Ezra Levant, the founder of Canada’s conservative Rebel News, explained in a lengthy Twitter thread Tuesday why the Canadian media is so biased against the truckers who are engaging in peaceful protest against vaccine mandates.
Levant argued that the Canadian media are not only biased in favor of the left, as the American media are, but are also highly consolidated and controlled, and have been essentially bought off by government support, enforcing a liberal point of view:
1. The first thing to know about the media is that they’re lazy. They’d rather re-write a government press release than get up from their desk and report from the field — especially when it’s -20° out.
So they repeat Trudeau’s lie that the truckers are racist and sexist.
…2
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
2. The second thing to know is that in Canada, more than 99% of journalists receive a payment from Justin Trudeau. Here’s the list of the journalists who took Trudeau’s $61 million pre-election pay-off: https://t.co/loGh7YgWqV
It’s more than 99% of working journalists.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
3. There is an illusion of media competition in Canada, but it’s an oligopoly. Postmedia — the largest recipient of Trudeau’s media bail-out — owns every English-language daily newspaper in Canada, except two. And even they just run the same wire copy as their competitors.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
4. And Trudeau’s CBC state broadcaster is larger than all other news media combined. Every non-CBC journalist tailors their work so that, if they’re laid off, they can get hired at the CBC, since it’s “too big to fail”. It’s the last resort.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
5. There used to be some conservative media in Canada, e.g. the National Post. But for years they hired woke leftist underminers. Personnel is policy. A majority of their newsroom signed a letter to fire their star columnist. They’re no better than CBC: https://t.co/fSvGLXn854
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
6. TV is the worst, of course. They are highly regulated by the CRTC, which has the power to kill any TV or radio station. They cancel the licence of any company that airs conservative views that offend the regime. Example: https://t.co/sXrNfd4ob1
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
7. When I worked at Sun News I learned that the TV part of TV companies was economically unimportant compared to the cell phone and cable side of the business. That’s how the CRTC pressures TV companies. News shows are a rounding error compared to regulatory givings and takings.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
8. These are all structural issues. But an obvious point is the lack of diversity in the news media. I don’t mean race or sex — I mean intellectual and class diversity. The Media Party (as I call it) is politically and culturally homogenous. Urban, woke think-alikes.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
9. They don’t know any truckers or farmers or anyone who works outside or wears a hard hat or a uniform. My favorite tweet from the Globe and Mail was this masterpiece. The reporter covering the working classes thought this was a wrecking ball and got scared. pic.twitter.com/mnKQrBTw2n
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
10. How can this rotting industry — monopolistic; corrupted by government money; regulated by government censors; a political monoculture; infected by woke cancel culture — possibly cover a populist workers rebellion? They are intellectually and structurally incapable of it.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
11. Psychologically, these middle class narcissists (every journalist must be a narcissist to believe the world needs to hear what they have to say) cannot believe that the working classes reject them. They always posed as saviours of the working man. It made them feel better.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
12. So the Toronto Star, with its Marxist Atkinson Principles, calls for martial law against working men. They’re for the mass firing of unvaccinated union members, a violation of collective agreements. They’re in bed with Big Pharma. They don’t use the phrase pro-choice anymore.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
13. My point is, for the media to report what’s really happening out there — 100,000+ truckers across the country; 1M people or more who cheered them along the way — would destroy not only the media’s worldview but their self-image. They just cannot believe their eyes.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
14. The pro-Trudeau pollster Abacus shows that 32% of Canadians see themselves in the trucker convoy. If the truckers were a political party, they would immediately be in first place. This is enormous cognitive dissonance to the Media Party who keep calling it a radical fringe. pic.twitter.com/jQgVqI7KrX
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
15. A reason why the Media Party narrative is failing is that a million people have had first-hand contact with the truckers. The revolution IS being televised, just not on CBC. It’s alive on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. These aren’t “racists”: pic.twitter.com/ymb87CZ18G
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
16. So many institutions have failed during the pandemic — Parliament, the opposition Conservatives, the courts, colleges of physicians and surgeons, police, etc. But the media has failed the most. But because they are immune to most consequences, they haven’t noticed it yet.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
17. They don’t understand why people don’t trust them. Here’s CTV, mad that the convoy they’ve been defaming for two weeks won’t invite them in to a press conference as an honoured guest: https://t.co/2vRNmoZpIb
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
18. The icing on the cake is that CTV is part of the government press gallery that excludes conservative media (like Rebel News) from the Parliament. They voted to protect Trudeau from our questions (but they’re accepting applications from Xinhua): https://t.co/WsgZxkWyZc
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
19. CTV is huge. They’re owned by Bell, the cell phone and cable company, that also owns two NHL teams. Which helps explain why they liked the lockdowns so much — but lobbied for special exemptions for them, but not for your kids’ hockey teams.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
20. CTV seems large to you, but it’s unimportant as a business to Bell, it’s a rounding error. It’s value to Bell is the same reason Jeff Bezos bought Washington Post or Carlos Slim bought NY Times: it’s a way to influence government. It’s a lobby group. Your mind is the product.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
21. Even if there were an independent journalist at CTV, they wouldn’t be able to contradict the corporate objectives of Bell. The Globe is owned by the Woodbridge Company. Postmedia is owned by New Jersey’s Chatham Asset Management. They’re all political toys of billionaires.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
22. I have to go to work now (I’m not some government journalist like those at Trudeau’s CBC state broadcaster, or the 99% of Canadian reporters whose paycheque is directly subsidized by Trudeau). But let me leave you with this delicious moment…
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
23. We had reporters at NINE different trucker convoys on the weekend. We’re embedded at the border in Coutts. We’ve got half a dozen people in Ottawa (on the street, not safely tucked away in offices). So people choose our news over the Media Party’s punditry.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
24. The whole world is riveted by what’s happening in Canada. But who can they talk to about what’s really happening? They could call the CBC, and I’m sure CNN does. But that’s just Trudeau’s point of view, it’s not really telling you what’s happening. So they call us.
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
25. Yesterday alone our team must have done ten foreign interviews. I was on Tucker Carlson; our young reporter @lincolnmjay was on Hannity (I’ll have to find that clip). Those two shows are, what, 8 million views? pic.twitter.com/9S0lnpjLJS
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
26. So what’s a government journalist to do? Here’s the CBC, reduced to tweeting about our reporter appearing on Fox. She’s rage-tweeting at people with ten times the viewership she has — even though (because?) she has a $1.5B/year subsidy. https://t.co/dEDWsq6PHV
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 8, 2022
As if to underline Levant’s point, the lead editorial in the Ottawa Citizen, the hometown paper of Canada’s capital city, on which the truckers have converged, is: “Freedom’ truck convoy isn’t the right way to protest.” The paper gave enthusiastic and empathetic coverage to Black Lives Matter protests throughout the city in 2020, in which Prime Minister Trudeau joined.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
