Imagine if Canada had journalists like BBC's Eddie Mair here seen grilling London mayor Boris Johnson. Imagine if someone in Canada had the courage to sit down with Sideshow Steve Harper and take him through his own lies and manipulations. It would be hard to get through that in a half hour but it would be delightful.
10 comments:
If only Canada had a population that wanted a free press and one that could read a newspaper. About 40 to 50% of Canadians can't read a newspaper; the percentages vary according to different surveys. In Germany 16% are substandard readers, and Spiegel magazine has fits about it - it's not considered clever to be a poor reader in Germany. In Canada we are uniformly indifferent. Indeed, there is considerable hostility to people who like to read, as I can attest.
If only Canada was not full of people who think that insulting scientists is clever or that reading is antisocial. People who could comprehend a story beyond the lost puppy level, who would find being treated like a three-year-old by the CBC insulting rather than relaxing.
I doubt that all this anti-intellectualism is accidental - it suits the powers that be so well. But it also suits the intellectually lazy and dishonest types that so characterize Canada today.
If only the CBC wold take a couple of lessons from the BBC.
Imagine if that were Rob Ford, Christy Clarke, Peter McKay, and yes, Steve Harper. The kind of stuff Mr Mansbridge ought to be doing in his puff one on one's. Absolutely brilliant journalism.
Yes, if only. Well legitimate journalism in Canada's dominant corporate media cartel has been well and truly tamed. This sort of questioning would probably lead the poor interviewer directly to a teaching job in the journo faculty at some backwater community college, blacklisted for all time.
This clip just shows how far we have fallen in Canada. Imagine Peter Mansbridge asking these kinds of questions? I can't.
Whenever I mention how conservative our media has become, the right screams with laughter and objection. Like most things, the Canada right is simply aping their US counterparts, where the press is a little more evenly spread across the political and ideological spectrum. Can you imagine a Canadian Eddie Mair? Let's face it, it can't happen here. The right is too rich to let that happen.
Plus people like Sun News pundits believe they are doing Mair-like work. But it comes out more like Limbaugh or Breitbart-work. Loud instead of challenging.
If you had a media like that inveterate cowards like the molly coddled clowns that pass for politicians to day wouldn't appear on those shows.
Harper vetted audiences during the last election campaign and had the goons in his protection squad turf them out if they weren't ideologically pure.
@ Godfrey. From my experiences as a working journalist in Ottawa in the early 70s I know that even the mighty PE Trudeau was never spared media confrontation. If anything, he welcomed it. He wouldn't hesitate to defend his policies and would just as readily take on his interrogators. He tested their reason, their logic against his own. Barbara Frum, David's mum, kept trying to sandbag PET in successive, year-end confrontations and he always very, very gently mauled her. Perhaps that's why David went to the Dark Side
Thanks for stopping by and adding your thoughts.
@ harebell. My comments to Godfrey stand here. It is an incident of the rise of corporatist journalism that political leaders are revered as rulers beyond question or challenge.
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