Zachary Thompson Reviews Cecil Rosner’s Manipulating the Message

Manipulating the Message: How Powerful Forces Shape the News. Cecil Rosner. Dundurn Press. $26.99 CDN, 280 pp., ISBN 9781459751255

Cecil Rosner is hitting the panic button as calmly as possible. His new book, Manipulating the Message: How Powerful Forces Shape the News, is a sober, at times downright polite, account of the sad current state of journalism. The book is built mostly out of concrete examples and plainly-stated case histories, rather than any impassioned rhetoric. Its moments of wit could most generously be described as ‘dry’, and although the book covers potentially-salacious topics such as conspiracy theories and federal espionage, these matters are discussed without flare or embellishment. In a decade where so much of our news is filtered through Netflix specials and viral social media, Manipulating the Message distinguishes itself by being, first and foremost very much, a book. Rosner presents facts: he is in search of the truth, and none of it is the least bit sexy. You wouldn’t want it any other way of course; your health and safety, to say nothing of the future sustainability of the planet, depends on Rosner’s message being heard as loudly and clearly as possible. 

Rosner is a veteran journalist of publications like the Winnipeg Free Press and CBC Manitoba, and was executive producer of the CBC’s high-profile investigative journalism program The Fifth Estate. He has spent a career breaking stories to the Canadian public, and is well qualified to scrutinize the information being put forth by his fellow journalists. Manipulating the Message is his book-length study of the findings of such scrutiny. Rosner suggests that we are in a very bad place indeed in terms of current standards of journalism, be it in Canada or abroad. Early on in the book, he points to a Statistics Canada poll from 2022 which shows that there are fewer than 12,000 actively employed reporters in Canada, while employees in the advertising, public relations, and communications industry number nearly 160,000. 

With statistics like that one in mind, it seems critical that Rosner should have solutions in mind, as well as clear notions as to the source of the problems. And so it is especially vital (and refreshing) that his observations of journalistic misconduct and media manipulation most frequently point the finger of blame at capitalism itself, rather than some more general notion of lax research or political bias. That is, his examples point to widespread corporate interference as a disaster engendered by both the Left and the Right, rather than casting such tampering as a partisan issue. 

The first few chapters in particular hit this point home very effectively. Rosner assembles example after example of corporations and corporate-interest lobbyists interfering with journalistic integrity, always at the expense of the general public’s best interests. He cites instances of fact-checking and research being replaced by simple glossing of corporate press releases put together by public relations firms. The financial strain on journalists and publishers trying to meet deadlines ensures that this sloppy approach to ‘research’ continues on unabated; the corporations issuing such manufactured PR for uncritical media redistribution see that their methods work, and the process repeats itself indefinitely. Rosner doesn’t just rely on the accounts of whistle blowers and inside-sources to debunk corporate claims; one of the early chapters’ most engaging anecdotes recounts how Rosner and his Winnipeg Free Press colleagues embarked upon their local Toyota dealerships posing as prospective buyers in order to verify the (what proved to be deceiving) claims of a new Toyota marketing strategy. Another lively example details Rosner sending a CBC Manitoba colleague to an IKEA media extravaganza, wherein it is revealed that IKEA is offering a 15% discount on merchandise to all attending journalists in order to ensure favourable press coverage.

While the book also targets ‘big name’ adversaries of the truth like Donald Trump and the CIA, Rosner’s most urgent and pointed take-downs are aimed at Canadian neoconservative organizations, like the reactionary propagandists of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) and the Fraser Institute. These and other neoconservative orgs are discussed in the third chapter, “Think Tanks or Spin Factories?”, which is devoted solely to manipulative think tanks, an especially timely target of criticism as Canadians approach the every-growing possibility of a Pierre Poilievre Prime Ministership. The succession of examples provided by Rosner in this section is absolutely incendiary. The Fraser Institute’s infamous proposal for an annual ‘Tax Freedom Day’ is exposed in 2005 to have also conveniently included royalty payments made by oil, gas, and mining companies when calculating the average taxpayer’s burden. The CTF is taken to task for its lack of transparency regarding its funding, as exemplified when its board of directors is found to include a board chair whose past roles include senior manager with the Phillip Morris International tobacco company and ministerial press secretary and communications director under various Stephen Harper-era federal departments – roles that are, to say the least, in conflict with the interests of average Canadian wage-earners whom the CTF claims to advocate for. 

Similarly unnerving is a later chapter in which Rosner recounts various scandals perpetrated by the previous Harper government, involving the silencing and outright denial of important scientific research findings. Again, the repressive neoconservative ambitions of Canada’s Progressive Conservative party may not offer as sensational an example of moral corruption as, say Roger Stone or Rudy Giuliani, but these chapters are all the more chilling and sobering for being so unsensationally real. As so-called ‘fiscal conservatism’ continues to be the slippery but ever-expanding wedge dividing Canada’s middle class’s interests from those of its corporate elite, Rosner presents a practical and accessible plea for progressive values in the face of conservative propaganda. By eliding specialized terminology or theory-heavy analyses, Rosner has perhaps succeeded in filling some gaps left by much academic writing on these subjects, by exemplifying where the journalist can persuade when an academic may exhaust. It’s a notable accomplishment not just of the kind of journalism Rosner advocates for, but of working class political praxis in action.   

Much of the praise I would heap on this book (that it at times feels like a catalogue of misdeeds without much critical analysis; that at times its refusal to be condescending results in its being overly earnest; that its message is so desperately needed when it should be common sense) sound like criticisms, which speaks to Rosner’s real achievement: that his book is effective, and accurate, and disciplined – but not fun. In fact, at times it is absolutely deadening. Rosner admits himself that it “would be easy to get despondent” about the situation he has described. But this, I think, is the desired result, and the required result, of Manipulating the Message. While taking to the streets to protest deceptive journalism will always be the frontline of defence for those seeking to protect the truth, after the marches and the rallies are over, someone is going to have to sit down at a keyboard and write the honest report of the day’s events. That, I believe, is the elevated position of responsibility in our society which Manipulating the Message reserves for journalism. 

That said, there is also a final, eerie aspect of Manipulating the Message, one it shares with Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, another book from the latter half 2023 also by a veteran Canadian writer, and which is also preoccupied with notions of truth, manipulation, and misrepresentation. Both Klein’s book and Rosner’s end with acknowledgements of Israel’s history of human rights violations against the Palestinians, Klein in the form of an entire chapter devoted to the subject, Rosner in a passing example concerning media coverage of a 2021 bombing of residential buildings in Gaza. Having read both books after the events of October 7, 2023 and its bloody, unending aftermath, it seems impossible to not conceive of both books as having their own double, their own menacing doppelganger: one version published and reviewed in mid-2023, and the other that will be read, interpreted, and analyzed in the wake of October 7th and the brutality that followed. 

As a conflict that has historically, hopelessly divided Canadian and global popular opinion like no other, the heightened scrutiny of mainstream media editorializing, along with a newfound appreciation for  social media’s ability to broadcast on-the-ground reports from reporters in Gaza, has exposed holes in even some of Rosner’s more robust safeguards against manipulation. We are seeing voices on social media being routinely dismissed as ‘uninformed’ or ‘radical’, while even independent journalists seeking to offer a more balanced view of the war are finding themselves receiving hostile reactions from a once-welcoming platform. As I write this, the Wall Street Journal has just published a headline referring to Dearborn, Michigan as “America’s jihad capital” and the New York Times’ mainstay political analyst Thomas Friedman has (on the same day as the WSJ piece) published an op-ed comparing the Middle East to ‘the Animal Kingdom’ and Arabs to various forms of insects. 

Perhaps the most important lesson of Rosner’s book in the wake of October 7th and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza is that the weight of reporting responsibly extends beyond journalists themselves. In an era where we are just as likely to be fed misinformation in the New York Times as we are on TikTok, Manipulating the Message reinforces that the same values we expect of the press should be the values we exemplify ourselves; critical thinking, a healthy distrust of power, moral integrity, and a willingness to listen to – speak up for – those whose voices have been repressed.

Zachary Thompson (he/him) is a writer living in Hamilton, Ontario. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature from York University, as well as a Certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. He has read from his fiction at the Lit Live Reading Series in Hamilton, and recently participated in a presentation at the 2021 Conference of the Comics Studies Society.