Canada's Globe and Mail now serving its readers "truth sandwiches"

Globe & Mail “Public Editor” Sylvia Stead shares some insights today on how professional journalists combat disinformation.

Apparently this is quite a struggle, especially in the current news environment, dominated by one V Putin, who is a serial liar, perhaps even as bad as Trump.

How do we know Putin is a liar?

“When a country claims to invade another nation, with a Jewish president, for the purpose of de-nazification, it’s pretty clear they are lying.”

That’s it, that’s all you need to know! I was hoping for something a little more sophisticated. The long and sordid history of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism and its nazi sympathies can’t be brushed aside with such a trite remark.

But that’s all we get, even though most Globe readers are well aware that a president doesn’t necessarily wield much actual power, the Trump presidency being a prime example.

Then there are the Globe’s reporters on the ground in Ukraine, up to eight at a time! Funny how they never manage to get close enough to the action to provide any evidence of all that heroic resistance pushing the invaders back.

There are also the “trusted wire services,” of which there are two with global reach in the English speaking world. One is the Associated Press, owned by a consortium of US media companies, every one of which worships at the altar of American Exceptionalism.

The other is Reuters, owned by the same hereditary peer in the British House of Lords who happens to own the Globe! He also belongs to the same church as the other guys.

So yes, you can obviously count on getting nothing but the unvarnished truth from those “trusted wire services!”

By this point I’m starting to second guess my life-long assumption that The Globe and Mail is a serious newspaper. Then comes the clincher;

“Another technique to expose lies is using a “truth sandwich,” in which you first share the truth of what is happening, then describe the lie, returning finally to the truth.”

Really? 

We're a whisker away from nuclear annihilation and this moron wants to talk juvenile witticisms?

Sounds to me like the G&M is trying to grow their pre-teen readership.

How else can you explain such idiocy?

This is the intellectual level of our "thought leaders."

We are fucked.

Is the mission of a free press to elucidate or obfuscate?

This story from the Washington Post (August 23) has found its way into my Sunday Star today, four days later. Only the title has been simplified for the benefit of the Canadian readership; Was the cost of defeating Daesh in Mosul too high?

Writers Kareem Fahim and Aaso Ameen Schwan never get around to answering their rhetorical question, because, by gosh, it's just too hard to figure out what the cost was. Nobody seems to know how many civilians have died in Mosul. We are provided with a reassuring quote from a US Army spokesman about "how we apply rigorous standards to our targeting process" and of course even one civilian casualty is too many.

The best estimate they can come up with is 1,429 civilian dead, sourced from the Iraqi military. Had they tried a little harder and spent five minutes with Google, they might have happened upon this story from PRI citing an Amnesty International report that came out a month and a half before their story, that claims 5,805 civilian casualties.

Or they might have stumbled over this story by Patrick Cockburn in The Independent. Citing Kurdish intelligence, Cockburn speaks of 40,000 deaths in Mosul.

PRI, Amnesty International, Patrick Cockburn, and The Independent are all legitimate (although Western) sources who are quoted without hesitation when their reportage suits the narrative we're trying to spin. When it doesn't, they can be safely ignored.

In a similar vein, a story by Ann Hui in the Globe and Mail last week included the audacious claim that China has more journalists in prison than any country in the world. Say what? Even a pot-addled hillbilly from the backwoods of Bruce County knows that's a crock of shit!

I fired off an appropriately miffed letter to the editor providing a link to more recent information than what their reporter apparently had access to. Within a few hours I got a reply from the Globe's "Public Editor," Sylvia Stead.

Well, by golly, the reporter had made an oopsie and mistakenly used statistics from December of 2015 for a story written in August 2017. That's an honest mistake of course; major news platforms use outdated stats all the time when it suits the narrative they're spinning. We must never be allowed to forget that China is a totalitarian state with no press freedom.

To their credit, they printed a correction of sorts the next day - China no longer had the most journalists locked up. They could have gone a little further and pointed out, given the latest available stats (and if I can find them, Ann Hui could too), there are currently about five times as many journalists in the prisons of our NATO ally Turkey (population 90 million) than in the Peoples Republic of China (population 1,400 million), but I guess that would be asking too much.

It would undermine the narrative. As we all know, NATO is a force for freedom and democracy while China is an evil dictatorship.

It's worth fudging the facts to preserve such an essential truth.