On her Instagram account, Rachel Gilmore describes herself as “your least favourite person’s least favourite journalist.”
Judging from the reactions her aggressively progressive commentary gets on the various social media platforms she uses, this is pretty much nails it.
If anyone knows how to make insecure incel brains explode or get those corporate bankrolled “weirdo quisling journalists” who nowadays inhabit the intellectual boondocks of the Canadian social media landscape to go bananas, it’s Gilmore.
And when they do, and go all misogynistic on her, they look like perfect prats. This certainly works for Gilmore, who with half a million followers on various social media platforms nowadays, is a high-profile commentator who towers over the countless Internet trolls toiling for the Maple MAGA cause in Canada’s social media ecosystem.
Nor does Gilmore particularly mind being screeched at by Pierre Poilievre Mini-Me’s, she told a breakout session at the annual Parkland Institute Conference at the University of Alberta Saturday. After all, she chuckled,* “when people leave hate comments and such, it allows me to reach a broader audience.” Remember, you’ll have to sign up to her social media accounts if you want to yell at her.
Gilmore is an experienced journalist in traditional media who has spent plenty of time covering federal politics, human rights, online disinformation, and far-right extremism. And she’s fearless, seemingly unfazed by the creeps who constantly attack and try to undermine women who speak up for progressive causes online.
“I’ve been reporting on white nationalists and far-right groups for years,” she told her Parkland audience. “To the point that one of the leaders of what’s now being described as the largest white nationalist network in Canada had my face printed on a pillow!” (Say what?)
“As weird as these guys are,” she adds after a well-timed pause, “they’re growing and they’re getting organized. And this isn’t the United States. This is here in Canada. They’re teaching each other to fight, and they’re strategizing about how to get their messaging into the political mainstream.”
So, she continued, “we really shouldn’t take for granted, as cringe as those guys are, that they’re going to fail.”
“If we’re going to stave off the symptoms and avoid the illness that the U.S. appears to be rapidly succumbing to, we need a strong immune system, and a massive part of that is the media. Press. We know that it is because autocrats attack it first, right?”
So what can we do about the way media is letting us down? Gilmore has ideas. Parkland asked her, along with and Jeanette Ageson, publisher of Vancouver-based online newspaper The Tyee, to try to suggest responses to the way 21st Century Canadian media is failing to protect us from the rise of autocracy.
For example, maybe drop some of the shibboleths of modern mainstream journalism that make it increasingly, and infuriatingly, part of the problem.
Consider “bothsidesism,” the lazy refusal by too many reporters – taught to them, it must be admitted, by too many journalism school instructors – to openly acknowledge verifiable falsehood when confronted with MAGA derp.
It’s not as if this is a new phenomenon. As economist and former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman famously described it 26 years ago, when George W. Bush was running for the U.S. presidency: “If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ‘Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.’”
Nowadays, of course, the Shrub looks like a beacon of intelligence and reason south of the Medicine Line, surely an indicator of how far things have fallen.
Or how about we acknowledge that perfect objectivity is impossible and respect our readers enough to be transparent about our worldview, Gilmore suggested.
“I really try to prioritize transparency,” she told her audience. “I think that a way that newsrooms can do that is they need to allow their journalists to have personalities.”
“What I try to do with my work, at least, is try to be clear that I am reporting from a progressive perspective. I believe that trans rights are human rights. That’s not a debate for me … And as I do that, I’m trusting the audience to recognize that.”
But if journalism is to continue to be a useful antidote to autocracy, Gilmore’s most urgent advice is the need to understand and acknowledge the constant “bad faith backlash” by right-wing commentators and their vast legion of online bots and trolls.
“We need to learn to recognize when a debate isn’t actually about the topics that are being presented,” Gilmore explained, “if it’s actually an argument being made in bad faith on one side that is about something else.”
“One of the things I think we should do is teach the ‘Gamergate’ model in journalism school so that folks know that this is a technique that’s used,” she suggested. Gamergate was the right-wing harassment campaign in the 2010s that targeted women in the video game industry, purporting to be about their work but in fact being an organized assault on feminism, diversity and equity.
Bad actors have weaponized conventional journalistic attitudes about fairness and balance to “develop a model for discrediting people they disagree with,” she asserted. “They pick a target, watch them like a hawk, hold them to a ridiculous standard.” When a person they already hate for what they stand for makes a minor mistake, they explode all over it.
Indeed, as we all understand, that is precisely how right-wing cancel culture works – in politics, journalism and increasingly any field subjected to the right’s endless culture wars.
“Because journalists need to both-sides everything, they are vulnerable to these bad faith narratives that make it out to be a debate about ethics,” Gilmore said.
And she is right, it’s time to call this out.
Ageson presented The Tyee’s model for funding real journalism, something that is being abandoned by the once great newspapers of English Canada under the ownership and influence of U.S. venture capitalists with ties to the Republican Party.
The Tyee, now run by a non-profit society, rejects the idea of hiding its journalists’ and commentators’ work behind a paywall, Ageson said. After 22 years, the Vancouver-based online news organization is supported by “11,000 paying members putting in about $1.3 million a year.”
“It’s membership; it’s not subscription,” she explained. “We’re asking people to help build something that they want to see in the world, and we’re asking people to support access for everybody.”
“Every single year it reinforces that this is a fantastic model to support the investigative and long-feature reporting that has since disappeared from many newspaper pages.”
*Yes, Gilmore really chuckled. I’m a veteran journalist myself and I know chuckle when I hear one. And who can blame her? I should add, in the service of full disclosure, that posts from this blog often appear in The Tyee. DJC
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