Dave Obee is editor and publisher of the Times Colonist.
As I write this, the sidewalk in front of the Times Colonist building is the scene of a protest, or perhaps street theatre. Some people are here to complain about this newspaper and others are here to defend it.
We appreciate our supporters, who came to our building knowing they would face certain harassment. Thanks.
The complainers — the ones who called the protest — have a grab bag of issues with us, but they did not do their homework. Honest research would have saved them a lot of bother.
The protest is led by Extinction Rebellion Vancouver Island, a group that wants more action, fast, to deal with climate change. The group has a valid concern, although its goals are, in my opinion, unrealistic, and would lead to suffering and starvation worldwide. But that’s a topic for another day.
We have published op-eds by members of this group. We have covered some of their protests. We, and other media outlets, have believed they were credible.
Yet they come to our building in an attempt to disrupt our work and cast us in a negative light, using misinformation and outright lies. For example:
They are upset because we outsourced our printing. That move saved the jobs of many journalists, and gave the newspaper a brighter future.
They are upset because we have “conflicts of interest” due to our parent company, Glacier Media, having oil and gas publications as well. To be clear, the brass at Glacier Media have never tried to exercise any editorial control over this newspaper. Decisions about what we cover are made in Victoria, not in Vancouver or Calgary or Fantasyland.
They are upset because we ran an op-ed by Maxime Bernier, the leader of the People’s Party of Canada. We asked the leaders of five parties to give their views on climate change, and Bernier was a party leader. All leaders deserve equal play; no responsible journalist would accept anything less.
They are upset with us because the major media outlets, or so they say, failed to report about major problems over the past century. How those unsubstantiated allegations prompted people to picket this week is beyond me.
One of their examples is the Holocaust, “which major media knew about but did little to report,” according to the news release announcing the Wednesday protest.
All of the Second World War decision-makers at the Victoria Daily Times and the Daily Colonist are long dead, so we can’t ask them what they knew. We can, however, dive into the microfilm, where we find a 1942 story in the Times saying two million Jews had already been murdered, and one from June 1943 that said the Nazis were using steam to kill 500 Jews at a time.
The latter story identified, accurately, the location of three death camps: Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. The media were not hiding that information. It took me less than five minutes to prove the protesters wrong.
A much bigger concern: It is reprehensible that modern-day climate protesters would use the Holocaust to try to validate their actions.
Finally, a reality check. We publish more stories, columns and letters on climate change than any other Canadian daily newspaper. So far this year, we have published about 900 items, 40 per cent more than you would find in larger newspapers such as the Vancouver Sun or the Ottawa Citizen.
We publish regular columns from writers calling for immediate action, people such as David Suzuki and Dr. Trevor Hancock. We published an op-ed from Elizabeth May, on behalf of the Green Party, as part of the series from party leaders.
But facts do not fit the agenda of the people outside our building, so they ignore them, and spew lies and hatred instead.
The Times Colonist is not perfect. We make bad decisions from time to time. I wish we could cover more local stories than we do.
We welcome feedback from readers who are not happy with us, but when a protest is based on falsehoods, assumptions and allegations, that’s another matter entirely.
Do Times Colonist journalists believe we need climate action? Of course we do — but we also believe in facts and truth, in balance and fairness and context. These attributes could not be used to describe Extinction Rebellion. We have already given them too much ink.
