Author: Peter Biesterfeld

  • Photo Credit: Google/Halifax International Security Forum

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    Editor’s note: The Canada Files’ is re-publishing Peter Biesterfeld’s two-part series, ‘One Simplified Truth’ originally released on his Substack, with updated titles and some small adjustments. This is part two.

    Written by: Peter Biesterfeld

    The Military Industrial Media Complex

    Billed as an international gathering of democracies, the Halifax International Security Forum is clearly an instrument of giant arms and energy monopolies and oligopolies and international finance capital involved in the business of war, the most profitable business of all.” – Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada (MLPC)

    In a 2009 press release, Canada’s then national defense minister Peter MacKay announced the launch of a major international security conference to take place in Halifax that November:

    The Halifax International Security Forum (HFX/HISF) will give international leaders a chance to view security issues ‘through a Canadian lens’, while promoting greater international awareness of Atlantic Canada. The Halifax International Security Forum will be organized by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a non- partisan American public policy institution dedicated to promoting greater cooperation between North America and Europe. This will be the organization’s first-ever public event in Canada.”

    Every November since, the Westin Nova Scotian hotel in Halifax has hosted the invitation-only Canadian forum, headquartered in Washington. HFX is capped at 300 participants and brings together a high ranking international who’s who of ‘thought leaders’, senior political and military decision makers, defense contractors and think tankers who fill the air with the significance of the ‘threat’ to Western democracies and what needs to be done about it.

    Over a weekend of symposia, key note presentations and round-table plenary sessions led by invitees from the international press, the Halifax International Security Forum offers journalists a front row seat to international affairs policy-making as positions are shaped and tested under “one simplified truth about hugely complex international matters,” as Jan Oberg observed.

    Typically, 30 of the 300 HSF invitees are journalists. Justin Ling, Steven Chase, Robert Fife, Andrew Coyne, Murray Brewster, Paul Wells, Adrienne Arsenault, Evan Solomon, are some of the Canadian mainstream reporters who at one time or another have reaped the benefits of access to high-powered decision makers via HFX invitation. Ling is a fixture at the annual conference having been invited four times.

    The Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson and Ipsos CEO Darrell Bricker noted back in 2018 that the Halifax forum “has emerged as perhaps the most influential annual conference on global security.” They should know, Ibbitson and Bricker are regular invitees who promote and amplify HFX agendas beyond Halifax; Bricker on behalf of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute a Calgary-based think tank with a mission: “

    “To identify Canadian global interests and promote more active and effective international involvement through rigorous strategic and policy analysis and to help inform Canadians on the connection between international affairs and a secure prosperous Canada.”

    Current HFX president and co-founder Peter Van Praagh was policy advisor to Peter Mackay when the long-time Conservative Nova Scotia politician was foreign affairs minister under then prime minister Stephen Harper.

    Paul Wells, senior writer at Maclean’s, Substacker and HFX regular, gives Van Praagh and the forum a breathless endorsement in a 2022 newsletter titled, ‘The progress of our arms – The Halifax International Security Forum in wartime’:

    Peter Van Praagh has built something sturdy and useful in Halifax. Van Praagh is a former policy advisor to Peter MacKay, who was minister of national defence in the Harper Conservative government, and who was so impressed by a visit to a security conference across the ocean that he wanted to build one closer to home. Van Praagh quickly built Halifax into an important stop on the diplomatic circuit, based largely on his success in getting substantial numbers of high-ranking American senators and members of the House of Representatives to commute north every year from Washington for the weekend. I’ve been to Halifax three times before and wrote about it here, here and here.”

    From the 2022 edition of the Halifax forum Ling tweeted out daily, substantial threads that amplified what approved media like Politico and the Guardian were reporting from the forum and what key note attendees were saying about the state of global security.

    The disinformation oozing out of Ling’s Twitter (X) threads is of the same variety he outlines to journalism audiences and at media round tables on disinformation.

    Excerpts from Ling’s uncritical HFX Twitter (X) coverage from Nov 2022 are revealing:

    Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Olga Stefanishyna is sitting down with journalists now. #HFX2022 On cyber attacks: “On a daily basis, we received more than 1,000” probing attempts on Ukrainian networks. “They have failed.”

    Stefanishyna underscores Ukraine’s cooperation with the International Criminal Court, and eyes the creation of a dedicated tribunal to prosecute Russian war crimes.

    “We’re not so much thinking about this war,” Stefanishyna says about a possible peace deal. “These negotiations should lead to an inability for Russia to have a hunger or appetite for the next aggression.” So sacrificing land or security guarantees can’t be part of the deal.

    We’re hearing from Andriy Yermak, a senior advisor to President Zelensky. He’s joining from Kyiv. “Moscow always sees dark and frost as its allies,” Yermak says. “Russia is a terrorist state.”

    “Attacks on Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure are going to continue,” Yermak says. “Ukriane desperately needs effective missile defence systems: and quick.” Before the winter, he says.

    Yesterday, in a statement, Zelensky said Putin is seeking a short term truce in order to regroup for a second advance in the spring. Has Putin made any direct offers? “We are not interested in any negotiations, any talks, that are not public and not official,” Yermak says.

    Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is delivering remarks now. He’s making the case for continued commitment to Ukraine: Both for world security, but also as a humanitarian imperative.

    Austin is spending a bit of time talking about China’s “increasingly provocative” actions around Taiwan, including intercepting NATO aircraft in international airspace over the South and East China Seas.

    “We are drawing on the lessons of Ukriane to further bolster the self-defence capabilities of our Indo-Pacific partners,” Austin says

    Austin predicts we could see Putin engage in “profoundly irresponsible nuclear sabre rattling” this winter.

    Ling’s comprehensive #HFX2022 Twitter reportage covers a lot of approved but false narratives, from ‘Putin’s war crimes’ to China’s ‘increasingly provocative actions towards Taiwan.’

    For background info Ling attaches links to MSM coverage including his own. With nearly 130,000 Twitter followers at the time, that’s a lot of amplification of disinformation, and who knows how many retweets infected the social media landscape as a result. A solid day’s work for the Canadian clown prince of disinformation.

    Former CBC and CTV current affairs host Evan Solomon now with GZERO Media was also a prolific tweeter from #HFX2022 where he moderated Plenary 4: The Disinformation Nations: Kidnapping Our Citizens, Corrupting Our Officials, Stealing Our Stuff.  

    In a series of tweets Solomon posted streeters, short interviews, from the forum with generals, politicians and thought leaders around this headline:  Authoritarian states are increasingly using disinformation to sow disorder & discontent by eroding a very powerful human emotion: hope.

    The journalism in the independent press and alternative media is generally not jingoistic and does not cheer the military industrial complex into war.

    Independent Canadian journalist, author and activist Yves Engler dedicated a page to the Halifax conference on his foreign policy blog. Writes Engler in a 2022 piece headlined, NDP in bed with neocons over China:

    Sponsored by NATO, DND (dept. of National Defense) and military companies, the HSF is based in Washington. It was set up by a neocon (Van Praagh) who advised the Harper government and was strongly promoted by arch militarist John McCain.

    The piece is about the blowback from Conservatives when the Liberal government pressured Halifax forum organizers not to give its John McCain Prize for Leadership in Public Service to Taiwan’s then president Tsai Ing-wen. The favoured candidate had rejected unification with China under “one country, two systems” as proposed by Chinese head of state Xi Jinping.

    “The award is part of HSF’s growing anti-China posture,” writes Engler. “In November they released a handbook titled ‘China vs. Democracy: The Greatest Game’ that painted Beijing as a threatening force bent on global domination. On Wednesday NDP MPs backed a Conservative motion in the House of Commons, which passed unanimously, supporting giving an award to Tsai and maintaining HSF’s funding.”

    The Halifax security forum receives $3 million a year from Canada’s Department of National Defence.

    Reader-funded indie news outlet, The Maple, also reports more critically than MSM-Canada on what goes on at the Halifax Forum (‘HISF’). In a Nov. 2022 analysis piece titled, Peace a Distant Prospect at The Halifax International Security Forum independent Edmonton-based journalist Jeremy Appel connects the dots between NATO messaging and Canadian journalists operating as embedded MSM mouthpieces for the military industrial complex.

    Edited excerpts from Appel’s HFX 2022 reportage reveal how small the distance is between power structures and Canada’s fourth estate:

    In his brief pre-recorded remarks, which were introduced by CBC News chief correspondent Adrienne Arsenault, President Zelensky lambasted Russia’s calls for a truce, which he called a “respite to regain strength” before continuing its invasion.

    “Immoral compromises will lead to new blood,” he said, calling for the “complete demolition of Russian aggression.” Until then, any talk of peace is meaningless, Zelensky argued.

    The weekend’s first panel, dubbed “And So, Where is the Security?” was moderated by Munk School of Global Affairs Prof. Janice Stein, whom Van Praagh praised as a “Canadian icon.” Stein sits on the HFX board of directors.

    The plenary included (Defence) Minister Anand, Estonian President Alar Karis, New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and World Uyghur Congress president Dolkun Isa.

    Stein kicked off the discussion by asking Karis what he, as the leader of a nation close to Ukraine, would tell Zelensky if he was in attendance.

    Karis called the war in Ukraine a “litmus test” for whether democratic countries are willing to “fight for our democratic principles,” and whether authoritarian states will be able to get away with invading their neighbours.

    “This war is about a lot more than whether Ukraine is able to maintain [its] territorial integrity,” she suggested in agreement with Karis. It’s about defending the “international world order,” Shaheen added.

    Many HFX ‘thought leaders’ and academics like Janice Stein are go-to establishment talking heads on mainstream current affairs programs where they provide wide-ranging expertise and analysis on military matters, foreign interference, disinformation warfare and threats to international order and security.

    Establishment journalists including CBC correspondent Adrienne Arsenault, and GZERO Media publisher Solomon, have been enrolled as forum moderators of working groups including plenary and off-the-record sessions. “Canada’s quiet tech triumphs” was an in-camera session moderated by Arsenault at the 2023 forum.

    Is it any surprise then that when mainstream journalists are not only marinated in approved establishment narratives at security gatherings like HFX, but are taking part in crafting them, that the resulting journalism has a distinctive pro-war bias that favours the establishment and its power structures, including the military and the security state?

    For anti-imperialists, peace and anti-NATO groups, and the annual HFX opposers protesting in front of the Halifax Westin every November, for them the Halifax Security Forum is the Halifax War Conference.

    The mainstream coverage of 2018 conference protests in the Halifax edition of the Toronto Star was refreshingly anti-war and gave voice to peace activists and HFX opponents. I’m including reporter Taryn Grant’s entire report (1 min. read) as we may never see one like it again published by a Canadian mainstream news outlet:

    HALIFAX—A few dozen people rallied against an international political forum in Halifax Saturday, calling it a conference of warmongers.

    Protesters held signs and banners bearing anti-war slogans, facing them toward the downtown Westin Nova Scotian Hotel where the Halifax International Security Forum (HISF) was underway.

    This is the tenth time that Halifax has hosted the NATO-sponsored forum, which this year attracted about 300 delegates including Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan, eight American senators and top military brass from 70 countries.

    “If you just look at the past 10 years, you can see that the security they talk about for 10 years has only brought worse problems, more death, more destruction, more war,” said Kevin Corkill, one of the protesters.

    Corkill said if any of the forum delegates were to venture over to the protest in Edward Cornwallis Park, he would tell them “warmongers are not welcome in Canada.”

    “Canada should be a factor and a zone for peace,” he added.

    Corkill and several others decried the forum over a megaphone to a mostly calm crowd. A few occasional boos and cries of “shame” let out whenever HISF, military action or NATO were mentioned.

    When HISF kicked off on Friday, Sajjan spoke about the importance of defensive efforts, pointing to Russian aggression as a top security concern. He told reporters that the recent centennial of the end of First World War was a reminder of western democracies’ fragility.

    Isaac Saney, a Dalhousie history professor, argued that the forum itself was a democratic threat.

    “What this represents here is the antithesis of democracy, the antithesis of people participating in shaping the direction of society,” he said in an interview.

    “We say not in our name. We want genuine peace, we want peace with justice.”

    “Canada should have an anti-war government. Halifax Harbour should not have war ships, they should be banned, and Halifax should be declared a zone of peace,” he added.

    Protester Alan Bezanson said he and an ad hoc committee called No Harbour for War have been rallying against HISF since it started in 2009, always gathering in Edward Cornwallis Park, across the street from the forum.

    In the past, protesters have thrown a sheet over the statue of Edward Cornwallis — Halifax’s controversial founder who put a bounty on Mi’kmaw scalps — but the statue was taken down last winter.

    Bezanson called it a “significant victory” when addressing the crowd of protesters this year, who stood around the empty platform where the statue used to stand.

    Recent King’s College journalism grad at the time, Grant is now reporting for CBC Halifax. Considering how against the run of MSM coverage Grant’s 2018 ‘warmonger’ story was, I emailed her to ask how the piece came about and how she managed to give it such a pro-peace bias, in favour of the protesters.

    She emailed back:

    ‘I’ll be frank – I was an early-career reporter and it was an easy story to do on a Saturday. Reading it now, I’m a bit embarrassed that I didn’t include a comment (or at least indicate that I’d made an attempt to get a comment) from the security forum organizers.’

    The late Robert Fisk would have lamented Grant’s j-school mea culpa.

    Labeled a journalistic provocateur in his day, the legendary war correspondent, and owner of a Carleton University honorary degree, Fisk said he didn’t believe in objective journalism and according to one diarist, called it ‘a specious idea that, as practiced by American reporters, produces dull and predictable writing weighed down by obfuscating comments from official government sources.’

    Fisk on journalism was very quotable. His nuggets remain relevant in a war-torn world that’s been given bloody consent by an out of touch fourth estate in Canada and the rest of the NATO and Five Eyes security press.

    Fisk: “Journalism is about truth. It’s about holding power to account, and giving voice to those who have none.”

    Fisk found the notion that ‘unbiased reporting mustn’t take a moral position’ was nonsense. Journalists insisted Fisk, “should, at the very least, challenge narratives of power, which were usually distortions of truth.”

    Dedicated watcher of HFX (HISF) and other military-industrial shopping malls like it, the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada (MLPC) reports back to the community of uninvited and shares via its newsletter a list of who makes up the roster of media representatives from the industrial-military-media complex:

    HFX Media Partners

    There are three U.S. publications/media organizations which are involved in main projects of the U.S. ruling circles to unite the vying factions, especially the huge military bureaucracy and moving more deeply into Canadian ruling circles, while also keeping the people dispersed and disempowered. The HISF describes them collectively as “thought leaders,” an elitist concept that denies the movement for enlightenment. Like the other HISF partners and sponsors, the basis for the partnership is not immediately clear.  

    Foreign Affairs Magazine: “Since its founding in 1922, Foreign Affairs has been the leading forum for serious discussion of American foreign policy and global affairs. It is published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a non-profit and nonpartisan membership organization dedicated to improving the understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international affairs through the free exchange of ideas.”

    Council on Foreign Relations is a leading council that brings various ruling factions together to work out relations. It has been previously described as a veritable shadow government that plans the general strategies of the global imperialist system, acting above any government. The CFR backed the presidential candidacy of Joe Biden and champions the chorus against China. The editor of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Rose, formerly of the U.S. State Dept., is participating in the 2020 HISF conference.

    POLITICO: This is a specialized U.S. political news journal, which recently moved into Canada with a subscription-based edition and a free weekly newsletter Crossroads. This company says it “strives to be the dominant source for politics and policy in power centers across every continent where access to reliable information, non-partisan journalism and real-time tools creates, informs and engages a global citizenry.” John Harris, Politico Editor-in-Chief, is a member of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS) board of trustees, original organizer of the HISF in 2009 and 2010 which followed on security conferences the GMFUS had staged in European countries targeted for U.S. influence operations, such as in Kiev, Ukraine; Riga, Latvia; Bucharest, Romania; and Istanbul, Turkey. It is hosting live streaming of the HISF conference to its readers.

    Foreign Policy Magazine: Although not listed on the HISF’s “Partners and Sponsors” page, it is listed on the “About” page as a media partner. It is U.S. news publication which focuses on global affairs, current events, and domestic and international policy. It was founded in 1970 during the turmoil of the Vietnam War by the imperialist ideologue Samuel P. Huntington of the “clash of civilizations” theory and Warren Demian Manshel.

    When foreign policy issues are ventilated inside security fora such as the HFX, CANSEC, the Best Defence Conference, the Global Security Forum et al, what the establishment press publishes contains more than a hint of the sinophobic, russophobic and ultimately uneducated Cold War II ‘reportage’ that corporate news outlets like CBC, CTV, Global News, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and National Post are passing off as journalism.

    The Halifax International Security Forum whose stated mission is “to strengthen strategic cooperation among the world’s democracies” also includes as its sponsors and partners an army of defense contractors including the following:

    –       CADSI (The Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries) is the national industry voice of more than 900 Canadian defence and security companies.

    –       Anduril – A US military technology company: ‘The company’s products enable security awareness, multi-domain launch capability and survey, inspection and Intelligence solutions across land, sea and air.’

    –       MDA – Canadian space technology company headquartered in Brampton, Ontario. The Department of National Defence is currently developing a new generation of Canadian military ships, and MDA is designing the Electronic Warfare system.

    –       CAE – Formerly Canadian Aviation Electronics, CAE is a high technology company providing ‘training and operational support solutions to global defense and security customers.’

    –       Pansophico works exclusively with democracies. We are dedicated to enhancing national and international security by building the military readiness of allied democracies. Pansophico sources and provides access to military and security hardware, technology, and advanced training.

    –        NATO: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is listed under its own heading that reads “With Support From.” Its entry on the HISF website reads:

    “The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s fundamental purpose is to safeguard the freedom and security of its members through political and military means. NATO brings together 28 member countries from Europe and North America, consulting and cooperating in the fields of security and defence. In this respect, NATO provides a unique transatlantic link for political and security cooperation.”

    Marxist Leninist newsletter writers don’t hold back their contention: “In practice, the HISF is fully embroiled in NATO’s agenda and provides a venue for it to promote its aggressive aims.”

    Establishment columnists like Terry Glavin are more reverential and better schooled in approved narratives. In a December 2021 National Post article titled, China’s disinformation campaign against Canada’s election is undeniable, Gavin dutifully promotes the work of HFX ‘thought leaders’:

    “We’ve gone well past the point where merely taking note of Beijing’s lies and belligerence will suffice. At the Halifax Security Forum two weeks ago, conference organizers released a 93-page strategy offering a reappraisal of the democratic world’s approach to China, based on consultations with 250 international diplomatic and security experts. It’s a refreshing document, written in plain language, about what democracies are facing, and how democracies need to start uniting against the threats Beijing poses.”

    Establishment ‘journalism’ as practiced by Justin Ling and jingoistic MSM-Canada colleagues like Glavin does not give voice to foreign state actors Russia, China, Iran and Syria to help news audiences better understand their positions, their concerns, initiatives and undertakings.

    There has never been a keynote speech, plenary or symposium at the Halifax International Security Forum that promotes diplomatic strategies for peace negotiations with the West’s so-called ‘adversaries’.

    Whatever it takes

    HSF 2023 plenary sessions point to a singular preoccupation of NATO and its allies: to prolong the Ukraine-Russia war to ‘the last Ukrainian’, as coined by Keith Kellogg, former national security advisor to then US VP Mike Pence:

    • Make the World Safe Again: Victory in Ukraine

    • Victory in Ukraine = Message to the CRINKs (China/Russia/Iran/North Korea)

    • Victory in Ukraine = Example for Israel

    • Victory in Ukraine = Indo-Pacific Possibilities

    • Victory in Ukraine = Feeding the World

    • Victory in Ukraine = Allies’ Access to Innovation

    • Victory in Ukraine = Climate Cooperation

    • For as Long as it Takes: Victory in Ukraine.

    Conference host Van Praagh’s welcome speech and introduction of freshly minted Canadian defence minister Bill Blair piles on enough Cold War II talking points to feed several MSM news cycles.

    This Violent New Era of global conflict that we are experiencing can be directly linked to Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Putin’s aggression gave bad actors and rogue regimes permission to challenge the rules-based international order and our Democratic Values. The simple truth is that when Putin fails in Ukraine solving all Global issues will become easier. Our goal this weekend is to show that China, Russia, Iran and North Korea who we’re calling the CRINKS, showing them that our resolve cannot be shaken when democracies work together there’s no challenge that cannot be met with strong voices like Minister Blair. I’m confident that the Halifax International Security forum will achieve that goal.”

    Blair echoes Van Praagh and lays out what Canadians can expect from its military on his watch in the near future.

    “When everything we stand for is challenged, as it has been by Vladimir Putin, we must stand with the Ukrainian people. Meanwhile in other parts of the world such as the Indo Pacific countries like China are openly challenging the rules-based international order. As a Pacific country ourselves, Canada is increasing our military presence in the region. We need to be there and we will be there and around the world. State and non-state actors are spreading disinformation meant to divide and cause chaos. There have been advances in technology like artificial intelligence which creates in some circumstances new opportunities but also new threats and new battlefields.”

    At the end of Blair’s key note speech Ling is at the front of the line for the Q & A. His first question is out of the playbook, “What will it take for Ukraine to prevail?”

    Blair’s response was a shopping list of ‘whatever it takes’ to prolong NATO’s proxy war with Russia. The defence minister’s overarching theme was that there is opportunity in escalation for innovators and defense contractors.

    Canadian Press reporter Mike MacDonald, next in line after Ling, asks Blair about that:

    “I wanted to ask you about the defense policy update Minister Blair. You’ve been quoted as saying that you’ve described this policy as a national industrial policy what did you mean by that?”

    Blair scans the packed room, many of the attendees are defense contractors:

    “What I was trying to be clear about, is it’s more than just a defense policy update. It’s an important update for our our military defense industry in this country. It’s also an important update on our policy with respect to foreign policy, because I believe absolutely defense policy and foreign policy are are intertwined.”  

    Also intertwined with Canada’s global affairs policies are approved establishment news media and their foot soldiers.

    Disinformation warriors like ‘investigative’ reporter Justin Ling and his colleagues in the corporate press continue to manufacture consent for Canada’s bloody contribution to a US-led NATO proxy war that’s killing off an entire generation of Ukrainians.

    All that to say, here’s hoping that when investigative journalists like Ling, independent, alternative, mainstream or otherwise, are invited to hold up a mirror to the journalism community and lecture us about what is disinformation, the least we will do is challenge the veracity of their claims and the facts of their dishonest reporting.

    Denouement

    In journalism school we were taught to end a news story, longer current affairs pieces and even interviews with a view to what’s next and what’s ahead for the people in the story Something for audiences to be on the look-out for.

    Not being the owner of a crystal ball, I’m still willing to make the reckless prediction that what’s ahead for global affairs journalism in Canadian corporate news media, as we currently despise it and mistrust it, is irrelevance. The clown prince practitioners of false narratives will become peripheral, pushed to the margins.

    The accumulated weight of disinformation, lies and propaganda under which MSM-Canada’s foreign affairs journalism currently creaks and groans, is not sustainable. Something has to give.

    If the future of journalism in Canada is not independence, then we can kiss our freedoms goodbye.

    But as a journalism community we don’t have to remain as sluggish as we were about Assange.

    We can take action.

    The media criticism and journalism analysis coming from Canadian independents is a start – the Maple, the Breach, the Canada Files, Dimitri Lascaris, Yves Engler, CJPME et al – they are already doing vital work holding Canada’s Fourth Estate to account when it comes to dishonest political coverage and foreign affairs reporting.

    Add to that the scrutiny from global progressive news media outing mainstream journalism for its pro-war and other establishment biases, and maybe there’s hope for democracy-informing journalism which Canadians deserve.

    When we amplify verified, fact-based independent reporting, truth will inevitably prevail – and embedded stenographers like Ling will be left standing, as naked as the emperor wearing only one simplified truth.

    Addendum

    In 2013 Chris Hedges gave a journalism talk in the same University of Western Ontario lecture hall where Justin Ling unpacked his state-sponsored propaganda eleven years later to a FIMS audience.

    Imagine a Canadian journalism school today inviting an award-winning American war correspondent who is also an activist, who supports the Occupy movement, and Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and Palestine, and have him unleash subversive ideas wrapped in metaphors about truth, power, morality in journalism  and the value of the alternative press.

    Please permit this American illustration to make a point about the state of our own journalism in Canada.

    By way of conclusion, here are some excerpts from Hedges’ 2013 talk at FIMS titled, the State of Journalism, a timely time capsule analysis, available in its entirety on YouTube.

    Hedges begins by dissecting the establishment media’s ineffectiveness in bringing about change:

    I think what’s most important is we begin to understand how power is configured. Because if we are entranced by the mirage of the formal systems of power, the political theater, we end up doing what Bill McKibben did with 350.org – where you get 40,000 people on a Sunday walking around the White House and not stepping off the sidewalk.

    It’s not going to stop the XL pipeline.

    The only thing that’s going to stop XL pipeline is a blockade. And Mckibben would have been far better taking 50 people down to sit in front of the pipeline than 40,000 people standing around the White House chanting.

    I think that is a failure to understand where our power lies. We can’t effectively fight back until we make an astute critique of power. Which means that the very liberal institutions are essentially our enemy in the sense that they divert energy back into a dead political system. So, I think that it’s incumbent upon us.

    And frankly, the only way that’s going to happen is for you to shut down your electronic hallucinations.

    Turn off Facebook, don’t put anything in your ears, throw out your TV.

    You have to read.

    And that’s what frightens me, that as we sever ourselves from a print-based culture we lose the capacity to deconstruct the culture around us.

    (journalism of today) It’s all about how you feel and how you’re made to feel … but that’s the society we are slipping towards. You’re not as far gone as we are (in the US). But you know, every time I come up, I see indications that you’re headed in that direction.

    It was the radical movements that pressured the liberals, the formal mechanisms of power to respond. I mean, the liberal class was never designed to be the political left. So, you destroy your radical movements and then in the name of any ‘communism’ you hollow out your liberal institutions, and your state ossifies.

    But yes, the liberal class designed it (power structure), because they set the parameters of debate. I mean for instance, you could critique the war in Vietnam, or you could critique the war in Iraq but you couldn’t question the virtue of the leadership.

    You couldn’t question the system of capitalism itself. Once you cross those lines you instantly become a pariah and that’s why the class or the group that hates Noam Chomsky the most is not the right wing, it’s the liberal class because Chomsky exposes their complicity with the systems of power.

    -30-


    Peter Biesterfeld is a freelance writer, independent documentary maker and educator based in Toronto. He writes and makes films about social justice and mediawatch issues. He has written for NOW magazine, Common Ground, The Dominion and Videomaker.


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    Editor’s note: The Canada Files’ is re-publishing Peter Biesterfeld’s two-part series, ‘One Simplified Truth’ originally released on his Substack, with updated titles and some small adjustments. This is part one.

    Written by: Peter Biesterfeld

    Today’s mainstream media are the single largest barrier to understanding the world we live in, and where it and humanity are heading

    – Jan Oberg, founder Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research (TTF)

    Jan Oberg’s claim bears repeating for as long as MSM-Canada journalists misreport what’s going on in the world. In a Transnational Foundation research paper titled, Smokescreen – An analysis of the west’s destructive cold war agenda and why it must stop, Oberg writes:

    “Over the last 20 or so years, a tremendous effort has been directed at the mainstream, private and public service media to hammer out only one simplified truth about hugely complex international matters. Hardly by coincidence, they are always compatible with the foreign – normally interventionist – policies of the U.S. and NATO allies.”

    Oberg’s assessment is alarmingly true when applied to Canadian mainstream news media. The corporate press in Canada today is mostly a pro-war press whose reporters are manufacturing consent for Canada’s belligerent US-influenced foreign policy.

    Canadian journalists who are filing and publishing international affairs content for establishment news outlets, are misinforming news audiences with every news cycle. Uncritical MSM reporting of only approved narratives supplied by official sources amounts to press release journalism which indeed, packages international affairs into ‘one simplified truth’ – the ‘truth’ according to the US-led, and cited ad nauseam, ‘international rules-based order’.

    Balanced insight and reliable analyses of geopolitical affairs and Canada’s role in them are sparse on the Canadian news landscape. Foreign affairs reporting by MSM-Canada reporters is sharply biased in favour of establishment interests and its power structures, the ultimate stakeholders in the military-industrial-media-complex, as coined by Helen Johnson in The Miscellany News a series of 2021 articles:

    “The potential for those who hold power within the military-industrial complex to use the media to influence public opinion, either intentionally or indirectly, is extraordinary…the concentration of power within the corporate media and the MIC (Military Industrial Complex), along with the intersections of these industries, can influence the messaging we receive on a daily basis. This can have devastating implications for democracy.”

    The aim of this paper is to illuminate how Canadian foreign affairs journalism in the main is focused largely through a military and state security lens. The pages that follow reveal how establishment bias in Canadian global affairs journalism ‘hardly happens by coincidence’ and that MSM-Canada journalists who warn the loudest against disinformation about Russia and China and Gaza and Syria and Iran are the very ink-stained wretches who are publishing most of it.

    ‘Reporting in a house of mirrors’ reads the entry on the campus events calendar.

    Last March one of the most prestigious journalism schools in the country, the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) at the University of Western Ontario in London invited investigative reporter Justin Ling to give a talk on safeguarding Canadian news consumers from disinformation.

    Montreal-based, award-winning author Ling penned Missing from the village (2020), a critical analysis of Toronto Police Services’ investigation of Bruce McArthur, the serial killer who murdered seven men in Toronto’s Gay Village between 2010 and 2017. Ling spotlights his crime and justice beat on his Muckrack profile, but these days Ling’s journalistic output, which is published widely across a spectrum of news media outlets, is preoccupied with ‘keeping tabs on extremism.’

    Ling’s work serves as an eye-opening case study for this report which argues that disinformation has become the ‘news normal’ in Canadian foreign affairs journalism as more establishment journalists like Ling are misinforming news consumers daily about global affairs, world events and Canada’s function and responsibilities on the international stage.

    Ling tells his FIMS audience: “I’ve been covering the problem of misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, political polarization, some cases of outright extremism for the last several years, and I think I’m starting to get an appreciation for the fact that we might not be doing a great job of dealing with it.”

    In the abstract, posted on line to promote his talk Ling sets up “the problem of misinformation” as he sees it:

    These days, it feels like we don’t even know what we’re arguing about anymore. Our society has been riven by political polarization, paranoid populism, even extremism, brought on by a deluge of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Our collective conversation has been warped, skewed, stretched, and shrunk beyond recognition, making it harder and harder to see what’s right in front of our faces. Journalists have rushed around, trying to correct all the distortion — often to little avail. Our body politic has suffered as a result, with crises and critical policy questions being ignored in favour of ideological crusades and small grievances made to look massive. If we are ever to face the myriad of problems facing us, we will need to return to some kind of collective reality. To get there, journalists will need to take the lead.

    Ling laments how bad the disinformation problem is and that “there should be no great surprise the problem is getting worse”. The diligent disinformation warrior who has written prolifically on the topic for the Globe and Mail, Politico, CBC, Buzzfeed, and many other outlets, captures the attention of his impressionable audience:

    “I want to tell you a little story,” Ling begins. “It’s a story of how I became friends with a Russian spy.

    Ling’s yarn about his relationship with a ‘disinformation-peddling’ intelligence source at the Russian embassy in Ottawa is worth retelling for its alarming falsehoods which Ling glibly presents as facts to FIMS students and faculty. To illustrate how pervasive and sinister the Russian disinformation threat is Ling recalls how over beers then embassy press secretary Kirill Kalinin tried to impress upon him the Russian perspective of events regarding Ukraine.

    Ling’s tone is dismissive:

    “What’s becoming increasingly clear over the course of our conversation is that a lot of those disinformation narratives the ones that Russia has been sort of peddling, that aren’t working all that well, they come like second nature to Kalinin: Canada, oh, it’s full of russophobic people who want to revive the Cold War, naturally, right? Russia, well, it didn’t mean to invade Crimea, you know. Ukraine, oh it’s full of neo-nazis that are being led around by the CIA right? So, over the course of the conversation it’s getting increasingly unreal, right? We’re just living, in some ways, two fundamentally different realities.”

    Ling’s incredulity at Kalinin’s attempt to explain Russia’s position on Ukraine comes from the same mistrust expressed by MSM reporters in their coverage of the Kremlin’s ‘information warfare’ – any information from Russian sources can’t be trusted, it’s all propaganda. By publicly dismissing Kalinin’s arguments as ‘unreal’ Ling exposes himself as the ‘disinformer’ who indeed, is living in a disturbingly ‘different reality’, a reality void of context, history and root causes.

    The public record shows that the ‘disinformation narratives’ Ling says Kalinin was peddling are actually based in fact. A critical review of Ling’s derisive talking points, taken one at a time, might be instructive, beginning with Ling’s attempt to sweep under the rug Kalinin’s concern for anti-Russia sentiments in Canada.

    You don’t have to be a history scholar to appreciate that current Russophobia in the West didn’t suddenly sprout up in February 2022 with Russia’s overt military action in Ukraine. A thumbnail history of anti-Kremlin thought in the West including in Canada, shows how mainstream news outlets got here from there:

    Way back when professional journalism was still in diapers, Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), the American media critic and scholarly journalist who coined the term ‘cold war’, gave the New York Times a failing grade in a 1920 news analysis for ‘short changing the public in its systemically biased and incomplete reporting of the Russian Revolution.” The report titled, Testing the News was co-authored by Charles Merz (1893-1977) who at the time reported for the then progressive New Republic but who would go on to become the New York Times’ long-serving Editorial Page Editor (1938 to 1961).

    Lippmann and Merz conclude in Testing the News: “In the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing, not what was but what men wanted to see. From the point of view of professional journalism, the reporting of the Russian revolution is nothing short of a disaster…They were performing the supreme duty in a democracy of supplying the information on which public opinion feeds, and they were derelict in their duty.”

    Columnist and award-winning author Patrick Lawrence (NYT, Counterpunch, Consortium News, et al) traces the roots of Russophobia in Anglo-western journalism back to Lippman and Merz in his 2023 work, Journalists and their Shadows which according to political writer Diane Johnstone’s cover blurb is “an eloquent plea for the revival of honest journalism”.

    Referencing Merz and Lipmann’s assessment of NYT’s biased anti-Russia reporting, Lawrence writes in Shadows:

    “So long as there was a chance Russia would continue fighting Germany, the newspaper of record (NYT) offered readers a positive picture of the October revolution. When it became clear that the Bolsheviks would pull the new Soviet Union out of the war ‘The Red Peril’ theme appeared in the Times foreign report, and organized propaganda for US intervention penetrated the news. One could carry these judgments forward to the post-Roosevelt half of the 1940s, and indeed to our age of raging Russophobia, without altering a syllable.”

    Independent Canadian journalist and author Yves Engler who hosts a weekly podcast ‘Canadian Foreign Policy Hour’, contradicts Ling’s repudiation of made-in-Canada Russophobia.

    In a September, 2023 blogpost titled, Russophobia a 150-year-old official Canadian passion Engler explains:

    “Russophobia in Canada is largely an outgrowth of the country’s relationship to the British and US Empires, which have viewed Russia as an imperial competitor… As part of its ties to the British empire, Ottawa has been in a near state of war with Russia for over a century and a half.”

    Engler’s summary of Canada’s historical involvement in Russian affairs includes references to early Canadian military history: Canadians volunteer for British units fighting Russia in the 1853 Crimean war; during WWI, six thousand Canadians fought alongside British forces against Russia between 1917 and 1920.

    Writes Engler:

    “Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Ottawa worked to isolate Moscow. Canada opposed a treaty to guarantee Russia’s pre-World War I frontiers, and for most of that period had no diplomatic relations with Moscow.”

    When Ling dismisses Russophobia in Canada he is outing himself as a careless researcher at best or at worst as a fraud who knows the background, but neglects to inform his audience to maintain his establishment bias..

    Canada’s enthusiastic anti-Russia position alongside the US state department’s was revealed in WikiLeaks’ 2010 ‘cablegate’ releases. Since the USSR fell apart in 1991 Canada has worked the diplomatic circuit on behalf of the US and NATO to promote NATO expansion eastward including a NATO Membership Action Plan for Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.

    Justin Ling and his MSM-Canada colleagues will have their audiences believe that any narrative that promotes Russia’s decades-long concern about NATO encroachment and western belligerence on its borders, is promoting Russian propaganda. However, the public record, including explicit diplomatic correspondence, chronicled over time, illustrates the full extent of the Kremlin’s vehement concern. News consumers wouldn’t know this from reading Ling’s ‘investigative reports’.

    Published previously in Facts are Subversive #3:

    In a diplomatic memo (June 9, 2008) titled “Volker consults with Canadians on NATO”, Kurt Volker, US ambassador to the UN under Bush and later Donald Trump’s special representative for Ukraine, writes a summary of his visit to Ottawa. Some excerpts:

    –       Ottawa wants to collaborate with the U.S. in an effort to face the range of Russian challenges, to make MAP available to Ukraine and Georgia, and to counter German efforts to steer NATO policy in unhelpful directions.

    –       (Canadian PM) Harper pressed his Italian, German, French, and British counterparts for the quick extension of MAP (NATO Membership Action Plan) to Ukraine and Georgia, (Acting Foreign and Defense Policy Adviser) Sinclair said. Canada’s bottom-line, she added, is that MAP is “imperative for Ukraine…but Georgia too.”

    In another cable dated June 6, 2008 two German foreign affairs diplomats Norman Walter and Rolf Nikel raise concerns with US counterpart David Merkel “that if MAP were pushed forward too quickly in Ukraine, where public opinion is bitterly divided on the issue of NATO membership, it could prove destabilizing and “split” the country.”

    It doesn’t get much more anti-Russia than Global Affairs minister Melanie Joly’s explanation to a Canadian Press reporter in the National Post the reason for Canada’s 2023 sanctions on Russia:

    “We’re able to see how much we’re isolating the Russian regime right now — because we need to do so economically, politically and diplomatically — and what are the impacts also on society, and how much we’re seeing potential regime change in Russia.”  

    With language straight out of U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s playbook Joly calls for regime change in Moscow, the ‘forcible or coercive replacement of one government regime with another’ – surely the ultimate ‘foreign interference’.

    Not one interference-obsessed MSM-Canada journalist challenges the Trudeau government’s US go-along policy. The National Post, uncritically reprints Ukrainian Canadian Congress president Alexandra Chyczij’s approval of Joly’s sanctions announcement:

    ‘Chyczij said the group would continue calling for a full trade embargo against Russia by Canada and its allies, along with the designation of Russia as a state supporter of terrorism, the expulsion of all Russian diplomats from Canada, and more effective enforcement of sanctions that have already been imposed.

    “Russia — a genocidal, terrorist state — must be treated as a pariah and isolated entirely from the international community,” she said in a statement.’

    Up and down the corridors of Canadian power a culture of Russophobia has infected decision makers, think tankers and media commentators.

    No CDN MSM journalist has publicly challenged government security institutions about the details of Russia’s ‘security threat’; not one reporter has expressed concern over Melanie Joly unflinchingly riding shotgun to a belligerent US foreign policy.

    Justin Ling – Canadian Clown Prince of Disinformation

    In his talk Ling continues to scoff at Kalinin’s claims, “Russia didn’t mean to invade Crimea…”

    The throwaway paraphrasing and dismissive tone towards his source’s Russian version of things diminishes the ramifications of an important historical building block in the Ukraine conflict. What happened in Crimea in 2014 is a critical causal piece in the evolution of the Ukrainian civil war, that deserves overdue and unbiased media attention.

    Unless Ling’s audience of young journalists did their own research, they will have come away from the disinformation warrior’s talk with the same false ‘Russia’s unprovoked invasion’ narrative that Ling’s MSM colleagues have been reporting during ten years of their Crimea ‘coverage’.

    The independent press, which according to Ling, ‘exists in a totally alternate reality’, contradicts MSM-Canada on all things Crimea.

    The late Robert Parry, former investigative reporter with Newsweek, AP and PBS who in 1995 founded the first US independent online news outlet, Consortium News, unpacks the background to what happened in Crimea in a 2015 article:

    A central piece of the West’s false narrative on the Ukraine crisis has been that Russian President Vladimir Putin “invaded” Crimea and then staged a “sham” referendum purporting to show 96 percent support for leaving Ukraine and rejoining Russia. More recently, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland claimed that Putin has subjected Crimea to a “reign of terror.”

    Both elements have been part of the “group think” that dominates U.S. political and media circles, but this propagandistic storyline simply isn’t true, especially the part about the Crimeans being subjugated by Russia.”

    The public record, independent reporting and even some Western establishment news outlets reported at the time that referendum results expressed the legitimate will of the majority of the Crimean people.

    In a March 2015 report on polling results titled, One Year After Russia Annexed Crimea, Locals Prefer Moscow To Kiev, Kenneth Rapoza writes in Forbes Magazine:

    “One year after the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea, poll after poll shows that the locals there — be they Ukrainians, ethnic Russians or Tatars are mostly all in agreement: life with Russia is better than life with Ukraine.

    Little has changed over the last 12 months.  Despite huge efforts on the part of Kiev, Brussels, Washington and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the bulk of humanity living on the Black Sea peninsula believe the referendum to secede from Ukraine was legit.”

    From behind his podium at FIMS Ling characterizes independent and anti-imperialist coverage of Ukraine as ‘Putin’s lies’, including the ones about ‘a Nazi problem in Ukraine.’ Ling scorns at the thought: “Ukraine, oh it’s full of neo-nazis that are being led around by the CIA, right?” Nothing to see here, Ling suggests to his audience, it’s all Moscow propaganda.

    The historical record differs. Independent journalism about Ukraine’s ultra-right elements make the mocking ‘analysis’ coming from Ling and other establishment-biased commentators sound like simplistic drivel.

    Long before Putin raised it as an issue of concern, before his 2022 military intervention into Donbass, traditional news outlets of note were reporting Ukrainian nationalist extremist involvement in the Maidan protests and Neo-Nazi factions operating in governance and military structures inside Ukraine.

    In an August 2014 Foreign Policy piece titled, Preparing for War With Ukraine’s Fascist Defenders of Freedom, Alec Luhn reports on ‘the new offensive in Eastern Ukraine’ near Mariupol:

    The Azov Battalion — so named for the Sea of Azov on which this industrial city is located — is one of dozens of volunteer battalions fighting alongside pro-government forces in eastern Ukraine. After separatist troops and armor attacked from the nearby Russian border and took the neighboring town of Novoazovsk, this openly neo-Nazi unit has suddenly found itself defending the city against what Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called a Russian invasion.”

    In a September 2014 Guardian report titled, Azov fighters are Ukraine’s greatest weapon and may be its greatest threat, Shaun Walker writes:

    “… there is an increasing worry that while the Azov and other volunteer battalions might be Ukraine’s most potent and reliable force on the battlefield against the separatists, they also pose the most serious threat to the Ukrainian government, and perhaps even the state, when the conflict in the east is over. The Azov causes particular concern due to the far right, even neo-Nazi, leanings of many of its members.”

    Since these 10-year-old reports were published, social media platforms and independent news outlets on all sides of the political divide have curated, amplified and posted audio-visual ‘evidence’ of a Nazi factor in Ukraine – evidence that suggests there is a good deal to see here.

    Via The Grayzone

    Journalism Fraud – Erasing Unapproved Narratives

    The Ukrainian civil war context i.e., the history of pro-Ukraine military versus Donbass/Luhansk separatist forces, eight years before “Russia’s unprovoked, full-scale invasion” goes unreported in the mainstream Canadian press. Ling and his pack of disinformation watchdogs are erasing vital milestones from recent history and flattening the discourse to ensure only approved narratives get out.

    Anyone who does independent research will find that what Ling’s source, the ‘Russian spy’ Kalinin had to say about root causes of the Ukraine conflict to be entirely correct. For Ling and his fellow stenographers in the mainstream media to misrepresent and attempt to erase historical context amounts to journalism fraud.

    Ling’s most unforgivable act of dishonest journalism is his zealous frenzy to erase, discredit and smear the important work of the alternative press. According to Ling, news outlets who publish narratives not approved by the NATO and Five Eyes media complex “carry water for despots who we know…committed war crimes.” 

    The anti-war and anti-imperialist reporters Justin Ling wants to suppress include some of the most respected independent voices doing accountability journalism in the progressive news media.

    In an email exchange for this paper, Ling characterized the work of independent reporters including Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté and Canadian freelancer Eva K. Bartlett as “junk reporting and propaganda.” According to Ling independent news outlets like Consortium News, the Grayzone, Telesur et al, are “more driven by cheering for the ‘home team’ than the legacy press”:

    The so-called independent journalists you keep referencing are getting paid by oppressive regimes to deny war crimes, be it via state broadcasters or the regimes themselves. They are not independent at all. Max Blumenthal and the Grayzone have tried to cover up chemical weapons war crimes in Syria, ethnic cleansing of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang, and deflected Russian imperial aggression in Ukraine. Bartlett has done much of the same.

    Ling suggests independent journalism of seasoned reporters like Chris Hedges are contentious and that not enough stock is put into the journalism of his preferred indie outlets. He writes in an email:

    “The issue I take with Hedges — or, more often, people who put too much stock into Hedges’ analysis — is that you’re not listening to all independent, progressive outlets, just the ones who confirm your worldview. In this instance, outlets like The Counteroffensive, Meduza, The Kyiv Independent are both critical of the major outlets,and often doing a better job. Why do they never factor into your commentary?”

    In my email response to Ling I include many of the same arguments I’ve made to other Canadian journalists and editors whose journalism is littered with the same establishment-biases. Please allow me to share:

    “To suggest ‘you’re not listening to all independent, progressive outlets, just the ones who confirm your worldview’ is a deflection from my true research interest which is to get at the facts of what is going on in foreign affairs regardless of the outlet doing the reporting, progressive or traditional media. So, when MSM Canada, Buzzfeed-affiliated Meduza or Global Affairs Canada-funded Kyiv Independent make claims about Syria, China, Russia etc. I prefer to verify their claims and allegations against what’s actually going on and reported elsewhere before I bite and swallow. What MSM never reports, including yourself, is that there are actually ‘alternative facts’ claimed by other sources. Facts that fly against prevailing narratives.

    The most reliable sources in foreign affairs reporting that I’ve found are the ones independents go to for long-form investigative reporting and long sit-down interviews that don’t necessarily spare the ‘home team.’ The public record helps; “read before you write” is not what MSM journous do. If they do, they prefer to read and regurgitate their own stuff, as you are confirming in our exchanges. When I stop finding examples of blatant violations of journalistic principles (unsubstantiated & establishment biased reporting like yours) in the corporate and mainstream press I will report that.

    When MSM shit all over Tucker Carlson for interviewing Putin we know MSM has lost not only its curiosity about what’s going on but have decided that news consumers should pay no attention. That’s censorship management. It wasn’t a great interview from the interviewer’s perspective but hell, news consumers finally heard from ‘the enemy’. I learned a bucket load. Putin’s explainers made what comes out of the mouths of Western leaders sound like kindergarten gibberish.

    The fact that your reportage, and that of others, continues to accommodate and amplify long-debunked MSM claims such as Russiagate for example, gives considerable urgency to my feeble corrective attempts, to keep yelling at the emperor and his stenographer court-jesters for wearing nothing but officially approved narratives. 

    The Twitter Files are a must read for any journalist wishing to hold power to account or do the kind of journalism that serves the public’s right to know. The Grayzone’s investigative work that leveraged Israeli media’s own reporting is what accountability journalism looks like.

    My research shows that journalists like yourself are not doing that kind of journalism. Your reporting and that of most MSM-Canada reporters, is not only establishment-biased but inaccurate and blocks the understanding of Canadian news consumers, and any impressionable unwashed j-school audiences, of the true state of global affairs.“

    In July 2022, CBC-The National gave Ling a 10-minute window, complete with a documentary video package, to explain to CBC audiences that independent news outlets and journalists like Eva Bartlett have a history of peddling pro-Russian information, propaganda and conspiracy theories.

    Ling’s maligning analysis of Bartlett’s vital eye-witness reporting on Ukraine and Syria, and CBC’s careless amplification of Ling’s slanderous claims didn’t go unnoticed by Global Research reporter Karin Brothers who holds the public broadcaster to account for publishing Ling’s context-free and ‘defamatory’ report.

    Writes Brothers:

    “Implying that those who call out US responsibility for fomenting the Ukrainian conflict are Russian pawns is cover for those propagating western propaganda — propaganda that:

    ·       ignores the US-backed 2014 coup against the democratically- elected Ukrainian president;

    ·       ignores Zelensky’s landslide victory on the platform of making peace with Russia;

    ·       ignores the U.S. undermining of the Minsk Accords that would have enabled that peace;

    ·       ignores the Kiev government’s ongoing attacks on Donbass civilians [now with the use of new U.S.weaponry!] that have killed over 15,000 Ukrainians since 2014; and that

    ·       even ignores the now-public evidence that the US motive in training tens of thousands of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi soldiers for the last eight years was to prepare them for this proxy war that would weaken Russia and get rid of Putin.

    In just a few bullet points Brothers summarizes the pathological ignorance in MSM reporting on Ukraine.

    When I asked Ling to point out any inaccuracies in the reporting of The Grayzone, Bartlett and the other independents we were referencing in our email exchange, the Canadian clown prince of disinformation stopped responding.

    Defactualization

    Patrick Lawrence calls it POLO, journalism that exercises the ‘power of leaving out’, the kind of journalism that according to Lawrence was common practice 75 years ago:

    “One could find lies in the major dailies during the Cold War – as one can now, indeed. But published untruths and distortion risk revelation. Lies of omission, trafficking in selective facts while leaving unmentioned those that would make a given story genuinely accurate – leave nothing on paper and can be just as effective when the intent is to mislead. To insulate Americans from reality became the work of media altogether during the Cold War decades.” Journalists and their Shadows (2023 – Clarity Press).

    In his 150-pager Lawrence takes a deep dive into root causes for what political theorist Hannah Arendt once called, ‘defactualization’. 

    To compare the “departure from reason, from factual assessment” in the journalism during the cold war to the reporting of today Lawrence references Arendt’s 1971 analysis, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” published in the New York Review of Books.

    Lawrence contends in Shadows that compromises in journalism then and now are rooted in what he calls ‘certain malign practices.’ Chief among them is what Lawrence calls ‘the access game’: “There is one rule – Write to reflect well on your sources if you want to keep those sources, even if they are in ‘defactualization’ mode.”

    Reliable and honest journalism writes Lawrence, “requires reporters to accept the risk of falling out of favour among their sources. Implicit in this are assumptions of equity and a proper distance between reporter and reported upon.”

    In Canadian establishment and corporate journalism that distance doesn’t exist. Mainstream Canadian reporters covering international, security affairs, and imparting analysis of Canada’s role in global events, are effectively embedded with their sources.

    Embedded

    Compromised foreign affairs journalism in the US legacy press inevitably spills over into Canadian mainstream coverage – a decades old and inevitable tradition when American and Canadian foreign policies are joined at the hip. ‘When Washington sneezes Ottawa catches cold.’

    When Canadian news media parrot US perspectives we get disinformation – which Oxford defines as: false information which is intended to mislead, especially propaganda issued by a government organization to a rival power or the media.

    When Googling “disinformation” very high up on the response page is a Canada.ca link titled, Online Disinformation – The gateway page links to everything the government of Canada wants citizens to know about disinformation, who’s doing it, why, and how to fight it.

    The government site alerts Canadians that, “disinformation damages the pillars of our democracy”, and reserves its most dire warning for Russia’s “dissemination of lies”:

    Sometimes state actors spread disinformation to support a specific agenda, such as the Kremlin’s use of disinformation in the invasion of Ukraine. Other times, the goal is to amplify divisions in our society by stirring up hot-button issues. If enough people react to a post, the disinformation takes on a life of its own.”

    The reason for bringing up the state’s official position and strategies around disinformation is to point out how closely the perspectives and concerns of the government of Canada’s security and military institutions are mirrored in the reporting of domestic mainstream journalists.

    Many of the widely read A-listers in the Canadian Anglo-establishment press are shoulder to shoulder with Ling on the front lines of the disinformation / propaganda wars.

    In central Canada, where I get my mainstream news, Steven Chase, Robert Fife, Andrew Coyne, Adrienne Arseneault, Rosemary Barton, Murray Brewster, Johnathan Kay, Chris Brown and Paul Wells come to mind. There are many other ‘disinformation warriors’ of course, like Evan Solomon, Warren Kinsella, Vassy Kapelos, John Ivison, the late Rex Murphy, Terry Glavin, John Ibbitson and Rosie DiManno.

    What they all have in common is that their foreign affairs reporting and analyses are sharply focused through an establishment, military and state security lens.

    Reportage from this cohort of Canadian MSM journalists on China, the Global South in general, Russia, and the Middle East is mostly uncritical of Canada’s lockstep relationship with US foreign policy. Should Global Affairs Canada fall out of step and not top up Canada’s defense budget to US or NATO expectations, Ling and his comrades in the NATO-aligned press will wag their collective finger and report accordingly.

    Accountability journalism as practiced by the Canadian establishment press means accountability to the self-appointed ‘international rules-based order’ of the US-led collective west.

    In a December 2021 MacLean’s article, titled, ‘Will Canada help save Ukraine?’ Ling writes: “In recent years, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s foreign policy posture has been a slouch.”

    Two months before Russia launched its 2022 military operations into Donbass, Ling warned against weak Canadian leadership in the face of Russian aggression: “Sending American and Canadian troops to fight in Ukraine is almost unimaginable. So, if we’re not prepared to engage militarily, we had better double-down on a diversity of other tactics. To do that, all of NATO will need to get involved — both operating independently and together — that we make clear the consequences of breaking the international order to steamroll a democratically-elected government in Europe.”

    Ling and many of his Canadian sabre-rattling MSM colleagues come by their vigilance over Beijing and Kremlin ‘threats’ legitimately. Many of the best and brightest Canadian establishment reporters are virtually embedded by the very military-industrial-complex the Fourth Estate is traditionally meant to hold to account.   

    Embedded journalism came into being as an experiment of the US military to provide the media on-ground access, but do so with utmost military control.” The Pangean  

    Embedded journalism in 2024 still means ‘on-ground access.’ However, control over what gets reported and what doesn’t no longer requires overt military or any other official approval. The process of manufacturing consent for US and NATO-led wars in the Canadian mainstream press is more nuanced than that.

    What follows in the remaining pages of this paper is detailed scrutiny, in the Canadian context, of Jan Oberg’s claim that it is “hardly by coincidence” that establishment reporters in their foreign affairs journalism hammer out only one simplified truth, which is inevitably “compatible with the foreign policies of the U.S. and NATO allies.”


    Peter Biesterfeld is a freelance writer, independent documentary maker and educator based in Toronto. He writes and makes films about social justice and mediawatch issues. He has written for NOW magazine, Common Ground, The Dominion and Videomaker.


    Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country’s only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We’ve provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.
     
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  • Source: Ithaka the Movie (@IthakaMovie). Free Julian Assange advocates with the Shiptons after a screening of Ithaka in Toronto, Ontario.

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    Written by: Peter Biesterfeld

     

    Note: This is part three of Peter Biesterfeld’s series for The Canada Files: Facts are Subversive, A Case for anti-war and anti-imperialist journalism. It focuses on how Canada’s mainstream media is failing Canadians with its foreign policy coverage. 

     

    KILLING the MESSENGER

    “If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.” Julian Assange.

    When WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange addressed the 2011 Stop The War Coalition demonstration in London in Trafalgar Square he didn’t hold back in his searing remarks about press collusion in the Iraq and Afghan wars.

    “Who are the war criminals?” asked Assange.  “It’s not just the leaders, it’s also the media. Let us ask ourselves of the complicit media, what is the average death count of each journalist?”

    More than a decade later establishment journalists are equally complicit in promoting the escalation of war in Ukraine.  

    The most damming evidence of a journalism crisis in the Canadian press is that there is virtually no coverage of the press freedom case of our time.

    The persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing inconvenient and unsettling truths about ‘rapacious power’, has received only sparse attention from Canadian newsrooms.

    The scant reporting that has appeared exposes Canadian journalists and editors working for the ‘most trusted’ news brands as abysmally informed and holding an unwavering establishment bias towards Assange and WikiLeaks.

    After Assange’s preliminary extradition hearings in the fall of 2019, this author submitted an op-ed to a news outlet of note about the paucity of Canadian media coverage. The editor’s suggestion for changes in my copy betrayed her bias as well as her ignorance: 

    “Assange is not a sympathetic character in many ways,” she wrote in email. “He is facing sexual assault and rape charges (in Sweden). The connections with involvement in Russian interference in the US election and democracy – I think it needs to be addressed in the op-ed.  It is certainly a strong possible reason why mainstream news in Canada (and elsewhere) isn’t covering the extradition hearings.” 

    International human right lawyer Nils Melzer details the lawfare perpetrated by Sweden, and the UK against Assange in his investigative 350-pager, The Trial of Julian Assange: A Story of Persecution (2022):

    “By deliberately withholding exculpatory evidence the Swedish authorities not only violated Assange’s procedural rights as set out in the Swedish Code of Judicial Procedure but, in conjunction with their aggressive dissemination of the rape allegations, may even have committed the criminal offense of false accusation.”

    There never were any rape charges and there never was any evidence that Assange was involved in ‘Russian interference’, the latter an MSM construct debunked by the independent press.

    When this author explained this to their editor she replied, “But Assange was never a journalist. He’s a hacker.” Reminding her of the long list of journalism awards won by WikiLeaks and Assange over the years apparently dispelled the editor’s skepticism as my submission was published, though downgraded from op-ed to letter to the editor. 

    Nils Melzer, when in his capacity as UN rapporteur on torture, was first asked by Assange’s lawyers in 2018 to investigate the publisher’s treatment at the hands of UK authorities. Melzer refused because the official narrative on Assange darkened his opinion about the beleaguered publisher.

    “I was still affected by all those headlines in the mainstream media which I had almost unconsciously absorbed over recent years: Assange the cowardly rapist refusing to turn himself in to the Swedish authorities. Assange, the hacker and spy evading justice in the Ecuadorian embassy. Assange the ruthless narcissist, traitor and bastard. And so forth.”

    Melzer writes in Trial of Julian Assange:

    “Only later did I realize how much my perception had been distorted by prejudice. Like so many, I was convinced that I knew the truth about him, even though I couldn’t quite remember where that knowledge had come from. The official narrative had the desired effect on public opinion – myself included.” 

    After years of exposure to official narratives and media regurgitations on the Assange-WikiLeaks file Canadian MSM reporters are producing what Chris Hedges calls “death spiral” journalism. None of it has been retracted or corrected even though the public record has shown much of the mainstream coverage to be false, misleading or without evidence.

    The late Christie Blatchford’s fact-free smear of Assange presented on April 16, 2019 in the National Post titled, ‘Julian Assange is no journalist, and he’s had more than enough due process’ is still available on the Post’s comment page.  Blatchford eerily pronounces over Assange as if ‘from the other side’ quoting a Guardian journalist: “Assange was willing to send death lists to psychopaths.”

    The reason for bringing up Blatchford is that three years later Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno appears to have found some inspiration from Blatch, as her colleagues liked to call her, for an equally unhinged opinion piece about Julian Assange. 

    Headlined, “Julian Assange is no hero for being reckless with data”, DiManno’s opinion piece reads more like slander than journalism: “Witheringly narcissistic…He’s cavalier with people’s lives, has let down friends horribly and repels one-time allies. Self-glorifying, he doesn’t have a moral fibre in his being.”

    Reciting the customary Assange smears and parroting state-approved, but entirely false claims, DiManno not only exposes her ignorance about the most consequential press freedom case of our generation, but also lays bare the cluelessness of the Star editorial board. Apparently, no op-ed editor thought to ask, “How do we know this to be true?” 

    DiManno wrote:

    “His recklessness with data that disclosed combat strategy imperilled the lives of thousands of troops and hundreds of vulnerable foreign nationals who risked their lives providing information to the U.S. and its allies … their names never excised from the exposed material”.

    Eight years ago the Guardian reported precisely the opposite in coverage of whistleblower then Bradley Manning’s court martial for leaking the Iraq war files to WikiLeaks: “Brigadier general Robert Carr, a senior counter-intelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the Defense Department, told a court at Fort Meade, Maryland, that they had uncovered no specific examples of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet.” 

    Expert witnesses including journalists who worked on WikiLeaks releases testified at Assange’s extradition hearing in the fall of 2020 that in fact Assange was not ‘reckless with data’.

    American journalist John Goetz working for Der Spiegel, a media partner for WikiLeaks releases in 2010, testified that WikiLeaks spearheaded a “very rigorous redaction process.” Goetz told the court that Assange was “very concerned with the technical aspect of trying to find the names in this massive collection of documents” so that “we could redact them, so they wouldn’t be published, so they wouldn’t be harmed.”  

    Balanced Canadian coverage on mainstream news programs of Assange’s extradition hearings was hard to find, what there was included smears, and deviated little from the narratives put forward by the U.S. government’s alphabet soup of state security departments CIA, FBI, DOJ, Sec. State, Homeland Security.

    John Pilger says media disinterest in the Assange hearings is global:

    “If the Assange trial is the political trial of the century, as I believe it is, its outcome will not only seal the fate of a journalist for doing his job but intimidate the very principles of free journalism and free speech. The absence of serious mainstream reporting of the proceedings is, at the very least, self-destructive.”

    Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, with daily Il Fatto Quotidiano, worked on all WikiLeaks releases as a media partner. Maurizi testified at Assange’s hearing that on the Iraq War Logs WikiLeaks redacted more than the U.S. government and held back 15,000 documents to ensure harm-minimization.  

    After 13 years of investigative work on the Assange case Maurizi compiled the outcome of her access to freedom of information battles in Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies.(2022) – “The most detailed account of Assange’s persecution”.  

    Maurizi has also been fighting a personal freedom of information war with Sweden, Britain, the U.S. and Australia trying to get to the bottom of why sexual-assault allegations against Assange were stalled at the preliminary stage for so long. Based on investigation files and correspondence between prosecutors in the four countries Maurizi shows in Secret Power that the UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and Swedish prosecutors colluded to prolong Assange’s persecution and incarceration.

    Maurizi’s Secret Power, is an impeccably researched resource that is politically charged with the lawfare of our time which has gone unreported by reporters working in the mainstream. Maurizi doesn’t have much good to say about establishment press coverage of Assange and WikiLeaks.  

    “The reporters covering Assange’s case were just willing to crib from the authorities’ declarations,” Maurizi told Berlin monthly Exberliner. “No media has tried to access the full set of documents in his regard. This is an unbelievable failure of journalism.”

    Uncritical reporting of unproven assertions and regurgitating smears made by official sources about Assange is a common example of journalism fraud that some Canadian journalists are beginning to regret.  

    On episode #291 of his podcast, Short Cuts, CANADALAND publisher Jesse Brown was debating the Assange case with co-host Jen Gerson. “When I was writing for Macleans as a tech journalist and on my show Search Engine, I called Assange an epic donkey. I called him a fame whore when he was doing that show for Sputnik, Russian state TV. I called him an Albino nomad with bad hygiene. I was right there with Christie Blatchford.”

    Gerson lets her bias slip, along with an opaque understanding of the material. “Let’s also acknowledge that he was running a Russian propaganda outlet. That strikes me as more pertinent to the issues at hand today than the personal attacks that he suffered back then.” 

    Only two clicks on Google show that Assange’s interview program on Russia Today (RT), The World Tomorrow was independently produced and licensed for broadcast by RT.

    The closing Shortcuts exchange between Brown and Gerson is a telling teeter totter ride.

    Jesse Brown: “So, do we claim him as one of ours and do we stand up for him when he is essentially a political prisoner? They’re going after him for what any kind of mainstream reporter might have done if they had a source like Chelsea Manning. They’re going after him because of the embarrassment that he caused, and as a warning to anybody who might do the same thing. I’m trying to dig myself out of my own sense of regret here. I know there was a campaign to tar him personally, I think it influenced me and it influenced my coverage.”

    Jen Gerson: “I think the campaign that focused on his personality was unfair. But as to the question, do we claim him as one of our own is probably the wrong frame. The better thing to do is just say, look they’re trying to extradite him under the espionage act. It’s one thing to say that our duty as journalists is to speak truth to power, that starts to ring hollow if in speaking truth to power, you’re just serving another power. And this is where Assange starts to get really complicated. I’m not talking about the personal attacks, I’m talking about the degree to which he was operating in concert with Russia with the explicit intent to sort of undermine American national security. That goes way beyond what most journalists would be willing to connect themselves with.”

    What Assange and other WikiLeaks journalists connected themselves with is an astonishingly perfect record of disclosing truthful information that has made the public aware of how corrupt people in power go about their secret business and why.  

    With journalists like Gerson and Brown dirtying the waters, who needs propaganda? What Canadian news consumers need more of on the Assange/WikiLeaks file is independent and prominent journalistic voices like Green Party leadership candidate (2020) Dimitri Lascaris: “The case of Julian Assange reminds us of the primordial importance of authentic journalism to the causes of justice and democracy. Julian Assange is being persecuted by the most powerful capitalists and imperialists in the world precisely because he fearlessly exposed their crimes.”

    Dispelling propaganda and misinformation about Assange and WikiLeaks is the aim of a 2021 documentary, Ithaka, which screened at Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto on March 24. Directed by Ben Lawrence and produced by Assange’s brother Julian Shipton, the film “works tirelessly to correct the portrayal of Assange that’s been shaped by mass media,” writes Pat Mullen in a POV Magazine review.

    The grueling screening schedule of the documentary and post-film discussions and information sessions with local audiences are essential to the campaign’s success. With 25 showings of Ithaka behind them and 25 to go, John and Gabriel Shipton spoke with Canada Files the day before their HotDocs presentation to discuss how the documentary tour is part of a larger campaign to raise awareness of not only of Assange’s plight but also the imminent threat to public interest journalism. After the UK, France, Germany and Australia the Shiptons are bringing Ithaka to North America, with Toronto the only Canadian stop. 

    “Last night we had a screening in Massachusetts, 100 plus people, 200 plus people the night before,” says Gabriel. “Seeing the crowds come out now we have a feeling of momentum and seeing a real hunger from people to hear more about this issue and what’s actually at stake in Julian’s case. And I think the recognition of that is growing.”

    John Shipton observed that European audiences were most concerned with human rights violations and the lack of due process and lawfare in Assange’s extradition case while Americans are worried Assange’s conviction under the espionage act will mean the end of the first amendment and a loss of the bill of rights. 

    Asked why Canadians should be concerned about the outcome of Julian Assange’s long-running battle with the US security state, John Shipton said:

    “When we were young, the way to get around the world safely was to have a maple leaf sewn on your backpack. Well that’s gone. And that’s just a terrible pity, the quality that we felt about Canada as distinct from the United States. That’s really not good for Canada, just to be a slave to ideas that Washington cooks up during a bad night of indigestion and they send them up to Canada. We can’t defend that.

    We defend principally the capacity of families to join together and defend a member, and the capacity of communities and families and a nation to have a decent understanding. And we also understand about Assange that the aggregate intelligence of a nation is a strategic asset for the independence of that nation and to fulfill its desire. I imagine that people are well aware that their understanding of the support, for example, of the truckers and their sensibilities, empathizing with the truckers, and the current inquiry in Canada revealing the distortion of the emergency act to benefit government oppression, that circumstance, I imagine, will bleed into the Assange matter.”

    Gabriel Shipton reminds Canadian audiences that “What’s really at stake is the ability of journalists to report on national security using classified information coming out of the US in Washington. There is also a territorial element to this that any US ally or any country’s journalists can be put in prison indefinitely under unprecedented espionage act prosecution. It really means that no journalist or publisher in Canada is safe from this sort of thing and really the main thing that’s being said about Julian can be applied to anyone all over the world.”

    He suggests that touring Ithaka is bringing momentum to the awareness raising mission. “I think the film is a really good entry point for people who have not really engaged with the facts around Julian’s persecution. Most people don’t really have an understanding of it. You have these journalists who are engaged in and committed to propagating these smears. I think generally most people once they engage with the subject then they see the facts and what’s at stake in the case and then they come to our side. It’s just getting people that critical information. The film and this tour is one way to do that.

    On March 24, 2023, after the post-film Q & A, the HotDocs audience of over a hundred dispersed, while the Shiptons mingled easily with some of the question askers and local Free Assange advocates. Charlotte Sheasby-Coleman, who has been chalking Press Freedom and Free Assange messages on the sidewalks of the CBC and the US consulate for years, reflected on the evening:  

    “Having invited three friends who were supportive of my Julian advocacy but who knew just the bare bones about the case, their reactions of incredulity on learning more of the facts speak to what an important tool this film is for educating the public and raising awareness – hopefully among more members of the media as well.”

    Sheasby-Coleman’s group of Assange supporters is planning to join an upcoming day of global action on April 11th which coincides with the fourth anniversary of Assange’s incarceration in Belmarsh high security prison in London.  

     

    LANDMARK JOURNALISM 

    “WikiLeaks is a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents. We give asylum to these documents, we analyze them, we promote them and we obtain more.” – Julian Assange, Der Spiegel Interview 

    WikiLeaks releases have sourced an abundance of public interest journalism since 2007, most of it is about official lies and the abuses and crime perpetrated by governments, institutions, and international corporations. An example from the CBC archives: 

    “The same day Canada publicly refused to join the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, a high-ranking Canadian official was secretly promising the Americans clandestine military support for the fiercely controversial operation,” reported Greg Weston in a 2011 CBC story based on diplomatic memos released to the broadcaster by Wikileaks. 

    Greg Weston’s source was the WikiLeaks library of 251,287 diplomatic cables from 1966 to 2010 leaked to WikiLeaks by Manning. Independent news outlet activismMunich recently posted a string of cables filed under The Public Library of US Diplomacy that shows the extent to which the US and its European allies knew about the potential for conflict in Ukraine more than a decade ago.  

    George Bush’s ambassador to the Russian Federation, now CIA director, William Burns wrote this prescient summary dated February 1, 2008:

    “Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine’s intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the Bucharest summit (ref A), Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains “an emotional and neuralgic” issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.” 

    In a diplomatic memo (2008 June 9) titled “Volker consults with Canadians on NATO”, Kurt Volker, US ambassador to the UN under Bush and later Donald Trump’s special representative for Ukraine, writes a summary of his visit to Ottawa. Some excerpts:

    • Ottawa wants to collaborate with the U.S. in an effort to face the range of Russian ‘challenges’, to make MAP available to Ukraine and Georgia, and to counter German efforts to steer NATO policy in ‘unhelpful’ directions.

    • (CDN PM) Harper pressed his Italian, German, French, and British counterparts for the quick extension of MAP (NATO Membership Action Plan) to Ukraine and Georgia, (Acting Foreign and Defense Policy Adviser) Sinclair said. Canada’s bottom-line, she added, is that MAP is “imperative for Ukraine…but Georgia too.”  

    • In another cable dated June 6, 2008 two German foreign affairs diplomats Norman Walter and Rolf Nikel raise concerns with US counterpart David Merkel “that if MAP were pushed forward too quickly in Ukraine, where public opinion is bitterly divided on the issue of NATO membership, it could prove destabilizing and ‘split’ the country.”  

    WikiLeaks releases are a treasure trove of primary source material, a public information service that will be mined by reporters and scholars for years to come.

    “WikiLeaks has achieved far more than what The New York Times and The Washington Post in their celebrated incarnations did,” writes John Pilger. “No newspaper has come close to matching the secrets and lies of power that Assange and (NSA whistleblower) Snowden have disclosed. That both men are fugitives is indicative of the retreat of liberal democracies from principles of freedom and justice. Why is WikiLeaks a landmark in journalism? Because its revelations have told us, with 100 per cent accuracy, how and why much of the world is divided and run.” — John Pilger: New Cold War & looming threats, Frontline, India (21 December 2018)

     

    DEATH SPIRAL

    “Once fact becomes interchangeable with opinion, once truth is irrelevant, once people are told only what they wish to hear, journalism ceases to be journalism and becomes propaganda.” Chris Hedges. 

    Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges refers to the “death spiral of American journalism” in his analysis of so-called ‘Russiagate’ reporting, the scandal around alleged Russia and WikiLeaks interference in the 2016 US election with the intent of helping elect Donald Trump.

    Hedges makes his foreboding claim based on the Twitter Files, internal documents made public by Twitter CEO Elon Musk after he completed his $44 billion buyout of the social media company in October 2022. Journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss are co-ordinating the releases of document details as a series of Twitter threads.

    First debunked by Aaron Mate in 2019, Russiagate has been confirmed to be a ‘titanic fraud’. Even conservative journalist-influencers like Fox News host Tucker Carlson are reporting that Russiagate ‘coverage’ has in no small way contributed to the Russophobic climate that took us to the conflict in Ukraine.

    What Taibbi and others have exposed in the Twitter Files so far is an “an outsized role of unaccountable intelligence officials and partisan operatives in influencing what the public is allowed to see and access on social media.”

    Taibbi in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on March 9 said:

    “The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere.

    What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”

    To date there has been no hindsight analyses of the Twitter Files in the Canadian press, who continue to rely heavily on Russiagate narratives in much of its foreign affairs reporting and coverage of Julian Assange. In fact news consumers relying on MSM in Canada will be hard-pressed to find mention of the Twitter Files or Russiagate, let alone contrition for ‘four years of reporting salacious, unverified gossip as fact.’

    Hedges writes, “Major media organizations, which produced thousands of stories and reports that were false, refuse to engage in a serious postmortem.”

    ‘Death spiral’ is an apt description of the status of Canadian establishment journalism today, journalism that misinforms Canadian news consumers about international affairs, coverage that fails to bring reliable insight and understanding of Canada’s true role as a global actor.

    John Pilger, reflecting on his own trajectory inside a career that spans half a century, tries to account for the low point in public affairs journalism: 

    “When I began as a journalist, especially as a foreign correspondent, the press in the UK was conservative and owned by powerful establishment forces, as it is now. But the difference compared to today is that there were spaces for independent journalism that dissented from the received ‘wisdom’ of authority. That space has now all but closed and independent journalists have gone to the internet, or to a metaphoric underground.” — John Pilger: Real journalists act as agents of people, not power, Daily Star (Bangladesh) (16 January 2019)

    World peace is under siege from a belligerent US-aligned ‘collective West’ that includes Canada. Our foreign policy is guided by the same imperative as that of the US: limitless capital growth and globalization. And the Canadian establishment press reports accordingly – through a capitalist-imperialist lens.

    I.F. Stone’s principles of anti-war journalism have been abandoned, if they were ever championed, by Canadian journalists. They bear repeating: “To write the truth as I see it; to defend the weak against the strong; to fight for justice; to bring healing perspectives to bear on the terrible hates and fears of mankind, in the hope of some day bringing about a world in which man will enjoy the differences of the human garden instead of killing each other over them.”

    Stone’s prescience of matters in the headlines today is eerie and shows that not much has changed in the struggle between the fourth estate and the rest to serve the public’s right to know the truth about the affairs of state.

    Stone writes in 1966: “To suppress the truth in the name of national security is the surest way to undermine what we claim to be preserving. There is a is a Latin legal maxim—justitia fiat, ruat coelum: Let justice be done though the heavens fall. I would paraphrase it for newspapermen and say: Let the truth be told as we see it though officials claim the disclosure would cause the heavens to collapse upon them.”  

    For a contemporary Canadian echo of how our national security is alleged to be threatened almost 50 years later, look no further than the latest CSIS-led media smear against Chinese-Canadian politicians.

    Next in this series about journalism fraud committed by Canadian global affairs and foreign policy reporters is an analysis of how the Canadian establishment press is reporting the CSIS allegations that Chinese-Canadian politicians are directed by China to interfere in Canadian elections. 


    Editor’s note:  The Canada Files is the country’s only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We’ve provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support. 

    We’re aiming to get up to $4000 CAD per month in support, up from $1444 CAD per month at present.
    Please consider setting up a monthly or annual donation through Donorbox.


    Valeriy Krylko is a freelance journalist, and translator of news articles in online media (English-Russian). These articles are published in English, European and Russian-language media.


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  • Caption: G9 Family and Allies leader Jimmy Cherizier speaks at a rally demanding an end to the Western puppet government of Haiti. Image Source – (Another Vision: Inside Haiti’s Uprising | Episode 3: A Burgeoning Revolution, 28:02)

    Chinese (Simplified)EnglishFrenchGermanItalianPortugueseRussianSpanish

    Written by: Peter Biesterfeld 

    Note: This is part two of Peter Biesterfeld’s series for The Canada Files: A Case for anti-war and anti-imperialist journalism. It focuses on how Canada’s mainstream media is failing Canadians with its foreign policy coverage.

    What follows is a critical examination of the reliability of Canada’s Fourth Estate, also known as Canada’s mainstream media. With examples torn from the headlines the aim is to shine some light on Canadian foreign affairs reporting and to learn from its failures in order to serve the public’s right to know more reliably in future.

     

    War porn

    “Ukrainian soldier Volodymyr Tereshchenko wants to ensure any Russian he confronts regrets it.” – Chris Brown, foreign correspondent CBC News Jan 23, 2023

    The journalism of Canadian political reporters covering wars and international affairs can be as jingoistic as Canada’s foreign policy which remains firmly in lockstep with the US and NATO.

    What amounts to war porn from embedded reporters like Brown reads like weapons advertising for the military industrial complex inserted into heroic anti-Russia narratives that feature and promote Canada’s billions in military assistance to Ukraine.  

    On the one-year anniversary of Russia’s special military operation (SMO) in Ukraine, the Canadian mainstream press continues to beat the drums for war and cheer for a Ukrainian victory.

    In a February 24, 2023, Associated Press story headlined Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy pushes for victory on war anniversary the Toronto Star reminds readers where the battle lines are:  

    “Western nations are supporting Ukraine militarily, financially and politically. But China, India and countries in the global south have proven ambivalent about Western arguments that Ukraine is the front line of a fight for freedom and democracy.”

    China’s anniversary position statement on the war reads like a generic road map to peace and includes all the traditional milestones and imperatives: cease fire, resumption of peace talks, dropping sanctions, and a resolution to the humanitarian crises. The Canadian establishment press is mostly dismissive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China who published the non-specific but constructive one-pager. 

    CBC News Feb 23, 2023: “China’s positions throw doubt on whether its 12-point proposal has any hope of going ahead — or whether China can be seen as an honest broker.”

    The Toronto Star describes some of China’s suggestions for peace in a Feb. 24 Associated Press piece titled What is China’s peace proposal for Ukraine War? But the story focus, like much of the reporting in the NATO-aligned press, is on China’s “no limits” relationship with Russia and whether China can be trusted: “China has offered contradictory statements regarding its stance. It says Russia was provoked into taking action by NATO’s eastward expansion, but has also claimed neutrality on the war.”

    Far from giving credence to China’s peace ‘offer’ the Star article quotes a belligerent US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken several times: “Publicly, they present themselves as a country striving for peace in Ukraine, but privately we’ve seen already over these past months the provision of non-lethal assistance that does go directly to aiding and abetting Russia’s war effort.” The State Department provides no evidence for the claim.  

    Not referenced in the mainstream press is a companion document  China’s foreign affairs ministry published alongside its position statement titled, US Hegemony and Its Perils. From the table of contents:

    I. Political Hegemony—Throwing Its Weight Around

    II. Military Hegemony—Wanton Use of Force 

    III. Economic Hegemony—Looting and Exploitation

    IV. Technological Hegemony—Monopoly and Suppression

    Independent commentators and analysts like Alexander Mercouris of independent news outlet the Duran, and the Grayzone’s Aaron Maté are much closer to serving the public’s right to know by providing historical context and significantly more in-depth analysis of what a Ukraine peace deal might look like from a Chinese perspective. Long-form reportage, debates and discussions with subject matter specialists are features in progressive press coverage that mainstream news consumers are often denied in global affairs reporting. 

    In a Substack article about how Zelensky went from “pro-peace candidate to no peace president,” Maté cites David Arakhamia, Zelensky’s house leader in the Ukrainian parliament: “By early 2021, Zelensky believed that negotiations wouldn’t work and that Ukraine would need to retake the Donetsk and Luhansk regions ‘either through a political or military path’. The Kremlin disengaged (from talks).”

    In a digital world of media abundance news consumers who don’t trust mainstream journalism can readily find independent news channels, alternatives to the mainstream media, which tend to have a particular worldview.   

    Many observers of the news industry don’t see this as a good thing. Chris Hedges says on his Substack: “The advent of digital media and the compartmentalizing of the public into antagonistic demographics has destroyed the traditional model of commercial journalism.”

    In today’s climate of discomposure around “fake news”, whose news can be trusted?  MSM, or the alternative press? Whose journalism is more reliable? Corporate or independent news coverage?

    Depends on who you ask. Most industry insiders agree with Hedges.

     

    Where are MSM on the decline of Canadian journalism?

    Our sense of skeptical inquiry needs to inform everything we do in journalism. It is a key quality in our quest to trust the news.” Jeffrey Dvorkin – Trusting the news in a digital ageTowards a “new” news literacy (2021)

    In a Massey College livestream in January 2022 long-time CBC broadcaster Michael Enright is in conversation with journalist-academic Jeffrey Dvorkin.

    “This is my deeply held view…” Enright leans into the microphone. “…the Internet has destroyed journalism.”

    The two elder statesmen of Canadian broadcast journalism are discussing the decline of the fourth estate in the information age. The occasion is the book launch of Dvorkin’s latest: Trusting the news in a digital ageTowards a “new” news literacy (2021). The compact but instructive 155-page primer is aimed at students of journalism and media studies, but anybody interested in journalism should read it. “How to use critical thinking to discern real news from fake news,” reads the blurb on the cover.

    Enright and Dvorkin are lamenting how social network services like Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have replaced newspapers, radio and television as destinations for vital advertising dollars in an already underfunded and ‘hollowed out’ Canadian news sector.  

    Many media observers agree with Enright and Dvorkin that there is a crisis in Canadian journalism and that the wild west of social media is at least partly responsible.

    Once Managing Editor and Chief Journalist for CBC Radio (1991-97) Dvorkin writes in Trusting the news: “As they look around in their media landscapes, many people have decided that the traditional media can no longer function as a gatekeeper when the Internet has removed the gatekeeping function of traditional news organizations. Information is no longer penned up but is running loose everywhere!”

    Dvorkin wants legacy news organizations to return to their role as gatekeepers. He argues in his book that the digital democratization of the public square inevitably brings with it “deliberate attempts to convey wrong information that need reliable journalism to help news consumers identify what can be trusted.”

    Dvorkin writes, “journalists place a great deal of value on skepticism” and reminds his readers of best practices for verifying a story by asking: Where did you get this story? Who are your sources? Do you have more than one source? Can these sources be trusted? How do you know this to be true? 

    Dvorkin scoffs at pundit tables stacked with “clashing opinions” for entertainment rather than news value. “Opinion journalism can be found everywhere, and it seems to be replacing evidence-based reporting,” writes Dvorkin. “It’s a lot cheaper than having a reporter out in the field covering a story that requires complexity and nuance and an expense account from the newsroom.”  

    Ontario’s public broadcaster TVO televised a debate of ‘clashing opinions’ early on in the Ukraine war. Steve Paikin on The Agenda (Mar 21/22) asked four academics around the table, “Did NATO provoke Russia?” The resulting discussion, though squarely set-up to clash, was more useful than Dvorkin might expect. Sides of the argument not typically explored on commercial news programs were put forward and argued, such as the eight-year civil war in the Donbass as the precursor to Russia’s SMO.

    Enright and Dvorkin are not the only observers of the Canadian news landscape who blame the ‘informational cacophony’ of social media for at least some of the decline in mainstream media journalism.

    In The End of the CBC? (2020) David Taras and Christopher Waddell point to the ‘attention economy’ and ‘the corrosive effects of media abundance’ as the main threats to CBC’s brand identity as a news organization of note, and ultimately as a threat to the public broadcaster’s existence.

    Taras, media scholar at Northwestern University and Waddell, former senior program producer for CBC The National, now a journalism professor at Carleton University, point out that ‘news is the lifeblood of public broadcasting’ and that the Canadian public broadcaster is chronically too underfunded to adequately meet its nation-building mandate. When ‘trying to do everything and be all things to all audiences’, ask Waddell and Taras, how can CBC be expected to produce consistently high-quality and reliable news programming from coast to coast to coast?  

    “Despite injection of $675m to CBC over five years announced by Trudeau in 2016 and the extensive handwringing about fake news and its undermining of an informed citizenry, CBC management has been cutting the money allocated to the news, declining in each successive budget from 2017-18 and 2018-19.” – Taras and Waddell in The End of the CBC? 

    The authors report that news programming on Canadian commercial networks has also suffered a decline as a result of cuts. “Too many news organizations promote opinions and ignore expertise; have few, if any, specialist reporters; crave sensational stories at the expense of accountability reporting; and do little if any digging or investigative work.” 

    In The End of the CBC? Waddell and Taras propose the public broadcaster become exclusively a news and current affairs organization, “dedicated to producing, high quality, dependable, and fair news and analysis. The CBC needs to do investigative journalism, produce the accountability news that holds people and institutions responsible, and do the essential work of democracy.”

     

    “The most trusted brands”

    One of the reasons why I think people have gone from reading mainstream newspapers to the Internet is because they realize they’re being lied to.” Robert Fisk 

    Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, in the introduction to its 2022 Digital News Report, proclaims: “the connection between journalism and the public may be fraying; there is a declining interest in news, and there is a rise in news avoidance.

    Reuters reports that only 42 per cent of Canadians trust “most news, most of the time”. That’s down from 58 per cent four years ago and it’s the lowest score ever.

    For the annual survey Reuters interviewed 92,000 news consumers in 46 different global markets. In the Canadian market, Reuters measured the interactions of English and French speaking news consumers with news organizations from “a list of the most trusted brands”.

    The 2021 list in descending order of trustworthiness with English speaking news consumers: CTV News; local or regional newspaper; Global News; CBC News; BBC News; Globe and Mail; City News; CNN; The New York Times; National Post; CP24; Toronto Star; MSN News; Yahoo News; Fox News.

    Trusted brand scores for French speaking audiences, from most to least trusted: ICI Radio-Canada Info/ICI RDI; La Presse; TVA Nouvelles/LCN; La Presse Canadienne; Le Devoir; Regional or local newspaper; L’actualité; Journal de Montréal ou Québec; TV5; CTV News; Noovo info; Métro; MSN Actualités; 24 Heures; Narcity.com.  

    Independent news organizations were not included in Reuters’ data collection. There are no measurements available of Canadians’ engagement with alternative news content in the 2022 report. The number of subscriptions to independent news channels globally confirms that a substantial number of news consumers are getting their news from non-traditional sources. Reuters reports that 77 percent of Canadians access news online, but not exclusively from the ‘most trusted brands.’ According to the report 40 percent of Canadians get their news on Facebook.

     

    Journalism Fails – A Compendium: Haitian struggles for freedom misrepresented

    The background and deep context news consumers require to fully understand what is going on in the world and Canada’s role in it are frequently left out of mainstream reporting.

    Case in point is establishment news media’s ongoing whitewash of Canada’s role in Haiti.

    This 2004 CBC headline is still posted on cbcnews.ca: – Aristide leaves office, flees Haiti – the article goes on to say, “Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned as president of Haiti and left the country Sunday, bowing to pressure from rebels who said they would not storm the capital if he left.”

    CTV’s update almost 20 years later in a 2021 story: “Reelected in 2000, he (Aristide) was ousted four years later in a rebellion led by opponents with ties to the elite and the old Duvalierist regime.”  

    Both accounts leave unreported Canada’s Machiavellian role in the ousting of democratically elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.  

    This l’Actualité banner headline (03/15/03) contradicts the English press: ‘- Haiti placed in trusteeship by the UN? – Aristide must be overthrown. And it is not the Haitian opposition that is calling for it, but a collection of countries brought together at the initiative of Canada!’

    Yves Engler reported that a Liberal insider in Jean Chretien’s government had leaked to l’Actualité reporter Michel Vastel details of a meeting of Canadian, French, and US government officials, along with representatives from the Organization of American States (OAS) who came together to strategize over regime change in Haiti. No Haitian representative was invited to the secret gathering designated ‘The Ottawa Initiative on Haiti’ where ‘Aristide must go’ was the theme and a “Kosovo-model” UN trusteeship over Haiti was on the table.

    Vastel’s 2003 story remains posted on l’Actualité’s news site and additional information on the Ottawa Initiative released to online news outlet The Breach  can be found in the public record. Still, establishment journalists continue to ignore the story, and Canadians who get their news from the most trusted brands remain no wiser about the true role Canada played and continues to play in Haiti’s affairs, acting in concert with US interests and the Organization of American States (OAS).

    At the time of this writing Haitian society is spiraling into chaos. Street demonstrations against foreign interventions in Haitian affairs have turned into a virtual insurrection. Protesters carrying symbolic coffins emblazoned with the flags of Canada, France and the US make for dramatic front-page imagery, but receive no meaningful editorial scrutiny in the mainstream Canadian press.

    Allan Woods, Montreal-based staff reporter for the Star puts forward a version of the current state of affairs in Haiti in a March 18 story: “The July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse set off a wave of insecurity that has inundated the island nation. Powerful gangs have been battling for control of the country and the Haitian National Police, lacking personnel and equipment, have been powerless to uphold the law.”

    A December 2021 CBC subheadline reads, ‘Some Haitians say de facto control by foreign ambassadors, local allies brought hunger and gang rule’. CBC Latin Affairs specialist Evan Dyer acknowledges foreign intervention and a corrupt ruling class as root causes of a perpetual humanitarian crisis in Haiti.

    Quoting Haitian activist Monique Clesca, a member of the Commission for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis, Dyer reports that the embassies “push a supposed stability that is filled with corruption and impunity. We are where we are because of the support of the Core Group, led by the United States, and Canada also plays a prominent role.”

    As with much of Canadian reporting on Haiti, Dyer’s story leaves out any meaningful explanation of Canada’s ‘prominent role’ in Haiti’s ‘supposed stability.’ Canada’s record as perpetual foreign intervenor, regime change backer, and supporter of corrupt Haitian leaderships is blurred out. 

    A December 3, 2022 Toronto Star op-ed titled, Don’t believe the media hype: Canada is no friend of Haiti is an uncommon example of historical context on Haiti making its way into the mainstream. Academics Karine Coen-Sanchez a first-generation Haitian and PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa and Kevin Edmonds assistant professor in Caribbean studies at the University of Toronto write:  

    “The dangerous lack of context in reporting on Haiti is positioning Canada as a saviour, when there is instead a complex history of self-serving, condescending, and imperialist actions that have neutralized popular political movements, undermined the capacity of the state, and supported a kleptocratic and gang affiliated PTHK party (Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale).”

    One distinguishing feature of mainstream reporting from ‘troubled parts’ of the world in general, including Haiti coverage, is that, with notable exceptions, too few establishment reporters spend significant time with  grassroots communities for a comprehensive street level perspective of events.

    Independent news outlets Haïti Liberté and Uncaptured Media present a more nuanced narrative on Haiti’s present-day troubles than the mainstream press. With correspondents seeking out voices from behind the barricades, from deep inside impoverished neighbourhoods, what emerges are layered accounts about gangs and violence and desperate lives that are not as homogenous as the establishment press make them out to be.  

    In a January 31, 2023, Associated Press story headlined, ‘In Haiti gangs take control as democracy withers’, Megan Janetsky and Pierre Richard Luxama point to Jimmy Cherizier, Port-au-Prince community leader and former cop, as the principal violent force inciting the gang wars:

    “Internationally, he’s known as Haiti’s most powerful and feared gang leader, sanctioned by the United Nations for ‘serious human rights abuses,’ and the man behind a fuel blockade that brought the Caribbean nation to its knees late last year.”

    Evan Dyer reporting for the CBC: “Gang leaders like Cherizier are no longer content merely to provide muscle and coerce votes for Haiti’s rulers; he now has aspirations of ruling Haiti himself.” Dyer’s assertion betrays his remoteness from actual events but manages with one careless claim to erase the revolutionary aspirations of ordinary Haitians. 

    Kim Ives and Uncaptured Media journalist Dan Cohen’s documentary, Another Vision-Inside Haiti’s Uprising (2022) is a must-watch resource available on YouTube that ‘tells the story of Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Cherizier and the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies, the armed neighborhood federation in the crosshairs of the U.S. empire.’ 

    Cherizier formally introduced his anti-violence G9 coalition in a 2020 YouTube video:

    “The G9 and allies is a group of young men and women who have united to say there will never be again be kidnapping in Wharf Jeremy, there will never be robberies, hijacking of people’s rice trucks or rapes. We in the ghetto have never benefitted from anything. G9 family and its allies is an organization of nationalists focused on the country and the ghettoes who united to dismantle a number of vagabonds and gangs that politicians use to harm the ghettoes each time they seek to take power.”

    According to Ives and Cohen’s documentary, Cherizier is the first populist leader since Aristide who has managed “to shine a light on the pain of the abandoned underclass.”

    The nearly three hours of documentary journalism, is part gritty verité that doesn’t look away, and part media analysis that ‘dissects western media’s disinformation offensive’ against Cherizier. Another Vision is a powerful re-education experience, if all you’ve been exposed to is mainstream coverage of Haitian ‘gang wars’. 

    Canadian mainstream journalism around Haitian affairs relies heavily on official narratives provided by western government officials, human rights organizations and think tanks.

    In November 2017, when still an officer with Haitian National Police (HNP), Cherizier took part in a UN supervised police operation to round up criminals in the Grand Ravine neighbourhood of Port au Prince. The operation went wrong, a gun battle ensued, two cops and nine civilians were killed including suspected gang members. According to Cohen, “The portrayal of this event became the opening salvo in an information war against Cherizier.”  

    Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH) issued a report that civilians had been summarily executed by police during the raid. An Intercept article relying on RNDDH claims called the operation a massacre. According to Cherizier, there were no summary executions by the police, people were caught in crossfire between police and gang members. “These falsehoods were fabricated by RNDDH to pressure the police so they could find an issue to bring against the government at the time.” In the film Cohen explains how the RNDDH report panicked police leadership who turned on Cherizier and accused him of conducting a rogue operation. He was fired after 14 years on the force.

    When citing think tanks or sources connected to human rights organizations, the establishment press typically does not report that many such groups, including RNDDH, are funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED is a known propaganda arm of the US government that carries out destabilization campaigns in foreign countries. In the documentary Cohen quotes Allen Weinstein, NED co-founder under Ronald Reagan: “A lot of what we do today was done 25 years ago covertly by the CIA.”  

    RNDDH has a history of political machinations on behalf of its foreign sponsors including, under a previous incarnation (National Coalition for Haitian Rights [NCHR]), running a disinformation campaign in the lead up to the 2004 coup against Bertrand Aristide.  

    The opening of the documentary unpacks the history of the Caribbean Nation’s struggle from slavery to independence: “Today Haiti is a neocolony of the US, France and Canada… …Gang violence is a continuation of the 200-year class struggle against exploitation and oppression.” 

    But the power in Ives and Cohen’s documentary is not in the narration, it’s in the images of the squalor and the sounds of determined defiance. Cherizier tours the film crew through some of the most desperate corners of his lower Delma neighbourhood.

    Narrator:

    “Children play near sewage-soaked canals, cleaning them is an endless task…mountains of stinking garbage line the streets and alley ways festering for months on end without collection. Many burn around the clock, picked over by beggars and dogs. But in Cherizier’s lower Delma the situation is different.”

    The documentary shows the results of Cherizier’s attempts to unite armed groups against criminal gangs and kidnappers. The former National Haiti Police officer amplifies to the camera “underlying issues that give rise to crime, poverty and inequality and a bourgeoisie that pays and arms criminals to do its dirty work.” 

    Cherizier:

    “This is part of Delma 5,6,8 Another Vision. Another Vision means the state doesn’t do anything for us in this place. If we relied on the state or the government our neighbourhood would never be clean.”

    Cherizier explains how funds raised from people in the Haitian diaspora, who once lived in lower Delma neighbourhoods, are used to buy street cleaning equipment. He points to a small pickup truck. “With this vehicle we go by people’s houses every Monday Wednesday and Friday to collect their garbage.” In addition to street cleaning G9 provides low-cost water for residents, youth recreation activities and community enrichment programs from cooking hot meals to dance classes and concerts.

    Narrator:

    “On June 17, 2021, Haitian National Police’s company for the maintenance of order supported by irregulars from the armed groups from Bellaire, Ruelle Maillard and TireMasse (rival neighbourhoods) attacked Delma 4 and 6 (Cherizier’s neighbourhoods). Over the span of a few hours they burned and bulldozed over 60 houses and at least one school. Witnesses told us 20 people died in the attack.”

    Cherizier leads Cohen on a tour of the damage:

    “What you see there was done by policemen. With armed groups from Ruelle Maillart, Belair, and Rue Tiremasse. They were using the policemen to bulldoze and destroy these houses. You’ll never see a human rights group talk about the massacre in Delmas 6. You’ll never hear human rights groups talk about people in Delmas 6 who were killed. You’ll never hear human rights groups talk about Delma 6 people made homeless.” 

    When challenged by Cohen, RNDDH director Pierre Esperance claims his organization is too strapped for resources “to report everything.”

    The documentary effectively debunks massacre and rape allegations against Cherizier, but doesn’t hold back on showcasing the revolutionary fervour of the movement he started.

    Cherizier acknowledges that the criminal gangs opposing him are victims of the system just like he is:

    “Who is our enemy? It’s not those armed guys from Ruelle Maillart who are our real enemies. It’s not the armed guys in Belair Rue Tiremasse and Grand Ravine who are my enemies. We have a society where 5 per cent of the population control 85 per cent of the country’s wealth. We have 60 per cent of individuals who are under 35 years old. 70 per cent of our people are jobless. That’s the reality of the country. Today I dare to attack the system. That’s why those guys want to destroy me. We want a revolution to redistribute the country’s wealth for all Haitians to have something.”

    An animated female supporter concurs:

    “We have to claim what is rightfully ours. When I say rightfully, I mean the right to healthcare, education and housing. We have a right to all those things to live like human beings. The same way people in Petionville live, the same way people in the upper Delmas live. We have to go to school too. They’re not any more intelligent than us, but why are they always marginalizing us. Today we say another Haiti is possible. Today we say about this system, it’s time to become conscious. We must become conscious to see the state people are living in. Come to Cite de Soleil to see how we live.”

    In a Haïti Liberté report Kim Ives recently speculated on renewed fighting between downtown Port-au-Prince neighborhoods, after months of relative peace:  

    “Some analysts question whether the confrontations now raging haven’t been engineered to provide a pretext for Washington and Ottawa to launch their third foreign military occupation of Haiti in the past three decades.”

    Indeed, on the eve of president Joe Biden’s Ottawa visit Allan Woods wonders in the Star whether “Canada will agree to lead an international security force to bring order to the country by reinforcing Haiti’s understaffed and ill-equipped national police.”

    The Canadian establishment press has abandoned accountability journalism when it comes to reporting on Haiti. Challenges to government decisions for military intervention in Haiti and questions to Canadian policy makers to account for a history of interference in Haitian affairs continue to go unexplored in Canadian news coverage and analyses. 

    Canadian news consumers who exclusively read, watch and listen to mainstream news remain underinformed about the dishonourable history of Canada’s interference in Haiti.

     

    Bolivarian Aspirations 

    There is a significant historical dimension to Canadian press coverage of Central and South American affairs.  

    Boiled down: socialism, in any form, has never sat well in the backyards of the hyper-capitalist and anti-communist duality of the US and Canada.

    Mainstream Venezuela coverage since the late Hugo Chavez was first elected president in 1999, is an unsettling example of how most of the corporate news media are cheating Canadians out of public interest reporting and their right to know. The right to know something about the complex and politically volatile history of the region and to know the facts about what the Canadian government is up to in the hemisphere and why.

    This Toronto Star headline from August 16, 2011 captures the dominant theme of Canada-Latin America relations over the years: “Canada backs profits not human rights, in Honduras.”

    Whether it’s Stephen Harper’s Conservative government supporting coup-installed President Porfirio Pepe Lobo of Honduras, or Liberal deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland presiding over the Lima Group to push for regime change and sanctions in Venezuela, Canada’s foreign policy in the region is firmly aligned with US interests. Likewise, Canadian media coverage echoes much of what the American press reports on Venezuela, Bolivia and the rest of Latin America.  

    Alan MacLeod’s Dec. 9, 2019 Grayzone article on Venezuela coverage states: “The corporate media has dutifully ignored the US role in the country’s economic woes, laying the blame squarely at the feet of (president) Maduro, omitting crucial political context on Venezuela’s economic crisis while keeping up a constant flow of content presenting the country as a socialist hellhole.”

    The Canadian mainstream press underreports the devastating effects of sanctions on Venezuela. A study by prominent economists Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot that links economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela to an estimated 40,000 deaths goes widely unreported. 

    Parallels between present-day Venezuela and Chile under Salvador Allende in the 1970s are unavoidable.

    According to unclassified documents, President Richard Nixon had ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream” under sanctions in Chile to prevent Allende from implementing his political vision while leading a socialist government.  

    In Canada, when Allende took office in 1970, the Trudeau government of the day fell in line with the US and suspended all aid to Chile immediately. Canadian banks pulled out of Chile. In 1972, Ottawa voted to cut off all money from the International Monetary Fund to the Chilean government.

    A September 5, 1970 Toronto Star headline: “Salvador Allende Gossen, Marxist president-elect of Chile, has sworn to impose socialism on the South American nation by nationalizing all large enterprises and expropriating almost all farm land.” Although the headline sounds like a warning siren for insecure Chilean capitalists, some reporting of the day included media criticism of the biased coverage of what went on in Chile.  

    Managing editor of the United Church Observer, James Taylor, wrote an opinion piece in the Star Sept.12, 1973 titled, ‘The Chilean experiment: We’re getting a distorted view.’ Taylor writes that without permanent foreign correspondents in Chile, Canadian newspapers depended on American news sources: “The Canadian reader has become a victim of US paranoia about socialism.”

    Excerpts from Taylor’s 50-year-old op-ed will be eerily familiar to regime change watchers today:

    “Yesterday’s coup that ended in Allende’s suicide was preceded by a transportation strike that brought the country to the verge of civil war. The implication was that this was a revolt against the president by the very people who elected him, the working classes. But it was not a truckers strike, it was a truck owners strike. Instead of being a revolt by the masses it turns out to be a sabotage action by the members of the former privileged classes, those who benefitted at the expense of the poor under the previous conservative governments.”

    In the aftermath of the coup, 3,000 leftists were murdered, tens of thousands tortured and hundreds of thousands Chileans were driven from the country. 

    Taylor cites a 1972 Rutgers University media analysis study that concludes: “The American public has been fed a steady diet of homogenized information which is uniformly prejudiced against the government of President Salvador Allende.”

    According to Taylor, the study’s author Dr. John C. Pollock contends “that US media treat Chile as a battleground between Marxism and democracy, that they portrayed Allende as a puppet on a Communist string who was juggling Chile’s economy in chaos for the sake of Socialist ideals, while they ignore the disruptive influence of US monetary and trade pressures and the destructive actions of Chile’s right wing groups.”  

    Independent Socialist magazine Monthly Review says: “In Venezuela today, as in Chile in the 1970s, U.S. intervention relies on an ongoing counterrevolutionary effort, with elites using the revolutionary potential of the masses to frighten the middle class.”

    Bolivarian aspirations and social successes achieved by Latin states such as Venezuela’s Chavista socialist revolution, and Evo Morales’ sweeping social reforms in Bolivia go mostly unreported in the Canadian press. Instead, the headlines are dominated by Canada’s overt regime change initiatives while the coverage cheers on the Trudeau government’s support for unelected anti-socialist leaders like Peru ‘president’ Dina Boluarte and Venezuelan opposition member Juan Guaido.

    Independent news outlets Kawsachun News, Consortium News, Venezuelananalysis, and Ben Norton’s Geopolitical Economy Report are some of the more reliable antidotes to distorted establishment press reporting on Latin America.  

     

    Douma and beyond

    Canadian foreign affairs reporting on events in the Middle East is as unreliable as the journalism coming out of Ukraine and Latin America. A deplorable case in point is mainstream coverage of the 10-year-long dirty war on Syria. Canada’s involvement, as reported by The Canada Files, includes air strikes, support for jihadists and close military collaboration with US and allied forces.

    Uncritical reporting by mainstream news outlets, that claimed the government of Syria launched chemical attacks on its own people in 2018, was the impetus for retaliatory bombing of Syria by the US and its allies.

    “Allegations of a chemical weapons attack by Syria’s government spark international demands for investigation.” Johnathan Gatehouse’s report for The National is still available on CBC’s news site:

    “Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) concluded that reactive chlorine gas was used against civilians in the Damascus suburb of Douma on April 7, 2018. At least 43 people died in that attack and more than 500 others were poisoned.”…  “The Assad regime’s culpability in horrific chemical weapons attacks is undeniable,” Morgan Ortagus, a State Department spokesperson, said yesterday.’

    The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté, Jonathan Steele for Counterpunch, and other independents like Eva Bartlett and Vanessa Beeley reporting from the ground in Syria, have done considerable digging on the chemical weapons allegations and found reports of Assad poisoning his own people to be without evidence.

    “OPCW inspectors found no evidence to support allegations of a Syrian government chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. But their findings were suppressed, and the team was sidelined,” reports Maté. Testifying before an Arria-Formula Meeting of the United Nations Security Council in 2021 Maté confirmed that “the actual inspectors who went to Douma did not reach the conclusion that was put out by the OPCW.” Maté says he based his UN testimony and his reporting on leaks received from two OPCW inspectors of the Douma Fact-Finding Mission who alleged that scientific evidence was suppressed. 

    The Toronto Star still has posted on its news site the Canadian Press story of then Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland asserting “it is clear to Canada” that the Assad government is responsible for a suspected chemical-weapons attack in Syria that left more than 40 people dead and 500 injured.

    ‘Evidence’ for claims that the Syrian army had used chemical weapons on civilians in Douma, was a video provided by the White Helmets, the much-lauded and supposed humanitarian defense group who worked exclusively in areas held by armed insurgents and rebels. The video, which has received a great deal of critical scrutiny from independent reporters, is of a frenzied scene inside of a hospital immediately after nearby shell fire. Adults and children covered in dust are carried in with a lot of commotion and hosed down with water by the rescuers.

    The late Robert Fisk, reporting for the Independent at the time, visited the hospital where the White Helmets recorded their video. Fisk interviewed one of the doctors who works there, Dr Rahaibani:

    “All the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a ‘White Helmet’, shouted ‘Gas!’, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”

    Canadian independent journalist Eva Bartlett reported from Damascus:

    “One week later, the night before Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons inspectors were due to visit Douma (at the request of the Syrian government), the US, France and the UK launched 103 missiles at Syria. They carried out this attack without waiting for any evidence at all, much less a full investigation by the OPCW. Indeed, the immediate attribution of guilt to the Syrian government, alongside the promptness of the retaliation, suggests at least foreknowledge of the ‘attack’, if not outright responsibility for it.”

    Even libertarian think tank CATO Institute calls media coverage of the Douma chemical weapons attack “a disgrace”. It notes: “Nowhere is the lack of media skepticism about government propaganda more evident than in the coverage of allegations that Assad’s regime has used chemical weapons against civilians.”

    A year after the alleged chemical attacks CBC posted a Thompson Reuters report that partially rolls back the initial allegations. This March 2019 headline states: ‘Under the OPCW’s mandate, it did not have authority to assign blame for April 2018 attack.’

    But the rest of the CBC article maintains the debunked claim. “Inspectors have concluded that a ‘toxic chemical’ containing chlorine was used in an attack last April in the Syrian town of Douma, at the time held by rebels but besieged by pro-government forces, the global chemical weapons agency said on Friday.”

    The Syrian-Arab News Agency published a timeline of the so-called ‘chemical file’ on February 2: “The US and a number of the Western states are continuing to use the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) as a weapon in the war waged against Syria, and a tool to exert political pressure to serve the agendas of these states in Syria and to justify their attack on it.”

    Mainstream news organizations have not reported the claims of dissenting OPCW inspectors, nor the eye witness accounts of people in the White Helmets video which contradicts the chemical attack narrative.

    In the meantime, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, Global News, CTV still have posted on their sites the Reuters and Associated Press wire stories as they first appeared, claiming that Syrian president Assad waged chemical warfare on Syrian civilians, justifying allied retaliatory bombing.

    What continues to undermine the reliability of international affairs journalism is the willingness of reporters working in the legacy press to simply report government statements as facts, without demanding evidence for the claims and assertions of official sources.  

    The question about whose journalism to trust, the alternative press or the corporate media, becomes meaningless if the standard for reliability is that the reporter gets the facts straight. If a journalist can answer all of Jeff Dvorkin’s questions in their reporting, “Where did you get this story? Who are your sources? Can these sources be trusted? And “How do you know this to be true?”, does it really matter whether the reporter works in the mainstream or in the alternative press?

    Recommendations laid out in The End of the CBC? for the public broadcaster need critical attention from corporate news outlets as well: “To do investigative journalism, produce the accountability news that holds people and institutions responsible, and do the essential work of democracy.”


    Editor’s note:  The Canada Files is the country’s only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We’ve provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support. 

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    Peter Biesterfeld is a freelance writer, independent documentary maker and educator based in Toronto. He writes and makes films about social justice and mediawatch issues. He has written for NOW magazine, Common Ground, The Dominion and Videomaker.


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    This is part one of Biesterfeld’s TCF series: A Case for anti-war and anti-imperialist journalism

     

    Read before you write 

    Once asked to explain his role as reporter preeminent investigative journalist I.F. Stone (1907-1989) answered: “To write the truth as I see it; to defend the weak against the strong; to fight for justice; to bring healing perspectives to bear on the terrible hates and fears of mankind, in the hope of some day bringing about a world in which man will enjoy the differences of the human garden instead of killing each other over them.”   

    Isidor “Izzy” Feinstein Stone was an unapologetic anti-war and anti-imperialist journalist, a rare breed of independent reporter, underrepresented in his time, and unheard of in today’s media wilderness.

    Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh was a friend and protégé of Stone. In his memoir Reporter, Hersh gushes over what was Stone’s legendary MO: “Reading and reading and reading before writing.” When speaking to journalism students Hersh never tires of exhorting the next generation of ink-stained wretches to, “Read before you write!” 

    The current crop of Canadian journalists working in the establishment press apparently didn’t get Hersh’s memo, at least not those reporters covering international affairs and Canada’s foreign policy. Canadians who get their news mostly in the mainstream media are too often presented with more misinformation and omission than fact and evidence about Canada’s role and responsibility in the world. Biased coverage of Latin America, Russia, China, and the Middle East is stark evidence that Canadians won’t get to experience reliable public interest journalism for a long time at best. 

    This writing (presented in two parts) shines a critical light on the derelict performance of Canada’s fourth estate in its coverage of foreign affairs. The aim is to impel succeeding generations to reject the unreliable reportage demonstrated by their forerunners who have been committing, what amounts to journalism fraud.

    A disquieting case in point is reporting in the Canadian establishment press of the Ukraine-Russia war.

     

    A tsunami of manipulated jingoism

    The lack of objective, principled coverage of the war in Ukraine is a degenerate state of affairs. The one thing worse is the extent to which it’s perfectly fine with most Americans.” Patrick Lawrence Consortium News April 5, 2022

    The Nation foreign affairs columnist Patrick Lawrence might have included Canadian news consumers in his assessment. Canadian war reporting coming out of Ukraine shows that the reliability gap between independent and establishment journalism has grown to a foreboding, democracy-threatening divide. The information wars over whose facts about the Ukraine-Russia conflict can be trusted are fierce and, often sensational. 

    Case in point: The heroes of Snake Island.

    Globe and Mail headline, Feb. 25, 2022: “Final moments of Ukrainian border guards’ fierce stand on Snake Island against Russian war ship become rallying cry.”

    Canadian news outlets reported as fact Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s claim that 13 border patrol officers died heroically after refusing to surrender the contested outpost in the Black Sea.

    Days later the Ukrainian navy confirmed the Russian version of events that Ukrainian soldiers on the island had surrendered, were taken prisoner and were not killed. Global News, the Globe and Mail and others published an update saying it was Zelensky’s mistake, but left posted on their news sites the initial story of the fictional heroic last stand and Zelensky awarding posthumous medals of honor to the fallen heroes who turned out to be alive.

    A CBC News headline for an Associated Press (AP) wire story dated March 25, 2022 reads: “300 died in last week’s airstrike on theatre in Mariupol, city government says.”

    Canadian MSM reporting follows the pack and like CNN and BBC relies on a single source but provides no evidence for the alleged Russian atrocity. “The bloodshed at the theatre fuelled allegations Moscow is committing war crimes by killing civilians.” The National’s Susan Ormiston repeats the claim and cites ‘local officials’ as her source.

    Donbass-based media, Russian media, and international independent reporters (Alina Lipp, Eva Bartlett, Patrick Lancaster and others) interviewed locals in Mariupol who testified that Ukrainian Azov fighters used civilians as human shields inside the drama theatre and detonated parts of it when they were forced to retreat. “No, nothing landed on it, it exploded from the inside, just dynamite or whatever,” said one eye witness interviewed by independent multi-language news site Donbass Insider

    It turns out that in spite of the alleged Russian “rocket strike’ that reduced the drama theatre to rubble, nobody was killed.   

    “It’s a miracle – civilians that were hiding in a basement at the Drama Theater in Mariupol survived the air strike,” tweeted Illia Ponomarenko, defense reporter for the Kyiv Independent one of several Ukrainian media outlets funded by NATO and Global Affairs Canada. 

    The initial AP story including false claims that Russian artillery killed 300 Ukrainian civilians huddled in a Mariupol theatre remains posted on CBC’s and other Canadian news sites without correction.

    “I’ve never seen coverage so utterly consumed by a tsunami of manipulated jingoism as this one.” Esteemed Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger told the China Morning Post in an interview that Ukraine war reporting in the legacy press is not to be trusted. 

    “Nothing should be trusted unless you’re going to sit in front of your television and deconstruct what you see, actually take it away with you and check it and try to verify it as much as you can and if you can’t, to discard it.”

    When grizzly atrocities attributed to Russian troops in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha dominated the news last April, the contradictory narratives coming out of corporate news rooms versus independent reporting describe two different realities. But only one side of the narrative received attention in the Canadian corporate press. 

    The Toronto Star headline on April 3, 2022, “Ukraine accuses Russia of massacre, city strewn with bodies,” sets up the AP wire story by Oleksandr Stashevskyi and Nebi Qena who provide indelible details of alleged murders, execution style, by Russian soldiers of civilians in Bucha:

    “Bodies with bound hands, close-range gunshot wounds and signs of torture lay scattered in a city on the outskirts of Kyiv after Russian soldiers withdrew from the area. Ukrainian authorities accused the departing forces on Sunday of committing war crimes and leaving behind a ‘scene from a horror movie.’”

    The caption under Margaret Evans’ April 4, 2022, TV report for CBC’s flagship news program, The National, reads, ‘Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky toured the carnage left behind by Russian troops in the northern Kyiv suburb of Bucha on Monday’. 

    The Star editorial board in an op-ed on the same day: “This is the fresh hell the Russians visited upon Bucha — and quite possibly on other cities throughout the country. This is not war. This is a war crime. Or, rather, these are war crimes, plural, exclamation point. Crimes against humanity. Genocide. And the perpetrators must be brought to account.”  

    In a report for independent news site SheerPost Patrick Lawrence admonishes sole source reporting: “Ukrainian officials say,” “according to Ukrainian officials,” “senior Ukrainian officers said,” “Ukrainian troops reported,” “the Ukrainian mayor said in an interview,”“police officers say,” given whatever these sources say or report or assert is played back to readers and viewers as factually so.”

     

    Bucha Timeline: 

    On March 29, 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators were in peace talks presided over by Turkish president Erdoğan in Istanbul. The Guardian reported at the time that Russia had agreed to “radically reduce military activity in the direction of Kyiv and Chernihiv”. Which Russia proceeded to do on March 30, 2022, withdrawing its troops, and evacuating areas near the Ukrainian capital including the suburb of Bucha.

    On March 31, 2022, Bucha mayor Anatolii Fedoruk recorded a widely publicized video message in which he cheerfully announced the Russian withdrawal: “March 31st will go down in the history of our settlement and the entire territorial community as the day of the liberation of our settlements from the Russian ‘orcs’, from the Russian occupiers by our armed forces of Ukraine.”

    Mayor Fedoruk confirmed that the Russians had left Bucha but said nothing about murdered civilians in the streets. On the same day, according to the Russian embassy This is part one of Biesterfeld’s TCF series: A Case for anti-war and anti-imperialist journalism

     Zhan Beleniuk, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament visited Bucha and posted photos of its streets on his social media pages. Beleniuk also made no mention of executed corpses in the streets.

    Russian troops had abandoned Bucha on March 30, but videos of atrocities did not start appearing on social media until April 3, four days later. 

    The main source of what happened in Bucha is a video recorded by Ukrainian National Police published along with some photos on April 2, 2022, three days after Russian troops had withdrawn from Bucha. The video shows a Ukrainian convoy driving down a main street in Bucha slaloming around a dozen or more corpses, evidently civilians. Some of the bodies have their hands bound behind their backs, some are wearing white arm bands designating support for the Russian military.

    The Russian embassy press office commented to The Canada Files: “We declare conclusively that the photographs and video footage published by the Ukrainian Government attesting to various alleged ‘crimes’ by Russian military personnel in Bucha are a staged provocation and have nothing to do with reality. We are not surprised that all the so-called evidence of Russian ‘war crimes’ in Bucha appeared a few days after this mopping-up operation when Ukrainian Security Service officers and representatives of Ukrainian television arrived in the town.”

    Western media including Canadian reporters expressed no skepticism of even the vilest claims coming from official sources such as Ukrainian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dmytro Kuleba and Ukraine’s former human rights commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova.

    Denisova claimed that “About 25 girls and women aged 14 to 24 were systematically raped during the occupation in the basement of one house in Bucha. Nine of them are pregnant.”

    Elizabeth Rinzetti quotes Denisova in an April 4, 2022, opinion piece for the Globe and Mail. “Russian soldiers told them they would rape them to the point where they wouldn’t want sexual contact with any man, to prevent them from having Ukrainian children.”

    Denisova made other claims to the international press about atrocities and perversions committed by Russian troops that are so depraved they strained plausibility and with it Denisova’s credibility, even with Ukrainian media.  

    When asked about her Russian rape and war crimes allegations in an interview with Ukraine News on Svoboda radio, Denisova said, “Yes, this vocabulary was very cruel, we discussed it (with the media). I said that, indeed, maybe I exaggerated. But I tried to achieve the goal of persuading the world to provide weapons and pressure Russia.”

    At President Zelensky’s request, an early end to Denisova’s tenure was put up for a vote to the Ukrainian Parliament, whose members voted her fired by a significant majority. Ukrainian media reported Denisova was being held accountable for failing to help organize humanitarian corridors, for failing to manage security issues in her department and finally: ‘she had not shown enough effort to find facts proving war crimes committed by Russian troops in Ukraine.’

    UK reporter Vanessa Beeley’s in-depth interview with former Swiss intelligence officer Jacques Baud brings context and nuanced analysis absent from much of MSM coverage on Ukraine.

    “We do not know the whole truth about the Bucha massacre,” says Baud, “but the available evidence supports the hypothesis that Ukraine staged the event to cover up its own crimes. By keeping these crimes quiet, our media have been complicit with them and have created a sense of impunity that has encouraged the Ukrainians to commit further crimes.”  

    However, Bucha narratives that run counter to official Kyiv talking points have not been presented to mainstream news audiences in Canada. The flawed news, fake news if you like, of Bucha atrocities supposedly committed by Russian soldiers, remains posted on Canadian news sites as a one-sided and unsettling rough first draft of history.  

     

    Disinformation warfare

    “Let’s imagine that the war dragged on and negative news dominates the positive. We simply do not notice this influence anymore and imperceptibly degrade ourselves emotionally. It is enough for the communicator to make us believe that everything is bad. Then, our brain itself will begin to distort reality.” Dmytro Kuleba – War for Reality – How to Win in the World of Fakes, Truths and Communities (2019).

    Ukrainian foreign affairs minister Kuleba is a communications specialist in disinformation warfare. He made some of the grizzly photos of the ‘Bucha massacre’ available to international media on his ministry web site. According to the cover blurb of his 2019 best seller, Kuleba “is a warrior in ‘hybrid war’ in the informational space between Russia and Ukraine. Dmytro Kuleba explains how not to lose a sense of reality when fakes have mixed with the truth, and the communication war has become no less fierce than the physical one.”

    War for Reality is a hefty instruction manual weighing in at 350 pages of guidance for the masses. Kuleba writes: “These are instructions that might help win in this and other information and communication wars: rely on reality, think critically, manage emotions, feel the community and interact with the state.”

    Kuleba who sits on the national defense and security council of Ukraine frequently co-issues joint statements with the defense minister to give shape to official narratives about the war, and about Russia.

    For example, a January 2023 joint communiqué “Regarding the urgency of strengthening Ukraine’s defence capabilities”, a weapons request to the international community, presents familiar talking points that have made their way into Canadian MSM ‘reportage’: 

    “We urge you to do this for the sake of your own citizens, who demand that the terrorist state be stopped so that the crimes it commits do not come to their land and in their homes.

    Russia’s criminal war of aggression against Ukraine, which has been waged for almost a year, remains the most serious threat to the international security and the single unprecedented challenge to the international community since World War II.

    This war poses a particularly acute danger for the Euro-Atlantic community considering Russia’s overt goals to destroy the European security order and undermine viability of democracy as a form of social life.”

    The language of official Ukrainian declarations and assertions about the war inevitably find their way into Canadian news reports unchallenged, uninvestigated and cited as fact.

    Some examples:

    “Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a terrorist state — Canada should say so” exhorts a National Post October headline.

    In November 2022, the European Parliament and NATO both declared Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. The NATO Parliamentary Assembly’s resolution, “to state clearly that the Russian state under the current regime is a terrorist one,” received approval from a delegation of Canadian MPs and senators who voted in favour.  

    Allan Woods writes in the Toronto Star: “The toxic ‘terrorist’ label, which has no agreed-upon definition in international law, serves nevertheless as a symbolic rebuke to any existing claims Russia makes to being a respected and law-abiding member of the international community.” (Nov.25, 2022)

    (Sidebar: In February 2023, Canada’s Parliament unanimously voted to list the Wagner Group, a Russian private military contractor, as a terrorist entity.)  

    Ukraine’s official position that the war started unprovoked in February 2022 is historically flawed, but echoed resoundingly by Ukraine’s allies including by Canadian officials such as defense minister Anita Anand, Global Affairs minister Melanie Joly and deputy PM Chrystia Freeland.

    Anand expresses her concern to CTV News over the Ukraine war spilling into a NATO country after a missile strike on Poland on November 15, 2022 which was later confirmed to have come from Ukraine air defenses:

    “I remain concerned, as I have been since February 24, when Russia illegally and unjustifiably invaded a sovereign democratic country.”

    Documented facts surrounding the beginnings and recent history of the Ukraine war are not acknowledged by the Canadian government hence historical accuracies are not making their way into MSM press coverage.

    When Anand, prime minister Trudeau and other Canadian officials talk about the war they inevitably reference “Russia’s unjustifiable and unprovoked invasion” of February 2022. MSM in Canada simply swallow and repeat and relegate to the memory hole critical history of the conflict.

    The Canadian press didn’t critically cover the US-managed regime change in Ukraine via the 2014 Maidan coup which violently toppled elected president Viktor Yanukovych. MSM narratives on the Maidan protest are about the Yanukovych government killing pro-European Union protestors in the streets with the help of Russian provocateurs. Whereas, independent reporters and academic observers arrived at a disturbingly different conclusion. 

    University of Ottawa political studies professor Ivan Katchanovski’s academic deconstruction of what happened inside Kyiv Independence square on February 20, 2014 shows that extreme nationalist elements inside Euromaidan protestors co-ordinated the violence for unthinkable political reasons. “Two leaders of the far-right Svoboda party stated in separate interviews that a Western government representative told them and other Maidan leaders a few weeks before the massacre that Western governments would stop recognizing Yanukovych after casualties among protesters reached 100,” writes Katchanovski.  

    Titled, The “Snipers’ Massacre” on the Maidan in Ukraine, Katchanovski first presented his study at the Annual Meeting of American Political Science Association in San Francisco in 2015. The 80-page forensic analysis has received no attention from the Canadian press even though it contains irrefutable video and audio data on who did the shooting and who ordered it.

    The failure of establishment reporters to connect the dots, even when handed a smoking gun of the heavy hand of US-led regime change, continues to eviscerate the public’s right to know.

    Robert Parry in a 2019 report for Consortium News writes, “In the upside-down world that has become the U.S. news media, the democratically elected president was a dictator and the coup makers who overthrew the popularly chosen leader were “pro-democracy” activists.”  

    The belligerent nationalism of Euromaidan found its way to other parts of Eastern Ukraine including the port of Odessa where anti-Maidan, pro-Russian demonstrators set up a protest camp of tents and barricades in the historical city centre, in opposition to the Euromaidan. Demonstrators demanded regional autonomy for the eastern regions, protection of the Russian language and historical heritage.  

    On May 2, 2014, a Euromaidan mob descended on the camp with violence. Maidan thugs threw Molotov cocktails, set tents and barricades on fire and drove a large contingent of the pro-Russian crowd into the nearby Trade Unions House. According to eye witnesses who spoke to Russia Today, “The attackers continued to hurl cocktail bombs filled with a home-made napalm mixture consisting of gasoline, acetone, and Styrofoam at the building.” Trapped protestors had called the fire brigade, but no one came. A handful of policemen watched the proceedings but did nothing. Reported by RT (and other media) : “A total of 48 people died. Eight people jumped from the building to their deaths, while others suffocated or died from burns. All were citizens of Ukraine. A total of 247 people requested medical help following the incident, of whom 27 had been wounded by gunfire.” Collective amnesia by MSM Canada about the grisly events now known as the Odessa massacre has erased from history one of the root causes that led to the present conflict.   

    Joe Lauria, Consortium News: “This event became the trigger for the uprising in the Donbass,”. Eight days after the Odessa massacre, coup resisters in the far eastern provinces of Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (LPR), bordering on Russia, voted in a referendum to become independent from Ukraine. The U.S.-backed coup government then launched a military attack against the breakaway provinces, which continued for nearly eight years, killing thousands of people before prompting Russian intervention in the civil conflict.”

    Russia did not recognize the independence of the DPR and LPR until Feb. 21, 2022, three days before its intervention which had been requested by the region years earlier.  

    Establishment think tank The International Crisis Group reports: “The armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine started in 2014. Between then and early 2022, it had already killed over 14,000 people.”

    This recent history and context go largely unreported in MSM news and seldom reaches mainstream audiences. However, local and international independents have been covering and continue to document, what amounts to an eight-year civil war in the Donbas. Reporting from Donetsk and Luhansk  by Vanessa Beeley, Patrick Lancaster, Alina Lipp, Thomas Roeper, Eva Bartlett and many others, has contradicted official narratives and discredited MSM transcriptions. 

    In October 2019, Canadian independent journalist Eva Bartlett filed one of many comprehensive front-line reports collected from local eye witnesses for Mintpress. An excerpt:

    We stopped in Zaitsevo town center, 800 meters from an NW front-line, and 1.5 km from the northern front-line.

    There, we spoke to Irina Dikun, head of the administration of Zaitsevo and, as it turns out, a remarkably courageous woman. She told me:

    ‘Here, we are not living, we’re surviving. Those who could leave, have left. Those who remain are mostly elderly. The shelling began in 2014 and hasn’t stopped till now. Six years of constant shelling. This morning at 6 a.m. there was a big blast [a 120 mm mortar (prohibited under Minsk) on a street where civilians still live, I later learn].

    I asked her whether she had a message for Western governments supporting Ukraine’s war on Donbass:

    ‘I want them to open their eyes and see there is no Russian invasion here. Just local, normal, peaceful, people who wanted to live another way. And we were not afraid to tell everybody how we want to live. In the beginning, we didn’t want to make a Republic; we just wanted to be autonomous. But we were not listened to. Ukraine moved its armed forces against the people and used their artillery against us.

    I want Western leaders to open their eyes and see this. Western weapons are used to kill us. We don’t wish for any person to live through what we are living here now. What is here is something you don’t wish for your enemy.’”

    For her reporting Bartlett ended up on an official Ukrainian ‘hit list’ posted on a website launched in December 2014 by former governor of Luhansk Oblast Georgy Tuka. The Myrotvorets or Peacemaker site lists people “whose actions have signs of crimes against the national security of Ukraine, peace, human security, and the international law”. When people on the list have died, the list is updated with a bold X struck through the profile image of the individual.

    Bartlett like many independents is given no love by establishment reporters. CBC’s Justin Ling posted a smear-piece on Bartlett in July 2022 claiming, “When it comes to pushing propaganda about the war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has help from a group of Westerners with long histories of peddling disinformation, including Canadian Eva Bartlett.” 

    Dissident facts and other counternarratives around the war are not sitting well with senior political decision-makers and their stenographers. Ling is not the only establishment journalist making false claims about independent news outlets on behalf of the security establishment.

    A December 2019 Global News headline states: “Canadian eyes only intelligence reports say Canadian leaders attacked in cyber campaigns.” One of the alleged ‘attacks’ reporter Sam Cooper references in his online report is a 2017 story published by independent US news organization Consortium News (CN) is titled, A Nazi skeleton in the family closet, about Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather. 

    Cooper reports: “The cyber-campaign directed by Russia involved distortions of facts and was timed, targeted and, according to the CSE (Canadian Communications Security Establishment) – Canada’s NSA, pushed the narrative to suggest that Freeland’s family immigrated to Canada as part of a wave of Nazi-collaborators. The first attack was a February 2017 report in the ‘online Consortium News’ followed ‘in quick succession’ by pro-Russian English language and Russian-language online media, the CSE report says.” 

    Apparently Cooper did not verify CSE claims with anybody at Consortium News who proceeded to sue Global for defamation. The suit accuses “the Corus Entertainment-owned network of entering into a business conspiracy with the Canadian Communications Security Establishment (CSE)” to “Link critics of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland to Russia as a way of discrediting those critics and protecting themselves.”

    Filed against both CSE and Corus the suit reads in part: “Global received the storyline from CSE and then consciously regurgitated the preconceived narrative that it knew to be false. In its quest to paint Plaintiff as a ‘Russian collaborator’, Global abandoned journalistic integrity and ethics, misrepresented the content of CN’s articles, and applied false labels to Plaintiff.” Citing case law, the suit filed in January, 2020, states that “a clear evasion from the truth and the failure to interview an important witness, who was easily accessible, supports a finding of actual malice.”

    CSE did not respond to the notice. Global News refused to apologize or retract all mention of Consortium News from the article which is still on line. The story of an American news organization filing a defamation law suit against a Canadian news outlet apparently failed to tweak the interest of the establishment press and remains unknown to Canadian news audiences.

    When asked to point to evidence that connects Consortium News to Russia, Cooper emailed The Canada Files, without comment, a link to the “Russian Asset Tracker” page of OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Project) an investigative reporting platform for journalists.  The site publishes “the global assets of Russia’s oligarchs and enablers.” On a list of oligarchs allegedly connected to Putin none is presented as having a connection to Consortium News. Sam Cooper hasn’t responded to requests for clarification.  

    As reported previously by The Canada Files, Cooper has committed other high profile errors.

    When emailed the same request for evidence a CSE media officer responded to Canada Files, “CSE’s threat coverage and analysis is based upon classified and unclassified sources. We do not have any further unclassified information to point you to regarding this topic.”

    The most recent journalism fail perpetrated by MSM Canada on Ukraine war coverage is the deafening media silence on Seymour Hersh’s in-depth report in Substack published February 8, How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.

    The bombshell revelations published by Pulitzer Prize winner Hersh have received scant if any attention from the Canadian establishment press. The Globe and Mail did publish an opinion piece calling for a “proper investigation” of what happened at the bottom of the Baltic Sea on September 26, 2022.

    Hersh writes: “Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.” 

    Citing an anonymous Washington source who was in on the planning of the sabotage with assistance from Norway, Hersh unpacks a tale that implicates the same players close to the Maidan coup, the team suspected of running the US proxy war in Ukraine: Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor to President Joe Biden.

    “I simply deconstructed the obvious,” Hersh tells a radio interviewer, likely referring to the trail of comments left by the major players including president Joe Biden about Nord Stream.

    According to Blinken, the Nord Stream pipeline bombing “offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come.”

    Victoria Nuland told a Senate hearing, “Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

    Biden said in a press conference, “If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it”

    Europe is dark and cold this winter because of an American act of war against a European ally, yet, no front-page reporting in the legacy press.

    The Canada Files put the question to Brodie Fenlon, CBC’s Editor-In-Chief and Executive Director of Programs & Standards a week ago: “In what journalistic universe is this act of war perpetrated by the US on one of its fellow NATO members, Germany, not newsworthy?” Fenlon has yet to respond.

    The war I know is not the war you’re reading about,” Hersh told Amy Goodman host of Democracy Now. To his Substack readers Hersh wrote, “Stay tuned. We are only on first base.”

     

    The Disinformation Industrial Complex 

    The climate of concern over how to counter so-called “Russian disinformation” has fostered a veritable disinformation industrial complex, including a number of government- funded research initiatives.

    As a result of disinformation research some reporters in the alternative press who have committing fact-based journalism and published unapproved narratives about the Ukraine conflict have found themselves targeted by the Canadian security establishment for ‘promoting Russian narratives.’  

    ‘Canada target of Russian disinformation campaign with tweets linked to foreign powers’, reads the ominous headline in the National Post. The Canadian Press story by Marie Woolf is splashed across news sites including the Globe and Mail, Global News, the Toronto Star, CTV and others.  

    The source for the story is a University of Calgary study. The School of Public Policy’s eight-page briefing document is titled ‘Disinformation and Russia-Ukrainian War on Canadian Social Media.’ Lead professor Jean-Cristophe Boucher explains that a ‘community detection algorithm’ was used for the study ‘to identify main influencers’ and found that in “the Canadian Twitter ecosystem” 25 per cent of the accounts were promoting pro-Russian narratives.  

    Topping Boucher’s list of alleged Russian influencers are some of the most reliable journalists working in the alternative press today, including Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal, award-winning reporters with The Grayzone, an independent news site based in Washington. Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton, Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald who published whistleblower Edward Snowden’s NSA surveillance leaks and John Pilger, a Julian Assange supporter, are also on the list of ‘pro-Russian accounts.’  

    It’s no surprise that Boucher’s report fingers whistleblower org WikiLeaks as a Russian-influenced account as well. But nowhere does the University of Calgary study cite evidence that connects any of the journalists on its list to Russia or to any Russian organizations. Nor does Marie Woolf’s CP story.

    Every war in the past 50 years is a result of media lies – Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder

    At the 2022 Collision tech conference in Toronto, Canada, guest speakers Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté appeared in front of an audience filled with members of the establishment press “to explain how the mainstream media is the most prolific source of disinformation on the planet.”

    Blumenthal and Maté claim establishment journalists “work closely with the national security state to cultivate public support for war while deflecting scrutiny from the oligarchy that controls it.” 

    CGTN America anchor Elaine Reyes, the event facilitator, asked the two award winning journalists a closing question, ‘What is the role of social media in promoting fake news in the future? 

    Maté’s response: “Obviously there are problems with social media and it’s very easy for fake stories to spread. But I’m most concerned with the fake stories that kill people, that kill children around the world based on lies that lead us to war and justify murderous sanctions that cripple entire economies.”

    For more on the unreliability of Canada’s establishment press and the urgent need for anti-war and anti-imperialist journalism that cuts through the media misinformation wilderness please visit this space for Part Two.


    Editor’s note:  The Canada Files is the country’s only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We’ve provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support. The Canada Files has just begun a fundraising campaign!  

    $4000 CAD per month is TCF’s goal for this fundraising campaign, up from $1407 CAD per month in support at present.
    Please consider setting up a monthly or annual donation through Donorbox.



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  • After 10 years of restricted freedom, political exile and incarceration, Julian Assange finally came face-to-face with his accusers at the Old Bailey Criminal Court in London. For three weeks in September, a team of English lawyers argued on behalf of their client, the U.S. Department of Justice, that the beleaguered WikiLeaks founder and publisher should be handed over to a U.S. national security court to face 17 counts under the 1917 Espionage Act.

    If convicted by the District Court of Eastern Virginia, where the indictments originated, Assange will spend the rest of his life in an American supermax facility for having published evidence of United States war crimes, torture and a host of other government wrongdoing.

    “The decade-long saga that brought us to this point should appall anyone who cares about our increasingly fragile freedoms,” blogged former Guardian reporter and Martha Gellhorn prize winner Jonathan Cook on the eve of Assange’s extradition hearings.

    “Right now, every journalist in the world ought to be up in arms, protesting at the abuses Assange is suffering, and has suffered, and the fate he will endure if extradition is approved.”

    If you go by years of Canadian reporting on Assange and WikiLeaks, Canadian journalists don’t share Cook’s sentiment. When asked in the summer if advocacy group Canadian Journalists for Free Expression has plans to advocate for Assange’s freedom, CJFE president Philip Tunley responded, “I am not seeing any consensus at CJFE to weigh in on behalf of Mr. Assange, though some clearly still support him and wish him well.”

    The premise that it takes an informed citizenry to run a true democracy is being seriously subverted by the Canadian fourth estate itself. By distracting attention away from the press freedom principles of Assange’s extradition case and obsessing over his character, Canadian mainstream press have undermined the public’s right to know while ignoring the significance of WikiLeaks releases themselves. That needs to change.

    As a Canadian freelancer, enduring 10 years of biased and inaccurate reporting in the Canadian press about Assange has been a source of dismay and frustration. Petitioning and complaining to senior editors and broadcast gatekeepers was clearly naïve given the paucity of responses.

    One response that did come back signposted a troubling predicament in Canadian Assange and WikiLeaks coverage.

    CBC had posted a Thomson Reuters story in August about a U.S. Senate Committee report that claimed WikiLeaks worked with Russian Intelligence to release the Democratic National Committee  emails in 2016.

    When I suggested in my complaint that the report provides no evidence for this classic claim against WikiLeaks and that repeating official unsubstantiated narratives does not make them true, CBC director of journalistic standards Paul Hambleton emailed back:

    “I fully understand that you may hold a different view than that of the Senate committee.

    It is not the CBC’s obligation to determine what is ‘truth’ (a truly dangerous notion for any broadcaster), but only to present differing views fairly and accurately affording Canadians the opportunity and the information they need to make up their own minds about the nature or quality of the views expressed.”

    I argued back: “The predicament here is that journalism is not principally about ‘the nature or quality of views.’ Journalism is foremost about presenting facts, checked and verified.”

    What’s seriously worrying in the Assange and WikiLeaks coverage I complained about to CBC and other news outlets is that for the public, the repetition of established narratives — including unsubstantiated claims and assertions —eventually becomes a substitute for fact or truth.

    I haven’t heard back from Mr. Hambleton.

    When I wasn’t writing complaint emails to news outlets, I was busy pitching Assange stories and opinion pieces of my own. Except for two queries, most were politely (but outright) rejected, citing issues with space and timing.

    Canadaland published one submission that called out Canadian Assange coverage for ignoring the United States’  attempt to criminalize whistleblower journalism.

    The National Observer posted my opinion letter after negotiating with the editor who asserted one of the classic positions held by many in the legacy press. “Assange is a programmer and a hacker, but never worked as a journalist. You’re framing the issue as a journalism freedom issue. For me this is still a problem in your framing.”

    The problem with my “framing” was resolved when I pointed out that Assange and WikiLeaks won a string of journalism awards over the years including the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism awarded annually to a journalist “whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda, or ‘official drivel’, as Martha Gellhorn called it.”

    We find ourselves in a time when unauthorized ideas are no longer guaranteed to make it into the mainstream, even when those ideas have been fact-checked and proven to be true.

    The crisis in Canadian journalism isn’t underfunding and it isn’t the concentration of media ownership. The plight of Canadian journalism, if reportage on Assange is the yardstick, are the signposts that fearless independent reporting that holds governments and institutions to account has all but vanished from the mainstream, which is where most Canadians get their news.

    In 2010, WikiLeaks released 750,000 pages of the Manning leaks, “the largest leak of classified documents in U.S history” declared the Pentagon  – State Department cables, Guantanamo secrets, Afghan war diaries and Iraq war logs which included collateral murder, the helicopter gunsight video that shows unprovoked slayings of civilians by U.S. troops in the streets of Baghdad.

    Australian journalist John Pilger said Assange and WikiLeaks were in the crosshairs of United States authorities years before the publicity around the war logs releases made WikiLeaks a household name.

    “The aim was to silence and criminalize WikiLeaks and its editor and publisher. It was as if they planned a war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech,” Pilger told a crowd of Assange supporters in front of the Old Bailey.

    Pilger described in detail the campaign to discredit Assange led by the Cyber Counter-Intelligence Assessments Branch of the U.S. Defense Department after a 2007 WikiLeaks post of a U.S. Army manual of standard operating procedures for soldiers overseeing al-Qaida suspects held in Guantanamo military prison.

    Pilger refers to the extradition hearings as “the final act to bury Julian Assange. It’s not due process, it’s due revenge.”

    According to independent observers, the structural inequalities of the extradition proceedings alone, as overseen by Westminster District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, provide plenty of cause to have the U.S. extradition request dismissed outright.

    During his incarceration at maximum security Belmarsh facility, Assange had only restricted access to his legal team and was only permitted to hold on to case files for a limited time. In court Assange sat in the back of the room behind a glass partition and wasn’t permitted confidential communications with his lawyers.

    Two protected defence witnesses, former employees of Spanish security firm UC Global, confirmed that they recorded conversations in the Ecuadorian embassy between Assange and his lawyers and gave the information to U.S. intelligence officials.

    Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, also a witness for the defence, had his case thrown out for less, after president Richard Nixon operatives broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to steal mental health information that might discredit him.

    Former UK diplomat and independent journalist Craig Murray, who reported in his daily blog from Courtroom 10 at the Central Criminal Court of England, wrote in his Day 6 report from the hearings: “What came over most strongly was the desire of both judge and prosecution to railroad through the extradition with as little of the case against it getting a public airing as possible.”

    None of the abuses of process were reported by establishment reporters. The only Canadian report from inside the courtroom, by the Globe and Mail, validated Murray’s observations and helped ensure judge and prosecution had their way.

    Globe and Mail Europe correspondent Paul Waldie concludes in his Sept. 16 report about Daniel Ellsberg’s testimony, “At one point he (Assange) started heckling Judge Vanessa Baraitser who threatened to kick him out.”

    However, according to Court News UK reporter Charlie Jones, what actually happened was that when U.S. prosecutors objected to the live testimony of German-Lebanese citizen Khaled El-Masri  — a survivor of CIA kidnapping, torture, and rendition —, Assange stood up and “heckled” from behind the glass partition at the back of the courtroom, saying “Madame, I will not accept you censoring a torture victim’s statement to this court.”

    Waldie made no mention of defence witness El-Masri’s testimony, which confirmed what WikiLeaks’ publication of U.S. diplomatic cables had revealed in 2010, that significant U.S. pressure was brought on German authorities not to arrest and prosecute CIA actors.

    Waldie also didn’t bring up that lawyers for the U.S. prosecution argued vehemently to keep all references to U.S. torture and wrong doing out of the proceeding’s transcripts.

    Noam Chomsky was one of the defence witnesses whose full testimony Baraitser and the prosecution didn’t want to hear. His live testimony was replaced by a four-minute summary read into the court records.

    An excerpt from Chomsky’s written submission: “In my view, Julian Assange, in courageously upholding political beliefs that most of us profess to share, has performed an enormous service to all the people in the world who treasure the values of freedom and democracy and who therefore demand the right to know what their elected representatives are doing. His actions in turn have led him to be pursued in a cruel and intolerable manner.”

    Canadian coverage of Assange’s extradition consists almost entirely of the same Thomson-Reuters and Associated Press dispatches posted on various Canadian news sites. If you held them up against independent accounts, you’d think indie journos and wire service reporters attended different events.

    Fidel Narváez, the Ecuadorian diplomat who granted Julian Assange political asylum, was one of only a handful of observers permitted into the courtroom. Narváez reports that on the first day, Baraitser cut access to the video stream in Courtroom 9 that had been previously authorized for nearly 40 human rights organizations and international observers, including Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and PEN International.

    “If the case in London were decided solely on justice, as it should in a state based on law, this battle would have been won by Assange,” writes Narváez in one of his daily dispatches.

    Narváez and other independent observers suggest that what was adjudicated was not whether Assange should be extradited for violating the Espionage Act, but rather the criminality of the American state itself.

    The chilling claim put forward by U.S. prosecutors that the United States has jurisdiction over any journalist, any publication, anywhere in the world to prosecute under the Espionage Act for publishing classified U.S. information hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Canadian Association of Journalists.

    “I can assure you that I, as president, as well as the CAJ’s advocacy committee, are keeping a very close eye on the Assange case,” said Brent Jolly. “The CAJ still believes the United States should immediately drop its attempts to extradite Mr. Assange.”

    “Encouraging sources to leak information that is in the public interest to the media is a basic practice of journalism which must be defended. Journalists and whistleblowers have a role to play in protecting citizens in a democracy,” Jolly’s predecessor, Karyn Pugliese, told me after Assange was arrested and imprisoned at Belmarsh in 2019.

    The CAJ’s position has yet to translate into accurate and unbiased reporting on the Assange-WikiLeaks file by Canadian journalists and news organizations. However, coverage of domestic occurrences of the ‘Assange effect’ — attempts to criminalize journalism, such as Justin Brake’s and Karl Dockstader’s arrest for covering Indigenous land disputes —  have been diligently reported.

    “There is a vague but widely held notion among the Canadian press that Assange’s troubles are not terribly important and not particularly newsworthy,” Canadaland publisher Jesse Brown told me in October after the hearings.  “To actually engage with the facts invariably means accepting that Julian Assange is being persecuted for telling the public things about the American government that they did not want known, and that means accepting that Julian Assange’s cause is every journalist’s cause.”

    The hearings wrapped up three weeks of witness testimonies in September. Assange’s lawyers submitted their closing arguments to the court on Nov. 6 arguing that the request for Assange’s extradition is the result of U.S. President Donald Trump’s political agenda.

    “It is politically motivated, it is an abuse of the process of this court, and it is a clear violation of the Anglo-U.S. treaty that governs this extradition.”

    Prosecutors will submit their closing arguments on Nov. 20. Baraitser is expected to hand down her judgement on Jan. 4.

    The post Where is Canadian Media on the Assange File? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.