Media Derision is Out of Step
Closing Submissions to the Emergencies Act inquiry didn't talk about the Freedom Convoy the way journalists do.
Yesterday I pointed out that journalists have spent the past year talking about the trucker protest in an overtly biased manner. According to them, people crying out for medical freedom in the streets of Ottawa weren’t actually concerned about freedom. Those opposing the firing of truckers, doctors, nurses, police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and pilots who refused a vaccine with no long term safety data were just using the word freedom to mask conspiracy theories and dark motives.
The truckers were a so-called freedom convoy. A quote unquote freedom convoy. All-seeing journalists summarily dismissed these protesters as cranks and deplorables. Negligible, marginal folk. No real or legitimate grievances worth mentioning.
Yet out here in the real world, it’s the media that’s out of step. When more than 20 parties filed Closing Submissions with the Emergencies Act inquiry last month, they didn’t behave the way journalists do. I’ve found not a single reference to a so-called Freedom Convoy.
The lawyers representing former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly submitted a document that mentions the Freedom Convoy 38 times. No scare quotes in sight. Lawyers for the City of Ottawa filed a similar document in which the term Freedom Convoy appears 44 times. Not a single scare quote.
The Government of Manitoba’s submission talks calmly about the Freedom Convoy sans scare quotes. So do documents filed by the Ontario Provincial Police, the Ottawa Police, and the Windsor Police Service.
The Ottawa Coalition of Residents and Business don’t like the truckers much. In fact, they’re suing them for millions. Yet even they don’t indulge in the childish derision that’s standard media fare. Across the 49 pages of the coalition’s closing submission, the term Freedom Convoy appears 20 times. Quotes are used once, in a grammatically appropriate manner in paragraph one, and are never seen again.
For the cherry on top, it’s worth noticing that the Government of Canada’s own submission employs similarly professional language. In my view, that document contains more than a few dubious claims. But what it doesn’t do is indiscriminately toss around scare quotes. The term Freedom Convoy appears 118 times in total. Where quotes make sense, they appear. Otherwise, everything is sober and sensible. Here’s part of page 55:
The Emergencies Act hearings were a multi-week affair involving significant numbers of lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians, and police personnel. Those educated, informed individuals spoke matter-of-factly about the Freedom Convoy. They didn’t employ scare quotes. They didn’t talk about a so-called convoy.
How many years will it take for the media to grow up?
I always use quotes for "climate change" or "climate crisis" as they are undefined terms with broadly accepted erroneous meanings. "Freedom Convoy" is not rigorously defined but there is no alternative understanding available. It was the group of citizens gathering in Ottawa to protest government abuse of power. The scare quotes and adjective phrase "so called" are employed to imply an alternative or even opposite meaning of the term. It is not only bad journalism but is, in itself, a lie unless the user is convinced that these truckers and their supporters were intending their actions to limit freedom. How many of the government witnesses could produce any evidence to support their actions based on that presumption of intent? What evidence did the reporters produce to convince their readers that the convoy participants were acting nefariously?