Where do you get your real news? Canadians can still turn to the impoverished Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Canadian Press Services and its Broadcast News are sadly reduced versions of a trusted past. Television and radio are more and more faceless conglomerates while newspaper empires crumble. All news media are in a rear-guard action as the Internet encroaches on their audiences.
Good grief, you are not reading this blog for news are you? Sorry, all you get from blogs are opinions.
The blogger who posits his or her opinion as news is misleading you. It is like suggesting that Fox News in the United States is free of bias or that Calgary-based Shaw’s Global Television in Canada does not favour pipelines. And how do you like having Canada’s largest television network CTV under the control of Bell Canada?
It is when you consider the madness of Canada’s media situation that you begin to understand the slippery downhill slope that traditional media are on. Why are they letting the Internet take over? Has print media just become another version of a Pokémon Monster? Is print media going to move on mass to the Internet with the confused public?
Are we expecting people with their cellphone cameras to replace professional news coverage? Are pseudo media such Huffington Post taking over with what seems to be a mixed offering of social media blogs and news networks? Where is the line between fact and fiction? How can readers have any trust?
All we know is that daily papers are thinner and thinner as the advertising moves to buy the viewers of television and identified audiences on the social media of the Internet.
Meanwhile we are time-shifting the TV shows we might watch while using live broadcast for breaking news and our favourite sports? And only a spendthrift would waste the extra money on sports packages that you might or might not watch. You are better off watching those occasional interests at a sports bar.
We knew this was coming in 1976 when we saw the Hollywood movie Network and we agreed that we should all be mad as hell and not take it anymore. It showed us that television news was no longer news but repetitious clips of entertainment designed to promote the network’s commercial laden programs for the lowest common denominators of society.
And people wonder why someone such as that disgusting Donald Trump can develop a following. Do we have any media left that we can trust?
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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