The new media and the old cowardice

Resisting the mob, defending the visionaries and saving journalism in Ca

Twitter is nearly dead to me but from time to time, I log in to check my messages.

Yesterday I do this and I find a message that calls me “truly evil.” My evilness is linked to four tweets that I wrote seven years ago that stated something obvious and objectively true.

I wasn’t going to start piece this by mentioning that. No. I was going to say that a few years ago, I have no idea how many, maybe three? I was presenting to students at Concordia about media literacy. When I asked where they got their news from, the vast majority said it was from TikTok. The students, mostly, said they were accessing direct, on-the-ground news from Iran that day. They couldn’t verify the sources nor could they understand the broader context, but they knew way more about what was happening in Iran than I did. What in the hell was I going to talk to them about if I had never even seen a TikTok video by that point?

But I can’t help myself — it’s been seven years and still (STILL!!) the invisible, anonymous chorus harasses me with my own correct, true and timely words in 2018. It’s a constant reminder that after years of trying different ways to harass me, the mob found one way that has incredible staying power. Throw October 7 2023 into the mix and boom — I’m officially marginalized, in perpetua.

Which you surely know. By now, you’re rolling your eyes and saying to yourself, Nora, you keep writing this. We know. I know you know. But the tactics that I experienced starting on April 8 2018 and continuing to today aren’t isolated. They aren’t random. They are part of a targeted, organized campaign of harassment to silence me that is so effective, that it’s been used against dozens of others to tremendous success.

Last year, I wrote a feature for J-Source about where Canadian newsrooms were at on online harassment. It was a moment where it felt like there was a harassment lull — no big controversies, most journalists had long ago fled Twitter — and I set out to figure out was this actually a lull or had newsrooms figured out how to better resist online harassment? Unsurprisingly, the answer was no, newsrooms were not better at resisting online harassment. It was that the harassment mutated, changed by the mass exodus off Twitter, but leaving dangerous traps for a certain kind of journalist. One journalist I spoke to who asked that their identity be withheld said that what they were most afraid of was the attacks that come from within the industry, the ones that aren’t received through an angry anonymous message, but one coming from a colleague that could sink or destroy a career.

In that feature, I interviewed Rachel Gilmore. Rachel is great. No, that’s not good enough. She’s really, really great. She’s effortlessly cool and her presence is big. When our big presences are together, we (ok, I’ll be accurate here because I won’t speak on her behalf), I have such a great time. For the harassment article, she told me that while going independent was scary and precarious, she also gained a level of control over her work and the freedom to follow a story the way she wants that was immeasurably good.

A few weeks ago, Rachel announced that she would be on CTV News to do a weekly election factchecking segment. I thought — well finally, that’s smart and long past due. Rachel has a TikTok following of 173,000 (for an account that mostly does Canadian news, that’s a ridiculously high amount. That would be like 1.7M in the US) and surely, CTV saw that following and figured they could get a bit of warmth from her glow.

Those Concordia students were telling me that the future of news is on TikTok. Not necessarily that specific platform, but it’s trending to decentralized, individual creators amplifying first-person accounts of things that happen. Rachel knows this and I thought that maybe, CTV is realizing this too.

But it didn’t take long for the mob, with deep ties to the Conservative Party of Canada, to mobilize and convince CTV to drop Rachel’s segment. Those tried and true tactics of harassment keep working and the mob grows even more rabid.

While this is gross and unacceptable and terrible and fucked up, Rachel doesn’t need CTV. If Bell Media cared about their future as a news broadcaster, they would know that they actually need her. But they don’t actually care about the future of news in this country. They serve corporate Canada and they know which side their bread is buttered on. Rachel is the future of journalism in this country and while it will be bitter to watch corporate media atrophy into a grotesque sideshow, it will also be a little bit sweet.

But the lack of outcry from other mainstream journalists, or industry groups like the Canadian Association of Journalists, demonstrates that they haven’t realized yet that they’re sitting adrift on an ice floe, one that will tip them into the sea at any moment.

The Conservative Party though, they worry me far more in this story than the CTVs of the world. They have this manipulation thing down to a science. They know who they can marginalize and harass. They practice their tactics on the careers of people like Rachel to see what might come of it. They practice their tactics on the careers of people like me (from refusing media accreditation to their convention, to having a literal though off duty cop physically push me out of their convention, to having two literal uniformed cops chase me out of their convention after hours).

And when they see that it works, they use the same tactics against the Very Serious Journalists who have never said shit about any of this harassment before.

This is a disaster for analysis in this election, obviously. Sandy and I talk about this in our Third Week of the Election podcast episode. It’s a disaster to live in a moment where communications is cleaving between two completely different worlds — one that grew up alongside liberal democracy and is an integral part of it, and one that rejects that world entirely and does something completely new. Unfortunately, this interregnum will plague us for a little while longer.

Our salvation, though, is that the world has already changed. It’s changed so quickly that the corporate overlords don’t really know what to do about it. So they double down on what they know best: keep the critics out, the loyalists in and serve pablum to a population that has its choice at the buffet. At some point, that pablum isn’t going to be eaten by anyone.

The visionaries know this — the ones who have the flexibility to do things creatively, the ones who show no fear in the face of the Brownshirts who want to keep the critics out, the ones who push forward against all odds. The Rachel Gilmores of the world. We just need to find ways to make sure that the visionaries can be visionary, continue their work supported and build what tomorrow will seem to be the most normal thing in the entire world.