Leftist journalism is necessary. While there’s no shortage of high quality centrist journalists, leftist perspectives can enrich journalistic work, especially where centrist media have erred.
Is there such a thing as neutral?
Choosing is renouncing. Every time a paper decides to cover an issue, a protest, some politician’s comment, one scandal rather than another, it renounces the opportunity to cover another story. What they choose to cover reveals the editorial line and especially, policy of a paper, even more so than its columnists and editorialists.
Which brings me to my thesis: CBC/Radio-Canada, La Presse, Le Devoir, the Journal de Montréal/Québec, etc. are not neutral, they’re centrist. The editorial choices and writing style of the reporting demonstrate this. And the center serves the status quo, especially when it’s the right.
For a newspaper like La Presse, presenting as and trying to be neutral is part and parcel with choosing which texts are published in their Dialogue section. Under the auspices of “neutrality”, they refused to publish the Robins des Ruelles’ communiqué, a collective who symbolically lifted 3000$ of groceries from a Metro supermarket in Montréal, because they judged it “too radical”. La Presse journalist Karim Benessaieh tried to enter into contact with the group to get their perspective, as a sort of compromise. Nonetheless, refusing a text in this way isn’t neutral.
Conversely, in this same report, Karim Benessaieh transmits verbatim misleading comments with no context made by Metro’s spokesperson, Geneviève Grégoire. She claims Metro isn’t responsible for rising food costs and boasts that the chain gave 8.6 million $ in corporate donations. When a comment from a representative of the ultra-rich is relayed without any contextualisation, it demonstrates a lack of journalistic integrity.
For example, it should be mentioned that the Metro Group is a gigantic conglomerate that includes the Metro and Super C supermarket chains, the Brunet and Jean-Coutu pharmacy chains, and the Première Moisson bakery chain. Also important to note is the fact that Metro CEO Eric La Flèche made 6.8 million $ in 2025, with the Metro Group announcing 1.02 billion dollars of net profit for 2025 in a press communiqué. This puts into perspective the relatively low sum in donations for the same year, which corresponds to less than 1% of the profits harvested by Metro. (which will result in a nice income tax return).
But no, for Metro, there’s no need to provide context about the company. However, for the vast majority of articles covering the genocide in Palestine since October 7th 2023, La Presse adds a practically copy-paste paragraph contextualising the conflict as having its origins in Hamas’ attack. This isn’t technically a lie, but it’s right at the limit of incorrectness, as it invisibilises the real beginning of the “conflict”, the (first) ethnic cleansing in 1948, the Nakba. Not pure disinformation, but very bad contextualisation.
The bread cartel: The Bread Cartel is a conspiracy allegedly involving a number of large supermarket chains. Loblaws have already been found guilty, whereas Sobeys (IGA), Metro, Walmart, Giant Tiger and Canada Bread remain accused. These grocery store chains allegedly conspired to artificially inflate the price of packaged bread by 1.50$ over 20 years, from 2001-2021.
It’s in this vein that the question poses itself: how do we cover an issue from several angles, while assuming a leftist position? We can’t leave analysis and contextualisation to columns and editorials, I believe a certain degree of analysis must always be present in reporting, which means verifying and refuting false declarations, if needed.
For a Journalism that doesn’t compromise
As a leftist paper, Le Débordement considers that the voices of poor people rebelling against rich supermarkets should be heard in the context of a staggering rise in the price of groceries. Yes, even if they engaged in an act that disturbs, and yes, even if they broke laws. We’ve thus decided to publish the Robins des Ruelles’ communiqué in our paper.
It’s this that sets us apart: a leftist newspaper can cover issues which otherwise fall into other media’s blindspot, and do so differently. For example, in this edition, we reported on the political repression of student activists at Collège de Maisonneuve, which went under the radar of mainstream media. We are, after all, a union newspaper, and informing readers of local struggles is a service to CRUES members.
Leftist papers are currently quite small in so-called Quebec, and put out fewer editions per year than their mainstream counterparts. In some cases, this slow publication cycle is a strength, allowing us to produce reporting over a longer period of time, which is rarely possible in the fast-paced work cycle of daily papers.
With the massive lay-offs at CBC/Radio-Canada and TVA’s news division this year, financial pressures on major newspapers are becoming more and more pronounced. In the last ten years, we’ve seen a transition from a subscription model to a (much less profitable) model centered around online subscriptions and advertising on their websites. The personnel cuts have in turn reduced the time available for papers to fact-check misleading declarations, which sometimes leads them to publish articles that are essentially a copy-paste of a press communiqué, because an article has to immediately be published reporting every single hot-button issue, so as to not lose out on clicks.
Raised-fist journalism
The challenges of socially engaged journalism remain complex: How can a centrist or right-wing student trust us if we assume our left-wing analyses in every article? This trust must be won through journalistic integrity, tight editing and a team dedicated to the pursuit of the truth, and all of this, durably over time. In our view, publishing reporting and columns marks the beginning of an approach aiming to bridge the gap between journalistic rigour and activist engagement.