propaganda | Joan Baxter

January 15, 2021

Beware, “The Epoch Times” are here … and there, and everywhere

(An earlier version of this opinion piece appeared in the Halifax Examiner “Morning File” of January 15, 2021.)

The “sample copy” of the newspaper landed innocently enough in our house.

On Tuesday, January 12, 2021, Canada Post delivered a “complimentary” issue of The Epoch Times right to our door in rural northern Nova Scotia.

It came with a “limited-time offer” for a special subscription deal to what looked – if one knew no better – like a normal newspaper.

I was one of those, unaware that in the past year, investigative journalists had revealed The Epoch Times to be a “shamelessly pro-Trump paper,” and a “global propaganda machine” that offers a “mix of alternative facts and conspiracy theories that has won it far-right acolytes around the world.”

A 2017 study in Germany found that The Epoch Times “disseminates antidemocratic false news and conspiracy theories, incites hatred against migrants and indirectly advertises for the AfD,” the country’s far-right political party.

Yet the masthead of the newspaper makes The Epoch Times sound benign as a newborn babe, a paper that stays “outside of political interests,” and is “dedicated to seeking the truth through insightful and independent journalism.”

Recipients of the free copy are invited to take advantage of a “$1 first month trial offer.” The “best deal” subscription is six months at $3.43 a week, or $89 plus tax. Subscribers get a weekly paper with 40 pages in four sections.

The Epoch Times, says the masthead, has readers in 36 countries and 22 languages, with a Canadian English version that has been operating for 16 years, with a “loyal readership” in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, and Edmonton.

As for its origins, it says only that it was founded in 2000 by “Chinese expats in North America.”

As I said, benign.

Or so the mysterious people behind The Epoch Times would have us believe.

Dig a little, however, and the paper looks anything but benign.

Continue reading Beware, “The Epoch Times” are here … and there, and everywhere

September 4, 2015

Shame on the Harper Government

By Joan Baxter

It was bad enough watching Canada’s Immigration Minister Chris Alexander on CBC’s Power and Politics lying to Rosemary Barton, telling her that the media are to blame for the country’s pathetic response to the refugee crisis.

And it certainly wasn’t any easier listening to Alexander stonewall As It Happens’ Carol Off when she asked, repeatedly, how many of the 200 government-sponsored refugees from Syria had actually made it to Canada by June 2014. That was before he hung up on her, claiming later he’d been late for Question Period.

It was equally galling reading Alexander’s nasty attack on the Ontario government after it reinstated health care to all asylum seekers after the Harper Government stripped it away. And his dangerous, preposterous comment that this would make Canada “a magnet for bogus asylum seekers” raised questions about just how low Harper’s government could and would stoop.

But nothing — absolutely nothing — could possibly be as distressing as that soul-searing, heart-wrenching photo of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi dead on a Turkish beach and the awful fact that Aylan and his family might have been granted asylum in Canada long before they got on that boat. Earlier this year, the NDP Member of Parliament for Port Moody – Coquitlam, Fin Donnelly, hand-delivered to Chris Alexander a letter in support of the privately sponsored refugee application for some of the Kurdi family to join their relatives in British Columbia. Citizenship and Immigration Canada now says no application for Aylan’s immediate family was ever received.

Regardless, it’s too late. Aylan Kurdi, his mother and his brother are now dead, like another 6,000 refugees and migrants who have perished or disappeared en route to Europe since January 2014.

There is much blame to go around in this horrendous refugee crisis. But the blame for how poorly Canada has responded lands squarely on the shoulders of the Harper Government with its rhetoric about “bogus refugees”. Continue reading Shame on the Harper Government

March 1, 2015

Canadians pay the high costs of Stephen Harper’s Conservative propaganda machine

BY: Joan Baxter

Former Senate Page, Brigette DePape in 2011

Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper is spending immense amounts of taxpayers’ money to promote himself, his government, the oil and gas industry, his neoconservative ideology and his neoliberal big-dog-devour-little-dog economic dogma – and this kind of propaganda machine does not bode well for Canada’s or any country’s democracy…

One of the very first things I noticed when, in the 1980s, I lived and travelled in some decidedly non-democratic countries in West and Central Africa, was the over-the-top narcissism of some of the dictators and their obsession with absolute control of their political messages, which were almost exclusively about themselves and what great leaders they were.

It was relentless. Their portraits and political propaganda were ubiquitous, filling billboards, plastered all over the front pages of newspapers, and even their most insignificant comings and goings monopolized radio and television newscasts (and caused massive traffic jams). There were no such things as genuine press conferences; rather there were staged events with fawning reporters recording the great leader’s every word while political partisans applauded.

As a young, impressionable Canadian woman who had come of age during the “just society” years in Canada, never experienced first-hand conflict or the political turmoil, excesses and human rights abuses that abound in the absence of democracy, I remember how terrifying it all seemed.

Fast forward to 2015.

Most of those African countries I lived in are now democracies, not perfect ones, but far more democratic than they were two or three decades ago. And while there is still a long way to go in many of these young democracies, at least most of the signs are pointing in the right direction.

Full speed backwards in Canada

Not so Canada, where we’ve been moving in the wrong direction, full speed backwards. Continue reading Canadians pay the high costs of Stephen Harper’s Conservative propaganda machine