A leading TV station was forced to fire its newly appointed fact checker after her biased past was exposed.
Rachel Gilmore, 30, had only aired a single segment on Canada‘s CTV News when she was suddenly ousted by the network earlier this week – a development first reported by the PressProgress.
On Tuesday, the Canadian nonprofit published a recording that showed CTV Your Morning Executive Producer Jennifer MacLean branding Gilmore ‘a distraction’, after ultimately making the decision.
In a recorded call with the recent hire, MacLean cited the ‘volume’ of ‘pushback’ she had received since appearing on the for the first time on Friday, after which conservatives took to platforms like X to call Gilmore ‘a conspiracy theorist.’
During the Freedom Convoy protests three years ago, Gilmore pedaled several dubious stories brought by anonymous sources – including one that ‘convoy truckers tried to burn down an Ottawa apartment building’ that turned out not to be true.
‘In a shocking new low for CTV News, they are having this disgraced disinformation peddler lie directly to their viewers under the guise of “news,”‘ said Sebastian Skamski.
He is a senior official for Canadian lawmaker Pierre Poilievre, who is hotly tipped to lead his Conservative party to victory in upcoming elections and become prime minister.
‘The Liberal media will do anything to ensure a fourth Liberal term,’ he added, recalling Gilmore’s style that regularly verged on personal speculation rather than verified information. ‘Remember that the next time they “fact check” Conservatives!’
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Prominent commentator Jonathan Kay also weighed in, pointing to Gilmore’s debunked claims. Gilmore, however, has framed her firing as ‘an attack on press freedom’, doing so in a flurry of her trademark, TikTok-style videos.
‘This is the real impact of the harassment I have to deal with,’ she began in a minute-long vertical video posted across YouTube, Instagram, and more.
‘After CTV Your Morning announced I would be joining them every Friday of the campaign to do a fact-check, a bunch of bad faith right-wingers who hate me for no other reason than I have reported accurately on the things that people they agree with politically have said and done.
‘They just swarmed, including someone who the week before the election has been Pierre Poilievre’s spokesperson and is still on Pierre Poilievre’s team,’ she added, referring to Skamski.
‘Yesterday, CTV called me and informed me that I’ve lost this career opportunity,’ Gilmore, an outspoken progressive who rose to prominence covering the protests of Justin Trudeau’s administration, went on to reveal.
‘Because I was worried that they were going to be spineless, I recorded the phone call
‘And in that phone call, CTV made it extremely clear that this was being cancelled because of the online backlash, not because of my skill set – not because of anything that I have said or done, but because of the way that these bad faith trolls were talking about me.
‘Online bad faith trolls and a member of Pierre Poilievre’s team… If opportunities can be stripped from journalists simply because enough people repeat the same bad-faith narrative, how can anyone withstand the career impact of doing work that matters?’
She went on to play the call in question – the same one obtained by the PressProgress.
‘I’m sure you’re well aware of the push back we received after your first appearance on the show,’ MacLean told her during the call. ‘The tricky thing for me is it just ends up being a distraction from what we are trying to do.’
‘The “who” we are talking to is kind of drowning out the ‘what’ we’re talking about right now,’ MacLean argued. ‘I don’t feel like we have the bandwidth to deal with it.’
The EP conceded: ‘I knew that you had that troll base and I knew that we would get some sort of reaction.
‘But I really did not realize the extent of the volume of that push back that we had.’
Gilmore – bolstered by a sizable online following infatuated with her alarming, at times unfounded anecdotes on platforms like TikTok – went on to speak to the PressProgreess as well.
‘I got really positive feedback after the initial appearance,’ she said. ‘The main thing was that this is too much of a distraction.’
Misinformation was a hot topic during Canada’s ‘Freedom Convoy‘ processions in early 2022, when truckers started a slow-moving convoy to the Canadian capital of Ottawa to push back on the since-resigned prime minister’s vaccine mandates.
Others, in solidarity, blocked a busy border crossing between Alberta and Montana.
Trudeau, who was moved from Ottawa into hiding in a secret location ahead of their arrival in his home city, bizarrely refused to meet with them because of ‘hateful rhetoric’.
Like Gilmore, who focused on the subject of ‘far-right extremism’ during the protests, he did not produce evidence to support his claims.
Moreover, crowdfunding site GoFundMe was accused of bowing to left-wing political pressure at time, by freezing a fundraising account holding $8million in donations for the protesters.
CTV is Canada’s most-watched television network.
