Earlier this year, protests were organized across Canada in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en land defenders fighting against the construction of the Coastal GasLink Pipeline through their unceded territory. These protests were met with an onslaught of demonization from a significant chunk of corporate Canadian media commentators.
I recently read through these articles published in the National Post, Globe and Mail, Toronto Sun and Toronto Star. I found that writers, and entire editorial boards, condemned the protests for a wide variety of reasons, but a few came up in almost every article on the topic: they ‘turned violent’; they were illegal; they inconvenienced people and impacted their ability to feed their families.