Mesleygate: Knee Capping A Free Press

Was it something we said? Turns out that our recent columns about the knee-capping of TV hosts Wendy Mesley and Ben Mulroney have gotten considerable attention on social media.

Which is a good and bad thing. It means you have a sticky story. It also means that the cancel culture has noticed you, too. 

To play catchup, here is the Mesley story about how her non-pejorative use of the N word in a story meeting brought about her suspension and (undisclosed) punishment.

Here’s the Mulroney story about how internet trolls— including a former close colleague of Ben’s— jumped him and his wife in the aftermath of her being fired from her TV show.

Something in these stories has captured the attention of readers. Page views for notthepublicbroadcaster.com are up 2000 percent, unique viewers up 2500 percent since we began writing about these newsroom dramas. In particular, it seems there is some resistance at CBC over our use of the words “snitch” and “rat” to describe the producer whose complaint of offensive words from Mesley went public. 

We’ll let CBC TV Ottawa host Adrian Harewood summarize the blowback against “one of the most fearless CDN sports journalists of his generation” who “was renowned/lauded for confronting powerful figures, like hockey titan #AlanEagleson.” Harewood points out that I relied “on ‘snitches’ aka whistleblowers to tell his groundbreaking award-winning stories…” 

But the terms snitch and rat? As Kris Shaw tweeted, “One person's tattletale is another person's whistle-blower. It depends on what you think about the thing being revealed.”

Uh, no.  The former is the essence of whistleblowing. The latter is gossip. You cannot compare the reporting of fraud/ theft/ breach of trust against Eagleson— which is what NHL players Andy Moog, Pat Verbeek and other brave souls were doing—to someone repeating a previously uttered word/ phrase in a newsroom context.

The hockey players were reporting real crimes— and risked their careers to do so. This CBC producer is reporting her hurt feelings. This will make her a hero to the newsroom wokerati and enhance her profile with CBC’s current cringing executive class. We had hoped people could still tell the difference. Apparently not all, including some within CBC, get it.

As for the words snitch and rat: They were deliberately chosen. They apply to people who break a trust. Like a jury room, a story meeting is where tough issues are seen/ debated before going to the public. Video of beheadings you’ll never see on-air, language you will never hear in a broadcast, arguments between colleagues. It’s where ideas are vetted. Trust is essential among the people within if they are to be frank. That trust was broken here by a producer with an agenda.

This sort of betrayal of colleagues was unthinkable even five years ago. But then, CBC— like so much of the Left— has lost its bearings. For much of the modern age, Canadian liberalism was defined by Pierre Trudeau’s philosophy that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” It was a declaration of independence and liberty for the citizen against the state.

As a result, classic liberal journalism jealously protected the right of people to be different. It was independent and uppity in the face of arbitrary power against gays, women and the downtrodden. That was what the Eagleson story— and other investigative work we did— was about. Giving a voice to the voiceless.

The far left, stinging from the collapse of communism, noticed, too.  It was observed that, properly coached, journalists might be employed as their advocates in re-starting the pursuit of identity politics and socialist nirvanas. So they courted the media.

Soon it was accepted that the traditional journalism of independence was corrupt. As the “old white people” were culled from newsrooms and replaced by eager young SJWs, the line between the reporter and the cause was blurred. Protection of rights for gay or black or indigenous people wasn’t enough for journalists. They would have to participate in the cause. (See Carleton’s journalism program vowing to fight “systemic racism” through its work.)

It became mandated that they also walk in the parades, voice the talking points supplied by spokespeople, issue lofty press releases on equity and white privilege. It was more than opportunities being equal; outcomes had to be equal, too. And, as Mesley discovered, anyone who disagreed with this new reality would be destroyed.

If journalists did not comply with this formula they would lose their sources and be cut off. From the acceptance of cause-related journalism it was a short step for the management class, eager for ratings, to go along. Sponsors were likewise pressured by the political left to support only the media messages that they approved. #BLM went from Marxist pariahs to the Boy Scouts overnight.

The irony is that where traditional journalism once protected those without power, the new journalism reinforces the upper-middle class poseurs of antifa in their masks and kabuki violence. It’s about enhancing the pervasive influence of the knowledge workers and the new phenomenally rich tech giants. It’s about the downtown Toronto’s bourgeois sensibilities of reporters and producers themselves.

It’s a revolution that goes up, not down. And it’s not snitching to say that it’s destroying an independent press.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his next book Personal Account with Tony Comper will be available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca this fall.