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You’re listening to a Frequency Podcast Network production in association with CityNews.
Jordan
There’s an old newspaper editor rule. It goes like this: for every single person who takes the time to write an old-fashioned letter to the editor, there are at least 100 and possibly 1000 people who feel the same way. This same ratio, I think, increasingly applies to real-life examples of the horrific behaviour we see online every day.
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Chrystia, what you doing in Alberta? Get the out of this province. You don’t belong here. You’re a traitor
Jordan
For four years now, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland has been a target for social media trolls, for online harassment and abuse and the worst kind of that garbage. It’s just that it takes a live and in-person example of it to make almost every public figure in the country condemn that. Meanwhile, outside the spotlight, the threats, abuse, hate mail and worse, being sent to women in public life every single day continues. And it’s getting worse. As I record this, there is what appears to be an organized hate campaign designed to terrorize a group of female journalists. There are other women right now sharing their stories of leaving politics or other public-facing industries forever because of unrelenting abuse. And yet we are still having trouble confronting this until it shows up in real life screaming profanity in our faces. Where does this go from here? And how can we possibly avoid what seems to be the most likely and tragic ending? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Fatima Syed is an Ontario reporter for The Narwhal. She is occasionally a guest host of this very podcast. She joins us today, though, in her capacity as Vice President of the Canadian Association of Journalists. Hello, Fatima.
Fatima Syed
Hi, Jordan. As always, we’re here to talk about dark and depressing things.
Jordan
That’s what we do here. But let’s start with the one that everybody saw because we’re going to try to get well beyond that. But I think it offers a nice jumping-off point for the conversation we’re about to have. So maybe you could just tell us what happened to our deputy prime minister in Alberta on Friday.
Fatima Syed
There was a video posted by someone on Twitter and other social media platforms that showed Chrystia Freeland, who is our deputy Prime Minister and finance minister, being yelled at by someone in Alberta. The person yelling at her was saying, f you, Minister, you’re not welcome in Alberta. When he called her out, she initially seems to say lift her head up from her phone and say yes in what seemed to be like she was going to engage with this guy. But then he starts yelling at her and she quickly sort of makes her way into an elevator. I think it was very jarring because for many people who watched that video, because here was this very Chrystia Freeland is a woman of small stature in a big position and there were people yelling very aggressively at her in a seemingly quiet space, like there wasn’t a huge crowd there or anything. It was like a building of some kind. So I think that juxtaposition really got to people.
Jordan
And it was really visible as well. And before this weekend had ended, it had been seen by most of the public figures in Canada, it seems. And because it’s relevant to the rest of our conversation, tell me a little bit about their reaction.
Fatima Syed
I mean, look, everyone started denouncing it, right? No politician deserves that kind of thing spewed at them. No politician deserves to be in that kind of position. Denounced hate, and talked about what kind of Canadian society do we want to be. I think that was the message of Justin Trudeau when he was asked about it and several politicians like, is this the Canada we want? And I’m saying it like that because I think that’s really ironic because this is the Canada we have, to put it in idealistic terms, is doing a disservice to both the problem and the solution that needs to address it. You know the thing that caught my attention when I watched the video is the change in expression on Chrystia Freeland’s face. Right. If you just watch her very closely, when this man who’s filming calls her, she looks up with a smile on her face.
Jordan
Yes. Well, he calls her pleasantly. He just says Chrystia.
Fatima Syed
Yeah. And she’s very happy to look up from her phone and look around and see who wants to talk to her. And it seems like she’s good to do that. And then as soon as he says FU, her face just drops like ashen. And she goes back to looking at her phone and walks semi-quickly, but not too quickly, to the elevator in an effort to try and leave the situation, not knowing what it might turn into. And the reason that caught my attention because of such a familiar feeling for, I think, many people, especially racialized or BIPOC people in public spaces. Whether they’re a journalist or in office, or many doctors at this point as well, who have faced that kind of vitriol both in online and offline discourse, like seeing that play out on Chrystia Freeland’s face really just struck me.
Jordan
Well, this was an incident that sparked national condemnation, as you point out. How unique is it?
Fatima Syed
Not unique at all. This is why when Justin Trudeau said, is this the Canada we want? My immediate reaction was like, dude, this is the Canada we have. In the past several weeks alone, Jordan, I know at least eleven, probably more, journalists across the country, many, if not most of whom are racialized female journalists who have been subjected to worse than what Chrystia Freeland heard in that video, like the words that were strung together in these emails to these journalists are just unfathomable.
Jordan
Let’s stop there for 1 second because this Chrystia Freeland incident actually came at a time when you and I were already discussing doing an episode about what appears to be a targeted wave of hate mail harassment abuse directed at the journalist you just mentioned. Can you just broadly describe who’s being targeted and what do we know about it?
Fatima Syed
So, in my capacity as the Vice President of the CAJ, our board has heard from reporters at major publications across the country who have just been targeted by the most vile, disgusting kind of threats in an onslaught of emails by anonymous vendors. I wish I could describe to you what these emails say, but they are honestly too horrific to even put words to. And that’s saying something, because the words these email senders use are, well, creative is a generous way to put it, but it’s unimaginable.
Jordan
Can you give us a little bit of an example? I know you can’t read them, I know they’re not appropriate, and I don’t want to put you through it, but just to give people an idea of how much worse these are from even what was being screamed at. Ms. Freeland.
Fatima Syed
So at least three of the journalists were sent emails describing how their faces were on a wall and how the senders had turned that setting into a game and had debated to no end on who they would marry, have sex with, or rape is the word they use and who they’d kill and how they do all three of those things. They essentially sort of turn these women into objects and I’m saying that very politely because it’s more than objectification. It’s just monstrous the way they describe these journalists, it has nothing to do with their work. It has everything to do with their appearance or their voice, the way they sound on their shows or their podcasts, and the way they look on TV or in their profile images. It’s honestly awful. No one should have to read anything like that and honestly, I don’t know how anyone can write something like that. So, yeah Chrystia Freeland for two minutes, someone said, F you to her, but the stark difference in the way everyone responded to that situation, to what we’re seeing in journalism and also in politics to a lot of degrees, was very telling because I think in public office, you can be expected to face a certain level of anger from constituents who may be unhappy with your policies. In that video, Chrystia Freeland wasn’t really attacked for who she was or how she looked, but I know that there are many female politicians and many BIPOC politicians who have been attacked in that way online. And that’s the difference, right? When politicians talk about what kind of Canada do we want to be, we are better than this. Unfortunately, we are at a moment in our country where there are a lot of angry facets of our society, and they are releasing that anger in really, really troubling and honestly dangerous ways. The fact that we have eleven journalists across the country who have faced this kind of threat and several of them are looking behind their shoulders when they’re in public or avoiding it completely or getting all the security measures they possibly can, worried for their families who are also being threatened in these emails or just thinking about whether they even want to continue in the profession that they chose for themselves. That’s a whole other level of danger that we as a Canadian society and as a global society, to some degree, are not taking seriously.
Jordan
So have these journalists or has the CAJ on their behalf going to the police about this in general? You mentioned that these things are discussing, they’re looking over their shoulder, they’re worried for their families. Are the police equipped to handle this?
Fatima Syed
They are not. None of our public institutions are equipped or willing and the willing part is really important because this isn’t a new problem, Jordan. I’m sure you’ve talked about it before, online and offline as an industry. We have discussed this several times. I’ve been a journalist for about six years, and I think 30% of my career has been defined by the hate mail that I receive, if not more.
Jordan
Wow.
Fatima Syed
I knew that I was going to get into it when I was graduating from journalism school. So it’s not a new problem and there have been calls after calls after calls, begging, pleading, imploring politicians and policing institutions and our entire public sphere to come together and address this seriously, because this kind of requires all hands on deck, because there’s no one easy fix.
Jordan
In your capacity at the CAJ, I know you guys have been working on this problem. What do you guys officially think needs to be done?
Fatima Syed
Well, to start, we need a process. We need a procedure. One thing that we have learned time and time again is that when it comes to actually report hate mail, it’s completely impossible. You can call a police, you can go to a police station, you can go online but there’s no sort of easy way to tell an officer that, hey, I just got an email. I don’t know what to do. I am scared for my life. I’m scared for my safety. I don’t know who sent it because they’re using encrypted mail services like Proton Mail and Mail Fence that completely hides their identity and can’t be traced back to them in any capacity, please help. In all those instances, the journalists that I have known, or me, myself, when you have those conversations with an officer, if they’re nice, they’ll hear you out. If they’re nice, they’ll file you a report. But for the most part, even they don’t know what they can do, and they sort of brush you off because of that. It almost feels like this is too big of a problem. I would much rather not take care of it and it’ll be fine, don’t worry kind of attitude. But I think it’s very unfair to have, like, a receiver of hate mail be on the end of a phone call or an interview that is like 2 hours long, and at the end of it, nothing happens and they’re still scared and they just, you know, there’s no one that can help them. That sucks. So what the CAJ is asking for is a better procedure, a better process that enables news organizations and managers to report hate on behalf of the people that receive it, so that they don’t have to go through added trauma, and also so that these newsrooms and managers can send batches of hate mail as opposed to, like, one case at a time. We’re asking for policing institutions to work together because, for example, right now, the three journalists that I talked about whose faces are on the wall of the A-holes’s basement, I assume they are in three different cities across two provinces in this country, and there are now active police investigations at three different policing institutions. We’re asking for policing to work together, to share notes, to collaborate, because based on the language alone, it seems like these senders are the same, if not part of a similar sort of group. It seems like there are links between them that I think are being missed, that we think are being missed. So we’re asking police to collaborate, and then we’re asking police to be transparent and accountable to the process. Tell us what’s being done. You know give us a timeline. Stay in touch with us. Don’t just disappear, Jordan. When I reported a piece of very threatening hate mail to the police late last year, I did the whole thing, went through the entire procedure, got a case file, sat for an hour in an interrogation room, told them everything, shared all the screenshots, all the emails, everything. And I have never heard since from the officer. It’s been crickets. Called a few times, emailed a few times, didn’t get anything back and this is also notable because as I was leaving my sort of conversation with them, I was leaving the station, the officer looked at me and said, I’ll try, but I’ll tell you right now, there’s probably nothing I can do.
Jordan
How do we solve the problem where officers that this is reported to, either feel like they can give that response or in some cases right, it’s an honest response? They just don’t know what they can do. They don’t have the tools to do it.
Fatima Syed
So let’s give it to them. Right? This is where I talked earlier about willingness. This is where the main roadblock is at this moment. Right now, these three journalists are also across three different newsrooms and those newsrooms and publications have come together with the CAJ to put together this list of requests of policing institutions and our politicians and we sent it out to all the relevant authorities. We sent it out to at least five ministers, and it was this sort of coming together in collaboration and you know making one request as a big group. That led to a meeting with Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino where everything was laid out on the table. And we hope that is the first step to putting this on the agenda. I think we often complicate things in our society because there are so many parts to a problem, but sometimes the first step is literally just being willing to bring everyone and everything to the same room and locking yourself in there and being like, alright, we’re not going to leave until we figure out at least one constructive thing to do about this. And years have gone by, journalists have received hundreds, if not thousands of hate mail. So have politicians, so have doctors, so have CEOs, and we’re still having the same conversations. It’s not even Groundhogs Day. It’s literally we haven’t moved from the very spot that we’ve been in.
Jordan
I’m going to ask a bit of a devil’s advocate question. I’m sure there are some people listening who would ask it by publicizing all this hate mail and by us doing a podcast on it. This is not the first podcast that’s been done on it. I’m sure it won’t be the last. By sharing the awful emails that they get, are we encouraging more of this stuff? It is presumably attention these jerks are looking for. Are we giving it to them? And you know this has been the advice since abuse on the internet was invented, but why shouldn’t we just ignore it?
Fatima Syed
Look, if milk is filled and you just push it under the stove, the milk is still going to be there. In fact, it’s going to rot, it’s going to smell, it’s going to ruin your tiles. The problem doesn’t go away just because you don’t talk about it. And in this scenario, you can’t expect the receivers of hate mail to deal with it alone. For the longest time, even newsroom managers weren’t taking this seriously. You know it was like, oh yeah, this is just a byproduct of being a journalist. Like, this is going to happen. Tell us if it’s really bad and we’ll address it. But it took groups after groups of again BIPOC journalists to be the ones to say, hey, this is not right. Like, why should I log into my inbox every single day and see hate mail directed at me? There should be better security systems in place. There should be a serious process on how to address this. I think it’s unfair of us to see someone with a problem and be like, hey, I don’t want to hear about it, just go deal with it by yourself because if you hear about it, it might just make the problem worse. At some point, we have to take it seriously that there is a group of people in this country or somewhere in the world who are constantly attacking members of our society and making them feel that they’re inhuman, that they don’t belong in their profession, in our communities, that can’t just be their problem. Maybe this sounds idealistic, but there are some challenges that really do require every single person to give a shit. I hope I can say shit on your show. I’m sorry if I can.
Jordan
You’ve probably said it before on this show. Let’s be real. No, I’m glad you mentioned the pretending it’s not our problem thing because this is my last question, which is you know when we talk about the media and we try actually not to talk about the media on this show because it does often feel like it’s inside baseball. But my point is that this isn’t that. In the big picture, what happens to the news when this kind of harassment and abuse continues to escalate? What are people who are not connected to the Canadian media losing when this continues?
Fatima Syed
Well, I want to be clear. First of all, it’s not just the news industry, right? It’s so many industries that are affected by hate mail, including politicians, including healthcare.
Jordan
All the things that we need, presumably.
Fatima Syed
Well, this is the thing. This is what you lose. You lose strength in public institutions that are designed entirely to serve you, the public. Journalism as a profession, whether you agree or disagree with the reporting or with the way the reporting is done or with the way the reporter does the work, journalism at its heart is about serving the public. It’s about telling the truth. It’s about holding our government leaders and businesses and anyone really in public office accountable to ensure that they are best serving the public and it’s about creating a more informed and engaged society so we, in turn, can better serve each other. When you attack a member of that industry, there is a very high chance that you lose them. And the less journalists we have, the less accountability and transparency you have in our society. Who is asking politicians questions? Who are politicians answering to right now? You know this is a much bigger conversation than what we’re having, Jordan, but in my opinion, a journalist is a bridge between who you elect and who you are and what you want out of your society. And there are so many cracks in that bridge right now. And if that bridge fails, politicians, leaders across industries, they can do whatever they want. There will be no one asking them anything. There will be no one holding them accountable. And I am, quite frankly, sick and tired of being among the people who really are scared to look at her inbox or at her phone when she wakes up in the morning because I don’t know what’s going to be there. I don’t know what I’m going to get when the show comes out but I’m sure there’s going to be some people who are going to be mad about it, and they’re not going to be mad because they disagree with me. They’re just going to be mad at me for being me.
Jordan
And just to make one last point, the people that are mad about it and decide to get up and spew out a hate-filled email that’s going to end up in your inbox and not mine, I am, like 99.99% sure of that, because that’s how this works.
Fatima Syed
And this is the thing, Jordan, right? We need solidarity across every industry and sector and so forth. Even now, it’s three newsrooms that are carrying the burden of you know challenging our public institutions to take this seriously. Right now, every newsroom should be joining this fight. Every politician should understand that when they stay silent, they are enabling this crowd. When all they do is just denounce it, they are enabling this crowd. When they actively talk to them, they are enabling this crowd. They’re also holding responsibility for the way the online discourse is. And I know journalists who get attacked when they share it. There are readers who will come out and say, I want to brighten up your inbox in your day and hear some love, I love what you do, etc, etc. thank you. But also, tell your minister, tell your city councillor, tell your member of parliament that this is unacceptable. We need everyone, just like we do with climate change, just like we do with healthcare support, just like we do with our transit projects. This is a big societal problem. And if everyone doesn’t understand its impacts and the role that they need to be playing in creating a quote-unquote, better Canadian society, nothing is going to get done. So yeah, I’m calling on every single journalist to join the fight, every single politician to join this fight because this is extremely endemic and it is not stopping and it’s not going anywhere. And we can’t just denounce it just because our Deputy Prime Minister was yelled at in a video. Because there are people hurting and scared for their lives in communities that they’re not getting help and they’re scared of doing their jobs. And if we care about them, we kind of have to come together.
Jordan
Fatima, thank you for this. I hope you don’t get any crap for doing this show.
Fatima Syed
Thanks, Jordan. Fingers crossed.
Jordan
Fatima Syed, VP of the CAJ, a friend of this podcast and not deserving of the kind of crap she gets online too. That was The Big Story. For more head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. You know, I’m about to plug our listener survey, so if you haven’t done it, please do. The sooner we get to the number, the sooner I shut up about it. You can find it right on our website. It says Survey. Just click on it and offer us five to ten minutes of your time. You can even tell me I suck. If you prefer, you can find this podcast wherever you get your podcasts, if it is in an app that lets you write a review or click a little button to share with friends, please do it And I’ll be grateful. if you haven’t filled out the survey, that is the least, literally, be the least you can do. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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