In a video from Ottawa, a broadcaster stares at the camera in silence as protesters surround him and scream expletives, calling him a liar and bellowing "freedom."
Near the U.S. border in Surrey, B.C., a cameraman’s equipment is shoved off his shoulder and two men spit on him. A demonstrator follows another journalist closely, yelling that he is a "disgusting, filthy human being," while police escort the reporter through a jeering crowd.
Experts and advocates say the treatment of journalists, captured in many cases on video, during recent protests against public health measures should be a wake−up call.
"What I’ve seen over the last two days has been absolutely sickening," Brent Jolly, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, said in an interview Sunday.
"This is what happens when you have brains scrambled by misinformation."
Journalists are working in an unprecedented difficult situation in Canada right now, he said, with threats being hurled at the press both online and in person.
The degree of hostility and the targets put on journalists’ backs are especially concerning, and the psychological consequences can be significant, he said.
Fixing the problem will require a long−term solution that involves a multipronged approach. Newsroom organizations need to beef up security, digital training and protections. Social media companies should be reviewing the role they play in facilitating a "toxic sludge of discourse," he said, while police consider whether their plans and enforcement are appropriate for a digital world.
Government also has a role to play and Jolly urged Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez to take seriously the responsibility outlined in his mandate letter to combat serious forms of harmful online content.
While footage of the attacks is important to document what happened, there’s also a danger it will galvanize further abuse among those who believe they will face impunity, he warned.
"We need to take this as a lesson," Jolly said. "I think we got lucky that nothing worse happened."
Jolly is not alone in raising alarm over attacks on press freedom.
Josh Greenberg, director of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communications, said the tenor and tone of the protests resemble those in the United States and some European countries in recent years.
Most reporters will say they have been on the receiving end of accusations and hate, but Greenberg said something has changed.
"The level of vitriol directed at the media in particular, which has been at a slow boil under the surface and invisible, has certainly surfaced and become highly visible," he said.
Interactions posted online tend to involve white male reporters and Greenberg questioned what the consequences might be for young, female reporters who are Black, Indigenous or people of colour.
"Younger BIPOC female reporters experience significantly more vitriol than their white male journalist counterparts do," he said.
Greenberg called for a pause to consider the risks to Canada’s democracy when threats are directed at those whose job it is to report on its twists and turns.
Paul Knox, a retired journalism professor at Ryerson University, echoed his concern for non−white, non−male journalists.
The impact can be more severe when attacks focus on a journalist’s identity characteristics and raises concern that it may push some who already belong to under−represented groups to leave the industry.
There has been a decline in trust of news media over the past 20 or 30 years but it’s not universal, he added.
"There is still a pretty good core of people that realize a lot of what news reporters do is essential, that it’s valuable and that the people who do it are doing it because they feel that’s what they were put on Earth to do," Knox said.
"All of the anger and hate that we’re seeing against individual journalists is really misplaced and corrosive."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 21, 2022.
Comments
Our species is in crisis, suffering from very low self esteem. Promised all the swank of devices and digital convenience it's easy to assume we don't need other people. Ordering whatever we need from the internet means we don't have to say thank you to a living cashier. Replacing humans with gadgets that do as they are told, letting social media applaud our every little sneezed abuse, the sub-conscious must ourselves as redundant. Working conditions worsen while costs go up. Surely we have concluded that we are now redundant as contempt for life deepens in entertainment, business and in some areas - politics. We must stop this pandemic as soon as possible and re-think policies. Money is not going to save a planet spiralling down in despair as we witness climate destruction, logged forests and pipelines crossing green spaces while protesters are battered and invaders are leaving their excrement in the city.
Who knew that social media and the digital world would take away our humanity. The common ground for mankind has always been to find recourse to damage in all its forms, helping one another. Pulling together, aiding one another through thick and thin. Old mottos today. Ethics, morals, common decency seem to have gone the way of the dodo as we fight amongst ourselves for our right to yell, scream and abuse our fellow man because they don't want to follow our path or belief. This shows us all just how little it takes to become the monster we always abhorred becoming. Yet, here we are. Many media outlets have been bought out, yes, the corporate word has managed to quell the disquiet amongst us and throw red herrings out in order to keep us from questioning their motives. They have us so enraged with one another, neighbour against neighbour, that they have succeeded in their greatest endeavour to keep us all quiet and in our place: divide and conquer. Just look at how many bought into the freedom caravan as a means of ridding us of vaccine mandates when in actual fact it wasn't for that at all. The agenda was to oust an elected sitting government. Just like January 6 in the U.S. Just like many of the coups, juntas & uprisings throughout every country in the world. So when a journalist from a media that has not been bought out, when said journalist wants information, they too have become the enemy. The few voices left we can count on that have not become twisted and illogical with political agendas and we cannot even tell the difference now. How far we've come in this new 21st century.
The problem is that on one hand, the decline in trust does stem from some real reasons in terms of the media not being entirely trustworthy. On the other hand, once the decline in trust has happened, it's easy for a bunch of lying grifters to say "We're not them, so you should trust us instead!" when in fact they're far worse.
The National Observer, with its subscription-based rather than advertising-based financing, is part of an effort to redress some of the problems with mainstream media untrustworthiness. It specifically is in a position to talk honestly about climate change, where news outlets deriving a lot of ad financing from companies complicit in the drivers of climate change (fossil fuels, up to now car companies and so on) have not done so. But there are other things--mainstream media has a tendency to parrot government, particularly on foreign policy. So you get situations where, as soon as a country gets on the bad side of the United States, its elected president is suddenly according to the news a "dictator" (eg Venezuela), whereas if a country is on the good side of the United States, its coup dictator is not a dictator but a "president" (eg from 2009-2021 Honduras, briefly Bolivia), and its human rights violations including mass assassinations are not worthy of comment (notably Colombia). And in general, matters of concern to ordinary people and policies that would help them are often positioned as marginal, unimportant, and not "politically feasible" even if they have majority support, while matters of concern to the very wealthy and policies that would help them are central, highly important, and absolutely necessary.