Aaron Maté Canadian Journalist From Vancouver

Early life

Aaron Maté is a Canadian journalist and writer. He was born on 13 March 1979 in Vancouver into a Jewish family. His mother, Rae Maté, is a visual artist who has illustrated children's books, and his father, Gabor Maté, is a Hungarian-born Canadian physician and author.

Maté studied at Concordia University in Montreal, where he became active in student politics and served as vice president of a pro-Palestinian student union. His campus activism became the subject of Discordia, a documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada, which followed how his advocacy affected his relationships with the union and with some of his friends. In September 2002 he was arrested during the Concordia University Netanyahu riot. He had stepped between protesters and police, and the episode exposed him to the possibility of expulsion.

From 2003 to 2005 he worked as a primary researcher for the author Naomi Klein.

Career

Maté has reported and produced for a number of outlets, including Democracy Now!, Vice, Al Jazeera English and The Real News Network, and he has contributed articles to The Nation. He later became a reporter for The Grayzone, a news website and blog, where he hosts the program Pushback with Aaron Maté. From January 2022 he has also sometimes stood in as a host on the podcast Useful Idiots.

A large part of his reporting from 2017 onward dealt with the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election. Writing in The Nation, he argued that coverage of the Special Counsel inquiry gave too much weight to unverified claims and that the reach of Russian social media activity was too small to have changed the result. He interviewed the journalist Luke Harding on The Real News Network in December 2017 about Harding's book on the subject, and the exchange drew comment in Vanity Fair. He developed these arguments in the 2022 book Cold War, Hot War: How Russiagate Created Chaos from Washington to Ukraine, published by OR Books. A second book from the same publisher, Their Blood, Our Bullets: The Hidden Story of the US-Russia War for Ukraine, is dated 2026.

He also reported on Syria, questioning the findings of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons on the April 2018 chemical attack in Douma. The organisation's director general, Fernando Arias, disputed the account Maté relied on. Maté was invited by Russia's permanent mission to the United Nations to speak at Arria-formula meetings on the subject in September 2020, April 2021 and March 2023. In May 2021 he accompanied Paul Larudee and other members of the Syria Solidarity Movement to observe that year's Syrian presidential election.

His commentary on Syria, Ukraine and other conflicts has drawn criticism from several writers and research bodies. A June 2022 analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue named him among the most active spreaders of disinformation about the Syrian conflict, a characterization he rejected, saying the report offered no evidence and questioning the funding behind it.

Other subjects he has covered include the Biden administration's response to the May 2021 fighting in Gaza, the decision by Amnesty International to withdraw its prisoner-of-conscience designation for the Russian politician Alexei Navalny, which he was first to report in February 2021, and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Recognition

In April 2019 Maté received an Izzy Award for his reporting on the Russia investigation. He and The Grayzone have also received the Serena Shim Award, presented by the Association for Investment in Popular Action Committees.

Public roles

Maté is listed among the affiliations of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media.