Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Man, am I psychic or what?

Only a day after I published some scintillating analysis about how to keep the shrieking yobs and loons from various right-wing fake news outlets out of the political process with an election coming up, here comes Rebel News' Ezra Levant, shrieking about ... well, here you go ...




Really? They did that? Well, sort of but not really, although anything for rage bait and a vengeful fundraiser, amirite? In any event, let's see what really just happened.

Here are the accreditation standards, which seem fairly reasonable. As you can read, there are three categories under which one can apply. The first two are clearly restricted to actual, legitimate, professional media, and not mentally unhinged whackjobs that hide in bushes to ambush politicians (Hi, Tamara!):




So deranged stalkers like Rebel News and True North Centre are restricted to applying under Option 3 and, for brevity, let's jump ahead to the detailed media accreditation requirements that so have Ezra's panties in a bunch, where it's pretty obvious what all the bitching and moaning is about:




Yeah, I'd say that, based on that accreditation criteria, Rebel News is pretty much boned up the backside, but there are two reasons why Ezra has no right to whine about this.

First, these guidelines come, for the most part, from the Canadian Association of Journalists and they are, for the most part, quite reasonable. Given the number of people who will be applying for accreditation, it only makes sense to weed out the obvious frauds and posers as quickly as possible. There are enough legitimate journos out there that there's little value in even looking at the kinds of hacks that fall under the above description. But that's not all.

What's entertaining is how Ezra, given how he runs his fake media outlet and white nationalist bar and laundromat, is quite open that the above is exactly what he does. One need only peruse the "Careers" page at Der Rebel to read:



At this point, one can safely say that Ezra has been hoist by his own pasty petard -- having yammered on for years about how his crappy news blog gets right out there and participates in the news, he has little basis to now kvetch how that makes him utterly ineligible for media accreditation along with the actual grownups.

Ezra may not like it, but this is a situation of his own making, and now he has to live with it.

That's a shame.

1 comment:

RossOwesDay said...

In fairness, the "endorses candidates" and "makes financial donations" would also rightfully disqualify Calgary Herald hack Licia Corbella, as well.