From journalism to propaganda

Whatever happened to the journalism tradition of pretending to present a balanced perspective? 

I say "pretending" because everybody always knew there were 101 ways to rig the final product, but it was the principle of the thing. Appearances matter. We were better than those totalitarian states where the government dictates the news and it's all propaganda. We in the Nations of Virtue believe in a free press, and our free press gave you the news, not propaganda.

Those days are long gone.  The CBC will have Bill Browder on and defer to him as a world expert on Russia with impeccable credentials, without ever hinting that there exists an opposing school of thought about the man. He is widely considered a fraud in Europe today.

Same with Eliot Higgins, the savant supposedly behind Bellingcat. I heard Matt Galloway interview him recently, and maybe international geopolitics isn't his bag, but he brought a level of credulity to the interview that would be more appropriate for a fan club president than a journalist.

Bellingcat is financed by the NATO countries and staffed primarily by veterans of the UK security establishment. At the very least, an interview should put that fact on the table. Instead, it's treated as Russian disinformation - just like Chrystia Freeland's Nazi Grampa.

You see this lack of balance all the time in the pages of The Globe and Mail as well. Today those stalwarts of the Yellow Peril file at the Globe, Robert Fife and Steven Chase, managed to wring a quarter page of anti-China propaganda out of a report from ACHK, the Alliance Canada Hong Kong. We are told this "is an umbrella group for pro-democracy advocates in this country."

Which it is. What we're not told is ACHK was founded in Vancouver in January last year, by pro-democracy activists who had already been kicked out of HK for their efforts or were getting out while the getting was good.

The folks who organized this crowd.

These pro-democracy activists have been lavishly funded by the US government via the National Endowment for Democracy for many years, and presumably that's who's funding ACHK now. If this organization issued a "report," what would you expect it to say?

I would expect it to say pretty much what Fife and Chase reported. But, if Fife and Chase were actual journalists, we would have seen a little more in the way of context.

Context doesn't matter. Balance doesn't matter. Nothing matters except maintaining the official narrative.

Doesn't that sound exactly like what the "journalists" used to do in those totalitarian states?