I try to give my brethren in the media the benefit of the doubt as often as possible, but yesterday there were two egregious examples of places where they framed a quote in a way that gave it a particular perception, and then went and tried to make news about that perception. The first example was to take a quote from Trudeau from the Global News interview from the night before, and tried very hard to make it look like Trudeau was blaming Trump for the deaths on Flight PS752.

“If there were no tensions, if there was no escalation recently in the region, those Canadians would be right now home with their families,” said Trudeau. “This is something that happens when you have conflict and war. Innocents bear the brunt of it and it is a reminder why all of us need to work so hard on de-escalation, moving forward to reduce tensions and find a pathway that doesn’t involve further conflict and killing.”

If you notice, the focus was – quite rightly – on the fact that civilians get caught in the crossfire of war. But the various outlets in this country (and the US – Fox News in particular) tried to frame this as Trudeau blaming Trump, which he didn’t actually do. And then, CBC had their Washington correspondents getting reaction to the “perception” that Trudeau was blaming Trump, even when he wasn’t, and in interviews, kept aggressively going after the perception of the comments, without actually acknowledging that they were trying to create that very perception with the very frame they put around those comments. The lack of self-awareness and self-reflection was entirely galling.

The second incident in a single day was taking a comment that Stephen Harper made, where he called for “change in the nature of the government” in Iran, and headlined it “calling for regime change” which has a very specific meaning, and got their reaction quotes based on the notion that he called for regime change – again, putting a frame around comments which were so bland as to be not worth reporting. (Note: CBC was not the only offender here, and they had to issue a “clarification,” which was really a correction, as a result; the CTV piece eventually changed their headline and lede, but didn’t note that they had made the correction).

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1217233046908416000

Two instances of torqueing quotes and placing dubious framing devices around fairly innocuous quotes to spark controversy in a single day. Not good, guys, and like Robert Hiltz said, this is the kidnd of thing that erodes trust. Let’s be better than this.

Good reads:

• Justin Trudeau and the president of Ukraine had a call regarding next steps in relation to Iran, the investigation, and compensation.
• The US Senate is expected to vote on the New NAFTA on Thursday, meaning Canada would be the last up to ratify the deal.
• Navdeep Bains says that the promise for 25 percent reductions to mobile phone bills will be over and above any savings seen since 2016.
• The government’s website survey for consulting on changes to the medical assistance in dying regime has received so many hits it crashed the site.
• The government is spending another $800 million to keep the CF-18s flying until they can get the replacement process underway.
• The Chief Statistician of Canada wants to move toward other means of data collection as surveys are getting more costly and unreliable.
• The bush fires in Australia are reviving an idea put forward by Davie Shipyard and Bombardier to share Canadian water bombers and a carrier with them.
• John Baird has completed his review of what went wrong for the Conservatives in the last election, but that report won’t be made public.
• Leaks of that Baird report say it places much of the blame on the centralization of the campaign in Hamish Marshall’s hands, and not listening to individual campaigns.
• Would-be leadership candidates are getting a more thorough grilling on their pasts from the party this time around.
• The NDP are pushing off their biannual policy convention to 2021, which has one former MP questioning the move and if it doesn’t harm them.
• The leader of Quebec’s Green Party is throwing his name in for the federal leadership. (Reminder that he got a whole 80 votes in a recent by-election).
• Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column wonders what the utility of recalling the Commons over the downing of Flight PS752 would be.
• Éric Grenier delves into how the official rules could affect the Conservative leadership race by comparing it to the last one.
• Chris Selley makes note of the way in which the Harry and Meghan news has unleashed every Canadian complex – superiority or inferiority.
• Heather Scoffield delves into some recent reports that are trying to make more sense of the gender pay gap.
• My column comes to the defence of “lifers” in Parliament after Erin O’Toole derided them. (Andrew Coyne offers his own defence – great minds think alike).

Odds and ends:

Over at Maclean’s, I suggest ways that Canada can put Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, to work (with a little shade thrown at the GG along the way).

As well, here is how Harry and Meghan’s stepping back puts more pressure on William and Kate’s workload (with charts!)

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