Everything about life I learned from The Flintstones. .Well that’s a heckuva way to open a column, but it came to mind after reading the thoughts of former CBC News executive Sue Gardner, who testified before a House of Commons committee on how she would rate Canadian journalism. .“I’d like to ask you about the state of journalism in this country as you see it,” asked MP Kevin Waugh (CPC-Saskatoon-Grasswood, SK).“It’s appalling,” replied Gardner. “It’s terrible. I don’t think anyone is arguing differently.” .Well, there’s a moment in one of the early Flintstones episodes where Fred and Barney take off for the evening to visit a jazz nightclub headlined by “Hotlips Hannigan.” The aging trumpeter is used to the adulation of younger crowd who see him as seething sex appeal. But when he tries to charm Wilma and Betty, he is knocked on the head with a purse and called an “old goat.” Hotlips responds to the television audience: “Every now and then, a moment of truth.” .Well, we had such a moment from Gardner who spared little of her wrath on the contemporary press in Canada. .“I had lived outside Canada for 11 years and I returned about a year and-a-half ago,” said Gardner, who left CBC management in 2007.“The Globe & Mail is a brochure now. The institutions, even the ones that still exist, are hollowed out versions of their former selves. They’re memories of what they used to be.” .Gardner was in town to talk about Bill C-18, the Online News Act, that would force Google and Facebook to fund corporate media with social media ad revenue through linked stories. That would add up to about $329.2 million a year, by the Parliamentary Budget Office's estimate. .Bill C-18 “is a very bad bill,” said Gardner. “Google and Facebook out-innovated the business side of the news industry and that's not a fairness issue, it’s not a moral issue, it doesn’t make them a villain,” she said. .“If you imagine it’s the 1920s, I make buggy whips and you make cars and Bill C-18 is the government saying you need to give me money forever because nobody is buying my buggy whips,” said Gardner. .Well, let me say it’s not the size of the Globe & Mail that worries me, or the deaths of so many print media. It’s not just that the media is terrible: It’s because it's terribly sycophantic.Perhaps more than any other event, the Freedom Convoy protest in downtown Ottawa pulled the curtain back on the Canadian legacy media’s sycophantic behaviour. Things that unfolded on livestreams through YouTube, Facebook and other social media were entirely the opposite of the government talking points 'reported' by the media or shall we say, regurgitated every day during the protests. From what I saw in Ottawa during the time that the Freedom Convoy was there, the mainstream media did not come out of their buildings on Sparks and Wellington streets. Perhaps it was too cold, or they were afraid to get on the ground and interview the working-class people who were protesting, to find out what it was about.Or perhaps the government subsidies were clouding the conscience of Canada’s fourth and fifth estates. Why else would the collective corporate media in Ottawa 'report' the grandmothers, families, and children who were on the street in front of them were “racist,” “violent,” “dangerous,” and a “fringe minority?”Now, from Emergencies Inquiry testimony this week, we know the spin was in for the truckers before they even arrived in Ottawa, when the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) told Public Safety Minister Mendicino’s office that they wanted him to talk about the truckers being “extreme.” Days later, Prime Minister Trudeau came out with his infamous “fringe minority” and other divisive Tweets condemning the Freedom Convoy’s “antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days. Together, let’s keep working to make Canada more inclusive.”Pure spin by Ottawa’s political elites, all of it. Yet, Ottawa’s legacy media in Ottawa bought the spin and chose to run with whatever the federal government or the police gave them, without questioning anything. No investigation, or even curiosity. As trucker Chris Barber with the Freedom Convoy said to the Emergencies Act Inquiry this week, “People came up to me and said they had to come down and see it for themselves because the media wasn’t portraying it properly. And it was a different thing when they got here.”And on the last day, after the Emergencies Act was invoked and when the police got nasty, so-called reporters literally reported from behind the lines, still regurgitating whatever they were told instead of what they were seeing with their own eyes. Canada’s national press corp even got into spats with the American journalists from the New York Times who were reporting what they saw happening. And the New York Times also had a different take when their editorial board agreed with the truckers right to protest" “Peaceful protest is a necessary release valve for pandemic fatigue and frustration.” International media then, and not just Fox News, had an entirely different story and perspective than what was shown by CBC and every other news station every day and night in Canada.Trudeau bought off all the legacy media by subsidizing their operations. Meanwhile, taxpayers are still footing the bill for the CBC to the tune of $1.2 billion. And it is continuing to grow with its tentacles reaching into spinoff networks and social media. But it still wants a piece of everybody else’s social media pie. .Canadian media is terrible because there is no cable news network like Fox News south of the border to generate stories the liberal media refuses to cover. Are CBC, CTV or Global News telling you the truth? How apt are they to really criticize the Trudeau government when he's paying their bills?.Thank God for alternative media, like the one you're reading right now. The Western Standard covers news the old fashioned way — without help from the state. It calls them as it sees them. .So yes, there’s a lot that’s terrible about the media in Canada today. But you know what? It’s getting better and the state isn’t going to tell this media outlet how to cover the news or how to avoid telling Justin Trudeau that he’s also running a terrible government.
