There is an editor in chief of daily news for CBC News. He is Brodie Fenlon, and he has a blog. Lately he has been whining about the lack of trust from the public in mainstream news outlets.
Recently he lamented about the findings of the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual study of opinion regarding trust in business, government, media and NGOs.
The Edelman report found that 49 percent of Canadians agreed "that journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations."
And 52 percent agreed that "most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position that with informing the public."
WHYYYYYYYYYYY???? he blubbered.
Well, Mr. Fenlon, meet Carol Sanders.
On Tuesday Sanders was responsible for the most shameful example of "new journalism" you could ask for.
She generated a story smearing the Freedom Mandate protestors at the Legislature without revealing her role in inventing the fake news.
The headline on her story read: 'Symbol in snow at legislature called a sign of extremism.'
There was, suspiciously, no photo of this allegedly inflammatory symbol.
There was a reason for that. It wasn't a "symbol" of anything despite the Winnipeg Free Press labelling it as such. It was a circle drawn in the snow with vertical and horizontal lines inside.
"A photo of it posted on Twitter Monday night drew a swift and emotional response," wrote Sanders.
She failed to tell readers that she was the one who posted it on Twitter. And she failed to say what the response was.
So let us repair that omission.
"What does this pattern in the snow symbolize, if anything, at the legislature?" Sanders asked in her post.
If anything? A basketball. A globe. A waffle, Tic Tac Toe, how to cut a pizza, and the icon on every iphone for the Safari browser were some of the ideas.
Kenton Smith @neoconsmasher provided the answer Sanders was looking for. It was, he said, a St. Michael's Cross.
Huh? A later post explained the St. Michael's Cross is a white supremacist symbol which originated in Romania---years before World War Two---as the symbol of the fascist Iron Guard movement.
So the scribbling in the snow was an obscure symbol of a European political movement more than 80 years ago that's been completely forgotten by history?
Yeah. That's exactly what you would expect to see at a protest in 2022.
The creator of the snow drawing would likely never be identified even if surveillance cameras at the Legislature caught the bundled person in the dark, said an anonymous "source" that Sanders quoted in her story.
Could that "source" be Ryan Thorpe, her Winnipeg Free Press colleague, who retweeted her original post and then declared definitively the next day that the snow squibble was a St. Michael's Cross?
First there was B'nai Brith Canada, where an unnamed spokesman said they had no idea what the design in the snow was, but it didn't matter because hate symbols were associated with the Ottawa protests.
Then there was Helmut-Harry Loewen, a retired sociology professor, who said it didn't matter what the snow drawing was, it was antisemitic.
And finally there was University of Winnipeg political studies professor Kawser Ahmed who said "the St. Michael's Cross inside a circle" was symbolism urging direct violence to overthrow an elected government.
Sanders had her story. A drawing in the snow, which she admitted meant nothing to her, had morphed into an antisemitic symbol of violent revolution which could be used to smear the people at the Legislature opposing vaccine mandates.
Her excuse? "Whether they were just having fun, trying to be provocative, or menacing, the symbol they created was no joke to those on heightened alert for extremism."
Brodie Fenlon must still be wondering why nobody trusts the mainstream media anymore.
Mr. Fenlon, meet Carol Sanders.
Published since 2005 on territory ceded, released, surrendered and yielded up to Her Majesty the Queen and successors forever by the aboriginal signatories to treaties in 1871.