I want to encourage readers of this substack to lend their ears to a podcast produced recently for the Canadian Global Affairs Institute (CGAI) by Colin Robertson, a former senior Canadian diplomat who produces excellent coverage of foreign policy issues.
You can find it here:
https://www.cgai.ca/foreign_interference_and_the_media
The podcast series is called Global Exchange and the particular episode I want to lead you to is on “Foreign Interference in the Media.” OK, I take part in this, but the reason I encourage you to listen involves the chance to hear from Chris Waddell. For those of you who do not know him, Chris had a long and distinguished career as a journalist, including stints as bureau chief for CBC TV news, as Ottawa Bureau chief for the Globe and Mail and as a Globe and Mail national editor. The second phase of his career saw him heading up Carleton University’s journalism program. Hard to beat that well-earned c.v.
It is an education to hear him talk about how journalists should handle stories based on leaks-what checks they bring to it and what ethical principles.
In particular I was struck by two things Chris had to say. One may be fairly obvious, that journalists like good stories, especially if they involve “scoops.” He characterized the chase for scoops in a digital age as a bit of anachronism, but granted that it was still a powerful force, and that temptations surrounded the telling of “good stories.”
A second thing was far less obvious to me. Chris suggested that a problem that the media community faces when reporting on national security and intelligence issues, is that they tend to bring the “lens” of political reporting to the work. In other words they are prone to look for political contestation, signs of failure, issues of scandal, misrepresentation and cover-up. Maybe, he suggested that political lens is not always well suited to reporting on national security issues.
But let me stop here—please listen to what he has to say. A free course in journalism 101.
Sadly, the media also take a political lens to reporting on the pandemic. As a result, very few reporters have demonstrated much curiosity about what aerosol scientists are saying about transmission of COVID-19. Nor have the media seemed very curious about the impact of COVID-19 on the immune system. As an aside, I'm not writing this comment in response to the note by Susan Carr. It's a coincidence that she's bringing up the latest nonsense from Robert Kennedy, who also has not demonstrated a great deal of curiosity about what the aerosol scientists and neurologists are saying about this disease. When it comes to COVID-19, I prefer to pay attention to the research of Avindra Nath at the National Institutes of Health. Here's an analysis that he co-wrote with a Yale University neurology expeert, which appeared in Science last year. It concerns COVID-19 and brain injuries. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm2052
I was struck by what the National Citizens Inquiry said about media. I was further struck by what Robert Kennedy tweeted regarding CBC and Canadian media propaganda. So far, that has gone around the world. Nothing you say will influence me regarding media today in Canada. No legacy media can or should be trusted. End of.