A New Year
When journalists become government propagandists, we need to turn them off, tune them out - and defund them now.
Hello 2023!
A New Year is beginning, but the problems that came into focus last year are still with us. When I chatted with photographer Luc Cherubino, he told me about heading back to his hotel room after spending hours outdoors in the Ottawa cold with his cameras.
While he selected, edited, and uploaded a new batch of Freedom Convoy photos to the Internet, he’d have the television on in the background. The media’s description of the trucker protest, he says, was so inaccurate he’d think to himself:
But I was just standing there. What are you talking about? That’s not true.
I’ve heard this story numerous times. It seems that anyone who actually visited Ottawa during those three weeks returned home with their view of the mainstream media forever altered. (See, for example, the experience of this young francophone woman.)
Journalists are supposed to be guard dogs, not government lap dogs. We’re supposed to hold politicians, bureaucrats, and corporations to account. We’re supposed to defend the public from malice, incompetence, corruption, predation, and overreach. We’re supposed to stand up for the little guy - not smear the little guy by amplifying insults hurled at him by the Prime Minister.
If none of those things happen anymore, then the media is no longer serving its intended purpose. A line has been crossed. The old model has been abandoned.
Which means no more public money. (Over $1 billion in taxpayer dollars is spent each year on the CBC alone). Which means most media outlets deserve none of our precious time and attention.
Rather than helping us make independent, informed judgments about current affairs, lapdog journalists feed us a line. They scold and scorn us. As though we’re wayward children. Who must be browbeaten and bullied into compliance.
Who do these people think they are?
It’s one thing to know all of the above, it’s another thing to act accordingly in our daily lives. We need a complete rethink.
Canadians have the power to turn off the television. We have the power to cancel subscriptions to newspapers that feed us narratives rather than actual news. It’s time to jettison outdated, romantic notions. The CBC is not a benign national institution. It might have been that once, but these days it’s a full-fledged propaganda machine that smothers rather than fosters genuine democratic debate.
We must demand - loudly and frequently - that its funding vanish. All of it. Yesterday.
I never thought I’d find myself writing these words, but much of the media is now our enemy. No other conclusion is possible. The public trust has been betrayed. We have all been betrayed.
We need to be cool and clear-eyed about this. The situation in which we find ourselves is serious. ‘Defund the CBC’ needs to become the slogan of 2023.
I started out thinking that these wonderful photos tell us about the protest and the politicians and journalists employed no photographs of videos documenting their accusations. Is it possible those harmed by the government actions could form a group litigation that would require the defense to provide evidence of the illegal activities and rebut the story Donna has shown us?
I might have shared this before, but it applies so much to this post. My one minute video slide show where my dogs get it.
https://rumble.com/vqzn2r-canadas-media-bought-and-paid-for.html?mref=6zof&mrefc=2
Happy new year, and Thanks Donna for all your hard work. I have been sharing all or nearly all of your posts with my little audience.