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Media Bias [Merged]

You should check out the latest Munk Debate on YouTube about mainstream media. "Be it resolved, don't trust mainstream media."

The link won't post for some reason.
 
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It’s stuff like this that makes the CBC less and less relevant everyday.


We have seen that this is extremely unpopular, even with liberal Democrats in places like San Francisco and New York. Most on the center-left are running away from this stupid idea. So with a wave of random violent crime in our cities, and general disorder, why is the CBC scandalized that police budgets aren’t being reduced? To me, this is another example of their growing irrelevance. Add to this their sob story/oppression story of the week they beat to death, or the impolitic comments by their president this week, I don’t know how they expect people to tune in, other than many communities are now news deserts.

It’s like the CBC is begging to be defunded. 🤦‍♂️
 
A lot of medium and smaller cities (and bigger centres too) have lost their newspapers, or the newsrooms have been reduced to a skeletal staff and nothing gets covered in depth. So in a place like Kamloops, you might get a ton of international and national news, but good luck finding out about corruption at city hall.

Meanwhile, CBC will spend a week with their comparatively larger newsroom talking about the poor woman with one leg who has to walk 500 meters uphill both ways to a heated bus shelter and wants one outside her house. Or the person who got a ticket from the mean by-law officer. Or the person who wasn’t allowed to use the bathroom at the gas station because they didn’t buy anything.
 
A lot of medium and smaller cities (and bigger centres too) have lost their newspapers, or the newsrooms have been reduced to a skeletal staff and nothing gets covered in depth. So in a place like Kamloops, you might get a ton of international and national news, but good luck finding out about corruption at city hall.

Meanwhile, CBC will spend a week with their comparatively larger newsroom talking about the poor woman with one leg who has to walk 500 meters uphill both ways to a heated bus shelter and wants one outside her house. Or the person who got a ticket from the mean by-law officer. Or the person who wasn’t allowed to use the bathroom at the gas station because they didn’t buy anything.
Like CBC national, or the various CBC local newsrooms?

When I was in MB, I saw CBC coverage about Winnipeg or Thompson, but nothing about folks in Victoria or Halifax. And vice versa when I was in those other places.
 
Like CBC national, or the various CBC local newsrooms?

When I was in MB, I saw CBC coverage about Winnipeg or Thompson, but nothing about folks in Victoria or Halifax. And vice versa when I was in those other places.
That maybe the case then, but now there is nothing in CBC Manitoba except Winnipeg stories or the latest disaster at a remote reserve on the upper reaches of Lake Winnipeg.

As for the CBC overall, the feeling in the colonies is that within the CBC bunker located in downtown Toronto is that their field of view encompasses the Toronto Waterfront and then an arc that encompasses Mississauga, Brampton, Vaughn, Richman's Hill, Markham and Scarborough. There is an outpost at Parliament Hill that sees the world within the 1,000 meter circle of Parliament Hill. The rest of Canada? Well, there be dragons out-there!
Someone needs to do a Downfall episode with CBC CEO Tait as the center of attention. :)
 
Like CBC national, or the various CBC local newsrooms?

When I was in MB, I saw CBC coverage about Winnipeg or Thompson, but nothing about folks in Victoria or Halifax. And vice versa when I was in those other places.
Sorry, I was talking about the local CBC outlet. They never went through the downsizing that their private competitors went through. But instead of using those resources for in depth journalism on local issues people might care about, it’s the sob story of the week and other human interest stories, usually with an activist bent. And forget about stories outside the urban centre that outlet is located.

In The Line podcast, Matt Gurney was talking about how one night, he saw a tweet from Toronto Police of an incident where police had to lock down a section of the city because someone was taking potshots at police. There was a time where local broadcasts would have been interrupted with breaking news about such a shocking event. Instead, there was nothing from any news outlet until one outlet re-tweeted the TPS tweet hours later. And this was in the one city in Canada that has a plethora of news outlets. Not that long ago, reporters and newscopters would have been all over a major public safety event like this.

Meanwhile, CBC uses it’s hefty resources for stuff that would be at home on college radio.
 
Sorry, I was talking about the local CBC outlet. They never went through the downsizing that their private competitors went through. But instead of using those resources for in depth journalism on local issues people might care about, it’s the sob story of the week and other human interest stories, usually with an activist bent. And forget about stories outside the urban centre that outlet is located.

In The Line podcast, Matt Gurney was talking about how one night, he saw a tweet from Toronto Police of an incident where police had to lock down a section of the city because someone was taking potshots at police. There was a time where local broadcasts would have been interrupted with breaking news about such a shocking event. Instead, there was nothing from any news outlet until one outlet re-tweeted the TPS tweet hours later. And this was in the one city in Canada that has a plethora of news outlets. Not that long ago, reporters and newscopters would have been all over a major public safety event like this.

Meanwhile, CBC uses it’s hefty resources for stuff that would be at home on college radio.
But they haven't skipped along unscathed from media downsizing and convergence. I can't find a list of television studios that closed or downsized, but on the radio side, several have been closed or reduced to a couple of hours a day as part of a centralized program.

In terms television broadcast, they shut down all of their analogue transmitters and only converted a handful, in large market areas, to digital. So if you live in an area outside of a major centre, you either hope for cable, shell out for satellite or wireless, or try and stream online which might be dial-up.
 
That maybe the case then, but now there is nothing in CBC Manitoba except Winnipeg stories or the latest disaster at a remote reserve on the upper reaches of Lake Winnipeg.
Similar pattern here in Ontario, especially listening to the weekend newscasts - if it happened outside 416/905, it better be huge to make it into the 'cast.
 

The PM, the Press, Polarization & Propaganda - Terry Glavin - 23 Jul 23 - The Real Story.​

Stage management, media availability and the "photo opp." It all blends into a easily digestible congee of outrage, cynicism, and . . . votes.


Here’s a bowl of congee for you. How it’s made should be instructive to Real Story subscribers who follow this newsletter for its focus on the way reality is distorted in the funhouse mirror the news media has become.
CTV News: Trudeau cuts appearance in Belleville, Ont., short as protesters swarm motorcade. CBC News: Trudeau cuts short an appearance in Belleville, Ont., after protesters swarm motorcade. National Post: Trudeau motorcade swarmed by protesters in Belleville, Ont., causing PM to cut appearance short. Toronto Star: Justin Trudeau cuts appearance in Belleville short as protesters swarm motorcade. Hamilton Spectator: Justin Trudeau cuts appearance in Belleville short as protesters swarm motorcade.

Weird, eh? You’d think it was all written by the same person. That’s because it was.

The thing about congee is that it’s such a simple, lovely and versatile little meal for breakfast or dinner, with few necessary ingredients. Rice, chicken stock, a bit of ginger and garlic. There are slight variations according to tradition and taste. Maybe add egg, a dash of coriander, chicken thighs, spring onions.

For our strained metaphor here, imagine these ingredients to be relevant facts.
But if you want to know something about what happened at a farmers’ market in Belleville on Thursday you will inevitably turn to the “facts” as they appeared on Instagram or Twitter or Youtube or Facebook. Imagine that same bowl of congree dropped from the ceiling into a giant cauldron of boiling sesame oil in the middle of a crowded restaurant causing an explosion of flames and agonizing screams, a donnybrook, and wildly contradictory accounts about what the hell actually happened and what it all means.

All those news reports - CBC, the National Post, the Star, the Spectator, Global, CTV - derive from a single report of a few paragraphs by a single “pool reporter” in Prime Minister Trudeau’s traveling press entourage. Her name is Mickey Djuric. She’s a perfectly creditable and responsible journalist who works as the parliamentary reporter for the Canadian Press news service.

Mickey filed her report in the usual way, and also posted a video of the Belleville Incident on Twitter. And the result immediately and irrevocably embedded in the public consciousness a version of what happened Thursday in that “friendly” Ontario town, which bills itself as The Friendly City. And in that version, there are facts.

But the “story” is also very much the story Trudeau’s communications team wanted out there. It was, you could say, stage-managed. It’s just how things work nowadays.
A big story in the News Media’s End Times, in Belleville. And what little we know about what happened comes from one reporter who was there.

Stop blaming “the MSM.” Ot at least stop thinking it’s that simple.​

“Pool” reporting is what’s done when it’s simply impractical to have a posse of reporters following the prime minister around at every step of his forays into public and sort-of public spaces. It’s also what happens a lot more nowadays than it used to, simply because there just aren’t many actual journalists to go around anymore.

The rise of social media as the primary means politicians rely upon to get their “message” out is just one pernicious consequence of the collapse of the legacy media’s business model and the shrinking space for conventional journalism. Another is that the “news” media and “social” media have become almost indistinguishable.

My former Maclean’s magazine colleague Paul Wells calls this impoverished state of affairs The Great Disintermediation. He gets into the implications in this series, The End of Media. So, whatever else happened in Belleville on Thursday, what we are left with is exactly the impression Team Trudeau wanted you to be left with, which is the impression they always want to leave you with.
Watch CP’s video again if you need to.

“Security reasons”? What security reasons?​

Remember, Justin Trudeau is a prime minister who requires a government jet to fly him not just around the world, but for security reasons, quite routinely for short-hop flights. The National Post’s Brian Passifume had a look at Trudeau’s high-flying habits back in March and found that over the preceding 30 days, Trudeau had logged 17 carbon-spewing flights, 10 of which were trips under an hour in duration.

“As per long-standing government policy and for security reasons,” the PMO’s Alison Murphy told him, “specific arrangements must be made for the prime minister when he travels, whether on official or personal business.”

And yet on Thursday, Trudeau arranged to have himself escorted right into the middle of a braying mob. With his official photographer on hand, of course. Watch that CP video and you will see that for several minutes, ringed by his security detail, the prime minister is smiling and meeting and taking selfies with people who seem very nice. They’re people of all sizes and colours. It’s all happening right smack in the middle of a crowd of shouting, brutish yobs, at alarmingly close quarters. And Trudeau is loving every minute of it.
The F*ck Trudeau flags, the stupid Trump flag, the shouted obscenities, the lowbrow lumpen chants of “traitor” and “pedophile.” The stuff that former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole called "the very antithesis of what it means to be conservative.” The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre noticed one of the loudmouths shouting “you’re a pathetic Jew” at Trudeau, at least twice.
I was reliably advised by Global News political reporter David Akin that contrary to my initial assumption the event was never intended as “media avail,” shorthand for media availability, which is a neologism for “press conference,” which is where actual journalists used to play at least a minor role in figuring out and reporting what’s what. But it wasn’t even that.

Trudeau’s official public itinerary for Southeastern Ontario was about celebrating the 7th anniversary of his child-tax credit, with this: “2:30 p.m. The Prime Minister will visit a local farmers’ market. Note for media. Pooled photo opportunity.”

The farmers’ market is conveniently located near City Hall where Trudeau met Belleville Mayor Neil Ellis, whose views on the day’s events were pretty much the only other national story about what happened at the farmers’ market. As reported by CTV News Ottawa Digital Multi-Skilled Journalist Ted Raymond on Saturday, Mayor Neil Ellis was “speaking out” about what happened.

After having reportedly taken a couple of days to “reflect” on the event, Ellis said what happened was “hateful” and “discriminatory” and it was an honour to have Trudeau in town and it was the hope of the mayor’s office that everyone could "move forward from this experience." Ellis was the local Liberal MP until his defeat in the 2021 federal election. I guess Beijing’s proxies didn’t work hard enough to monkeywrench the Bay of Quinte riding to his advantage. I’m kidding.

Anyway, the Belleville Farmers’ Market visit was circulated within the parliamentary press crew as “a straight photo opp,” shorthand for photo opportunity, which nowadays is of course a video opportunity for Youtube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. “That's why only a pool camera and pool reporter went to this thing,” Akin said.

And at this thing, the “straight photo opp” involved a true story about loud and unruly yobs who had obviously made at least some effort to mobilize in common to locate and disrupt Trudeau’s Belleville event in ugly ways. Creepy as hell if you ask me.

But Trudeau’s Meet the People things are always choreographed in the way the prime minister’s communications team prefers. What ended up happening in Belleville wasn’t scripted, but it didn’t happen by accident either, and Trudeau’s people got what they came for. Video of a smiling, affable prime minister with ordinary Canadians who like him a lot. Fabulous bonus prize: shouting, menacing yobs who don’t like him at all.

And that is the sum and substance of Trudeau’s most adoring admirers’ organizing principle, right there. He’s the nice man who’s watching out for us. The Conservatives? Haters, shouters, racists, yobs.

And here’s the thing about partisan ideologues of that most fervent kind. No matter the evidence against Dear Leader, they’ll dig themselves ever deeper, because they’re afraid. They’ll lash out wildly rather than consider the terrifying possibility that they’re being taken for fools by the handsome messiah they’ve gone to such lengths to so loudly and publicly defend.

 
I thought there was a more recent “media bias” thread on here than this one but my searching ability only brought up this one.

Anyways, an interesting article from a conservative-biased outlet. I tend to think of the bias being very subtle and unintentional, like how most journalists come from the same urban, upper middle class backgrounds and go to the same j-schools. I tend not to believe that editors and journalists sit down every Monday morning and say, “Ok, how can we f#%^ conservatives over this week!” It’s that they are like a fish; they don’t know they’re wet.


I also like this warning from a former Harper comms guy about getting ahead of their skis on media paranoia.

While MacDougall agrees that conservatives generally have to work harder to get a fair shake from the media, he also warned people on the right not to get too caught up in playing the victim. He pointed to the current controversy around Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent free luxury holiday in Jamaica as proof that, above all, the media craves juicy stories.

And when conservatives govern, he said, there are times when the negative reporting targeting them is just proper reporting.

“The hardest thing in government to do is to distinguish between the fact that you’re getting heat for being in government versus for being the party that you are in government,” he said.
 
I tend not to believe that editors and journalists sit down every Monday morning
And yet the "Journolist" was real.

Adam Smith: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Smith's observation is about social, not economic, behaviour. People in the business of publishing news are people in the same trade. They tend to lean in the same direction politically out of proportion to the overall distribution in the general population. Many show obvious interest in shaping stories rather than reporting them.

Common sense suggests a lot of collusion is going to result.
 
It’s stuff like this that makes the CBC less and less relevant everyday.


We have seen that this is extremely unpopular, even with liberal Democrats in places like San Francisco and New York. Most on the center-left are running away from this stupid idea. So with a wave of random violent crime in our cities, and general disorder, why is the CBC scandalized that police budgets aren’t being reduced? To me, this is another example of their growing irrelevance. Add to this their sob story/oppression story of the week they beat to death, or the impolitic comments by their president this week, I don’t know how they expect people to tune in, other than many communities are now news deserts.

It’s like the CBC is begging to be defunded. 🤦‍♂️
Hello,

So, if CBC is getting irrelevant, may I ask what mainstream media you turn to, for your source of news?
 
Hello,

So, if CBC is getting irrelevant, may I ask what mainstream media you turn to, for your source of news?
Sorry I missed this. I get most of it from various mainstream private sources of a variety of leanings, including a subscription to Canada’s newspaper of record, the Globe and Mail. I used to be a loyal reader of the National Post, but they, and Postmedia in general, had gone downhill in recent years. I pay attention to the local broadsheet for factual reporting but take their editorial positions with a grain of salt. I also follow several quality writers on Substack. I also check in with the Atlantic on my Apple News app, as well as other outlets there.
 
Sorry I missed this. I get most of it from various mainstream private sources of a variety of leanings, including a subscription to Canada’s newspaper of record, the Globe and Mail. I used to be a loyal reader of the National Post, but they, and Postmedia in general, had gone downhill in recent years. I pay attention to the local broadsheet for factual reporting but take their editorial positions with a grain of salt. I also follow several quality writers on Substack. I also check in with the Atlantic on my Apple News app, as well as other outlets there.
I see, thanks for the answer.

I have been leaning towards online, independent sources of news, myself. Honestly I feel a deep sense of distrust towards mainstream, more established media.
 
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