Lately, the Globe and Mail, Canada’s ‘paper of record,’ has been so gripped with anti-Chinese fervour that it has become blind to a blatant double standard. Contrasting the newspaper’s reporting on Chinese influence in Canada with its coverage of the Israel lobby highlights the increasingly Sinophobic nature of its journalism and commentary.

Culture informs politics, and politics inform culture. The often confounding questions of why people vote against their own interests, get swept up in conspiracy theories, or rally behind politicians who only seek to further their own agenda has answers that can be difficult to articulate, given the complex intersections at play. But to understand it, we don’t need to look much further than the field.

Two of the rebels I admire most, Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher, and Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, are in jail in Britain. That should not be surprising. You can measure the effectiveness of resistance by the fury of the response. Julian courageously exposed the lies, deceit, war crimes and corruption of the ruling imperial elites.

In recent weeks, multiple organizations have spoken out against the CBC’s decision to issue an on-air apology after Duncan McCue referenced Palestine during an interview with cartoonist, journalist and war correspondent Joe Sacco on “the themes of colonialism and resource extraction.” The response from CBC management, however, has not been convincing.

Freedom of the press now rests with the honourable few: the dissidents on the internet who belong to no club, who are neither rich nor laden with Pulitzers, but produce fine, disobedient, moral journalism—those like Julian Assange. Meanwhile, it is our responsibility to stand by a true journalist whose sheer courage ought to be inspiration to all of us who still believe that freedom is possible.

“I referred to the Palestinian territories as ‘Palestine,’ we apologize.” This surreal on-air apology was broadcast last week on the CBC’s The Current, after guest host Duncan McCue referenced Palestine during an interview with cartoonist, journalist and war correspondent Joe Sacco on “the themes of colonialism and resource extraction.”

Attention, as a dialectic of focus and distraction, has become central to understanding mediated life in the information economy. If we are our experiences, and there are more possibilities to experience than ever before, then the highly selective allocation, surrender, and capture of attention determines what we become—and all that we can become⁠—as individuals and as a society.

In 2020, an onslaught of global crises have come hurling towards us all at once. The mainstream media can no longer ignore the fact that these issues are interconnected, and must report on them as such. Until they do, the momentum for justice will continue to reverberate, and fundamental problems will remain unsolved.

It is obvious that right across the board, in each tiered sector of institutional representation, the corporate media is facilitating violence, exploitation, and abuse of the weak for the gain of the powerful. In our compromised, corrupt democracies there is little chance of accessing justice for this abuse of the fourth estate.

In the aftermath of Soleimani’s assassination, Krugman rushed to assure his readers that Trump’s bullying violence represented a fundamental break with American history. While America once had “a special leadership position, one that sometimes involved playing a role in reshaping other countries’ political systems,” he argued, Trump “has never shown any sign of understanding why America used to be special.”