Big Fossil Fuel has immense influence seemingly everywhere — and a disproportionately large quantity here in Canada. Most of the mainstream media are formally bedded with industry interests.

Notably, Postmedia — which, among many other publications, owns both of Canada’s two national newspapers, The National Post and The Globe and Mail — is on record allying itself with not only the planet’s second most polluting forms of carbon-based “energy” but also THE MOST polluting/dirtiest crude oil, bitumen.

During a presentation, it was stated: “Postmedia and [Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers] will bring energy to the forefront of our national conversation. Together, we will engage executives, the business community and the Canadian public to underscore the ways in which the energy sector powers Canada.”

Also, a few years ago, Postmedia had acquired a lobbying firm with close ties to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney in order to participate in his government’s $30 million PR “war room” in promoting the industry’s interests.

And in May of 2021, the newspaper giant refused to run paid ads by Leadnow, a social and environmental justice organization, that exposed the Royal Bank of Canada as the largest financer of the nation’s fossil fuel extraction. …

Still, other concerned people would’ve worded it more intensely than I:

“I would argue that what little ethical and moral foundation the country has is deeply threatened by the crumbling discipline of a fossil-fuel-based economy and the politics it spawns. Nothing requires government supervision in so many areas (and nothing has anything like the influence on government) as this industry.

“It follows that no other industry remotely requires the amount and kind of honest, wary media surveillance this one does,” Rafe Mair aptly wrote in his book Politically Incorrect: How Canada Lost Its Way and the Simple Path Home [published in October 2017, the same month he died].

Within, he forensically dissects democracy’s decline in Canada and suggests how it may be helped. Mr. Mair may also be remembered as a B.C. MLA, journalist and talk-show host.

“What has the media, especially but hardly exclusively the print media, done in response to this immense challenge? It’s joined fortunes with the petroleum industry. And a very large part of it has done so in print and in public.

“The facts are that the rest of the media have not raised a peep of protest at this unholiest of alliances and that governments contentedly and smugly pretend all that favourable coverage they get proves their efficiency — not that the fix is in and they’re part of that fix. Let me just comment that the difference from 1972 to 2017 in the media’s dealing with governments and politics takes the breath away!”

Some people may feel that a self-compromised news media is better than no news media at all, but I do not.

Meanwhile, there are reporters/journalists and editors who still speciously reply to accusations of subjective journalism with ‘I’m just the messenger’, or that they are but a reflection of the community in which they circulate. They’re not.