October 1st, 2025 | Steven Parker

Five Years Later, It's All Different

Most of us have changed.

Once upon a time, I used to believe that the nightly news did the job it was meant to do, which was to tell us what happened, occasionally ask awkward questions of the powerful, and if we were lucky—let us make up our own minds. Five years ago that faith was pedestrian and courtesy-based. Now it's the kind of faith you reserve for fairy tales and dodgy gym memberships. The pandemic was the turning point. I watched, mouth half-open, as entire debates that used to live in journals, lecture halls and boardrooms were flattened into a handful of permitted headlines. Dissenting scientists and clinicians who questioned lockstep policy, or who advocated alternate treatments, or different public-health trade-offs, found their work and sometimes their reputations casually scrubbed from social platforms and search results. That wasn’t merely a handful of errors, it was a structural massaging of public reality.

You’ll forgive me if I sound petulant. It’s one thing for tabloids to chase clicks, but it’s another for a handful of megaplatforms and gatekeeping institutions to decide that whole clusters of professional opinion are “misinformation” and therefore unpublishable. The Twitter Files and other leaks exposed how content moderation decisions were made with some political and editorial whim—not always transparent scientific rigor—pushed up the stack. When private platforms and official-sounding public-health pronouncements converge, you don’t get debate; you get a single-lane motorway.

And a democracy needs two lanes.

Injecting Bleach

If you want a case study in how a line can morph into a national myth, look no further than that whole “he told people to inject bleach” story. The claim was hurled and cheered in headline after headline and then repeated and moralized. Yet careful fact-checking shows the reality was messier and less theatrical than the meme. Trump’s chaotic remarks about disinfectants were wrongly condensed into the simplified boast of a literal instruction to inject bleach. Some honest fact-checkers walked reporters back from the cliff and reminded the public that nuance existed; but nuance doesn’t trend. The damage was done and once the caricature circulated, it became shorthand for everything that might be called presidential malfeasance, whether accurate or not.

Why does this matter? Because it reveals the media's appetite for theatrical simplicity over precise truth. When the convenient version of a story travels faster than the careful version, the public square degrades into a theatre of outrage. I began to notice that the outlets I once treated as watchdogs were often keener on catharsis than on exactitude—and catharsis makes for lousy civic infrastructure.

The latest Tylenol fiasco shows they have learned nothing.

Justice As Persecution

I’ve always been a fan of law and order. That doesn’t mean I support law used as a cudgel. Over the last few years, I’ve watched the justice system used, in the eyes of many critics, as a political instrument. Whether you think the prosecutions of high-profile political figures were warranted or not, the sheer scale and theatricality of charges, raids, and indictments—often aired to breathless coverage—gave the impression that the courthouse had become an extension of cable-news judgment. Multiple indictments of a former U.S. president and high-profile prosecutions triggered questions about motive, timing and norms; commentators on all sides worried about selective enforcement and the erosion of procedural guardrails. To be clear: charging people is not the same as conviction; but the optics and the rapid politicization risk turning justice into vengeance rather than a neutral arbiter.

If you believe in an independent judiciary, then you should also worry when the line between accountability and persecution grows faint. I found myself worrying not only for the targets—whether you like them or not—but for the idea of impartial law. When legal proceedings double as a political spectacle, the rule of law becomes a crowd-pleasing narrative instead of a set of rules we all agree to obey.

Frozen accounts and broken promises

Canada’s trucker convoy in 2022 is another moment I keep coming back to when I think of how my views have changed. I didn’t have to agree with every honk to be alarmed by the invocation of the Emergencies Act, banks freezing accounts linked to fundraising for protesters, and platforms closing the faucets of online support.

It wasn't so much the actions of the Trudeau government as it was the complicity of ordinary Canadians and those who cheered on the Liberal government.

Whether you call the convoy a threat to public order or an organic eruption of anger is almost beside the point. The government’s response—extraordinary powers, financial censorship—set a precedent with chilling implications. People’s bank accounts were frozen; crowdfunding pages disappeared; and thousands who had never imagined themselves political suddenly felt the pressure of a system that could sever them from their means. Reuters and coverage at the time documented frozen accounts and the Emergencies Act measures in real time.

There’s a strain of civic culture that assumes the state will step in and correct wrongs, and in emergencies it must. But when the machinery used to do so is opaque and heavy-handed—when money and speech are curtailed without the usual garden-variety transparency—you breed suspicion. And suspicion spreads faster than any press release.

How Canadians still voted Liberal

Finally, the strangest jolt. So many Canadians took Mark Carney at his word. Here’s a man with a golden résumé—the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, UN climate envoy—who stepped into politics and, by the spring of 2025, led the Liberals back into office. Whether you admire him as a crisis-tested technocrat or view him as the epitome of the global finance class, his ascent exposed something about trust and the perceived legitimacy of elites. For a swath of voters, Carney’s credentials meant competency, calm and a steady hand; for others, they telegraphed an elite steering a distant ship. The media’s coverage of his entry and victory leaned into the narrative of the pragmatic saviour—yet those same outlets had spent years flattening alternative narratives about economic policy and public sovereignty.

I’m not immune to the appeal of technocrats; crises sometimes require steady hands. But when a nation chooses a former central banker who has spent a career telling us how markets and global governance should hum, it’s worth asking: did voters swallow a package of comforting authority because the other options were painted as apocalyptic? Or did that same media ecosystem, which previously narrowed debate around pandemic science and political “misinformation,” shepherd voters toward the most reassuring image it had left—an expert in a suit with a press-ready plan? The answer, I suspect, is both.

Now What?

I’ve become suspicious in a gentle bloke sort of way—not a conspiratorial man-hating-the-news kind of way, but a patient, irritated skeptic. I want my media to be wrong sometimes, loudly; I want experts to be contradicted and to have their cases tested in public; and I want the justice system treated like a neutral umpire, not a partisan scoreboard. That’s the conservative in me that wants to keep institutions robust, predictable, and constrained. But I have also grown less tolerant of the elitist, managerial style that assumes expertise is identical with unimpeachable authority. There is a difference between trusting expertise and surrendering all debate to experts who operate behind a velvet curtain.

If you ask for one practical thing—beyond the usual “read widely” platitude—it is this: re-learn curiosity. Read the meticulous fact-checks from all sides as often as you read fulminating headlines. Demand transparency from platforms and governments when they act in secrecy. Remind yourself that nuance is not cowardice. And if you’re worried this sounds like hedging... well, good. Democracy is healthier with a few hedges.

I lost faith in the news because it stopped being a mirror and started being a projector. That’s a fixable problem, if we truly want to fix it. It begins with insisting on honesty over theatrics, process over catharsis, and debate instead of bans. If that makes me an awkward, grumbling conservative Englishman in a Canadian cardigan, so be it. At least I’ll be grumbling with my brain intact.