(link to the story here: Reported hijab attack on 11-year-old girl ‘did not happen,’ Toronto police say )
This was national headline news in Canada for three days. The Mayor of Toronto, the Premier of Ontario and even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau felt obliged to release official statements about it.
Even if this had been TRUE it would have been a minor… if ugly, isolated incident.
But the CBC gave these people a national platform, hyped the story out of rational proportion and broadcast it repeatedly around the clock. It was the lead story on their flagship nightly news program The National! That’s how consumed the mainstream media in Canada is with demonstrating their ‘progressive’ bona fides and virtue signalling. Some random little girl lies to her mum and before anyone has bothered to activate a neuron or two…. our $1 billion a year, taxpayer extorting, state-run, multimedia news and information corporation has turned it into a national news event and an indictment of the character of Canadian society. As mentioned above, even the Prime Minister jumped at the opportunity to get in on the act and virtue signal… thereby blowing the incident even further out of proportion.
And yet the same CBC and other mainstream media corporations keep telling us that THEY are the only sources of news and information that can be trusted…. and that it’s those grotty little alternative media outlets… which just happen to pose a threat to their own jobs and industry… who must be seen as having no credibility and expunged from the Internet for being purveyors of ‘fake news’.
The underlying problem here is more troubling and insidious than simply a lack of due diligence on behalf of professional journalists…. which is a serious problem in its own right. The incautious enthusiasm to believe and imbue this story with a significance far beyond anything such an isolated incident should merit exposes how the media has exchanged objective reporting for the promotion of narratives which reflect a ‘progressive’-Left worldview: “Of course a little Muslim girl was attacked by a man driven insane by his hatred and racism! That’s the inherently racist, Islamophobic, far-right, white male privileged, random hijab scissoring world we live in don’t ya know!”
‘Progressives’ will ignore the media’s role in turning what was literally a non event into national moral crisis and simply delete this from their consciousness. For these people, critical judgement is a faculty reserved exclusively for people and institutions with whom they disagree. And the next time the CBC or another mainstream media outlet frames a story in a way that just happens to mirror the assumptions and preoccupations fashionable among the Left or casually dehumanizes their enemies by labeling them ‘racist’…. they will be comforted by the affirmation while taking for granted that they are getting an unobstructed, unmediated window directly onto objective reality.