Canadian Politics Today

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I understand that credible news organizations feel a duty to tread lightly on hot-button issues, but there is also danger in steering too far the opposite direction. 

If I look at other media outlets, I can see happy human interest stories about the Syrian refugees. Syrian refugees attend their very first hockey game! Syrian refugees attend Rememberance Day ceremonies. Syrian refugees help family find lost dog!  No story about Syrian refugees having problems integrating with highschool students. If you're only reporting positive news about something and ignoring the negative, isn't that called propaganda?

It's not much of a secret in Ottawa who commits the lions share of street crime. But you'll never read about it in the local papers or hear it mentioned on the news. If there are swarmings the criminals are described as 'youths', and when there are shootings the only time you'd get any idea of who was involved would be if there were deaths or arrests so the names or pictures get in the paper. There were a lot of street gang shootings last year. No media mentioned any suggestion, not even a hint, that there might be any sort of commonality among the people involved. Of course, if you kept track of the dead and those arrested or wanted for murder, you soon began to see a pattern.

Certainly the Ottawa police do, which is why the usual suspects are complaining that police are stopping more Black and Arab drivers than would be statistically proper, and our mayor is busily making the rounds of ethnic activists to assure them something will be done to ensure the police aren't racists.

The media see their role very paternalistically, like teachers ensuring their students don't see what they shouldn't see, or like parents who want their children to think the right things. They don't want people talking about all the ethnics involved in crime, and maybe wondering why that is and whether our immigration system is necessarily bringing in the right people. But now and then stuff gets out, even in the major media, either by mistake or by the design of someone bucking the trend. Like the recent posting of an Ottawa police wanted poster in the paper showing 22 out of 25 wanted people were non-white, most with obviously Muslim names. Or another article in the human interest section praising those working to fundraise for a Somali youth center and pointing out how strong the need is given more than half the youths in Ottawa's detention centre were Somalis. And of course, reading all those murder reports last year it was impossible not to notice how many Muslim names were involved.

But all the media will show us is smiling immigrants cheerily waving Canadian flags...