Dissecting the Biased Media Coverage of "Book Bans" in Canada
YouTuber Paul Chato takes apart the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's highly biased reporting into the debate over "book banning" in Canada.
On Friday, February 7th, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation published an “expose” on the battle over sexually frank children’s books in Canada. Entitled, “A Shadow War on Libraries,” the article used community conflict over the public library in Valleyview Alberta to claim that parents concerned about such books were under a “web of influence [from] the United States, where an anti-2SLGBTQ+ campaign evolved from right-wing campaign rhetoric to laws that threaten libraries in Republican states.” The printed version of the investigation was paired with a Fifth Estate television report.
However, the always astute (and humorous) Canadian YouTuber Paul Chato—aka the “Former Network Executive”—wasn’t impressed with the report. In his own expose, he goes through the production scene-by-scene to highlight the rhetorical sleights-of-hand and gaps in the story—most notably that the allegedly inappropriate contents of the challenged books in question were never actually discussed or shown. Chato’s video is a brilliant piece of media literacy and analysis, illustrating the role major media play in misrepresenting this debate, and—as a consequence—doing little to lower the temperature on the community conflicts facing public and school libraries.
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Not to mention how eager activists in the YA book world were/are to prevent “problematic” books from being published. They’re more sinister about it than prudish church ladies; many of those books don’t make it past sensitivity readers, and if they do, an author’s career can be ruined if the mob is displeased.