Journalistic Venom vs Salt-of-the-Earth Decency

Why do people who write for a living think they're superior to people who drive for a living?

My post yesterday featured a video clip from a formal debate in which UK journalist Douglas Murray condemned the Canadian media’s response to the Freedom Convoy. The partial transcript I provided didn’t include most of the examples he cited.

Collectively, those examples demonstrate three things: Egregious journalistic bias. A frightening inability to empathize with the working class. And a bizarre eagerness to slander and dismiss fellow human beings.

Because the examples cited by Murray are vile, I didn’t amplify them. But those of you who watched the three-minute clip heard about them. On further reflection, therefore, I’m going to highlight one of them. Simply to make the point that Murray wasn’t exaggerating. When he used the words rancid and corrupt to describe our current media environment, he was wholly on target. Here’s a small portion of Murray’s remarks, including some third party profanity:

You had a Toronto Star columnist saying, quote (sorry for the language), it’s a homegrown hate farm that was then jet-fuelled by an American right-funded rat-fucking operation…

Yup, that was a real tweet from Bruce Arthur, who earns his living as a sports writer, currently for the Toronto Star. Below is his full reply to comments made by another Canadian journalist, Jeet Heer, who writes for The Nation, a far-left US publication:

click image to see this on Twitter

I worked with both these gentlemen 20 years ago, in the earliest days of the National Post. It was a large newsroom. I didn’t get to know either of them.

The day after they catapulted these deluded, venomous tweets into the world, I arrived in Ottawa. I spent a week there, taking photos and actually talking to people. The Freedom Convoy protesters I met were supremely decent human beings. Since then, I’ve formally interviewed many of them. I’ve learned about their lives, their triumphs, their troubles, their sorrow.

My conclusion? If I were stranded on a desert island - or if a nuclear bomb detonated anywhere near me - I’d be sticking close to folks like these. People who know how to fix things, how to build things, and how to get things done. People sufficiently concerned about right and wrong to put themselves at risk. People of faith, many of them, who show us religion at its finest - a stable, calming force. A source of courage, strength, and big picture perspective.

Those who protested in Ottawa were human beings, not saints. That’s true of every large gathering. But overwhelmingly, they were decent, salt-of-the-earth people.