Trust and the media

This column came from my having watched two interesting news stories on CBC’s Newsworld. Now I know that if you are an individual who believes that our national news network is a propagandist media outlet with a particular “bias” towards conservative “values”, feel free to assume that the ideas I have to offer about them are equally prejudicial, but I beg to differ. Were it not for the CBC, I would never have completed my THIRD attempt at obtaining a university degree, going on to obtain two more, and in the process beginning to understand what it means today to still have the ability to determine fact from fiction, being able to translate that skill into the written word, and yet in spite of my attempts to create an “objective opinion”, and to encourage others to debate with me with a presentation of fact, as opposed to being blurred by prejudice or the benefit of disinformation hindsight.

Were it not for the CBC, I’d have starved while attending university. How I managed to obtain a job freelancing for Halifax’s CBC Radio is irrelevant at the moment, even though it has its origins in my being on assignment by our campus paper covering an anti-nuclear demonstration against President Nixon testing bombs over the San Andreas fault line, ending in my having a massive RCMP officer nose-planting me in front of then PM Pierre Trudeau, thus allowing me to not only cover my assigned story, but score a personal interview with His Eminence as well.

The exchange that I and four other students were able to have with the senior Trudeau now comes back to haunt me. Since then, society has become so insecure that it no longer “trusts” what were the traditional sources of information that media once represented.

Historically speaking, in order to even obtain a broadcasting license, media outlets were first REQUIRED to provide at least one hour a day of news content devoid of advertising interruption and FORBIDDEN from profiting by such endeavour. Equally notable, the Canadian government established the CBC so as to provide our nation with the news of events that mattered to our nation and were willing to publicly fund that organization to carry out that task. Today, however, and driven by politicians such as Pierre Poilievre, the CBC has been accused of “bias” in its news coverage, particularly of events whose origins reside in the arenas of personal freedom, justice and personal struggle. From the conservative perspective, this implies that the news is being “weaponized” against their beliefs and philosophy, thus providing well-funded “think tanks” (e.g.: the Fraser Institute) a voice to challenge the reporting of stories whose “facts” are subjected to social scrutiny.

In the U.S., this has resulted in media “splitting” into policy advocacy organizations whose primary interests may seem to be reporting “fact” but whose true intent is to either embellish or refute the event’s result. Outlets such as MSNBC are now built to appeal to the “progressively minded” and well educated, only to end up being labeled as “elitist” and devoid of information relevant to the so-called “common man”. Then there is FOX News, whose aggressively “conservative” talking heads and news readers turn MSNBC’s and others interpretation of the news as “elitist” in origin, and increasingly “woke” in the progressive media’s constant linkage to the story’s concerns relating to social injustice and discrimination.

Unfortunately, the metamorphosis of this struggle over news bias has resulted in the more right-wing of such media sources increasingly utilizing children and women’s role in formulating our future societies as examples of how far the progressive movement has strayed from traditional reporting. Whereas democracies usually delink matters involving church versus state, the so-called “evangelical” component of the right’s resistance now places itself front and centre in this campaign by denigrating educational studies highlighting unfinished reforms and or even violations of human rights that to their followers don’t exist, such as same sex marital rights. Given such counterproductive collisions within our society, I believe that we have to reestablish our “trust” in our traditional media sources. The two stories to which I originally referred by my having viewed them on CBC I only hope will start this debate. The first of these items is a Fifth Estate documentary on events that have to date managed to remain in a behind the scenes disinformation campaign about the February 2022 occupation of the Coutts, Alta. border crossing by members of the so-called “Freedom” Convoy during the Covid-19 pandemic. The second item to also undergo analysis in the same column has to do with how Alberta premier Danielle Smith and Ontario’s Doug Ford are practising historical revisionism in order to create a frivolous discussion as to how best to placate the incendiary nature of Donald J. Trump once he again becomes president of the United States Regrettably, their approach requires Canadians to consider “abandoning” our trading friends in order to “please” a wannabe dictator’s incendiary mood swings, and  smacks of the very sentiment that drove the British to abandon the hopes of Neville Chamberlain in keeping Hitler from attacking that nation. 

More to the point, is such effort even worth it, given that we may still end up having to deal with twelve more years of “Trump” by J.D. Vance, the VP-elect, assuming his position for the next two terms.

Are you truly worried about what may happen in such a future? 

Perhaps you should be…

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