At Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, a panel of journalists and media professionals declare their priorities

The full two-and-a-half-hour video, which begins with a land acknowledgement and rumblings about “settlers” and their “racial guilt,” and “white supremacist colonial mindsets which we have internalised both collectively and individually,” can be endured here

Following this lengthy declaration of innate racial wrongness, the panellists begin to ruminate on “how best to confront the corrosive force of online hate targeted at journalists.” Being a journalist on Twitter, where the public can talk back, sometimes bluntly, is equated with surviving in an active warzone and other “hostile physical environments,” with women, the majority of the panel, apparently hardest hit. Journalists, we’re told, are “exposed to danger in the digital world” and consequently suffer high rates of “anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic distress.” As a result of being mocked or disagreed with on Twitter. “We don’t want our journalists to be killed,” says Catherine Tait, the president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The term “hate” is used often and expansively – not only to cover threats and vividly abusive emails – “violent messages” – but also mockery and brusque corrections of factual and logical error. Even being referred to by the public as woke is presented as a basis for weeping, a form of psychological torture. Indeed, almost any kind of demurral is framed as an attempt to “silence” the journalists’ self-declared heroism, to deny them their cosmic destiny. And hence, it seems, the imperative to shut down reader-comment sections on national newspaper websites, on grounds that readers are no longer content to confine their feedback to the polite correction of typos. Throughout, the air is heavy with self-elevation, and claims of being scrupulously unbiased and “speaking truth to power” are deployed entirely without irony. 

However, the more plausible explanations for why journalists may not be held in the highest possible regard remain oddly untouched. Even when Hill Times columnist and “anti-racism expert” Erica Ifill boasts that she doesn’t bother to interview white men. And the implications of a room full of statusful media professionals being fixated with the supposed pathologies of “whiteness,” and being pretentious and neurotic, and mentally uniform, and both distant from and disdainful of the concerns of the public that they claim to serve, are, needless to say, not vigorously explored.

Update, via the comments:

Sk60 adds,

They’re teaching the kids the basics, like victimhood grift.

As others have pointed out, these are not clueless students or random maladjusted teens. They’re statusful professionals at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Global News, The Hill Times, etc. (A Hill Times columnist, by the way, who is clearly confident that she can boast of her own overtly racist behaviour and not be challenged by any of her peers, or by any of the would-be journalists in the audience.)

And the pretentiously apologetic wretch who opens the proceedings, Allan Thompson – Mr ‘I’m white and I’m terribly sorry about it’ – is not only the head of Carleton University’s journalism programme, a supposedly “non-partisan” position, but also a failed Liberal candidate who was appointed to see how Trudeau’s Liberal Party could better connect with rural voters. Presumably on grounds that the average working person just can’t get enough pretentious self-abasement and contrived racial agonising.

And which rather underlines a problem for the scrupulously woke. As wokeness is essentially a status game, premised on signalling how superior one is, how unlike the unsophisticated, it must be difficult to feign common ground with the kinds of people one must continually disdain. Say, by calling them racists, oppressors, colonisers, and “white supremacists.” 




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