Mass Exodus Underway at Canadaland?

Karyn Pugliese(Pabàmàdiz) is a great editor. She was hired to edit Canadaland after doing a prestigious Niemen Fellowship at Harvard, after a very tough competition.

Before that, she was senior editor at the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) and a contract worker on some of the CBC’s better radio shows, eventually leading two of its investigative shows. Pugliese is a member of the Pikwakanagan First Nation, based on Golden Lake between Ottawa and Algonquin Park, which is one of the Indigenous communities in the unceded Ottawa Valley.

Pugliese edited the National Observer, a prestigious online publication. In 2021, she won a National Newspaper Award for her columns.

In short, she was a good catch, yet she lasted less than 18 months as editor of Canadaland.

Every writer and journalist needs an editor. Lord knows, I’ve printed things here that I’ve regretted, and I know people have fun finding the typos in my pieces. I have great editors for my books and have worked with some of the best magazine and newspaper editors in the country and I thank them for making my work better.

A good journalist with a reasonable ego will be grateful for an editor that catches their mistakes and curbs some of their impulses.

Right now, journalism is in a lot of trouble. There’s the big picture, the death of news outlets caused by Internet competition, over-leveraging and generations of poor management. And there’s the small picture, the battles within diverse newsrooms over issues like Israel-Palestine that make news organisations tough places to work.

Despite what so many bad-faith critics might say, people on both sides of Israel-Palestine come to their opinions honestly.

Trauma from conflict is real. Not just PTSD, but psychic damage that lasts through generations. My own family was in North America during the world wars. My paternal grandfather lost three of his first cousins in World War I but he and his brothers were too young to go.  Their father died doing war work in Canada (his construction company kept an important highway open), leaving his sons without a father, and so with no one to show them how to be a good dad.

My maternal grandfather was born in 1901, too young for World War I, too old for World War II. But four of his wife’s brothers fought in the Pacific, three in the U.S. Navy (a sailor, a Marine and a Seabee) and one in the army, fighting in New Guinea under McArthur. All four were united for a short time on Guadalcanal, probably for propaganda.

I’m sure that was hell for my great-grandparents, though all the boys came back. My uncle Walter, the Marine, eventually died of malaria. All these men had tough lives after the war.

But that was nothing compared to what happened to my wife’s family. Her father, a child living with his Dutch father and aristocratic German mother, was in Hamburg during the fire raid. They left Germany and settled in Oosterbeek, Holland, which was at the centre of the fighting in the  Operation Market Garden (A Bridge Too Far) campaign of September, 1944. At the same time, my wife’s mother’s family moved from Rotterdam after it was bombed in May, 1940  to her grandfather’s home town, Putten, a village in Gelderland.

Putten is not known in Canada, but it’s a symbol in the Netherlands for Nazi atrocities. A few weeks after Market Garden failed, Dutch resistance fighters killed some Nazi soldiers. In retaliation, the men of the town, including my wife’s grandfather, were seized and sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp. He starved to death in February, 1945, just weeks before the camp was liberated and the commandant was hanged. Letters from him to his little daughters were read at my mother-in-law’s funeral in September.

German authorities, returning personal affects seized by the British when they liberated Neunegamme in May, 1945, sent Hugo van Holten’s empty wallet to my brother-in-law last year. The whole family sadly and solemnly passed it around when we met at Christmas. I see the trauma in my wife’s generation and there’s a hint of it in the generation that follows.

So when I look at Canadaland, with an owner, Jesse Brown, who believes Jews in Canada are seriously under threat, and some staff who are Muslims who believe Gaza is targeted for genocide, I understand some of what’s happening.

I would be very surprised if Brown’s extended family was not touched by the Holocaust, which was real and was formative to the world view of Jews. As is the expulsion of millions of Jews from Muslim nations, with those Jews making up half the population of Israel, and carry trauma of their own.

At the same time, Palestinians have lost so much. They’ve been displaced from their lands, sometimes after fleeing in 1949 from areas settled by Israelis – who were carrying their own Holocaust trauma. Some fled out of fear, sometimes they were conned to flee by Arab propagandists who went on to use their plight as a cudgel against Israel. They were never allowed back.

Civilians on both sides have been pounded with bombs and artillery. So, whatever your take on who’s right or wrong, please accept the idea that everyone in the region his directly or indirectly either suffered direct loss or been under generations of threat and insecurity.

Until war and the trauma is dealt with, there will be no peace. Right now, all sides seek victory. As in World War I, victory is unattainable. Military defeat of Hamas and Hezbollah will simply delay the fighting for one or two decades. Real peace means abandoning war and seeking meetings of the mind with the real intention of finding ways to co-exists, whether apart or intermingled.  Otherwise, the cycle of violence will never stop.

I know this is windy, and it seems to stray from media criticism, but it doesn’t. The trauma is in the newsrooms of the Toronto Star, the CBC, and Canadaland and it affects their coverage at a time when we badly need journalism.

That’s why it was odd that Jesse Brown let go of the brake on his editorial decision-making and decided to personally interview Iddo Moed, Israel’s ambassador to Canada, on the anniversary on the October 7 Hamas attacks along the border of the Gaza Strip. Brown must have known the decision to assign himself to the interview was controversial. He’s been bleeding support from his left-wing listeners for months, and some of his (surviving) staff were so incensed that they wrote a rebuttal that Brown had the good grace to publish.    

On the October 11 Shortcuts program, guest Jen Gerson asks Brown about the staff response. “What criticism?”, he says with a laugh.  “No, it was very predictable that people who have already reached the conclusion that I think is an unfounded conclusion because I have never taken a position in support of the Israeli government and the Israeli war, but people who think at that because I have been talking about antisemitism so I must be radically pro-Netanyahu…”

Gerson interjects,  “You’re telling on yourselves. I just want to point that out.”

Brown: “Nothing dissuades them if they’ve come to that conclusion. If you watch the interview… Look, I’ve watched every interview Isreal’s ambassador Iddo Moen has done with Canadian media. We gave him the most challenging interview.  We gave him the most challenging interview that anyone has given him. So I think the work stands for itself.” At the same time, he said opponents of Israel’s military actions would not have got the interview, and that he asked important questions relating to Israeli policy and Jews in Canada.  

Gerson asked, “So my question is, ‘why you’?  You’ve got a staff at Canadaland. You’ve got a (garbled word) staff. There are other interviews [sic] you could have sent. Why did it have to be you?”

Brown answered, “Well, when I think that so much of what I had to ask had to do with Israel’s relations with the Jewish community, in the same way that you want a newsroom that has people that has positionality, you want a newsroom where people know the topic well and have a personal connection with it [my emphasis], it cuts both ways because some people say I shouldn’t have done it, I shouldn’t have done it. And I reject outright the idea that I have a conflict of interest, by being a Jew, I have a conflict of interest.

“I would have a conflict of interest if I had taken a position, which people have been pressuring me to do since the start. But if I had taken a position, I wouldn’t have gotten the interview. This is why we retain our neutrality. We might have opinions. If you were to say ‘Pierre Poilievre should win and the other guy should lose,’ you’re not getting an interview with Trudeau. You’re not a journalist anymore. You’re a political opponent.”

Later, he said, “I am running the newsroom and I intend very much to keep covering racism in Canada against any group that’s facing it.”

That’s why the loss of Pugliese is so important. Canadaland got sued over two stories that Brown wrongly thought were scoops. One lawsuit, over a fantasy and conspiracy theory series about a group of Albertans, was settled. The other, the brutal libelling and mistreatment of Theresa Kielburger, has passed one big hurdle and is headed to court. I suspect Pugliese would have killed both the WE Charity series and the one about the Albertans (which I would prefer not to describe).

But Pugliese’s departure isn’t a one-off. Canadaland is not a good place to work, judging from what ex-employees have said about it, and the decision of remaining employees to unionize.

Four other Canadaland employees (Kevin O'Keefe, Mattea Roach, Leora Schertzer and Kim Wheeler) disappeared from the Canadaland masthead at about the same time. Jonathan Goldsbie has a one-year university fellowship and I’m told he’s not going back.

Roach got a CBC show that focusses on writers, which was a move up from covering politics for Canadaland. In that job, she was at best a personable, well-informed amateur.

Canadaland lost a pro a few weeks earlier when Justin Ling – a somewhat prickly but very capable freelancer who I worked with during my last years on Parliament Hill -- announced he had ended his recurring hosting gig at Canadaland because of decisions  Brown made about a  Canadaland podcast hosted by Ling in September.

Ling wrote about the incident on his Substack. I’m posting the entire text to show the full context, which demonstrates how bad this looks for Brown. (The emphasis in bold text is mine.) Notice Ling’s parenthetical comment about Karyn Pugliese being “on leave” when the incident occurred.

“On Canadaland’s Short Cuts today, on which I was filling-in as host alongside my guest Paris Marx, we had a fascinating chat about the enshittification potential of generative AI, as well as Russians At War, which I highly recommend. We also talked about the war in Gaza.

Unfortunately, the show was edited over my objections and I feel the need to highlight it. Yesterday evening — after the show had passed a fact check — publisher Jesse Brown decided to impose some unusual and fairly sweeping cuts to our conversation about weapon sales to Israel. I objected to these cuts and Jesse relented on some. But he insisted on two cuts to Marx’s comments: One, which noted how Western weapon sales are offensive as Israel ‘continues to bomb Gaza and kill so many people’; two, that Israel is engaging ‘in what many people are claiming is a genocide against the people of Gaza.’

“Jesse claimed the comments were too vague. I think that is obviously untrue. Jesse’s decision to remove them, particularly over my objections, is an editorial over-step and, I think, made because he simply disagrees with the allegations. Cutting the phrases robbed Paris’ comments of their intention, which is a significant editorial mistake. The line was re-recorded and added back in after the episode was posted, but the damage is done.

“I absolutely despise the deluge of hate, often veering into antisemitism, that Jesse gets. But I also don’t believe Canadaland is a free and neutral place to discuss this issue in particular, given that Jesse — as publisher and owner — frequently imposes his editorial line on others’ work. (A little addendum: Karyn Pugliese, the Editor-in-Chief, was on leave when this all went down.)

“My position on the war and the allegation of genocide is, at this point, fairly clear. (Dispatches #74, #76, #77, #78, #82, #101, #109) But as I wrote recently, we are making this debate more difficult and vitriolic by aggressively policing each other’s speech, and I think that’s what’s happening here. I certainly respect Jesse’s position on the conflict, and the deleterious knock-on effects here in North America, but I don’t respect his willingness to let his personal beliefs cloud his editorial judgement.

So, in keeping with my relatively long tradition of quitting gigs on matters of principle, I’ll be ending my recurring hosting gig at Canadaland.”

This is the killer line: “I don’t respect his (Brown’s) willingness to let his personal beliefs cloud his editorial judgement.”

Again, that’s why he needs oversight and pushback. He is a “personality,” not a journalist. He’s not good at boundaries and doesn’t have the self-doubt needed to prevent himself from obsessing on issues and making the horrendous mistakes that I have documented to often on this site.

It’s been a brutal year for Brown, as I wrote about in July after Brown was admonished by a Ontario Superior Court Judge in May while trying to get the Theresa Kielburger lawsuit thrown out of court. Not only was Brown’s motion to dismission the suit declined, he was also ordered to pay Mrs. Kielburger’s legal costs on the motion.  And the judge’s words were scathing.

Then came this mutiny by Canadaland staff, some of whom have quit, against Brown’s position on the Gaza war and what they see as pro-Israeli bias. Earlier, his own employees posted a statement on Twitter/X.

Once again, Brown was accused of publishing a series of “misleading and targeted statements”, “irresponsible” tactics, and selective application of editorial standards. Sound familiar.

This is what the Globe and Mail’s (then)-media critic Simon Houpt wrote in 2015:

“It's hard to pin down Brown's primary allegiance, because he has a track record of playing fast and loose with facts. Some years ago, while developing his show The Contrarians for CBC Radio, he faked a scene for the pilot. When producers discovered what had happened, they hit the roof and killed the episode. It never aired. This week, he told me the experience was "surreal," that he had simply "re-created" a scene, and in any case it was for a humorous bit rather than a piece of documentary journalism. (That is not how staff there remember the incident.)”

According to Ling’s post, Brown did basically the same thing to him by cutting material from the episode. When Ling objected, Brown relented somewhat and “…the line was re-recorded and added back in after the episode was posted, but the damage is done.”

I have reached out to Brown for comment on all of this and will report back if he responds.

So why 2500 words on one podcaster?

Because private media in Canada is dead. Not on life support, stone dead. If things get covered in our cities and towns, it’s by chance. Now that I am out of mainstream journalism, except for the odd op-ed and magazine piece and am practicing law, hanging with people who aren’t in media, I see how there’s an awful lot of miss, and not much hit.

When Canadaland calls itself the best newspaper in Canada, I shudder. When it does news, it’s either late to the story (Thunder Bay) or wrong (WE Charity). We need better. There is a direct correlation between voter turnout and the health of local media. There’s also strong evidence of cause-and-effect between the health of professional media and the level of disinformation belief in a community.

We need better, and what’s happened here is another setback.

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