time covering federal politics, human rights, online disinformation, and far-right extremism. And she’s fearless, seemingly unfazed by the creeps who constantly attack and try to undermine women who speak up for progressive causes online.
“I’ve been reporting on white nationalists and far-right groups for years,” she told her Parkland audience. “To the point that one of the leaders of what’s now being described as the largest white nationalist network in Canada had my face printed on a pillow!” (Say what?)
“As weird as these guys are,” she adds after a well-timed pause, “they’re growing and they’re getting organized. And this isn’t the United States. This is here in Canada. They’re teaching each other to fight, and they’re strategizing about how to get their messaging into the political mainstream.”
So, she continued, “we really shouldn’t take for granted, as cringe as those guys are, that they’re going to fail.”
“If we’re going to stave off the symptoms and avoid the illness that the U.S. appears to be rapidly succumbing to, we need a strong immune system, and a massive part of that is the media. Press. We know that it is because autocrats attack it first, right?”
So what can we do about the way media is letting us down? Ms. Gilmore has ideas. Parkland asked her, along with and Jeanette Ageson, publisher of Vancouver-based online newspaper The Tyee, to try to suggest responses to the way 21st Century Canadian media is failing to protect us from the rise of autocracy.
For example, maybe drop some of the shibboleths of modern mainstream journalism that make it increasingly, and infuriatingly, part of the problem.
Consider “bothsidesism,” the lazy refusal by too many reporters – taught to them, it must be admitted, by too many journalism school instructors – to openly acknowledge verifiable falsehood when confronted with MAGA derp.
It’s not as if this is a new phenomenon. As economist and former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman famously described it 26 years ago, when George W. Bush was running for the U.S. presidency: “If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ‘Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.’”
Nowadays, of course, the Shrub looks like a beacon of intelligence and reason south of the Medicine Line, surely an indicator of how far things have fallen.
Or how about we acknowledge that perfect objectivity is impossible and respect our readers enough to be transparent about our worldview, Ms. Gilmore suggested. “I really try to prioritize transparency,” she told her audience. “I think that a way that newsrooms can do that is they need to allow their journalists to have personalities.”
“What I try to do with my work, at least, is try to be clear that I am reporting from a progressive perspective. I believe that trans rights are human rights. That’s not a debate for me … And as I do that, I’m trusting the audience to recognize that.”
But if journalism is to continue to be a useful antidote to autocracy, Ms. Gilmore’s most urgent advice is the need to understand and acknowledge the constant “bad faith backlash” by right-wing commentators and their vast legion of online bots and trolls.
“We need to learn to recognize when a debate isn’t actually about the topics that are being presented,” Ms. Gilmore explained, “if it’s actually an argument being made in bad faith on one side that is about something else.”
“One of the things I think we should do is teach the ‘Gamergate’ model in journalism school so that folks know that this is a technique that’s used,” she suggested. Gamergate was the right-wing harassment campaign in the Twenty-teens that targeted women in the video game industry, purporting to be about their work but in fact being an organized assault on feminism, diversity and equity.
Bad actors have weaponized conventional journalistic attitudes about fairness and balance to “develop a model for discrediting people they disagree with,” she asserted. “They pick a target, watch them like a hawk, hold them to a ridiculous standard.” When a person they already hate for what they stand for makes a minor mistake, they explode all over it.
Indeed, as we all understand, that is precisely how right-wing cancel culture works – in politics, journalism and increasingly any field subjected to the right’s endless culture wars. “Because journalists need to both-sides everything, they are vulnerable to these bad faith narratives that make it out to be a debate about ethics,” Ms. Gilmore said.
And she is right, it’s time to call this out.
Ms. Ageson presented The Tyee’s model for funding real journalism, something that is being abandoned by the once great newspapers of English Canada under the ownership and influence of U.S. venture capitalists with ties to the Republican Party.
The Tyee, now run by a non-profit society, rejects the idea of hiding its journalists’ and commentators’ work behind a paywall, Ms. Ageson said. After 22 years, the Vancouver-based online news organization is supported by “11,000 paying members putting in about $1.3 million a year.”
“It’s membership; it’s not subscription,” she explained. “We’re asking people to help build something that they want to see in the world, and we’re asking people to support access for everybody.”
“Every single year it reinforces that this is a fantastic model to support the investigative and long-feature reporting that has since disappeared from many newspaper pages.”
*Yes, Ms. Gilmore really chuckled. I’m a veteran journalist myself and I know chuckle when I hear one. And who can blame her? I should add, in the service of full disclosure, that posts from this blog often appear in The Tyee. DJC
When we have too look at Alberta Politics, The Tyee, and other sources for information, there certainly is a problem. Postmedia is a classic example of how the media has turned foul. Practically anything their columnists publish, praises these phony Conservatives and Reformers, such as Danielle Smith and the UCP, and Pierre Poilievre and the CPC, regardless of how awful they are.
I find it helpful to view these sources as alternative education systems. In the case of Postmedia, they’re a corporate-funded platform that tries to educate people that a bunch of nonsense ideas must be true because they say so. Their bias is obvious to people who care about bias, but maybe not so much to everyone else.
George Bush, a beacon of intelligence and reason? LOL. Let’s not forget he signed off on the invasion of Iraq back in 03. To whip up public hysteria they came up with Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD’s) where Saddam Hussein was on the verge of launching a war against western civilization and that he needed to be stopped and stopped now. Surely one of the biggest media hoaxes of all time. Makes the MAGA scribblers supposedly spreading online disinformation look like beer league hockey.
I think he’s saying this is by comparison to the current occupant of the Shite House (that was supposed to be White House, but I think the typo is appropriate as it is lol).
Climenhaga – the radical leftist – once again projecting his extremism and intolerance onto everyone he disagrees with.
(Eyeroll) DJC
Eyeroll??
You leftist-radical you.!!
Thank you for giving us commentors a big laugh ,LMAO–
You’re too polite, DJC.
That response would be met with opprobrium in Glenn’s usual haunts (if they knew what “opprobrium” meant).
Thanks, CovKid. I am polite. I do try to find a way to publish all comments – leastways, those that aren’t peddling dubious products and services, using the names of people who obviously didn’t post them, or defaming people in an actionable manner. However, people who keep making the same comment over and over again, as Glenn seems to be doing, eventually start to have their comments deleted. So it’s a good practice to stick to the topic at hand.
well….go join a convoy there Glenn! Raise those fuck whoever flags and show everyone who you are eh!
“Climenhaga – the radical leftist . . . ”
“It’s astounding, time is fleeting, madness takes its toll. But listen closely . . .
. . . I remember doing the Time Warp. Drinking those moments when the blackness would hit me and the void would be calling . . . Let’s do the Time Warp again.”
Or more to the point . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AylFqdxRMwE
Poor Canada. Poor Alberta.
There was a post (actually, more than one) on Xitter the other day revealing how many right-wing aligned accounts on that platform, active in Alberta and Canadian politics discourse, are actually based outside Canada.
https://x.com/rodkahx/status/1992355843875144114?s=61&t=J5HMElKzoj9LqXXp3sKA4A
Jerrymacgp— there were alot of people who managed to take advantage of the ‘slip up’ ….and the number of accounts* based in the US and Ireland purportedly from Alberta,
gives a pretty good indication of how much propaganda is perpetrated on the general public from these bots. Unfortunately for Albertans, Marlaina doesn’t even have to use them, she does it the “old fashioned way” on her radio talk show, where her can sing to her hearts Con-tent .
*I find it quite ‘ironic’ that a large number of the maga accounts were from what d’rump described as that sh••hole ‘country’. Ah! The old Nigerian Prince scam. Maybe someday someone will figure out who is really behind that royal pain in the bank accounts.
“Bothsideism” is hardly the pressing issue in journalism today. Noam Chomsky quite ably and throughly demonstrated that there are many subjects which are not to be objectively discussed. The yokels think they’re subversives now, despite MAGA tripe never, ever questioning the principle power dynamics in the plutocracy/kakistocracy/kleptocracy. The discourse is never about who rules, how they rule and why they rule. Gore Vidal said the US has one party with two wings, the Money party. We have four or five right wings in our Money party, producing perhaps a greater illusion of locomotion while remaining at a standstill.
You can offer both sides of an opinion, such as policy choices that need to be made by government. But you can’t offer “both sides” of an objective fact. Either it’s true or it’s not, and we should only ever publish truth. So, climate change is real, and arguing it’s not is disinformation. Vaccines work, and the only thing childhood vaccines cause is adulthood, and claims to the contrary are false and do not deserve to be debated or published.
Bothsides-ism is one problem in media. Another is Murc’s Law – “…a term that describes a tendency in political journalism to attribute responsibility or agency only to Democratic Party actors, while treating Republican actions as inevitable or structurally determined.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murc%27s_law)
I just learned about this a couple of months ago, and now I see it everywhere.
These ladies are incredibly brave, to come and do a presentation in Alberta. That is awesome! After reading your column, I think that the far right, the UPC and Ms. Smith are just frightened and insecure. They are trying to hold on to a past, which in their mind and sometimes mine, was safer and secure. They will go after anything, books, flags, organization’s, etc, that represents a paradigm shift, from their beliefs. They create legislation that suppresses and they try instill fear, that without, the UPC, or the far right, we will lose all of our rights and freedoms. I think, that without democracy and level headed leaders, we will will lose everything, that our fathers fought for.
A current US example is of how the other press members allowed the Orange Blob to address the Bloomberg reporter, Catherine Lucey, with the horrendous “Quiet, quiet, piggy” comment on Air Force 1 last week. Why didn’t they all refuse to engage with him? Why didn’t Bloomberg call him out?? Enough already!!
Ms. Gilmore is well aware of that old adage, never underestimate your opponent.
Postmedia is just boringly predictable. I get way more riled up listening to CBC’s daytime radio and political podcasts. I fully appreciate that they have an obligation to provide fair, balanced journalism. We know who funds THEIR work. The finances aren’t quite so clear when it comes to some of the guests they invite though, the conservative think tank pundits, the lobbyists, the political strategists.
I don’t know if it’s lack of time, laziness, lack of background knowledge on the part of the host or just that they have a directive to remain neutral, but so much goes unchallenged. Here of some of the latest pronouncements that had me yelling at my cat:
From a Charter scholar: ‘We need to take Danielle Smith at her word, that her intention is to protect children.’
A senior fellow and director of energy, natural resources and environment at a national think tank: ‘We can’t afford to build sustainable homes for the underprivileged.’
A former political staffer (in conflict of interest on the subject): ‘Independent schools save taxpayers money.’
A former politician, in a bit of a conflict-of-interest role: ‘As long as there’s equity participation from Indigenous communities’ we can do whatever the heck want, bulldoze a pipeline through their territory, ceded or Treaty(my interpretation).
And it all goes through like butter on toast. Don’t they know that anybody listening to CBC radio in the middle of the day has far too much time on their hands to read all the stuff, that we know who those ‘experts’ are and who they work for? Methinks the experts have a vested interest in saying the things they keep saying. What’s CBC’s excuse?
Keep up the excellent work, Ms. Gilmore. Nice to see you don’t take down time from standing up, not even at Friday night parties.
‘The Narwhal’ is also worth a mention for people looking to invest in independent journalism.
I may not win popularity points on this space by suggesting a different approach to this topic.
The media dichotomy is a reflection of the widening divisions within our society. It is not the cause. Bothsidesism is a problem, but it’s not at the root of what ails us.
What is being downplayed on the left and on the right is the hate, fear and distance between the competing spheres of influence. Women, minorities, including sexual minorities have good reason to be enraged. But, as an increasing number of observers are realizing, young men are justifiably angry. The former have found their solace on the Left. The latter on the Right.
I may have expressed this clumsily, but we have to dig much deeper to understand the divisions within our society, and hence divisions within the media.
Glenn posted an unfriendly comment. David responded with an eyeroll. I’m not sure that’s helpful. Similarly, other disparaging remarks on this public site do little to ease the conflicts among us. Maybe, it’s a chance for people to let off steam, and enjoy David’s sharp wit and sharp observations. But it doesn’t ease our dire divisions.
You know what Andy…I am tired of giving stupid and mean a voice.
About what precisely are young men “justifiably angry” that applies to them qua young men?
Glenn posted an idiotic comment. He’a acting in bad faith because there no way to assert in good faith that our host is a “radical leftist”. There is no duty to engage with such, nor is there any point.
You’re onto something about divisions in our society, but willfully missing the point about entities owned by private equity such as the National Pest. This division is between owners of capital, and the rest of us. There’s no dialogue to be had with them, either. There are actual conflicts of interest that can’t be papered over.