Kanienkehaka: I love my commenters.

Even though this is a recent comment here at CC HQ, I was so transfixed by it that I'm boosting it. Enjoy. (Aesthetic editing added.)

How badly does the Rebel fail as a "journalism" shop?

I once participated in an extraordinary year-long project with the goal of creating a national news service for a cultural group whose stories were simply not being told by other media. Advisors and contributors to the project included some of the best known journalists and producers in Canada, but their role was input and commentary only. The project, and the design of the service itself, was spearheaded by a brilliant Kanienkehaka journalist and a team of Indigenous reporters, playwrights, writers, artists and editors. The challenge they set themselves was to identify what aspects of Western/mainstream "journalism" had relevance and value in an Indigenous context, what other values should inform a news service, and how could a service be structured to reflect those principles.

I bring this up because that year was essentially about stripping the concept of "journalism" down to its absolute essential core, without the dross and drama they teach in J-school. And the essentials were pretty strong.

• You had to tell the truth. No post-modern nonsense about "what is 'true'" allowed.
• You had to correct any error as soon as it was detected, and draw the audience's attention to the correction.
• You had to use reliable, named sources, and you had to corroborate their story. If you couldn't the story didn't run.
• You had make a clear and constant distinction between journalism (here's what happened), editorial content (here's how we interpret what happened), and commercial content (someone is paying to use our platform to sell you a product or message. Here's who it is.)
• You had to provide the opportunity for the "other side" of any story to respond, ideally within the same story, or, if later, in a story of equal prominence.
• Any conflict of interest - family, political, economic - was to be avoided and, if unavoidable, disclosed. Actual sources of all funds will be disclosed.
• The broadcaster's commitment to those standards needs to be explicit, accessible to everyone, and constantly monitored internally for compliance. Clear channels for complaints about failure to meet those standards will be advertised to the audience.

Those are the principles that distinguish actual journalism from the propaganda practiced by state broadcasters in totalitarian regimes, or by paid advertorial writers for specific industries or political interests masquerading as reporters. And those are the principles that Ezra and the Rebel violate Every. Single. Day.

Sorry to be so long winded about this, but it's a useful exercise to reflect on exactly WHY the Rebel is such a cancer. Because Ezra has neither the interest, the integrity or the capacity to meet those standards, his fallback position is to deride them, and consequently to convince his audience and the stupider members of his team that (a) those concepts don't matter, and (b) nobody pays attention to that stuff anyway.