LETTER – Unverified information should not be presented as the news

Mel I just returned from a month-long trip to Europe, and read your Oct 10 response to my e-mail where you accuse me of bullying you with long responses when I comment on articles that you publish. Is your accusation of bullying based on the fact that some comments are long or that they are inaccurate?

 Positive and cost-effective change in society will only happen when we have an informed electorate that takes interest in how the bureaucracy manages the tax base. Participation by the electorate in a creative and flexible way will promote accountability.

 You are an influencer who at times practices the fine art of evasion, “out of sight out of mind” process, without many verifiable critical comments, a tactic used to evade accountability by those who comment and publish.

 What exactly is your objective if not to investigate the validity of the information posted by the people who don’t post evidence-based responses like several you published by one of your commentators that I responded to which you called bullying.  If you consider fact-based criticism as “bullying” I have a suggestion, provide your evidence.

 You ignore my concerns when you publish unverifiable sources. I am not interested in confirming what you think should be published or what a right-wing or left-wing commentator writes, however, I will not shy away from refuting what you and your contributors write when you and they don’t provide verifiable evidence. Online News is a “convenient way to keep up with what’s going on” but one must ask does it provide a saner and more balanced outlook on the future when historians and journalists manipulate facts to influence social behavior

You and your blog influence social, political and economic policy and you have a duty to examine the evidence not just on a micro level but on the macro level since what is posted and what you pass as evidence and approve by omission represents our society, our education system, our family life and the world that Canadian Media represents. When you massage the truth, you are not accountable to our trust.

The truth is a social matter and so is its access and presentation on which you have a monopoly. The search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned; it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

I oppose the axiom “that facts speak for themselves” and look at interpretation and observation of the facts as a cornerstone of any critical writing. Churchill knew his history well as he said “history will be kind to me as I intend to write it”. We remember him as an orator and writer but not as a racist who banned interracial boxing matches so white fighters would not be seen losing to black ones.

In addition, historical facts as found in archives and documents only tell part of the story since many editors, journalists and historians are discriminating in what they emphasize and select.  For that reason, the questions about the facts, be they Churchill or Mel, are more important than the answers. Consequently, the main work of the news provider, you Mel, is not to record, but to evaluate what you publish.

Journalists, editors and newspapers provide historical documents and like other mortals must take a position and free themselves through understanding and mastery of the past in order to evaluate its meaning. This interpretation must not be colored by one’s environment, social and political position. Interpretation of the past, connects to the understanding of the present but more importantly it may provide a key to shaping a more just future.

Furthermore, by placing restrictions and infrastructural limitations which you ignore, constantly restrict access to the internet of people who comment where the speed and quality of internet connections hide evidence? It is not something that is just happening on your blog, its common world over. The first mistake we make is looking for the truth in Online Media.

You ignore these concerns by saying my comments are “too long” and no one reads them. I am only concerned that you read my comment since they are critical of your omissions and since it is you who refuses to post them and if only one reads them that is certainly better if no one reads them. Obviously, no one will read them when you don’t post them.

By not posting my comment, I am just a falling tree in the forest that no one hears, which is just one more part of the wire services “digital silk road,” in which you knowingly or unknowingly participate in a minor way. You are not alone in this, Europeans do it, Chinese do it and we and you do it here in Canada.

If issues are not discussed in an open forum, these obscure concerns represent a distraction or are used as fishing for readership. When you fish in your favorite fishing hole and cook the catch the way you like it, it smells fishy to me.

For example, if neighborhoods are affected by high crime rates and homelessness as faced by many cities in BC, and when real issues that cause this are ignored, important elections like the recent one in BC become a “one trick pony” called “opioids”. Journalists, and many who commented on your blog did not provide potential solutions, or discussed systemic causes such as corruption, social exclusion, family values or any other related issues.

Consequently, they reduced direct awareness of the public of the real issues and reduced them to a single narrative so it becomes a news organization’s commercial interest to try to find an agenda which corresponded as closely as possible to peoples’ desires and fears as was done by the right-wing in the recent election in BC. We have years of evidence to stop voting for those who live in our glorious province, who look around them and only see ways to convert what they see into cash which has steadily ruined us and our heritage. Now we blame those who have taken advantage of our economic ignorance as we buy what we should have produced at home.

 In my recent travels in city after city I did not see a single grocery store cart with one’s life belongings in it, not a single person lying in the street, and not a single homeless person living in a tent.

What I did see is some homeless dogs and cats and in one town a Roma person politely asking for some money. I did see trees, clean parks, pedestrians in many outside coffee shops having a drink or dinner, families with their children enjoying life without any concerns for their safety, and not a single bird nest of wires above their heads. However, while waiting in Vancouver for my Kamloops connection I did see three young men in loud voices “effing” this and that while an elderly female worker provided one beer after another. Selling beer was more important than polite conversation.

You know better than most that truth may be generated by social procedures and structures that are verifiable and so are lies. Truth and lies are things that can be verified or at least corroborated by evidence. Truth implies an obligation to say that what happened did indeed happen. It is never one sided as the right wing would have us believe and as our media present it on national news particularly in agenda-setting a la Justin style in foreign policy, in which very few Canadians have direct experience or knowledge of the issues.

Freedom of the press should not be defended selectively or when it’s threatened close to home.  The journalist can say anything in the defense of democracy as long as it is positive of the prevailing narrative.  The prevailing narrative will not be challenged by most editors even when subverted, because they fear losing the support of people whose approval might be useful to them or whose disapproval might find them unemployed.

 I am asking you and those who comment on your blog to provide their evidence and I would expect you and the others who comment to provide their counter evidence. This is not bullying. Facts never are unless one lacks understanding.

 Every day CBC inundates us with unverifiable clips of rape, shootings of civilians, damaged buildings, and children in distress, homelessness and killings on our streets.  On the world stage this is almost always attributed to the “other” when we know that such propaganda has been manipulated for the past thousands of years to serve the national narrative of the side producing such information.

 In school books alone curriculum defines economic, social and political ideology, as democracy as we see it. To make it so the required reading was Orwell and Solzhenitsyn, as for domestic news we never look at the government policy for the decline in services, rising food prices and the economic boom and bust cycles that we face every seven or eight years here in Kamloops.

 These supposedly newsworthy events are used by political chameleons who jump from one political party to another with the same stripes in order to inflame emotions rather than to engage our mental processes. To investigate the real cause requires work and education not regurgitation from the wire services, consequently, we allow a “Hail, my leader!”, or “Sieg Heil!”  salute in parliament to the most repugnant right-wing ideology “Nazism” saluting a man who participated in the death of over 100 thousand Polish, Ukrainian and Russian civilians.

 Some of the articles that I have read on your blog, stated that native “children went through a much larger environment of disorder” Yes, native children, Chinese Children, Japanese children, Eastern and southern European children were part of this disorder.

Stanley, Timothy J. quotes from a Canadian Case Study”. Children Teachers and Schools. In the History of British Columbia that at the start of the twentieth century, the government of British Columbia, disenfranchised over half of its population and had institutionalized racism in law, education, and the economy, while the government of Canada, institutionalized racism in its immigration policy.

 Many comments on your blog and on visual media present unverified information as the news, material that can be manufactured by a cell phone or in a propaganda studio to serve a narrative that the government wants us to support. This narrative is then supported by dubious characters whose reputation is questionable but never exposed by journalists.

 If one provides a counter view which exists in every conflict, the consistent narrative one gets is we are “good guys” while they are “bad guys” which is never verified as to why we are good and why they are bad by using credible sources of information. It seems to me that many in the media do not know that there are different accounts of ‘‘truth’’ or differing ‘‘truths’’ and this should be presented, provided they are verifiable.

 Many years ago, I wrote to you about the issue which dominates the present wars in the Middle East, present demonization of India, China, Russia and the war in Ukraine. Most people had no clue about the “petrodollar”, “de-dollarization”, and “BRICS” which influence our standard of living as does the IMF and the World Bank which we use as a Trojan Horse of destabilization and war.

You know just as well as I do that people responsible for this war in Ukraine or the social decline in our society are caused by people with whom you and I so peacefully co-existed with here in Canada. The same ones whose children and grandchildren were fed forgetfulness about the nature of the regime which killed so many millions in pursuit of the ambitions of one of the most odious ideologies of all humanity – Nazism.

Media seems to have forgotten their duty of care to the truth, The Media seems to forget Keegstra and Zundel who were jailed not so long ago in Alberta and Ontario for glorifying Nazism but now we are OK that our deputy PM calls her Nazi grandfather, who celebrated the death of Canadian soldiers on the beaches of Dieppe and Normandy as a “freedom fighter”.

WALTER TRKLA

Editor’s Note: You’ve just made my point about overly long submissions that are a challenge to get through. Your above letter to the editor is more than 2,000 words long. With your background in teaching and your obvious command of history and language, could you not say everything you need to say in much less space? Despite the fact I’ve explained to you about length, you have chosen to accuse me of not running your comments because I disagree with your opinion. I may or may not disagree with your opinions but that has nothing to do with not running a particular comment.