Feral hacks: Canadian journalism’s bloodlust

David or Dave Topping, known to habitués by the ancien userID dstopping, is an actually competent young Toronto journalist. (Yes, he’s the one.) dstopping got Peter Principled into some management position at the content farm known as St. Joseph Media – publisher, variously, of the journal of the dumb rich, a nonviable transgender blog, and 12:36.

dstopping released a so-called survey about journalism in Canada. It stacks the deck so egregiously I think I may have to stop considering him competent anymore. He can’t really believe his own lies.

Context

1. Nassim Taleb: “[J]ournalists are currently in the most insecure profession you can find: the majority lives hand to mouth and ostracism by their friends would be terminal.”

2. Weisblott (≈1:12:27): “I don’t need to be – I cannot afford to be some kind of Canadian media pariah.”

When I hear the word “diversity,” I take my roti out of the microwave

The first question in the survey already has a lot of gall.

What’s missing most in Canadian journalism right now?

• Diversity

• Money

• Talent

• Independence

• Mentorship

• Innovation

• Guts

• Integrity

Jesus H. Christ. “Diversity.” That means whatever the speaker intends it to mean, except it never means white males, even if, like me, they’re gay.

• Diversity advocates have never clarified how hiring nonwhites and females could improve the reporting of straight news. It cannot: 2 + 2 = 4 no matter who tells you it does. Any suggestion that on-air personalities should be “diverse” so as to promote “role models” is infantilizing nonsense. If what’s stopping you from becoming a journalist is not enough “representation” in the field of journalism itself, you were never cut out to be a journalist.

• If “diversity” actually worked as advertised, the news of Joseph Boyden’s false self-identification as an aboriginal would have been broken by a real aboriginal instead of by the Venezuelan male who did break the news. (Diversity advocates call you genocidal for calling aboriginals anything other than Indigenous.)

• In my direct lived experience, which diversity advocates might immediately discount even while “privileging” the experience of a 23-year-old vizmin RyeHigh grad, properly functioning broadcast journalism renders so-called diversity invisible even while presenting “visible” minorities.

  I live in a town that for years offered, as co-anchors of an evening newscast, male and female first-generation Indo-Canadians who were both Goan and who both had Portuguese surnames. Nobody gave two shits, and that was because they were competent at the undemanding job of reading straight news.

• Diversity advocates are inveterate hypocrites when they aren’t liars. They don’t want “diversity”; what they want are females and vizmins (ideally both) who have exactly the same political beliefs as diversity advocates themselves. Attractive, fit right-wing women, and manly white sportscasters, baffle diversity advocates so much that they revert to the atavistic if inchoate imperatives that drive them generally – to destroy the enemy. (By the end of this article you’ll understand what I mean.)

The true functions of diversity in journalism

As a trained linguist, I will burst various bubbles here as I explain the true functions of diversity in journalism. There are precisely two: Topic knowledge of ethnic communities and language fluency.

• The only way to learn the truth about honour killings among Indics of various nationalities and religions, to take one example, is to be an Indic whom sources trust and who (again) has direct lived experience. The same holds true with, say, analyses of Christian conservative politics, where you really do have to have been raised Catholic or at least Protestant just to understand it and speak subjects’ language.

• There I’m using the term “language” figuratively, but I cannot emphasize enough how stunted and palsied Canadian journalism is solely because journalists are monolingual.

  • Anglo hacks can’t even cover Quebec properly, let alone Acadians or Franco-Ontarians. Why were there “so few” articles about the Quebec City mosque massacre compared to, say, the assassination of Nathan Cirillo on Parliament Hill? Because Anglo hacks cannot communicate with Quebec sources well enough to write more articles. They can’t even pronounce easy French proper names in viable English accents.

  • In a nonwhite ethnocultural context (what “diversity” always means here): If you can’t speak a third language then you can’t cover the minority that speaks that language. Very specifically, we desperately need native Arabic-speakers and ‑readers who can thoroughly translate what imams preach to congregations. As diversity always means being non-male in some vague way, that might imply the deployment of Arabic-speaking Muslim females into mosques, who would then have to sit at the back.

  • This pressing need for language competency will never be met. First‑ and second-generation immigrant children lose the ancestral language. It is only the third generation and later that suddenly realizes what it lost and demands to be taught the home language. Young vizmin J‑school students generally are as unilingual as the white males that diversity advocates insist should be replaced.

  • Viewers did not give two shits that a pair of news anchors were both Goans because the two of them spoke with the same Canadian accent. I am not precisely the expert on spoken Canadian English, but I am well informed about it and can categorically state that Canadian is the most neutral English dialect. The reason Canadians do so well as reporters and newsreaders in the United States is the reason why vizmins on Canadian TV and radio are easily accepted: Because all of them sound the same and audibly represent no particular place.

  • If diversity advocates were really committed to diversity, they would welcome non-Canadian dialects onto the airwaves. Once in a blue moon a New Zealander or a Brit is allowed in, but anyone with second-language English is weeded out immediately.

  • This has come up before. Jan Wong, a heroine who has been cast aside by Canadian hacks, recounted being pressured by the Globe to work on far too many China-related stories. If you want that much coverage, she told the bosses who would later abandon and dismiss her, then hire more Chinese-speaking reporters.

    There’s your imperative for diversity.

Question for diversity advocates:
Who are the white males you intend to fire?

I have been sitting for most of a year on a project to dismantle diversity advocates’ critiques of the purported lack of diversity in newsrooms. A classic tale of lying with numbers, they’re invariably written by young vizmins without statistical knowledge. Just as invariably, those diatribes never specify which experienced white and/or male journalists they want to fire.

There’s endless handwringing when the Tubby shitcans hacks in waves, just as there was back in the day when the Corpse did the same thing. Hacks wring hands when “journalism” faces “layoffs.” But diversity proponents are intrinsically dishonest in that they refuse to produce the Soviet-style list of names of the enemies of diversity who will be ritually fired from their jobs to make way for females and vizmins. For their purposes, employment in journalism is a zero-sum game, and it is entirely proper in their philosophy to shitcan a 20-year veteran in favour of a wet-behind-the-ears, but racially correct, J‑school grad.

“Give me your hitlist and then I’ll take you seriously” is what I’d say to diversity proponents.

There are precisely two demographic groups facing discrimination in Canadian journalism

1. People with disabilities, who just never ever get hired and who have the worst employment prospects of all definable groups in the country bar none.

2. Older people, especially victims of layoffs and buyouts.

Nobody else is facing a barrier. Nobody! Visible minorities visibly do get hired in Canadian journalism. So do females. Disabled people and the middle-aged do not.

As ever, diversity advocates do not want to solve a problem. They merely decided that journalism jobs were desirable, then demanded two things that intrinsically conflict: That half of those jobs go to women while a vaguely defined proportionate number go to visible minorities. Diversity advocates do not want to solve the problems faced by disabled people and middle-aged and older people.

Opinion columnists are the argument against “diversity”

“Diverse” opinion columnists are what turn people off diversity altogether. The same journalistic agitators who are trying to complain Peggy Wente out of a job have no objection whatsoever to diversity hires like Denise Balkissoon. Yet vizmin opinion columnists, like Tarek Fatah, who hold opinions that bien-pensant downtown hacks consider incorrect are simply ignored.

Here’s the endgame that diversity advocates wanted – and got

• Race-baiting harridan Scaachi Koul, despite obvious lack of talent, gets a book deal and will always have a paying job.

• Seasoned hack Bill Doskoch got shitcanned and deserves never to work again.

“Guts” and “integrity”

People distrust “the media” because it lies to them. The minute I see David Topping’s peer group honestly reporting on Muslims and transgenders – two heavily favoured groups that directly threaten mine – is the minute I’ll believe that “guts” and “integrity” are imperatives with any meaning in the lives of Canadian hacks.

Ills

Canadian journalists who effectively run the joint have no willingness whatsoever to honestly reflect on their failings. Each of the following represents an enormous failure in and of itself that Canadian hacks manifestly refuse to address.

• Getting off Twitter. Journalists spend all day on Twitter. They end up unable to actually report for the simple reason that their attention spans are in shatters. Hacks snipe at each other and engage in what right-wing assholes call virtue-signalling.

  Twitter is the worst thing that ever happened to Canadian hacks. Twitter is the natural home of cyberbullying and it has proven to be right up the alley of the natural cyberbullies calling themselves Canadian journalists. Try turning it off and doing your fucking jobs.

• Technical incompetence. Hacks’ technical abilities (full list):

  1. Typing into a TEXTAREA using exactly and only the characters imprinted on their keyboards

  2. Top-posting E‑mail (typically Gmail)

  3. “Tweeting”

  Given nearly a decade’s worth of chances to remedy their technical incompetence, journalists individually and as a profession have refused to do so. This really is one of those cases where I know better and where I do everything correctly. It is also one of those cases where my ostensible colleagues choose to stay incompetent, because I have repeatedly offered to share every single shred of knowledge I have and have been rebuffed at every turn.

  The prospect of teaching hacks literally the first thing about typography is also a non-starter.

• Fake jobs at fake outlets. Hacks really do know that Vice, the Huffington Post, and especially BuzzFeed have no reason to exist. Hacks know that what they are doing at those outlets does not constitute journalism.

  It is especially rich having to listen to hirsute Haligonian Heeb Craig Silverman lecture us about “fake news” given his own byline history at the content farm that maintains him as respectability cover.

• Rewarding the incompetent. I remember in the era of Midday complaining that the reward a hack gets for securing a sinecure is adding on even more gigs: A newspaper columnist could appear on a Sunday TV political talk show, for example. The true upper echelon also got to talk to Gzowski every week.

  That hallowed Toronto tradition continues to this day. There’s always a new outlet you can add to the outlets you already have. Even while Wente’s continued nonfiring drives you to rage, you decided that there is not a single error that journalists in your own protected class could possibly make that would disqualify them from future gigs. Ashley Csanady, David Hains, and of course Goldsbie are classic examples of immunity by the herd. Make enough mistakes and even Jesse Brown will hire you.

What Canadian hacks really want

In dstopping’s survey, respondents have precisely two options to describe themselves:

1. I’m a straight, cisgender white person born into a middle-class-or-higher family.

2. I’m not a straight, cisgender white person born into a middle-class-or-higher family! [exclamation point sic]

“Cisgender” doesn’t exist and amounts to hate speech. But this reveals a great deal about Toronto journalists’ mentality.

Toronto journalists (this means Canadian journalists) are in the grips of a pathology. They believe not only that countervailing opinions are invalid; not only that right-wing outlets have no justification for their own existence; and not only that there’s an Us and a Them.

Journalists here want to suppress and mock countervailing opinions, especially opinions about them. They believe right-wing outlets must be crushed, and they’re exasperated beyond belief that serial defamer Ezra Levant is laughing all the way to the bank. (“We’ve tried everything! Why isn’t he dead yet?”) They want everyone on the outside, everyone who isn’t one of Us, actually destroyed.

I read countless thinkpieces about the “culture” inside the CBC that allowed Jian Ghomeshi to run rampant and assault and harass women and some men. (That story was broken by two [white] males.) Toronto journalists will not recognize and remedy their own culture, their own pathology, their own psychosis.

The Toronto journalism herd seeks to destroy outsiders, whom it considers enemies. Like antifa who think that calling a man a nigger is the same as a cop shooting him in the back, Toronto journalists want dissenters eradicated. I do not just mean silenced; I mean eradicated.

I can’t emphasize strongly enough the bloodlust Toronto journalists nurture that impels them to destroy their enemies. If you think that’s not what these lovely people, so supportive of niqabis and transwomen, could ever do to their enemies, you and they need listen to me when I state that you are lying to yourself. Their own victims are the only ones they won’t listen to.

I told you all this already: The suffering we have already undergone is the very least we deserve, and you guys, whatever your gender presentation, aren’t remotely done with us yet. Complaining about the feral pack of Canadian journalists is proof you deserve whatever that pack does to you.

Toronto journalists are a politicized faction that seeks to crush, destroy, and eliminate outsiders, whom it deems enemies. That faction has succeeded shockingly well with many victims, some of whom I have named here. I am one of them. In fact, I’m at the top of the list. It’s a miracle I’m still alive.