The dog days of summer are actually rooted in the past but today it an excuse for the media to produce some really cornball material. It is as bad on television as it is in newspapers. They all act as though they have nothing to write or talk about. It is getting so bad that one of the two chain newspapers that ill-serve Babel wrote an extensive editorial about its print competition.
Talk about the skillet calling the frying pan black! This is the blunderer complaining about the incompetent. The Torstar publication, a free distribution grocery and furniture store wrap, the one we call Babel Backward, ran an editorial by Torstar Chairman John Honderich. Entitled Accountable to no one, the editorial complains bitterly about Sun Media, owner of the Barrie Examiner, quitting the Ontario Press Council.
The Ontario Press Council is near and dear to the Toronto Star which helped create the Council. It has made Torstar look good over the years while other people get to arbitrate when someone claims to have been wronged by the publication. It cuts down on cost of lawyers to handle the law suits and usually resolves any incorrect utterance with a deep and moving apology. And who cares?
Sun Media, the print media accumulation of Pierre-Karl Péladeau’s integrated media empire, has dumped all links to other media through such cooperatives as Canadian Press and the Canadian Newspaper Association. It was very amusing to hear that one of Péladeau’s executive’s accused the Ontario Press Council of being ‘Politically Correct.’ It is hard to imagine Péladeau understanding what that term means. It certainly does not apply to his flagship newspapers Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec—publications that could make Rupert Murdoch blush!
What Péladeau is creating across his media empire is best described as editorial anarchy. Conrad Black, no matter how much we hated him, at least brought a level of discipline to the newsrooms when he owned newspapers. Talking to one of the few real reporters at the Sun Media outlet in Babel, we once remarked that the Canadian Press Style Book had stopped spelling a farmer’s plow or a snowplow as ‘plough’ more than 50 years ago. He laughed and told us that the publisher did not care and the reporter liked spelling it the old way. ‘So there!’
John Honderich should try to read some of the sorry excuses for newspapers that Torstar produces across Ontario. The newspaper industry is not dying because of the evolution of electronic media but because of the greed and uncaring attitude of the Canadian newspaper industry’s corporate ownership.
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