Here’s to another year of phoney, media-fuelled panic
With all due respect to Noam Chomsky, the corporate media isn’t only adept at “manufacturing consent”. It’s also pretty good at manufacturing outrage.
Recall how, in the lead-up to the last election, much of the Ottawa press corps shared a collective tantrum because then-Tory MP Eve Adams pitched a hissy fit over a bad $6 car wash. Or the collective hemorrhage experienced by the Hill pundit corps over a “testy” little exchange Tom Mulcair had with a reporter in a scrum a few weeks later. (One foolish fixture on the Ottawa media carousel even suggested that ‘Hulk’ Mulcair’s tepid sparring with CTV’s Laurie Graham over the difference in meaning between “change” and “amend” disqualified him from being prime minister. Hilarious.)
Predictably, in the months following the election, we’ve seen more displays of the same petty, churlish tendency to make mountains out of molehills — this time in connection with Prime Minister’s Justin Trudeau laudable decision to fast-track the arrival of 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada.
The first target of phoney outrage — with a good measure of fear mixed in — was the phantom security threat the humanitarian initiative posed to Canada and Canadians. Here, for example, is the usually sensible Wendy Mesley seizing upon a discredited report that one of the terrorists involved in the November Paris attacks had entered France by “posing” as a Syrian refugee to suggest that other terrorists could “infiltrate” Canada under Trudeau’s plan.
“Should Canadians be worried that the Canadian refugee system could be infiltrated too?” Mesley asked her two guests on The National late last year. Bessma Momani, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, and Mubin Shaikh, a former CSIS operative, basically told Mesley to take a deep breath and calm down. Canada, they reminded her, isn’t part of Europe and it doesn’t have the continent’s “open borders”.
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