Recently, in response to SWC’s announcement of our intent to set up a chapter at McGill university, Selena Ross of CTV Montreal (CTV-M) published an article which grossly violated several basic principles of journalistic ethics, including provisions of the Quebec Press Council as well as CTV’s own ethics guide.
We contacted CTV-M to address the issues but the changes were never made. In response, we have filed a complaint with the Quebec Press Council.
Below, we will address Ross's misrepresentations and journalistic failures.
1. Ross intentionally misrepresented SWC
Ross suggested that SWC claimed to have applied for official club-status through the Student Society of McGill University (SSMU)—a claim we did not make. As CTV’s report states “the organization is applying for official status at McGill as a student group, but the student society that approves such requests said it hasn’t received one from him.” Another outlet followed suit, stating SWC “told CTV that [we] had submitted such an application”.
In a pre-publication email, we told Ross that we were “seeking official recognition from McGill’s student society” and that “we've received 11 new applicants, but they haven't gone through our admission process yet.” We did not claim to have filed for club status or to have submitted our application. After the article was posted, we contacted CTV requesting that they correct this misrepresentation, which they have neglected to do, or even respond to our concern.
Ross’s misrepresentation is highly damaging from a reputational standpoint as it implies SWC’s entire announcement is fabricated, an objective which Ross is clearly aiming to achieve, as is further demonstrated below.
2. Ross hid behind an unverifiable source to facilitate reputationally damaging claims against SWC
According to Ross, she located a trustworthy authority who suggested that SWC is, in fact, not a student group, nor any group at all, but not “much more than a single man in his 30s”. Ross attributes this claim to ‘some persons’, making the statement unverifiable to the reader. This use of an anonymous source to make a derisive claim is in direct violation of CTV’s own “Unnamed Sources Policy”, which states that its reporters “must guard against those who wish to use anonymity as a means to hide the truth, deride opponents or manipulate public opinion.”
3. Ross uncritically cited a biased, hostile source
Capping off Ross’s complete disregard for balance in her reporting, the article heavily relies on the statements of a patently hostile source: Daniel Lombroso of the US-based Atlantic magazine. Lombroso has no knowledge of SWC other than a brief meeting with our spokesman, George Hutcheson, in 2018, in a capacity that had nothing to do with our organization. That meeting was to do with a different journalism project of Lombroso’s for which he was later accused of blackmail and misrepresentation by his primary subject. Ross cited Lombroso uncritically, making no mention of the accusations made against him.
For a single journalist to have neglected her duties is a significant offence, but that CTV-M neglected to correct or address these transgressions after we had pointed them out shows that CTV-M is not a genuine news reporting outlet, but a partisan organization intent on manipulating the Canadian public. Its reporting and its treatment of SWC shows precisely the need for advocacy groups like ours to combat anti-white bias and to affirm European-Canadian identity.