Last week, The Citizen ran a Canadian Press story about the efforts being made to create a national three-digit suicide prevention hotline.
Here was the headline: “Make three-digit suicide prevention hotline accessible, CRTC told in consultations.”
But except for two paragraphs near the bottom of the 638-word story about how deaf advocates asked the CRTC to make the hotline inclusive, that’s not what the story was about.
The story was actually about two Conservative MPs – one of them Cariboo-Prince George MP Todd Doherty – leading the charge to get the hotline up and running, loudly complaining to anyone who will listen that this bureaucratic foot dragging is going on while 11 Canadians take their own lives each day.
We changed the headline on The Citizen website to read: “MP Doherty demands CRTC hurry up with national three-digit hotline.”
For a national audience, the headline should have been: “Conservatives urge Liberals to speed up suicide hotline creation.”
The problem with that headline is that it simply doesn’t make sense to liberal (and largely urban) Canadians who think the federal Conservatives only care about cutting taxes (and the carbon tax in particular), ending vaccine mandates, denying climate change and discriminating against everyone advocating for social justice.
And it really doesn’t make sense to reporters and editors based in Vancouver and Toronto that Conservative MPs from Prince George and Edmonton are advocating for government action on a social issue that would help save the lives of vulnerable individuals.
This is just a Prince George example of a much-wider news media phenomenon that’s been going on for years.
In 2018, the Washington Post ran a story that clearly confused its editors: “White liberals dumb themselves down when they speak to black people, a new study contends.” Note the verb use. “Contends” is the fancy word white liberals use when they’re suspicious of academic research that doesn’t confirm their worldview. It’s not a verb used when reporting on studies on climate change, COVID-19 or immigration.
In 2020, the U.S. liberal media explained that uneducated and lower income whites were the reason Donald Trump attracted millions more votes than he received when he won the presidency in 2016. In other words, the story was about racism. Far less reported was how Trump’s support among Black and Hispanic voters, especially men, also grew. The Hispanic vote enabled Trump to hold onto both Florida and Texas comfortably, despite reports in the last days of the campaign that they were in play for Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
Closer to home, the Justin Trudeau stories about blackface, unwanted sexual advances, rude treatment of Indigenous leaders and favours to his rich friends and benefactors didn’t land with nearly the impact they would have if he was the leader of the federal Conservatives. That’s partly to do with the federal Conservatives having poor leadership since Stephen Harper left (and seem well on their way to shooting themselves in the foot and mouth again). But it’s mostly because federal Liberal supporters and MPs have kept their mouths shut for fear kicking Trudeau to the curb would open the door to the crazy Conservative horde.
So much for holding the rich and powerful accountable for their actions. Turns out if your politics are correct, you can get a pass on deplorable behaviour.
Here at home, my liberal bias as Citizen editor became too entrenched over the past two years and I apologize to readers for that. Before 2020, I regularly received complaints from both sides of the pollical aisle. Right-of-centre readers told me I was a bleeding-heart liberal and left-of-centre readers accused me of being a privileged, middle-aged-white guy. Correct on both counts. That’s the sweet spot for a fair and balanced editor and opinion writer.
Over the past two years, however, the compliments have been almost exclusively from the left and the criticism has been almost exclusively from the right (except for the people who thought I wasn’t far enough to the left or who were angry that I published right-of-centre perspectives as letters to the editor). While I’m hardly alone when it comes to an increasing disdain of people and perspectives during the COVID era, it’s no excuse, either. I have a professional responsibility (in other words, I’m paid) to seek out, understand and articulate views in the community that are not my own.
Recently, I’ve been talking with some of my harshest online critics, readers who care about Prince George and The Citizen but feel we’ve lost our way, as a community and as a publication. Turns out we care about the same things a lot of the time and our differences aren’t nearly as wide or as deep as they may have appeared.
I’ll share how some of those conversations have gone, the insights I’ve taken away so far and what I plan to do about it (both in my opinion writing and in future Citizen coverage) in editorials later this week.
Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
