Please Advise! Have National Post Editors Gone Too Far?

[Editor’s note: Steve Burgess is an accredited spin doctor with a PhD in Centrifugal Rhetoric from the University of SASE, situated on the lovely campus of PO Box 7650, Cayman Islands. In this space he dispenses PR advice to politicians, the rich and famous, the troubled and well-heeled, the wealthy and gullible.]

Dear Dr. Steve,

An analysis by two organizations, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East and the Media Bias Project of Tech for Palestine, has found that the National Post newspaper regularly rewrites Canadian Press news stories about Israel and Gaza, inserting different language while still identifying the stories as originating with CP. Among other changes, references to Palestinian “militants” or “fighters” were regularly replaced with “terrorists,” the phrase “pro-Palestinian” changed to “anti-Israel.”

Is this kosher, Dr. Steve?

Signed,

Subscriber

Dear Sub,

These are difficult times for journalists and other writers. The increasing encroachment of AI, via apps like ChatGPT, have left many with a frightening vision of a future in which human-generated content will be replaced by algorithmic pablum. Dr. Steve is heartened to see that the profession is fighting back. The National Post is a key example.

Many have pointed out that AI has a nasty habit of getting things wrong. Janel Comeau, writer for the satirical paper the Beaverton, recently reported that both Google and Meta have said Cape Breton's time zone is 12 minutes ahead of mainland Nova Scotia's, a fun fact based on her 2024 Beaverton article.

More pertinently there was Elon Musk's Grok chatbot, which recently began answering almost every query by citing “white genocide” in South Africa. Looking for a refreshing sangria recipe? Try two parts red wine, one part orange juice and three parts white genocide for a refreshing apartheid, er, aperitif. In response to one user's clever query, Grok fessed up that the whole “white genocide” obsession was simply a matter of following orders, like an interior decorator instructed that the living room motif should be taxidermy, zebra-skin chairs and vintage lawn jockeys.

This sort of hidden machine-generated agenda is frightening. That's where the Post comes in. They are proving you don't need algorithms to screw around with news copy. Boldly reasserting the human element, the Post has been taking in source material and making alterations just like AI does, but with no artificial help at all.

One CP story about Gaza written by Mia Rabson said, “Some other Liberal MPs have said a ceasefire is complicated.” In the National Post version, the sentence goes on: “a ceasefire is complicated because Hamas is a designated terrorist organization according to the Canadian government.”

The story is still credited to Rabson. Awkward. A writer might well be surprised to read just what they've supposedly written. F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in April 1925, with its famous final line “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The Post version might be: “And so we beat on, boats against the current of the previous administration's misguided policies, now being rectified by the wise leadership of President Calvin Coolidge.” (No need to mention it to Scotty. The poor devil is usually soused by noon anyway.)

The Post is in the forefront of those who are asserting that technology need not take the place of old-fashioned human bias, and even sycophancy. Politico is doing their part too. As Donald Trump declared war on the likes of Shohei Ohtani, Javier Bardem and other vicious West Coast aliens, publicly claiming California Gov. Gavin Newsom should be jailed for the crime of “running for governor,” Politico published this: “Trump is leveraging his role as commander-in-chief in a much clearer and more urgent way than he did during his first term — embodying the image of a strong military commander that he has long admired in other foreign leaders, allies and adversaries alike.”

See? There's no need to bow down to our new robot overlords. You can bow down to tyrants and genocidal fanatics with no computer assistance whatsoever. Why should our profession surrender to artificial intelligence? We can bend the knee just fine, all by ourselves.