The media as a whole (excluding notable independent reporters, and local reporters such as Julie K. Brown and Will Bunch) are increasingly becoming victims of their own choices. Woodward is a perfect example of a former journalistic icon devolving into a caricature, churning out meaningless books for dollars...long after the information divulged is no longer useful to inform public opinion. Another factor tarnishing the 4th estate is the lack of accountability. When Pelosi had power to slow the spread of authoritarianism, she chose instead to ignore it. Biden, campaigning to restore the 'soul' of America, has similarly chosen to ignore (and thus further marginalize) the vulnerable. If nothing happens when increasingly fascistic actions are taken or rampant corruption exposed, we can't be surprised when reporters stop covering such stories. Unfortunately, as we have seen the pattern with every struggling democracy lost to authoritarianism, a free press is the first casualty. It's clear that revamping libel laws is on the hit list of our remarkably corrupt SCOTUS. And then what?
I don’t live on the east coast but I do consider myself fortunate to have several good newspapers available, although their slants are obvious. Never was this more blatant than during the Detroit water cutoffs and the contamination of Flints water with lead. The national coverage in print was relatively small for both stories, but I never thought of it as snobbery. I read the Washington and New York papers for international and political stories, which the Detroit papers can’t begin to cover.
I understand the financial imperative to nearly all journalism, which is why my most trusted source is NPR. But it doesn’t have the capacity that a well funded newspaper has for in-depth reporting.
You didn’t ask, but I’d love for you to cover my biggest peeve right now. What’s up with all the journalists saving the juiciest exposes for their books? As employees of papers or networks, don’t their companies have the ability to publish that information? Scientists doing research at a university don’t own all the rights to their results. I didn’t expect more from John Bolton, but Bob Woodward? Jonathan Karl? Very disappointed.
Same is true for the national media in Canada. Local news has been gutted by the Postmedia oligopoly (equivalent to Sinclair Broadcasting), and the rest of the void is filled up by vacuous "punditry." Coverage reflects the partisan interests and contributions of the papers' and networks' corporate ownership (the Tories have been endorsed in election after election), and of what is called the "Ottawa bubble" with Toronto being the "centre of the universe." So-called process stories get inflated into "scandals" that get pundit-ed and analyzed ad nauseam, instead of reporting on real-world issues facing the everyday Canadian. Our countries really are more alike on more fronts than they are dissimilar.
A classic example of this out-of-touch quality of the press is that there is a massive flooding disaster overtaking British Columbia right now, and the first thing that reporters wanted to ask MPs about was procedural drama involving the Conservative party leader and a senator calling for his ouster. At COVID pressers, public health officials are asked their opinion of such-and-such policy from the government that doesn't involve them ("Dr. so-and-so, do you have anything to say about the Liberal handling of the deficit"). People are dying and the press gallery wants to hear about drama. The media is dizzy itself because they're suffocating on their own hot air.
The vast majority of decision-making happens at the provincial (equivalent to a U.S. state) and municipal (city council) levels, yet the coverage is almost obsessively fixated upon federal politics. On one part this is because local news is gutted. The other facet is that our prime minister has a kind of Obama/Clinton quality in that the press covers him like a celebrity, spending inordinate amounts of time talking about his socks or what he had for breakfast (like the tan suit and the "elitist" cheeseburger). At the same time, they feed conspiracy theories that may as well just be copied and pasted from Benghazi, Clinton Cash, Pizzagate, etc. substituting his name or his wife or mother in place of Hillary, Bill or Chelsea.
It's really awful up here. Sometimes coverage actually radicalizes people to the extent that they're willing to commit acts of violence. Someone actually plowed their truck full of guns into the PM's home and had a note with a bunch of QAnon conspiracies that he wanted to confront him about. It went virtually unreported, in part because the press was, yet again, so out of touch that they didn't think an *assassination attempt* was important, but some inane controversy happening at the same time, involving the PM and a pandemic-related charity program for students, was deserving of months and months of wall-to-wall coverage even when there was nothing new to report (i.e. "but her emails"). The other evident reason that the story got buried, as BIPOC remarked about at the time this incident occurred, was that the individual in question was a white guy rather than a Muslim or Indigenous or some other visible minority. He was even portrayed sympathetically as a "friendly sausage maker" who lost his artisan deli business due to COVID shutdowns and supposedly had legitimate grievances. It's thanks to the media dropping the ball on covering that incident (along with the numerous other threats to the PM's life that they've ignored), that "friendly sausage maker" has become a tongue-in-cheek slang term for a *violent right-wing terrorist.* In the U.S. context of similar whitewashing, one might say Kyle Rittenhouse was a "friendly sausage maker."
A poll was just released by a Canadian survey firm, demonstrating a depressing level of civic ignorance among the broader Canadian populace and it's fed largely by the media's unwillingness to inform. A hashtag has been trending as of late, #CdnMediaFailed, because a growing number of people are fed up with their abysmal coverage, their cliquishness, and their thin-skinned refusal to accept valid criticism. The response from journalists when this hashtag started trending was to snap back in anger and block anyone using the hashtag, then complain behind their echo chambers that the people using it were the Liberal equivalent of Trump supporters leveling attacks upon the "fake news lying press." Jake Tapper of CNN coined a term "Tru-Anon" that's been used to harass anyone who dares call out media for one-sided or incomplete coverage. He didn't like how Canadians were pointing out factual errors in his story about our vaccination rates and so he lashed out, all but accusing them of being a cult that worships the PM. He has an *international* platform, and he shouldn't have been using it to sic his dogs upon everyday citizens who dare challenge his air of divine wisdom.
It's such an incestuous high school bubble who absolve each other of any wrongdoing whatsoever. Many in the Ottawa/Toronto bubble are in live-in relationships with other journalists or political staffers. These relationships are open secrets among those in-the-know, but not publicly disclosed to viewers and readers. They maintain this omertà at the same time they can't resist gnawing upon supposed "conflicts of interests" in the federal government. The media needs to get it through their heads that they are not "too big to fail" and when they do, they will have no one to blame but themselves. Not Twitter users and not the PM and not even "friendly sausage makers" they coddle while making villains out of the innocent.
The media as a whole (excluding notable independent reporters, and local reporters such as Julie K. Brown and Will Bunch) are increasingly becoming victims of their own choices. Woodward is a perfect example of a former journalistic icon devolving into a caricature, churning out meaningless books for dollars...long after the information divulged is no longer useful to inform public opinion. Another factor tarnishing the 4th estate is the lack of accountability. When Pelosi had power to slow the spread of authoritarianism, she chose instead to ignore it. Biden, campaigning to restore the 'soul' of America, has similarly chosen to ignore (and thus further marginalize) the vulnerable. If nothing happens when increasingly fascistic actions are taken or rampant corruption exposed, we can't be surprised when reporters stop covering such stories. Unfortunately, as we have seen the pattern with every struggling democracy lost to authoritarianism, a free press is the first casualty. It's clear that revamping libel laws is on the hit list of our remarkably corrupt SCOTUS. And then what?
I don’t live on the east coast but I do consider myself fortunate to have several good newspapers available, although their slants are obvious. Never was this more blatant than during the Detroit water cutoffs and the contamination of Flints water with lead. The national coverage in print was relatively small for both stories, but I never thought of it as snobbery. I read the Washington and New York papers for international and political stories, which the Detroit papers can’t begin to cover.
I understand the financial imperative to nearly all journalism, which is why my most trusted source is NPR. But it doesn’t have the capacity that a well funded newspaper has for in-depth reporting.
You didn’t ask, but I’d love for you to cover my biggest peeve right now. What’s up with all the journalists saving the juiciest exposes for their books? As employees of papers or networks, don’t their companies have the ability to publish that information? Scientists doing research at a university don’t own all the rights to their results. I didn’t expect more from John Bolton, but Bob Woodward? Jonathan Karl? Very disappointed.
Same is true for the national media in Canada. Local news has been gutted by the Postmedia oligopoly (equivalent to Sinclair Broadcasting), and the rest of the void is filled up by vacuous "punditry." Coverage reflects the partisan interests and contributions of the papers' and networks' corporate ownership (the Tories have been endorsed in election after election), and of what is called the "Ottawa bubble" with Toronto being the "centre of the universe." So-called process stories get inflated into "scandals" that get pundit-ed and analyzed ad nauseam, instead of reporting on real-world issues facing the everyday Canadian. Our countries really are more alike on more fronts than they are dissimilar.
A classic example of this out-of-touch quality of the press is that there is a massive flooding disaster overtaking British Columbia right now, and the first thing that reporters wanted to ask MPs about was procedural drama involving the Conservative party leader and a senator calling for his ouster. At COVID pressers, public health officials are asked their opinion of such-and-such policy from the government that doesn't involve them ("Dr. so-and-so, do you have anything to say about the Liberal handling of the deficit"). People are dying and the press gallery wants to hear about drama. The media is dizzy itself because they're suffocating on their own hot air.
The vast majority of decision-making happens at the provincial (equivalent to a U.S. state) and municipal (city council) levels, yet the coverage is almost obsessively fixated upon federal politics. On one part this is because local news is gutted. The other facet is that our prime minister has a kind of Obama/Clinton quality in that the press covers him like a celebrity, spending inordinate amounts of time talking about his socks or what he had for breakfast (like the tan suit and the "elitist" cheeseburger). At the same time, they feed conspiracy theories that may as well just be copied and pasted from Benghazi, Clinton Cash, Pizzagate, etc. substituting his name or his wife or mother in place of Hillary, Bill or Chelsea.
It's really awful up here. Sometimes coverage actually radicalizes people to the extent that they're willing to commit acts of violence. Someone actually plowed their truck full of guns into the PM's home and had a note with a bunch of QAnon conspiracies that he wanted to confront him about. It went virtually unreported, in part because the press was, yet again, so out of touch that they didn't think an *assassination attempt* was important, but some inane controversy happening at the same time, involving the PM and a pandemic-related charity program for students, was deserving of months and months of wall-to-wall coverage even when there was nothing new to report (i.e. "but her emails"). The other evident reason that the story got buried, as BIPOC remarked about at the time this incident occurred, was that the individual in question was a white guy rather than a Muslim or Indigenous or some other visible minority. He was even portrayed sympathetically as a "friendly sausage maker" who lost his artisan deli business due to COVID shutdowns and supposedly had legitimate grievances. It's thanks to the media dropping the ball on covering that incident (along with the numerous other threats to the PM's life that they've ignored), that "friendly sausage maker" has become a tongue-in-cheek slang term for a *violent right-wing terrorist.* In the U.S. context of similar whitewashing, one might say Kyle Rittenhouse was a "friendly sausage maker."
A poll was just released by a Canadian survey firm, demonstrating a depressing level of civic ignorance among the broader Canadian populace and it's fed largely by the media's unwillingness to inform. A hashtag has been trending as of late, #CdnMediaFailed, because a growing number of people are fed up with their abysmal coverage, their cliquishness, and their thin-skinned refusal to accept valid criticism. The response from journalists when this hashtag started trending was to snap back in anger and block anyone using the hashtag, then complain behind their echo chambers that the people using it were the Liberal equivalent of Trump supporters leveling attacks upon the "fake news lying press." Jake Tapper of CNN coined a term "Tru-Anon" that's been used to harass anyone who dares call out media for one-sided or incomplete coverage. He didn't like how Canadians were pointing out factual errors in his story about our vaccination rates and so he lashed out, all but accusing them of being a cult that worships the PM. He has an *international* platform, and he shouldn't have been using it to sic his dogs upon everyday citizens who dare challenge his air of divine wisdom.
It's such an incestuous high school bubble who absolve each other of any wrongdoing whatsoever. Many in the Ottawa/Toronto bubble are in live-in relationships with other journalists or political staffers. These relationships are open secrets among those in-the-know, but not publicly disclosed to viewers and readers. They maintain this omertà at the same time they can't resist gnawing upon supposed "conflicts of interests" in the federal government. The media needs to get it through their heads that they are not "too big to fail" and when they do, they will have no one to blame but themselves. Not Twitter users and not the PM and not even "friendly sausage makers" they coddle while making villains out of the innocent.