Liberals don't actually care about good journalism — or at least not enough to oppose bad journalism when it helps them

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CTV News made a seemingly necessary decision Thursday afternoon in the aftermath of one of the craziest Canadian network-journalism fiascos in recent memory: After an internal investigation, it says it discovered two video editors were involved in “altering a video clip” — which is to say doctoring, truncating and taking entirely out of context a quote from federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre about an urgent need to bring down the government.

CTV announced Thursday that it has now parted ways with those editors.

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The issue, in brief: In a Sept. 18 scrum with reporters in Ottawa, Poilievre said a non-confidence motion in the House of Commons was necessary to trigger a “carbon tax election.” CTV repurposed the quote entirely to have Poilievre argue an election is needed to prevent adults from becoming eligible for the federal dental-care program on Jan. 1. That topic hadn’t even come up in the scrum.

Assuming these video editors were indeed responsible, CTV is well rid of them. But the damage is done. Poilievre hasn’t reversed his ban on Conservative MPs speaking with CTV News, which he imposed earlier in the week.

And the pink slips look a lot less impressive considering the network’s initial response to the scandal made no mention of any forthcoming investigation: “A misunderstanding during the editing process resulted in this misrepresentation,” CTV’s original statement read. Not only was that woefully insufficient, it’s not clear now whether it was even true.

So as is so common in Canadian politics, we have arrived at a sort of worst-of-all-worlds situation. The Conservatives have perhaps their most compelling single data point to........

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