If anyone in the conservative media environment should know about the Canadian media works, it’s Ezra Levant. He was one of the key personalities on the short-lived conservative Sun News Network, and before that, he wrote columns for years.
When Sun News Network folded in 2015, Levant co-founded Rebel News, a digital news outlet dedicated to presenting Canadian news from a right-of-center perspective. Rebel News has since expanded to cover news in the UK and Australia as well.
Levant’s team embedded reporters with the Freedom Convoy as they traveled across Canada, and their reports tell a much different story than what we’ve heard from Canada’s mainstream media, as well as from the government.
On Tuesday, Levant posted an epic Twitter thread that helps explain why the Canadian media parrot’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s mischaracterizations of the Freedom Convoy. What he had to say is eye-opening.
1. The first thing to know about the media is that they're lazy. They'd rather re-write a government press release than get up from their desk and report from the field — especially when it's -20° out.
So they repeat Trudeau's lie that the truckers are racist and sexist.
…2
— Ezra Levant 🍁 (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
“The first thing to know about the media is that they’re lazy,” Levant’s thread began. “They’d rather re-write a government press release than get up from their desk and report from the field — especially when it’s -20° out.”
“So they repeat Trudeau’s lie that the truckers are racist and sexist,” he continued. “The second thing to know is that in Canada, more than 99% of journalists receive a payment from Justin Trudeau.” This tweet links to a Rebel News article explaining a 29-page list of roughly 1,500 news organizations that received taxpayer money from Trudeau’s government just before the 2021 federal elections.
Levant went on to explain that even private media companies in Canada are under the thumb of the Trudeau administration because of his largesse. Many privately-owned media outlets are smaller subsidiaries of cable and utility conglomerates, which means that their leadership doesn’t care when woke publishers and editors squeeze out conservative points of view.
He concluded this section of the thread by saying, “These are all structural issues. But an obvious point is the lack of diversity in the news media. I don’t mean race or sex — I mean intellectual and class diversity. The Media Party (as I call it) is politically and culturally homogenous. Urban, woke think-alikes.”
Related: Canadian Truckers Say They’re ‘Digging in for the Long Haul’
Levant noted that these urban wokes are so elite that they’ve never been in touch with working-class Canadians like those involved in the Freedom Convoy. He shared a tweet from a reporter who confused a crane hoisting the Canadian flag with a wrecking ball. The reporter later corrected her mistake.
I deleted a tweet calling this a wrecking ball.
It’s a crane with a weighted ball and a hook that sits outside the Prime Minister’s Office – right across from Parliament Hill #cdnpoli #convoy #ottawa pic.twitter.com/VaxgR3CTbl
— Marieke Walsh (@MariekeWalsh) February 5, 2022
Levant went on to boldly state that the elite members of the Canadian media are “intellectually and structurally incapable” of understanding the working men and women of their country.
“Psychologically, these middle class narcissists (every journalist must be a narcissist to believe the world needs to hear what they have to say) cannot believe that the working classes reject them,” he said. “They always posed as saviours of the working man. It made them feel better.”
Levant cited a liberal Canadian pollster who released a survey stating that 32% of those surveyed identified with the truckers. He said that if that 32% were a political party, they would win the next election. In Levant’s eyes, this is because so many people have been on the ground with the truckers and have spoken to the protesters themselves.
Some liberal news outlets have complained that the Freedom Convoy has not invited them to press conferences while ignoring the fact that Canada’s Parliament routinely leaves center-right media out of their press briefings.
Levant concluded (saying “I have to go” several times near the end of the thread) by pointing out what makes right-leaning outlets like Rebel News different.
“We had reporters at NINE different trucker convoys on the weekend,” he noted. “We’re embedded at the border in Coutts. We’ve got half a dozen people in Ottawa (on the street, not safely tucked away in offices). So people choose our news over the Media Party’s punditry.”
“The whole world is riveted by what’s happening in Canada,” he continued. “But who can they talk to about what’s really happening? They could call the CBC, and I’m sure CNN does. But that’s just Trudeau’s point of view, it’s not really telling you what’s happening. So they call us.”
We can see some of the same forces at work in the American media. CNN, MSNBC, and the networks take a similar ivory-tower, distanced view as the Canadian media, while Fox News keeps an ear on the heartland, much like Rebel News does. The difference in the coverage between those outlets is noticeable.
Check out Levant’s thread in full, and you’ll understand much more about why the media narratives are so much different from reality.
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