Government-funded legacy media outlets are fawning over Prime Minister Mark Carney after his brief meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday.
Although Carney was unable to achieve a reprieve from tariffs as originally intended and was instead confronted by Trump on Canada becoming the ‘51st state,’ several media outlets attempted to spin the meeting as a resounding success.
Positive headlines dominated the frontpages of legacy media outlets, emphasizing Carney while burying Trump’s insistence that he would not budge on the trade war.
The CBC, CTV, and the Toronto Star ran headlines gloating that Carney told Trump Canada was “not for sale.”
The CBC featured an especially upbeat headline: “Carney tells Trump Canada is not for sale, president premises PM as a ‘very good person.’ The outlet then ran an “analysis” piece suggesting that Carney and Trump are beginning to redefine the Canada-US relationship.
Journalists reported on Carney’s response to Trump’s claim that Canada should become the 51st state highlighted the prime minister’s analogy that some pieces of real estate are never for sale, but ignored Trump’s response of “never say never.”
CBC analyst Catherine Cullen celebrated Carney’s use of humour to defuse tension in the meeting, even praising his facial expressions and how he wiggled his eyebrows.
CTV News interviewed body language expert Mark Bowden who claimed that Trump shaking Carney’s hand upon the prime minister’s arrival to the White House showed a “certain level of respect” to Carney and that Trump sees him as a “strong person.”
Bowden went on to claim that during the Oval Office meeting with the media, Carney’s lip purses and sucking in of his cheeks signalled a withheld opinion to those watching.
The Globe and Mail wrote an article highlighting American late night talk show hosts and their response to Carney’s visit to the White House. The article describes Trump’s Oval Office meetings with world leaders as a “gonzo talk show” while highlighting the Late Night Show’s part-time host Sesi Lydic saying Trump got” friend-zoned” by Carney.
The Toronto Star published two opinion articles praising Carney, with one headline claiming Carney had “Carney successfully walked Trump’s tightrope at the White House.”
The column, written by Andrew Phillips, acknowledged that the Prime Minister’s Office had successfully manoeuvered the media into setting low expectations for the meeting, but still claimed Carney did “particularly well.”
“Carney’s formula, judging by a riveting half-hour in the Oval Office, is to use a combination of patience and firmness, leavened by a dash of humour, to keep things civil,” said Phillips.
“It was a deft performance under trying circumstances and I think he’ll get pretty high marks for successfully walking that treacherous tightrope.”
Reporters also largely ignored Trump saying that there is nothing the prime minister can say that would see the United States drop its tariffs on Canadian goods.
Little attention was paid to Carney’s press conference after his meeting with Trump where he was unable to lay out a timeline toward lifting Trump’s tariffs on Canada.
“We’ll see where that goes. In other areas, the tariffs are, in our view, not in the interests of American competitiveness and jobs. We have more work to do on making those cases on that,” said Carney.