The Problem With ‘Just Asking Questions’

How the internet changed our approach to knowledge — and stopped us from thinking

A clip that circulated widely on Twitter this Wednesday shows a CBC journalist getting shouted at by a freedom convoy protester. Joseph Tunney was working on a story about an Ottawa Police statement regarding children at the protest. The cops, it said, would be working with the city’s Children’s Aid Society because there had been “ongoing reports…regarding child welfare concerns amid the Ottawa protest.”

In the clip, which begins partway through Tunney’s conversation with the protester, he can be heard asking, “Did you hear the statement that I—” before the protester cuts him off. “I heard what you said,” the man tells Tunney. “So are you saying my teenagers are threatened for being in Ottawa? Is that what you’re telling me?”

Tunney tries to defer to the police statement as his basis of knowledge, but he’s cut off again when the protester repeats his question. (This goes on for a bit while, for some reason, other protesters surrounding them begin singing ‘O Canada.’) After claiming Tunney “works for the devil,” and has “sold his soul,” the protester repeats his question again. “I have two teenagers here, they’re in my car. Are they in danger, yes or no?”