News hosts don’t all have to be Walter Cronkite. But neither should they be mere masters of ceremonies allowing a collection of vested interests to steal their profession from under their noses. Recycling professionally-spun narratives — or handing your microphone over to the surrogates of the people you’re supposed to be covering — is not journalism. It’s surrender. What sort of radio station owner, for example, would give a program to a sitting politician? Putting the Ford Brothers on the radio in Toronto with their own show amounted to telling the world that journalism has no value in this country. After all, this tawdry tag-team already had access to every form of media through their elected positions. But that didn’t matter. It was all entertainment, there was no sense of a responsibility to inform the public — and the Brothers Ford could lie their brains out without being challenged. Newspapers, if anything, are worse than the broadcast side. Columns in the Globe and Mail from Steve? Say what? As for international news, forget it. What Canadian newspaper invests seriously in foreign bureaus these days? The Globe deserves some credit for having a few bureaus. But one person for all of South America? This is why you can’t remember the last time you saw a foreign correspondent reporting from the ruins of Tripoli or the war zones of Benghazi showing what really resulted from our ‘noble’ mission there. The allies flew away from the pandemonium they created and declared victory. Since then, there have been precious few stories or pictures to say otherwise. Which may be why Stephen Harper — who has been a thundering bozo on foreign policy — believes he can go into another senseless war and not worry about paying a political price. Writing in The Guardian, reporter Anjan Sundaram offers a theory to explain our shrinking knowledge, explaining along the way how genocide in the Congo never quite got on the radar of Western editors: “The Western news media are in crisis and are turning their back on their world. We hardly ever notice. Where correspondents were once assigned to a place for years or months, reporters now handle 20 countries each … As the news has receded, so have our minds.” In Canada, our minds have receded to the point where going into this ill-advised, dishonest and unwinnable war looks like the decision of a strong leader — and opposing it the mark of weakness. Paul Godfrey, astride his new empire already, has his shoulder to the public relations wheel. The Liberal caucus votes against the war — and the National Post makes the abstention of one Liberal MP a front-page story on their website.
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 05:52:17 +0000
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