Juno News - Unifor's anti-Conservatism risks making unionized journalists a threat to truth

00:00:00.480 Unifor is Canada's largest labour union and with just under a year to go until the next

00:00:05.400 federal election, that union has decided to make itself as markedly political as possible.

00:00:12.400 Unifor has declared itself the resistance against Andrew Scheer or what Jerry Dias,

00:00:18.120 the head of Unifor, calls Scheer stupidity with a hashtag in front of course because

00:00:22.800 otherwise it doesn't count.

00:00:24.800 Now, that a labour union would take a left-wing position in advance of an election is not

00:00:30.360 surprising or newsworthy.

00:00:32.720 There is a hitch with Unifor though, 12,000 of Unifor's members more than any other representation

00:00:39.840 of this industry are from the media, journalists and other workers in the media sector who call

00:00:45.400 Unifor their representative body, which means that the largest labour organisation for journalists

00:00:52.760 has declared itself against a political party that it will supposedly be covering fairly

00:00:59.400 in the months up until the October election.

00:01:02.320 Now this is not to say that every single Unifor member reporter has consumed the Kool-Aid and

00:01:07.760 is anti Andrew Scheer, but this is a very real conflict that journalists are now thousands

00:01:12.760 of the members of an organisation that has already determined it wants a particular outcome when

00:01:18.680 the readers and consumers of media in Canada are expecting, as I think most people do or

00:01:24.280 would like to expect, fair, honest, impartial and unbiased coverage.

00:01:30.560 Now the announcement by Unifor that it was going to be focused on defeating Scheer came just

00:01:34.960 one week before Justin Trudeau announced a $600 million bailout to members of the press in Canada,

00:01:41.960 which means that not only are the unions representing many of these journalists somehow tied to defeating

00:01:48.440 Andrew Scheer, but the employers of these journalists are receiving big fat paychecks from Justin Trudeau.

00:01:55.960 So for Canadians there is an inability to decipher who was beholden to whom in this,

00:02:01.320 which is why I've put forward a very simple proposal. Any journalist who is a member of a labour union

00:02:07.880 should, when covering any political story now, disclose alongside their byline what union they're

00:02:14.440 a part of and if they have a position in that union like union steward or something like that.

00:02:19.640 And this goes for media outlets themselves. If they've been on the receiving end of government funding,

00:02:24.440 they should be disclosing that up front. This paper has received X number of dollars or X

00:02:30.280 millions of dollars from the government as part of an effort to quote unquote save journalism.

00:02:37.000 When I was a columnist for a national company and I wrote about firearms, I disclosed that I was a gun

00:02:41.960 owner and that I was a member of a particular gun group that had a vested interest in certain policies.

00:02:47.880 If you're a member of a law society writing about an issue that a law society has taken a stance on,

00:02:53.240 you would disclose that. So it should be no exception for unionized journalists if their union has been

00:03:00.680 engaging itself which Unifor has in the political process. Now in many cases editors wouldn't even

00:03:07.240 allow someone to write with that conflict but if they are going to at the very least disclosure is

00:03:13.640 essential. And this is so important to deal with the already eroded trust that the public has or lack

00:03:19.560 thereof in media and the challenge goes to the reporters and journalists who are ethical. If you truly

00:03:25.640 value your ethics you will support this because you will not want a conflict or even the appearance

00:03:33.080 of conflict. For the True North Initiative, I'm Andrew Lutton.

Juno News - December 01, 2018