Peter Menzies

Plus! Politico warns that the far right’s stealing Christmas, a CBC content analysis ruffles feathers and more! Happy New Year

Last week, according to the people who produce the nation’s most popular newscast, the hell that is Gaza froze over.

That’s right. According to CTV News, “freezing” rain flooded Gaza camps, leaving “displaced Palestinians in dire conditions.” This, as was pointed out by social media critics (including the National Post’s Chris Selley) was an absolutely false statement. It was, to be clear, a lie.

Winter rains had indeed fallen and made life unpleasant for people in Gaza. But the Associated Press (AP) report for which some eager beaver wrote the headline (one is tempted to suspect either a social justice warrior posing as a journalist or a bumbling incompetent produced by J-school) made no mention of anything “freezing.” Of course it didn’t, because on the day the story was published the high temperature in Gaza was 17C with a low of 13C.

Now, as one who has visited Disneyland in January, I am aware that temperatures can be relative. When it’s 14C in southern California, people from Saskatoon and Winnipeg are jumping into the local hotel pools while “cast members” at Disneyland are wearing toques and mittens. So AP was entirely within its rights to refer to conditions as chilly.

CTV Evening News, historically, has been one of Canada’s most watched regularly scheduled programs. It has boasted in the past about being the nation’s “most trusted” newscast.

So it was bad enough that CTV posted a barefaced falsehood. What was worse, although it did soften its internal headline to refer to “winter” rains, was that it did not take down its “freezing” posts or offer any hint of regret – at least none I could find – that it had ever posted information that amounted to the antithesis of journalism’s first obligation – The Truth.

While CTV’s owner, Bell, continues to lobby for its newsrooms to qualify for government subsidies such as the Journalism Labour Tax Credit and campaign in Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) hearings for newsroom funding, it does not appear super interested in investing in good journalism or even maintaining public trust in it.

Which is a shame, because last week its presentation of fake news did significant harm to trust in the craft and was inconsistent with its published standards.

Peter Stockland did a fine job the other day in addressing the fuss raised in media concerning CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’s decision to pull back a story regarding US deportees because, she said, it wasn’t complete enough for airing on 60 Minutes. Others viewed it more suspiciously.

If you haven’t read it yet, please do. We’ll see how it all turns out but what caught my eye was the manner in which the Globe and Mail’s U.S. correspondent, Adrian Morrow, chose to describe Weiss. He portrayed her only as “an anti-woke media personality” – a term of which his editors apparently approved. Given that Weiss was the Opinion Editor of the Wall Street Journal and then the New York Times, this seems a little, shall we say, catty? A childishly nasty manner in which to refer to Weiss, I thought, considering she also launched an online publication – The Free Press – that, because she was good at being an editor, used talented journalists and paid them well, recently sold to Paramount Skydance for more than $200 million.

Most of all, though, I found the reference entirely unnecessary and self-indulgent, as if the piece was written for the approval of peers and not for the benefit of readers.

Unsubstantiated references to the “far right” continue to be in prolific use as we begin a New Year, still searching for reasons to be optimistic about the state of journalism. References to the “far left,” meanwhile, continue to defy Newton’s Third Law of Motion concerning equal and opposite actions.

The European edition of Politico used no less an occasion that the birth of the previous millenium’s most influential figure to weigh in with its report on “How the far right stole Christmas.”

“U.S. President Donald Trump claims to have “brought back” the phrase “Merry Christmas” in the United States,” Politico declared, “framing it as defiance against political correctness. Now, European far-right parties more usually focused on immigration or law-and-order concerns have adopted similar language, recasting Christmas as the latest battleground in a broader struggle over culture.”

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Whew. Politico, focusing on Italian leader Giorgia Meloni, went so far as to quote attendees at a Christmas celebration who wished to remain anonymous for fear of being associated with a “far right” event.

Me? I thought it was Karl Marx, father of the far left, who labeled religion the “opium of the masses” and a human creation designed to keep the working classes oppressed. And weren’t the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and other Communist states the ones that did and do their level best to “steal” Christmas and other festivities founded in faith? Times have clearly changed, even if some newsroom instincts have not.

Speaking of disconnected media, prolific numbers man David Clinton has ruffled a few feathers with an extensive analysis in his Substack platform, The Audit, of CBC content. Here’s his summary of what he found:

“Of the 300 stories covered by my data, around 30 per cent – month after month – focused on Donald Trump and U.S.- Canada relations. Another 12-15 percent related to Gaza and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Domestic politics – including election coverage – took up another 12 percent, Indigenous issues attracted 9 percent, climate and the environment grabbed 8 percent, and gender identity, health-care worker assaults, immigrant suffering, and crime attracted around 4 percent each.”

Clinton provides a list of topics that were not “meaningfully represented in my sample of CBC’s Top Stories.” It includes housing affordability, immigration levels, crime rate, private sector investment success stories, the oil and gas sector, Chinese interference, etc. You can read his full analysis here.

You can also look for my New Year’s predictions on media that (spoiler alert) states that seeing as there has been no evidence of reform in CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard’s first year at the helm of the Mother Corp, you can expect more of the same nothing in 2026. That piece is expected to appear in The Hub this week.

Western Standard announced before Christmas that it’s heading East and hiring a reporter to cover news emanating from Queen’s Park, Ontario’s provincial legislature.

The most notable media-on-media smackdown that came to my attention over the festive season goes to the reliably rambunctious Ezra Levant of Rebel News.

Seizing on a year-end column by the Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin that hailed 2025 “as one of Canada’s great nation-building years” under Prime Minister Mark Carney, Levant had this to say:

Ezra Levant  @ezralevant The sole fact or anecdote in this entire column is that the author had lunch with a millionaire friend who said he felt “a foot taller”. Imagine spending hundreds of dollars on a subscription for this. https://t.co/vBhEfKTAc9 The Globe and Mail @globeandmail Opinion: 2025 will rank as one of Canada’s great nation-building years https://t.co/uNiE0n88cf 5:05 PM · Dec 18, 2025 22 Reposts · 57 Likes

And that, for this week, is that. Welcome to 2026.

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(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, a former vice chair of the CRTC and a National Newspaper Award winner.)