The elite media can spin the news all they want, but citizens have found new ways to consume information directly — through social media, alternative news sites and direct news feeds.
We no longer need to have our news filtered through the Ottawa group-think bubble.
In the case of Omar Khadr, despite having the usual chorus of media cheerleaders defending Trudeau’s deal, Canadians made up their own minds.
Editorials, columns and even some news stories in major Canadian media outlets overwhelmingly told us Trudeau was right to award Khadr millions of dollars.
Some media stated as fact that Khadr was a child soldier — (Khadr was 15 at the time, while the Geneva Convention refers to children under 15) — and that he was tortured. (A military judge found he was not.)
Some reports began slipping the word “allegedly” before stating that Khadr killed Sgt. Christopher Speer, ignoring that Khadr signed a confession.
They simply accepted as factual Khadr’s later retraction, saying he only did it to get out of Guantanmo.
This is the type of spin Canadians have become used to, and fortunately, can see through.
According to J.D. Gordon, a retired U.S. Navy Commander who escorted media attending Khadr’s military commission hearings at Guantanamo, the Canadian journalists were “hopelessly naïve to the threat posed to Western Society by jihadist networks.”
Gordon worked closely with “a dozen or so Canadian journalists,” and told the Sun it often felt, “as if some were writing for student newspapers on left-wing college campuses.”
Many elites in the media, as well as academia, the courts and the Liberal government may hold deeply anti-American views.
They may prefer to sympathize with terrorists and traitors over our neighbour and closest ally, who helps keep us safe.
But most Canadians see things differently.
Most Canadians side with the real victims, the Speer family and former Sgt. Layne Morris, who was blinded in one eye, not the manufactured martyr, Omar Khadr.
That’s Canadian common sense, and it’s the Trudeau government’s worst nightmare.