I ran across this tidbit yesterday on my Facebook feed (somebody, please stop me from scrolling!) A post from Pierre Poilievre about the plagiarism accusations against Carney.
About the plagiarism claim; I am compelled to chime in with a very loud “whatever”. This is a pithy attempt at discrediting someone with a very long and accomplished resume, the likes of which Poilievre can only dream of aspiring to. Maybe Carney borrowed a few words. Maybe it was coincidence. As Woody Guthrie famously observed “plagiarism is basic to all cultures”, and it is quite possible that particular arrangement of words came out of Carney’s brain, thinking it was original. Whatever. It is an ad hominem attack that doesn’t inform current debates about trade wars, cost of living, or the climate crisis.
Plagiarism is not my point here.
Manipulation tactics are.
Examine the screen shots below (I obfuscated my link bar – you don’t need to see it!).
Note Poilievre’s comment:
Top London paper
Compare to mediabiasfactcheck.com’s review of The Daily Telegraph. It is rated as heavily right wing biased and somewhere between “Mostly Factual” and “Low”.
Calling this biased and rather unreliable paper “Top” sounds an awful lot like Donald Trump’s narratives around “the very successful <insert paper, channel, or personality here>” when someone is fawning on him and “the failing <ditto>” when someone is criticizing him or his policies.
Poilievre is manipulating his reader’s emotional response to an article by suggesting that a highly biased media source is something other than what it is. Perhaps it is “top” in earnings or readership (I don’t know), but it is not “top” in terms of credibility or journalistic integrity.
So when Poilievre says he wants to defund the CBC, when he makes attacks on “mainstream media”, when he bans journalism from his campaign tours, be sure that this is coming from a desire to control what we read and how we interpret it.
It isn’t Poilievre’s place, or any other politician’s, to decide for us what media is good for us to read or not. It certainly isn’t our place to manipulate people into believing highly biased press is something other than what it is. It should be our place to defend and encourage excellent journalism.
