Have you heard about the Honkening? Possibly you haven’t, because the term is only just becoming attached to Canada’s massive trucker protest. If it was up to the mainstream media, you wouldn’t even hear about that. Stuff has just one story on the protest. Australia’s ABC has none. Neither do The Age or NZ Herald.
This is the mainstream media playbook for dealing with inconvenient news, of course: simply pretend it doesn’t exist.
When they are dragged, kicking and screaming, into reporting what they desperately tried to avoid noticing, the next step in the mainstream media script is to lie and smear. The Canadian legacy media are following the template set by the Australian and American legacy media, in trying to demonise a working-class movement rising up against their leftist darlings.
Step One: pretend it doesn’t exist.
First, they ignored the convoy altogether.
Then, they pretended the truckers were protesting bad road conditions.
Then, something amazing happened. The convoy took on a life of its own, grew beyond anything anyone could have predicted and inspired and united the nation.
Step Two: Ok, notice it, but deride it as a “tiny minority”.
In an attempt to downsize the convoy’s scale, The Logic’s Ottawa reporter David Reevely took a misleading photo of an empty street and used it as proof that the protest was “medium-large by Ottawa standards.”
Reevely did not indicate when he took the photo.
Aerial footage of the protests shows massive gatherings of tens of thousands of people in the capital’s core and pouring out into nearby streets. Additionally, trucks at the tail end of the convoy continue to roll into Ottawa to join protests as rallies continue throughout the weekend.
In fact, as many as 50,000 trucks and 100,000 people have converged on Ottawa (which may explain why Justin Trudeau did his best Louis XV impersonation and fled the capital with his family).
Step Three: Call them “fascists” and “white supremacists”.
Washington Post cartoonist Michael de Adder released a vastly unpopular cartoon on Friday as the convoy closed in on Ottawa.
In his caricature, de Adder portrayed a series of trucks all blazoned with the word “fascism” […]
Unfortunately for him, Canadians came out in droves to downvote the cartoon into oblivion, with over 11,000 commenters expressing their disgust at the portrayal.
Still, “fascist” is sooo 2016, now. People have screened out the media barking “fascist” just like screening out that yappy dog down the street that just won’t shut up. The go-to epithet for the legacy media these days is “white supremacist”.
The Globe and Mail published a misleading article suggesting the Sikh community had not been invited to join the Truckers for Freedom Convoy.
In ominous tones, the Globe and Mail muttered about “far-right and extremist groups”. You know the ones they mean. But, just as the Freedom protests in Australia have been the most diverse ones I’ve ever seen, plenty of Canada’s Sikh community were out standing by their fellow Canucks.
Step Four: gin up a single, isolated nutcase.
The Australian media went into hyperbolic overdrive when a single nutter carried a noose at a Freedom protest. (Strangely, they never blinked an eye at feminist protesters in Canberra carrying nooses strung with mock-up severed male genitals.)
CTV National News journalist Mackenzie Gray used a single photo of one hooded individual carrying a confederate flag in Ottawa to paint the convoy as a potentially racist movement.
Gray’s insinuation was quickly challenged by others, including Florida Gov. Ron Desantis’ press secretary Christina Pushaw. Pushaw accused Gray of tweeting the photo with “no context” and that it appeared that he was “implying the entire convoy are racists.”
Step Five: trot out your pet (leftist) experts, to stroke their chins and lecture about “terrorists” and “extremists”.
On Wednesday the capital-based news outlet Parliament Today released a report citing “national security expert” Jessica Davis, who falsely claimed that anyone donating to the convoy’s fundraiser could be found guilty of providing financial assistance to a terror group.
“(Davis) warns that those who have donated to groups in support of ongoing truck rallies could be found guilty under the Criminal Code, as they ‘directly or indirectly’ could provide financial services intended to carry out any terrorist ‘activity’ or benefit such a ‘group’,” tweeted the outlet.
After being challenged and shown that Davis had a bias against the truckers, the outlet quickly deleted the tweet without issuing a correction […]
A recent article by CTV News cited little-known Canadian Anti-Hate Network activist Peter Smith as a credible “expert” source regarding the alleged extremism of the convoy and its supporters.
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network has frequently shared and promoted the work of the violent far-left group Antifa.
True North
That’s only a smattering of the Canadian legacy media’s hysterics and lies, of course. Protesters are lighting fires! The Russians are behind it! Death threats! Hate texts!
I’m sure you’re all grimly familiar with the script.
