A panel discussion at Carleton University's journalism school had no violence, but they did describe the violence of receiving mail from angry viewers. And of course, Trudeau had a cabinet minister there very eager to call the police on any conservative letter writers. I'll let you see with your own eyes what happened.
00:15:37.500It's in the criminal code, has been for years.
00:15:39.500Simply applying it to a digital communication is a small novelty that is actually about 30 years old already.
00:15:46.500It is already against the law to utter a death threat, whether it's by words, by radio, by CB, by walkie talkie, by cell phone or by email.
00:15:54.500But what we see here, at least in the two hours that I subjected myself to this video, are people who have clearly not received real death threats.
00:16:04.500I mean, I won't deny some of the communications they received are genuinely mean, genuinely rude.
00:16:12.500Some of them are racist and sexist, absolutely.
00:16:15.500But none of them rise to the level of a crime.
00:16:19.500And an underlying theme in this was to get police to criminalize what right now is just a political disagreement.
00:16:30.500There was one other white male on the panel, Marco Mendocino, the public safety minister.
00:16:36.500And he repeatedly said he was open to using police.
00:16:40.500I thought that was actually the most terrifying part of it.
00:19:36.500The minister is here to tell us how to fix it.
00:19:39.500You know, Marco Mendocino was the weakest cabinet minister who appeared at the public order inquiry into the Emergencies Commission.
00:19:49.500It was not only his answers were slippery and vague, but the documents were, this one document, where his own staff were revealed to be writing reports and sharing them with others in the government and not even bothering to pass it by Mendocino himself.
00:20:06.500Even his own staff knew he was not a decision maker, knew he was not a decider or a thinker or influential.
00:20:13.500They ignored him and they laughed at him.
00:20:16.500He was sent to the commission as an empty suit.
00:20:19.500And it just is perfect that of all the people who could have attended on behalf of the government, it's Mendocino.
00:20:25.500But he's going to be there to tell them how to fix it.
00:20:27.500Why would you call the government in to fix a problem that the media has with credibility?
00:20:33.500Because the reason that people are angry at the media, there's a lot of reasons and I'm sure I don't know all of them, but one big one is that people don't trust the media anymore.
00:20:43.500And a reason for that is that so many media are on the government payroll.
00:20:47.500So if you're trying to win back trust, if you're trying to stop people from clapping back at you on social media, and one of the knocks on you is that you're in the pocket of Trudeau financially and politically, how is inviting a chummy public safety minister going to disabuse anyone of the notion that you are in full collusion with Trudeau?
00:21:09.500Anyway, Catherine Tate flew in from her home in New York City.
00:21:14.500I find that just absolutely amazing that the head of the CBC can live in New York and commute.
00:21:20.500She says that the Internet is the worst place.
00:21:24.500And she praises the panel as being diverse.
00:21:31.500Reporters Without Borders found that an overwhelming majority of journalists agreed that the Internet was the most dangerous place for journalists.
00:21:41.500Nearly half of women journalists said they self-censored to avoid exposing themselves to violence.
00:21:48.500Another 21 percent had resigned or were considering not renewing their contracts.
00:21:54.500All news organizations, and you've got us pretty well, a lot of us represented here tonight, in Canada, across Canada and around the world, have been alarmed by the galloping increase in vitriolic online harm that targets disproportionately, as Joyce has said, women, women of color, and racialized journalists.
00:22:16.500You know, they're emphasizing that women are the victims.
00:22:18.500Well, actually, studies show that men are as much the victims of harassment online as women are.
00:22:24.500But they're trying to fit this in their critical theory that it's about women and about minorities.
00:22:32.500Everyone and anyone on social media can be harassed.
00:22:35.500I think the most criticized and harassed man on social media right now is Elon Musk.
00:22:41.500I want to show you one more statement from Catherine Tate where she says that the people on this panel are fiercely independent, that they're strong and they're free.
00:22:54.500Do we have a fiercely independent and strong free press?
00:22:58.500I know that the sole purpose of this vile form of harassment is to silence these voices, to silence these journalists, and in so doing, to undermine the foundational pillar in our open societies, in our democracies.
00:23:17.500So I'm here tonight to say to all of you, stay the course.
00:23:32.500Journalists who reflect a wide range of voices and perspectives.
00:23:38.500Without a strong, free, and diverse press, democracies cannot function.
00:23:43.500So we worked together with the Toronto Star, CTV News, Global, La Presse, APTN, the Canadian Association of Journalists, and others to develop a newsroom guide for managing online harm.
00:24:05.500So I don't know how many pens were in it, but a lot.
00:24:08.500And the idea was to provide advice on what to do before, during, and after incidents of online harassment or abuse.
00:24:18.500And basically, we've had to adapt many of the same practices that we've used when we send journalists overseas to war zones or when we send them to natural disasters.
00:25:48.500We know from the preliminary findings that journalists who are harassed online have significantly more symptoms of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic distress.
00:27:56.500But there must be penalties also for those who refuse to stop.
00:28:01.500And that's why we need legislation to ensure online safety.
00:28:05.500So we'll be working with other media colleagues, many of whom are here tonight, but across the country, to better support and protect our journalists.
00:28:14.500Because until you are safe, we will not stop talking about this.
00:28:19.500We simply cannot afford to lose your voices.
00:28:23.500Now, I mentioned earlier that in the entire two hours that I watched this panel, there was not a single incidence of violence described, which is quite something, given that the panel was supposedly about violence.
00:28:36.500If they would have invited anyone from the rebel, myself, David Menzies, Alexa Lavoie, really half a dozen of our team, we would have told them about actual violence towards us.
00:28:46.500But they did manage to get a story about violence, but it was not on social media.
00:28:53.500It's a story of one of the speakers here, Ms. Verma, from Global News.
00:29:31.500Nearly three months ago, our Lara Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob in Cairo, Egypt, while covering the celebrations after Hosni Mubarak stepped down as president.
00:29:41.500Now, for the first time, she's speaking publicly about the attack, which she says was merciless.
00:29:47.500In a 60 Minutes interview, Lara tells Scott Pelley she thought she would die.
00:30:53.500Listen to her describe what she went through when she encountered a mob of men on the streets who didn't like the fact that she was uncovered.
00:31:06.500She swarmed her, surrounded her, and bruised her, beat her up until a janitor nearby grabbed her and her Globe and Mail colleague and pulled them into an apartment.
00:31:17.500And this is a terrible story that could have been horrendous as it was for Lara Logan.
00:31:40.500And all of a sudden, I was completely surrounded by these men who were grabbing me and pushing me, grabbing my notebook, grabbing my pen, pulling Patrick Martin, my colleague, away from me.
00:31:51.500I felt totally alone, totally overwhelmed, and totally powerless.
00:31:58.500And it was an incredibly scary feeling.
00:32:01.500My whole body was covered in bruises that I hadn't felt at the time, but were there and lasted, you know, a few days until they healed.
00:32:10.500I'm telling this story because I think that I was able to sort of get away from that very scary situation, that very scary crowd.
00:32:20.500I look at my colleagues right now, who are the topic and the subject and the target of online hate, and I feel that they don't have that safety anywhere.
00:32:31.500I feel like every day in my job right now as Editor-in-Chief of Global News, I see, you know, incredibly violent messages come through our email filter systems that are forwarded to me by Rachel, by others.
00:32:47.500And I think there are many ways every day that are just as damaging and I think just as wounding as what I experienced at that time.
00:37:07.500And all sorts of vile stuff was coming in through that door.
00:37:10.500So we closed that door, you know, and we're...
00:37:13.500It's like a little whack-a-mole, but we're constantly looking.
00:37:16.500We've put some resources against security.
00:37:20.500So we now have people who are, like Dave Seglins, who are working on helping our journalists through the process when they're attacked, providing mental health support.
00:37:33.500There was another reporter who joined via Zoom.
00:37:36.500I didn't quite catch where she was from.
00:37:38.500The journalists who ran the thing didn't do...
00:38:00.500Safe has now become an alien word to me.
00:38:03.500I can't remember what safe looks or feels like, which is ironic because safety is what I came to this country for.
00:38:13.500I left Pakistan after my reporting on human rights abuses and state complicity led to a horrific organized online hate campaign against me, just like it did here.
00:38:23.500I was doxxed, I was vilified, assaulted by misogynistic, ethnophobic, violent abuse, just like here.
00:38:49.500Or is she using the word attack, violent attack, to mean mean tweets?
00:38:55.500There were there was another guest, another reporter named Erica Ifill and there's Mark Mendocino and CTV and Global and CBC was all the big shots.
00:39:04.500And then some people who I think were chosen to give the pretense of diversity, although, like I say, there was no ideological diversity.
00:39:11.500And they only talked about mean tweets from the right.
00:39:15.500There was no mention of violence from the left, including real violence from Antifa.
00:39:19.500Take a look at this talking about how all the problems on social media are from the far right convoy and convoy adjacent people, white supremacists.
00:39:30.500I think I think I think what I experience, what we experience is a continuation of threats that have come from work that we've done on on far right and the rise of the far right.
00:39:45.500And the fact that we've gotten into how many minutes, almost an hour into this and we haven't talked about the far right is like a huge problem because that is the context within which this is happening.
00:39:59.500These are all either convoy people or convoy adjacent people or white supremacists or something like that.
00:40:07.500And the fact that we haven't characterized it as that kind of tells me that we have a long way to go to getting people in positions of power to really understanding what is going on.
00:40:20.500Minister, do you understand what's going on?
00:40:23.500I certainly have a I think a very much more sober appreciation and of the experiences that you're going through every day.
00:40:33.500And I think I can't do anything except start by expressing the gratitude for the candor and the bravery that you show every day.
00:40:43.500I think you're having had to crash through barriers to crack into your profession and then to then have to be inundated day in and day out with intimidation, harassment, overt racism, obviously criminal conduct.
00:40:59.500And the fact that you still go out there and write stories, which is for the benefit of all Canadians, is I think a real testament to each and every one of you.
00:41:09.500And so I would just begin by saying that. Thank you for what you do.
00:41:15.500It is important that we call it for what it is, Erica, and I, you know, it is racist.
00:41:29.500It is misogynistic. It is criminal. It is against the law.
00:41:35.500And it is intentional that it targets disproportionately women, racialized indigenous and other minority communities.
00:41:45.500I think there is no doubt in my mind that the goal is to crowd you all out and to preserve or restore some delusional sense of what the status quo was like.
00:42:00.500Isn't it odd that all the government-funded inquiries into hate are only what they are looking for hate on the right?
00:42:09.460I haven't seen condemnations of anti-Semitism on the left or violence on the left, anti-violence or Black Lives Matter.
00:42:17.260Why is it, how is it possible that the only social media harassment that they're discussing is from what they call the right?
00:42:26.520And, you know, Marco Mendocino was up next. He had a few thoughts himself on Tahrir Square.
00:42:34.280And, you know, I think, Sonia, your metaphor at the beginning of describing how you felt in Tahrir Square when you were assaulted and you didn't even realize it because of the trauma in the moment was very apt.
00:42:47.700And what we are seeing online is every day at Tahrir Square where nobody is safe.
00:42:53.600And the trauma that that causes to professionals, journalists who have a response, who are trying to fulfill a, like, a democratically essential responsibility to tell stories from perspectives that have not historically been told.