Watching Global television news from Toronto the other day brought on a profound dismay with what many people consider as news. There are people who never read a newspaper or news magazine. They have never learned to discern opinion from news. And it appears that neither has Global Television.
In years gone by we expected our news sources to ensure balance to their stories but that costs time and money. Even the vaunted CBC news has succumbed but at least they now fill their news time slots with opinion by people with strong and studied opinions to share. And the CBC also labels it as opinion. The other television networks do not seem to know the difference.
We are hardly letting CTV off the hook here. We were fugitives from Channel 9 News in Toronto. What finally tore us away from the station was not the inside jokes among the on-air staff or the repetition of news stories and shallow coverage, it was the insufferable promotion of other CTV programs. Hollywood blather is not news. Sports news does not have to be covered by people who pretend they never completed grade school.
And as a writer of political commentaries, we care very much that people should get unbiased news coverage. We all recognize that it is very difficult to hide your bias on a news story but there you have to be seen as being fair. The best we have ever worked with is national affairs reporter Tom Clark of Global. We cannot point to a single incidence of biased reporting from him. It is obvious that the Prime Minister’s Office does not trust him but that is probably the best measure of his fairness. The PMO only likes reporters who do what they are told.
One of the worst examples we have seen of biased reporting on Global was a clip the other day by reporter Mark McAllister about the planned expansion at Woodbine Entertainment in Toronto. The reporter started out telling us that Global had studied the situation and found that there was a tendency for people with a gambling problem to live near a place where you can gamble. (That is about as profound as they get!) McAllister tells us that the Ontario government is addicted to gambling and is creating problem gambling. McAllister even had a spokesperson from Addiction and Mental Health to warn us of the dangers. There must have been a point to this but it seemed to have been ‘left on the cutting room floor.’
It would have been no surprise that when James Robert Shaw started his local cable business in Calgary back in the 1960s people would have thought he was crazy to take such a gamble. Luckily there was no intervention and JR Shaw’s little cable company (which now owns Global Television) is doing just fine today, thank you. It is just too bad it does not have higher standards.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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