The progressive bias in our national institutions, and particularly in our media and our universities, is so clear and indisputable that I won’t waste your time, dear reader, reciting the evidence. The only things worth discussing are its nature, its source, and the solution.
Of these, the last is the most important. There must be a “solution” because the problem of institutional bias is not an immutable law of nature. It is not something we just have to shrug and accept, like snow in winter or rain in Vancouver. And because it can be fixed, governments that recognise and reject the bias have a duty to do so.
But first let’s consider the nature and the source of bias.
In the recent dustup between Pierre Poilievre and CTV, the major journalistic sin was the deceptive splicing of Poilievre’s words to invent a sentence he never said. But as The Hub‘s Sean Speer pointed out, the fact that they made it appear (incorrectly) that he wanted to bring down the government and force an election over dental care, of all things, was also revealing.
“In what world does CTV News staff (including its senior journalists) scan the country’s political environment and decide that dental care is the biggest issue or think that it will be decisive in the next federal election? The choice is clearly a highly editorialised presentation of the political facts that’s at least as manufactured as the words put into Poilievre’s mouth,” wrote Speer.
Whether the choice was conscious or unconscious, it is an example of how our national news is not just dominated by the issues that interest very online professionals living in the Laurentian corridor but also shaped by their assumptions about those issues.
