Chris Selley: Asking the government to protect journalists is just a bad idea

Roughly two hours into a Thursday-evening panel hosted by Carleton University’s School of Journalism, titled “Journalists and online hate,” an audience member made a very key point: “Based on what I’ve heard, this isn’t just an issue for journalists, right?” he said. “It’s anybody in the public eye. It’s politicians, it’s lawyers, somebody in a religious group.”

Indeed, it can be pretty much anyone. A Strategic Counsel poll for the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, , found 37 per cent of Canadians aged 18–34 had witnessed or experienced harassment online.

We are several years deep now into a discussion about the horrendous abuse many Canadian journalists, especially female and non-white journalists, absorb both on social media and in personal communications — in the latter case, often in the form of encrypted emails. Too often, I am afraid, it sounds like special pleading. Online abuse is a societal problem. Journalists aren’t owed more protection from law enforcement than anyone else, and should not want to be perceived as asking for or receiving it. (If anything, considering the state of Canadian policing, that relationship probably isn’t adversarial enough.)

Let me be clear: It’s not that reporters are being unreasonable in demanding police act against clearly worded threats. It’s entirely understandable that Toronto Star journalist Saba Eitizaz would think the following disgusting email (fair warning), which she read out to the panel, was worthy of some redress: “When a chimp-faced sand-(N- word) cocky c–t like you is dragged out to the end zone, a stadium of white men in purple cheer as you’re draped in a s–t-brown burka.”

It gets worse from there, culminating in an imagined execution. At no point does the author absolutely explicitly threaten Eitizaz with anything, but I imagine most Canadians, if asked, would think that ought to be a police matter. And I imagine most police would tell you otherwise. That has certainly been Eitizaz’s and other journalists’ experience when reporting such loathsome correspondence to the cops.

Canadian journalists with any amount of experience should understand a central fact about policing in Canada: Police enforce, and do not enforce, pretty much whatever they want, whenever they want, for whatever reasons they want. And despite an endless parade of humiliations in recent years — most recently the comprehensive twin failures in Central Nova Scotia and in downtown Ottawa — politicians aren’t noticeably more willing to take on the cause of reform.

Canadian journalists who have seen the federal government’s pathetic and shambolic attempts to police “online harms,” meanwhile, should have no time for Public Safety Marco Mendicino’s assurances that he is seized with the issue, which he provided as a guest on Thursday night’s panel.  “I’ve written, in the wake of the complaints that you’ve all put to me, to Twitter and to other platforms (to say), you know, let’s do something about this,” Mendicino meekly told his fellow panelists.

In essence, he wrote a letter to Elon Musk asking for help. And he is frustrated that little has been forthcoming. His pledge to seek “objective clarity about how police make decisions” on matters such as these is almost as risible. There are dozens of police forces in Canada; most do not report directly to Ottawa.

Times are pretty tough across the news industry nowadays (except at CBC, obviously) so I understand why media executives don’t want to hear it. But if news outlets are as eager as they say they are to protect their journalists from abuse — criminal or otherwise, online or off — then they’re going to have to do it themselves.

CBC president and CEO Catherine Tait basically acknowledged this during the panel. “Social media can be as dangerous and environment as hostile physical environments. We take precautions when we send reporters to Ukraine, and we need to take precautions when our people, our journalists, are similarly exposed to danger in the digital (world),” she said.

Laughable comparison aside, the principle holds: Canadians can no more legislate, regulate or police social media into safety than we can Mariupol or Kharkiv — certainly not if we intend to protect freedom of speech. It’s fantasy to pretend otherwise, and frankly it’s a very bad look for journalists to be encouraging governments and police to try. In the very unlikely event they succeeded, it would certainly come at the cost of stifling strident and controversial opinions that are unambiguously protected by the Charter. That’s the opposite of journalism’s mission.

When television news outlets send their correspondents into dangerous situations, they pay (or they should) for private security. When they send them to war zones, they pay for evacuation and life insurance. Global News editor-in-chief Sonia Verma told the panel her network has hired a security expert to assess the harassment as it pours in, which makes good sense. If anyone is going to out an anonymous emailer or social media user targeting one of Global’s journalists and then pursue some kind of redress — at a human rights tribunal, say, or in a civil suit — it is almost certainly going to be someone on the company’s payroll rather than on the police’s or the government’s.

You can go ahead and wish it were otherwise. But journalism’s job is to portray the world as it is, not as it should be. Journalists have to live in that imperfect world as well, unfortunately.

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