For the most part the media in Canada is finished.
Very lax CRTC rules, very biased free trade agreements, and extremely toothless foreign ownerships rules means that our media for the most part is American owned and always has a pro-corporate, pro-capitalism, anti-worker bias, and anti-socialist policies at play.
It doesn’t matter if the newsroom or the head office has a Canadian street address. If the board of directors and the majority of shareholders are Americans, then the product that they produce is American propaganda.
We don’t have to worry about the Americans launching an invasion to take over Canada, the invasion has been going on since the Mulroney years in the ’80s, some might even say that the invasion started with Dief – the – Thief’s policy of overt American appeasement.
This morning when I logged into the cesspool formerly known as Twitter I caught this tweet from Lynda Steele.
This would be depressing, except Lynda is one of those in the news media that practically ensured the death of local media.
When Lynda was with 980 CKNW her pro-automobile industry / anti-alternative transportation biases were on full display. But I guess that she was just playing to her audience. The only place I’ve ever seen people listen to AM radio is in the car. But Lynda should have realized that the days of AM radio are coming to an end. Even FM radio isn’t far behind.
I stopped listening to radio back in the early ’00s when Rock 101 was blitzing the airwaves with that Spence Shriek commercial.
MP3 players made portable music that much easier to obtain and they totally negated my need for a radio. More importantly I never had to listen to that insistent Spence Shriek or annoying crap like it again.
People in general don’t like biases in their news, and people are fairly decent at detecting biases.
During the Covid-19 lockdown, the previous park board and city council agreed to install a bicycle lane in Stanley Park that would separate the bicycle riders from the pedestrians on the seawall thus allowing the pedestrians on the seawall to distance themselves by spreading across the walking path and the bicycle path and allowing the bicycle riders to continue using the park.
Now, I don’t think we’ll ever know the truth about what happened at CKNW, but to hear Lynda describe it lycra clad MAMILs were dragging the disabled out of their vehicles and euthanizing them at the main entrance to the park. The elderly were no longer able to drive to the park. Traffic in the park was now forced to drive at the posted speed limit. Car drivers were now forced to sit behind the horse drawn carriage tours and left to contemplate the meaningless existence of being a horse pulling tourists around and around in a loop.
In reality, there were only three groups of people upset at the bicycle lanes.
Car drivers using the park to avoid north bound traffic jams on the Stanley Park causeway. Car drivers using the park to avoid the downtown core by rat racing through the park to get to Beach Ave thus avoiding West Georgia, Burrard, and Howe.
And the most important group of all, the tour bus operators. There is a metric shit ton of money made in fares and tips from tourists that come to town on the cruise ships and want to go see “World Famous Stanley Park”. And no doubt there is some form of benefit to the tour bus operators when they deliver fresh cattle to the two “major” tourist attractions in the park.
The bicycle lanes made it impossible for tour busses to fit back in to the park. Because park drive was meant to meander through the park it has some tight bends. With the concrete barriers running through the park it would have been impossible for a full size tour bus to navigate.
Under an outrage that was practically stoked by the media Vancouver got a populist mayor elected with support from just over 18% of eligible voters.
The first thing Qatari Ken did when elected was to jump on an airplane to go watch a soccer game in Qatar. Hence why I call him Qatari Ken.
Ken’s plan was to rip out all of the bicycle lanes in the park to allow the “disabled and elderly” park users to get back into the park. Ken got as far as tearing out the lanes expect for the eastern Beach Avenue exit. The problem that Lynda and Qatari Ken didn’t account for was the public uproar that resulted from the removal of the bicycle lanes in the park.
It never was about the “elderly and disabled”. If it were then Qatari Ken and Lynda would have been pressing for a “community shuttle bus” that would stop at all of the hospitals, senior homes, assisted living homes, and other care facilities in order to give ALL disabled persons and elderly persons the ability to visit the park, especially those without families or those without the means to travel.
No, what it was all about was Qatari Ken riding a wave of populism in to the Mayor’s office to ensure that the interests of a select few business owners were looked after.
Both Lynda and Qatari Ken had been buoyed in their anti-bicycle / anti-alternate transportation biases because of the dynamics of the echo chamber. Lynda’s audience was only car drivers basically. So when Jim-Bob-Joe called in from Abbotsford to say that he’s never coming back to Stanley Park because the City of Vancouver has gone woke with bicycles, that’s what she heard.
The truth is there’s far more daily traffic from bicycle riders and roller bladers in the park than there is from actual park using car drivers.
But, I digress.
My beef with the media comes from the fact that not one single local news media outlet has dare look into historical child sexual abuse on bases that used to be located within city limits.
Does Lynda believe that no children were ever sexually abused on Canadian Forces Base Jericho in Vancouver during the days when both the 3-year-time-bar and the Summary Investigation flaw were in effect?
After report after report of the failure of the military justice system looking into sexual abuse of adults, isn’t Lynda and the rest of her cohorts curious in the slightest about the sexual abuse of children living on the same bases?
Isn’t Lynda, as a reporter, curious about the fact that children who lived on Canadian Forces Bases prior to 1998 don’t have the same rights that their civilian counterparts had?
When West End MP Hedy Fry said that she was not going to look into the matter of child sexual abuse on the Canadian Armed Forces bases in Canada because there were no bases in the West End even though I had lived in the West End since 1992, isn’t this “local news”? Isn’t it news worthy when a sitting MP says that a person can only get justice for military child sexual abuse if they live in a riding with a military base?
Is Canadian Forces Base Jericho not “local”?
Yes, fine, I get it. Lynda had no control over what stories she was allowed to cover and report on when she was at CKNW. CKNW survives on automobile advertising and its listenership is comprised of people stuck in cars. Therefore bicycles are a commie plot to steal your freedomobile away from you and force you to ride a bicycle.
Reporting on a story that would cause the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces a severe amount of negative publicity is something that corporate would have frowned upon as many of the owners are well connected and don’t want to be seen as pissing on the troops.
In the end, with the exception of just a few persons in the media, if the average “journalist” wants a paycheque they have to conduct the reporting that corporate dictates. But these “journalists” shouldn’t be surprised in the end when being a corporate puppet just means that the profession that they were a part of becomes a relic of the past.
And so far the “alternative media” is no better than the corporate media.
Beeshive 