Shameless: are we seeing Katie Telford's journalist friends organize a cleaner whisper campaign against Jody Wilson-Raybould?

There are so many aspects of Jody Wilson-Raybould's testimony to the Justice Committee that received a lot of media attention.

While the country took most of the testimony at face value, we noted that the testimony was revealing more about Canada's media culture than the big-money press was willing to admit.

As the testimony came out, Global News and the Toronto Star were quick to point out that they, and not the politicians, were in control of what they publish. But can we trust organizations who just recently received a $600 million Liberal bailout amid government efforts to censor the next election?

The testimony I am referring to is former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould's allegation that part of the effort to get her to play favourites with Liberal-connected construction giant SNC-Lavalin was the offer of favourable press. According to her, Justin Trudeau's chief of staff Katie Telford said that "if Jody is nervous [about giving into government attempts to obstruct justice], we would of course line up all kinds of people to write op eds saying that what she's doing is proper."

Never mind the fact that Katie Telford neither knew nor ever claimed to know what exactly what was "proper" to do. Another famous part of the testimony alleged that the PMO expressed its unwillingness to debate "legalities".

It has not even been a week since then. However, op-eds from the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and the Hill Times, published suspiciously close together in time, are once again sounding the anti-alarm that 'there's nothing to see here'.

Here are the articles

It is important to keep in mind that opinion pieces often do not reflect the official opinion of the news organization that publishes it. The suspicion here is not that these organizations themselves are colluding with government players, but that government players have the ability to coordinate narrative-building in the press through opinion pieces.

In the Toronto Star's "SNC-Lavalin controversy? Just put it to bed," Heather Mallick literally could not believe how big this story has become! How has this, of all stories, broken the Ottawa bubble?! She also claims that young people will not even notice the story because "they have bigger problems".

In the Globe and Mail's "Look away. There's no scandal here with SNC-Lavalin," Barbara Yaffe cannot even believe we are hung up on a scandal that does not even involve "pocketed envelopes" or "tainted food or blood products". There is also an unsurprising mention of the 9000 jobs that would have been lost, a claim that has recently come into doubt, as Liberals have repeatedly been unable to point to any evidence that those jobs would have even been lost. In fact, SNC-Lavalin had signed an agreement not to move its headquarters until 2025. According to her, Jody Wilson-Raybould was an ideological "purist", who would be at odds with "[t]axpayers of a more pragmatic bent".

In the Hill Times's "Wilson-Raybould doesn't trust the prime minister and the feeling is mutual," Sheila Copps take a similar tone with an interesting twist. Take a look for yourself. It is almost as though Katie Telford was trying to convince Justin Trudeau to kick Jody Wilson-Raybould out of caucus. Maybe Justin "is nervous" and so they "would of course line up all kinds of people to write op eds" saying that removing her from caucus is the right thing to do.

Of course, it is not unthinkable that that three people in a country of over thirty million would write similar opinion pieces within a similar span of time.

However, in light of the importance of the press in our society, it might also be a "pillar of our democracy" that our media institutions do their best to "be free from even the perception of political interference".