[R-G] Turn off the Canadian Media, Please

[Anthony Fenton]

Turn off the Canadian Media, Please

January 09, 2009 By Justin Podur

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20209

If national media help make a nation, then we all need to stop reading  
and listening to conventional Canadian media if we want to make a  
decent Canada. Benedict Anderson, perhaps the leading scholar of  
nationalism, wrote that the daily newspaper (along with other  
innovations like novels, maps, censuses, museums) played a key role in  
creating national consciousness. People in a country like Canada use  
their own media - public (CBC) and private (CanWest, TorStar,  
CTVglobemedia) - to know what is happening in their own country. Media  
are also an important part of forging a national identity. They are  
supposed to represent the broad spectrum of Canadian opinion. When  
they present information on the rest of the world, they do so from a  
Canadian perspective and have the Canadian audience in mind.

And today, if you want to have the first idea what is happening in  
Israel/Palestine (or most of the rest of the world), the best thing to  
do would be to turn them off completely.

In the face of a major ongoing crime like that of Israel's siege and  
assault on Gaza, Canadians turn to the Canadian media in good faith to  
try to learn and understand what is happening, who is to blame, and  
what they might be able to do to help the victims. On each of these  
counts, the Canadian media fails. But the days when Canadians would be  
stuck listening to local radio, picking up the local print newspaper,  
or watching local television packaged by Canadian media corporations  
for their consumption are over. There is, for the time being, media  
choice. And given the choice, on Israel/Palestine, it would be foolish  
to turn to the Canadian media.

These days I actually don't have the stomach to do an exhaustive  
survey of Canadian coverage of these massacres. I have done such  
surveys in the past (see my letter to the Toronto Star's Mitch Potter  
from a few years back)[1], and I spent a lot of time and energy  
thinking about how to democratize the mainstream Canadian media and  
pressure it to be more open. These days, though, I mainly follow my  
own advice. A friend of mine, Brooks Kind, spent some time going  
through the least biased of the Canadian media, CBC radio, over the  
past two weeks. He found that the CBC suppressed crucial facts,  
presented an unrepresentative spectrum of opinion, and falsified the  
historical record. The suppressions and omissions are in the service  
of the perspective of the US and Israeli governments (and Canadian  
politicians), but they are no less false for that. With the reminder  
that I am picking on the CBC not because it is the worst, but because  
it is by far the best, here are just a few examples.

First, remember that the pretext for Israel's attack is that Hamas  
refused to renew the June 19/08 ceasefire and started rocket attacks  
in December/08. But Israel violated the ceasefire in two ways. First,  
by continuing to starve Gaza (as Israeli officials openly admit and  
have done for years), and second, by attacking Gaza on November 4/08  
and killing six Hamas people. Why is this important? There is a  
pattern here: Israel has repeatedly broken truces, ceasefires, and  
peace talks with spectacular assassinations that involve killing large  
numbers of people. This has been a pattern for many years, and has  
included the assassinations of many of Hamas's leaders (Abd-el-Aziz  
Rantisi, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, and many, many others). It is an  
explicit part of Israel's strategy to provoke its opponents and get  
pretexts for further attacks. But this timeline, and the November 4/08  
attack by Israel, is not part of the 'boilerplate' provided when the  
attack on Gaza is reported in the Canadian media.

Second, Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in  
the Occupied Territories, has been making very strong statements about  
Gaza in recent months. Falk is an acclaimed scholar and a highly  
credible source. He works for the United Nations, which Canadians  
supposedly have special respect for. When Falk traveled to Israel, he  
was detained, strip searched, and deported. Israel's contempt for the  
United Nations could hardly have been more starkly revealed. Except,  
perhaps, when the Israelis killed a Canadian UN observer (Paeta Derek  
Hess-von Kruedener) in Lebanon in 2006, along with 3 others (Du Zhaoyu  
of China, Jarno Makinen of Finland, and Hans-Peter Lang of Austria).  
Or, perhaps, when the Israelis bombed the UNRWA school in Jabaliya on  
Jan 3/09, killing 43 Palestinians and wounding 100. Unlike much of the  
UN, whose main response to these killings might as well be to  
apologize for getting in the way of the bombs, Falk has provided  
urgent warnings to the world about the seriousness of the situation.  
But Falk's story is not given any prominence in any Canadian media. An  
entire story on the UN aspects of the situation [2] quotes Israel's  
envoy to the UN and Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas, the UN Secretary  
General Ban Ki Moon and others, but not the important and strong voice  
of the UN's Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories.

And then, of course, there are the cliches, the horrible cliches of  
this conflict. Like this story [3] about how "World leaders call for  
Mideast ceasefire as more civilians die." They just "die", these  
civilians. The lead reads "World leaders called for a ceasefire in the  
fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas as civilian casualties  
climbed in the Gaza Strip." The "casualties climbed", the "civilians  
died", of their own accord, with no help from the Israelis. Israeli  
officials are allowed the grace of their titles ("Israeli Defence  
Minister Ehud Barak") but Mahmoud Zahar from the elected Hamas  
government is called "Gaza's Hamas strongman" (there are no Western  
strongmen).

Just before the current massacres, on December 8/08, Radio Canada's  
ombudsman found that the CBC had erred in running a very factual  
documentary called "Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land" (3PL).  
The ombudsman Radio Canada erred in broadcasting because "militant pro- 
Palestinian groups were involved in researching" it. Who were these  
groups? FAIR (www.fair.org), or Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting,  
whose principal activity is to act more or less as Radio Canada's  
ombudsman should, pointing out inaccuracies and unfairness in US media  
coverage of critical topics. "Factual errors" pointed out by the  
ombudsman include that the film "speaks of the occupation as being  
illegal, but Miville-Dechene points out that this has never been  
clarified by the courts". This merely suggests that the ombudsman  
lacks the most cursory understanding of international law. And  
possibly, an understanding of what constitutes a factual error. In any  
case, the Quebec Israel Committee (QIC) said that, by changing its  
policies to prevent documentaries like these from being seen by  
Canadians, "Radio-Canada has strengthened its credibility and has  
become a better news organization." The more "credible" a media outlet  
is to an outfit like the QIC, the better off Canadians would be in  
turning it off altogether. What is good about this situation is that  
all Radio-Canada can really do is prevent Canadians from seeing 3PL on  
Radio-Canada. They can't prevent Canadians from seeing it altogether  
(in fact, you can watch it at the Media Education Foundation [4] site  
or on Google Video [5]). The natural response is the right one: turn  
off Radio-Canada.

A last example. The rally against the Gaza massacres that happened in  
Toronto (as well as many cities in the world) on January 3, 2009. I  
was at the rally. I have been to a lot of rallies over the years. Many  
of these, I must admit, have been very small. Activists learn how to  
assess (and yes, unfortunately, sometimes to inflate) numbers at  
demonstrations. But to say that the January 3, 2009 rally had "more  
than 1000 people", as CBC did [6], is simply preposterous. They may as  
well have said "more than one". There were easily 10,000 people there  
- unless someone can show me how you can fill Yonge Street between  
Bloor Street and College Street in Toronto with a thousand people. And  
no, at no point was the march single file.

In the past, when I, and others like me, have made points like these  
to Canadian journalists, they reply that we are leftists and biased  
and merely want them to be biased the way we are. But the above are  
mostly matters of fact and of professionalism, not of analysis or  
opinion.

I am willing to declare my biases. I write for ZNet (www.zcommunications.org/znet) 
  and work as an editor for it. I wouldn't do either if I didn't think  
people should read it, and I wouldn't criticize the mainstream media  
if I thought it did a good job. ZNet is a site for analysis. It  
features analysts who write on other sites, like the Electronic  
Intifada's (www.electronicintifada.net) Ali Abunimah, Phyllis Bennis  
from the Institute for Policy Studies (http://www.ips-dc.org/staff/phyllis 
), Jonathan Cook, Ha'aretz's own Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, other  
Israelis like Neve Gorden and Jeff Halper, as well as folks who write  
mainly for ZNet. If you're distrustful of the "alternative media" and  
fear that folks from the region will be biased, try the mainstream  
(liberal) UK papers, whose openness to diverse analysis puts the  
Canadian press to shame. Guardian's Comment is Free (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree 
) section has had Leila el-Haddad, Nir Rosen, Seamus Milne, and plenty  
of others that don't see the light of day in the Canadian press.  
Reading these analysts reveals the incredible mediocrity of the  
Canadian punditry when it addresses international affairs.

But analysis is not news, and people do need news. Not only do they  
need news, but they need a variety of perspectives, and the Israeli  
perspective is a very important one. There is, however, a difference  
between what the public relations line of a state at war and the  
actual perspective and debates in that state. In other words, if you  
want the Israeli perspective, you can get it directly, in the Israeli  
press: read Haaretz (www.haaretz.com) and the Jerusalem Post (www.jpost.com 
). They are available in English, and they are much more frank about  
Israel's aims and practices than the Canadian media are. Why read what  
the Israeli military wants Canadians to read, when you can read what  
they want Israelis to read?

If you want news about how Israeli destruction looks to its victims,  
there is nothing better than the IMEMC (www.imemc.org), which is a  
genuine news outlet run by Palestinians, in the Occupied Territories,  
with as high professional standards as you could want. These are  
journalistic heroes, and the first place I go.

If you want news that is actually balanced, with "supporters of  
Israel" and "pro-Palestinian" voices represented, as well as actual  
reporting from the ground, use al-Jazeera (www.aljazeera.net/en).

[Aside: I can't use the phrase "supporters of Israel" without  
reminding readers of Chomsky's note in Fateful Triangle, where he said  
"supporters of Israel" should more aptly be called "supporters of the  
moral degradation and eventual destruction of Israel". "Pro- 
Palestinian" is another strange term, since it seems that thinking  
that a group of human beings are, in fact, human beings, makes you  
"pro-Palestinian", rather like how agreeing with the overwhelming  
scientific consensus on climate change makes you an "environmentalist".]

If you want to make your own decision about how many people were at a  
demonstration or what its message was, you might as well go directly  
to the people involved: they all have their own websites. The  
Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (www.caiaweb.org) has one, the  
Canadian Arab Federation (www.caf.ca) has one, and so on.

Let me rephrase my point here. Modern Western armies, like those of  
Israel, the US, and Canada, think of information as part of warfare.  
They expend tremendous time and resources mobilizing support for their  
violence. They do this by controlling information, disallowing  
independent journalists (as Israel is doing), using embedded  
journalists, and running a massive public relations machinery designed  
specifically to deliver arguments and propaganda for the foreign press  
and for foreign consumption. There is a special machinery just for  
Canadians, and a special strategy to sell war in Canada. There was one  
for the Iraq war, there is one for the Afghanistan war, and one for  
Israel's wars as well. What is so unusual about the media environment  
today is that all this expense, all this media machinery, can be  
circumvented by anyone in its target audience by the simple click of a  
mouse. So click away.

The Canadian media are a biased little niche of pro-Israeli spin, and  
should be seen that way. There are times when the Canadian media are  
useful for news about Canada, if read critically. Even for Canada,  
there are reasonably good alternatives for analysis, commentary, and  
features (dominionpaper.ca, rabble.ca, briarpatch.ca), and plenty of  
direct information from politicians (the political parties have their  
own sites, as do many individual polticians, activist groups, and so  
on). Still, read critically, the Canadian media can be a good source  
on goings on in the country.

But on Israel/Palestine, please, find more serious sources.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer. His blog is  
www.killingtrain.com.

References:

[1] http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/2049

[2] http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/01/06/gaza-attacks.html

[3] http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/01/05/gaza-attacks.html?ref=rss&loomia_si=t0:a16:g2:r2:c0.195922:b20613139

[4] http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=117&template=PDGCommTemplates/HTN/Item_Preview.html

[5] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6604775898578139565

[6] http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/01/03/gaza-protests.html?ref=rss