What the heck is going on with CBC radio? : CBC_Radio - "It seems the majority of cbc radio one programming is centered around identity politics. In addition the editorial shows are so mindlessly focused on left ideology they aren’t substantive. For example, all Tom Power wants to do is ask about his guests oppression dragging them there whether they want to go or not. Or take Ali Hassan’s comedy show which seems to feature the latest trans / lesbian / black / pick one person who could find there way to a microphone, self identify as a comedian and spew annoying word salad anecdotes with no punch line. I. Can’t. Find. The jokes. Wen jokes? Or the because news show. It’s like a panel of unfunny losers trying to outdo each other in how snide they can be of anything slightly right of center that occurred in the world. Or the show that features only native musicians, it’s called unreserved I think? Unfortunately they mostly play bad nicklebackesque rock and roll of little to no cultural value. I don’t mind that it features native musicians. I mind that the music is mostly embarrassingly bad. This is just a short list ( and I don’t intend this as a takedown - I used to love the cbc!!) if it’s quirks and quarks, or under the influence, or black coat white art, or as it happens it’s usually a decent listen. But I swear to god is rather have shad back on than most of this shite. 50% of the time I get so annoyed I have to turn it off with a slight headache and / or bad mood."
LILLEY: Journalists now lecture us, contributing to the lack of trust in media - "A poll commissioned by the federal government found that just 32.5% trust the media in this country “to make decisions in the best interests of the public.” As traditional media outlets continue to lose audience share, it might be worth asking why people are tuning us out or losing trust. Far too often, it’s that people think we have an agenda and increasingly, people who think that would be correct. Look at the furor over Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s gender policy. Most media coverage would have you thinking this was incredibly controversial, that it was only supported by a small fraction of the public. Instead, the opposite is true, and we’ve known that for months now. Last May, before this topic began dominating headlines, Leger conducted a poll that found 57% agreed with the idea that parents should be informed before a student changed their name or pronouns at school. When New Brunswick announced that they would adopt that policy in June, the media coverage was widespread and highly negative against the idea and Premier Blaine Higgs. Yet in July, an Angus Reid poll conducted in the middle of the controversy found that 78% agreed with the policy and just 14% opposed it. Still, most media outlets ignored that poll while portraying the issue as if it were the opposite, that those on side with what premiers in Alberta, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick have done are the small group of radicals. In essence, the media is lecturing the public, telling them that something the vast majority agree with is controversial. No, it’s not. It’s decidedly mainstream, with the majority in every demographic group and those supporting every party backing it. Sometimes it feels like the 14% opposed to this policy are all in the media or working for Justin Trudeau. On Wednesday morning, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was asked repeatedly if he agreed with Smith’s plan to ban puberty blockers for kids under 15. They were not just questions, though, they were accusations with the full implication that it was wrong to ban strong hormone therapy from being administered to young children. “For minors?” Poilievre asked. “Irreversible?” “I think we should protect children and their ability to make adult decisions when they are adults.” While it’s a totally rational position to most of the country, in the rarefied air of Parliament Hill, amongst our media, this is the wrong position, and they will tell you that. And not just the columnists and opinion writers like me, the people who are the straight-up news writers will do the same. As TVO’s Steve Paikin recently said in a podcast episode with The Hub, objectivity is too often something that is absent in journalism now, especially with younger journalists. Harrison Lowman wrote a long piece for The Hub on how much journalism is changing, especially with reporters seeking to put forward their own social justice agenda in every story."
If you disagree with the liberal agenda, you are a dangerous far right extremist
LILLEY: Canada's biased media do themselves no favours with Poilievre - "We’ve all seen the video by now of Poilievre munching on an apple in the Okanagan as a journalist tried to vaguely, and without proof, claim that the Conservative leader was just like Donald Trump. “Which people would say that?” Poilievre asked, as he was accused of being like Trump. The journalist fumbled, couldn’t answer and fell apart on camera. It’s a real problem in this country that news reporters, as opposed to opinion columnists like me, show up with their minds already set on what the truth is on an issue. They show up not to ask questions and find the truth, but to ask questions which back up their pre-determined narrative. Mostly these days, that narrative is that Poilievre is evil, unCanadian, far-right or whatever latest talking point the Liberals are pushing."
Journalism schools are failing a generation of students - The Hub - "TVO’s The Agenda host Steve Paikin said the freshest crop of Canadian journalists had a much weaker devotion to objectivity than their predecessors. Hub editor-at-large Sean Speer asked Paikin whether he had “observed any fault lines or tensions [around objectivity] with the new generation of journalists.” “Yes,” said Paikin. “This was a major fault line nowadays with the new journalism,” he confessed. This was big. One of the most well-known and respected impartial journalists in Canada was pointing out something my colleagues and I at CBC, CTV, and a variety of other outlets had whispered about over late-night beers for years... "I believe there are many younger people nowadays who, because they have been taught this way in journalism schools, believe not only is it their job to figure out which is the best party that ought to govern, but then [to] tailor their coverage accordingly to ensure that the party that they don’t like runs into the roughest time…I think it’s a big problem.” He went on to add that, as an “old school” journalist, he saw his job as reporting the “objective” facts on the ground. The reader needed to be allowed “to come to his own conclusion.” Cue online Canadian journalist outrage... Bubbles burst in newsrooms across the nation. The consensus seemed to be that we should dismiss this sort of critique in its entirety. Nothing to see here. Everything is fine. Move along... journalism schools are now developing and encouraging almost exclusively left-wing storytellers, who are most comfortable with progressive storylines, and who often question the value of objectivity. And, at the end of the day, isn’t that almost as bad for Canadian democracy? I have had the privilege of mentoring countless journalism school students and interns for the last ten years, so I have had a front-row seat for this shift in journalistic thinking. I have watched, in real-time, how a new generation of journalists has changed the reasoning around what the purpose of journalism is, whether objectivity matters, and what constitutes a good story. Five or so years ago I started noticing that nearly every pitch that came out of their mouths fell within the “social justice” realm. More specifically, pitches were from the new progressive and increasingly orthodox and illiberal perspective. They dealt with various conditions of victimhood, that were not to be questioned but emblazoned on the banner of universal justice. This is not to say that some of these stories didn’t deserve to be told. They should make up a slice of the journalistic story pie. But…the whole pie? Stories increasingly fit a mold of “_______ group felt hurt by _______. Here is their story.” Their coverage increasingly prioritized “lived experiences” over expertise, and “first-person accounts” instead of data. The job was sometimes seen as a way to upend power structures. Truths multiplied. Stories about members of a community could only be told by members of that community. Interns and students were at a loss when it came to finding right-leaning sources. It was rare, if ever, that they suggested a debate-style program. Many weren’t checking their biases at the door. It seemed that some believed it was their job to tell their audience what was wrong, who was in the wrong, and what needed to be done about it, rather than allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions. What I could not determine was how much of this was caused by a new generation that saw the world differently, or a new kind of journalism professor in front of the chalkboard. Or whether it was both... This group also challenged the idea of journalistic objectivity, which they claimed was an idea invented by “white, straight, cis-male journalists.” Among their list of requirements, the signatories called for all staff to undergo repeated anti-bias and critical race theory training. They also demanded the journalism school start surveying the race of journalism students. How did the adult faculty, composed of veteran journalists, respond to this call for major reform? They endorsed it... the faculty expressed how much they valued “lived experience.” For a school that once taught me to use simple everyday language, they were certainly not practicing what they preached in their press releases. A handful of the changes made sense. Of course the faculty should attract more diverse instructors. Of course minority voices have sometimes been ignored or misrepresented in Canadian reporting. Of course journalism students should be obligated to take a course on reporting on Indigenous Peoples. Of course there should be financial support for racialized students who are struggling financially. But you can call out racism and promote diversity without doing it entirely through the lens of the new identity politics. Politics is the keyword here. Approaches like those referenced above are inherently political. They are regularly and exclusively employed by left-wing thinkers and left-wing political parties... As journalist and podcaster Tara Henley summarized on our Hubs Dialogue podcast last week, “This thinking has dominated the media…It is presented as a moral imperative. ‘If you are a decent person this is how you should think about the world.’ It is not presented as an ideology…[But] this is a political ideology and we are politicizing content.” In sum, these schools act like they have cornered the moral market. They end up producing young journalists who struggle to understand or appreciate any competition to the progressive worldview. This “new journalism” education means students are often not ready to practice their trade in the real world. Yesterday, I spoke with a senior CBC host, who asked to remain anonymous. “The reality is [student] journalists are coming into the workspace not fully understanding the fundamentals of journalism,” they said. “Activism has crept into their journalism. Thankfully vetting and editing by more seasoned staff catch a bunch of it. But it’s there.”A CTV journalist, also wishing to remain anonymous, recently described it to me this way, “Younger journalists entering newsrooms are often more committed to sticking to their own idealism, than considering a story from every angle,” she said. “They have practised technical skills, but lack news judgement, perspective and are unprepared to be challenged, or to challenge their own assumptions. The result is stories and news copy that lacks critical context or meaningful insight.”... the message sent to journalism students who consider “right-wing” topics or perspectives is that their kind of thinking is not welcome, and even more troubling, not morally right."
Media bias is a myth, of course. If you disagree with the left, you're just not a decent human being
Objectivity: What Journalists Hate but the Public Still Craves - "Bari Weiss had been recruited to help the New York Times try to reconnect its commentary with mainstream America. Weiss had been taught that “journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history,” i.e., were fundamentally reporters who needed to seek and tell the truth as accurately as they could. The Times news staff evidently had other ideas, for Weiss was systematically smeared as a bigot, racist and Nazi by members of her own newsroom, who succeeded in hounding her out of her job... when National Post opinion columnist Rex Murphy two years ago (at the height of the U.S. riots following the police murder of George Floyd) ventured the opinion that the vast majority of Canadians are horrified by racism and that Canada is not a fundamentally racist country, the paper’s news staff rebelled and demanded that Murphy – whose job it is to express his opinion – be fired. An email signed by more than half the newsroom denounced the publication of Murphy’s column as “lazy, ignorant, and dehumanizing to Black and Indigenous peoples.” Murphy kept his job, but at the price of a grovelling confession of error by the paper’s editor that remains atop the offending column to this day, along with links to columns about racism written by others and suggested by the editor as more suitable. Then there’s the case of Wendy Mesley, formerly of the CBC and certainly not known for unfashionable views. Just over two years ago Mesley quoted an infamous book title containing a single bad word at two internal meetings of ostensibly hardened and detached professionals, only to discover she had offended the dignity of her fellow human beings and traumatized at least one with her insensitivity. This colleague ratted Mesley out to senior management, claiming she had been made “to feel unseen, unheard & unsafe.” And that was the end of Mesley’s 40-year broadcast career. News organizations overflowing with agenda-driven employees intent on publicizing their own opinions while suppressing or ejecting anyone guilty, in Weiss’s words, of “Wrongthink,” have proliferated across North America. The Washington Post, for example, has had to battle its own reporters over their social media activism. Staff at National Public Radio, the U.S.’s federally funded, not-for-profit network, demanded and last year received the right to participate in demonstrations and voice political opinions in public. And now, the establishment walls of the Toronto Globe & Mail have been officially breached as well. The Globe was perhaps Canada’s last major media outlet still attempting to restrain its reporters from expressing their personal opinions online, and it remained capable of generating some great news reports... Yet now this celebrated newspaper with its 178-year history is officially and deliberately banishing journalistic objectivity from its “democratic mission, principles and practices”... The traditional news media’s abandonment of objectivity en masse comes during a time when public trust in the media and other institutions has been eroding seriously. It coincides with and perhaps is part of a broader trend of elites and institutions increasingly doing what they please without regard to public opinion...nowadays, the public conversation seems always to be driven in one direction – whether by the news media, academia, culture, government or, now, even our courts... increasing numbers of reporters are, like Wagner, fearlessly hanging their opinions out there. Rachel Gilmore of Global News has achieved celebrity in that regard. Very active on Twitter, she worked to uncover a link between last winter’s protests/border blockades and white nationalists. And when she discovered that Conservative Party of Canada leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre once walked with a guy who was interviewed by a guy who knew a guy who talked to a couple of guys with far from progressive views, Gilmore joined the dots and – “gobsmacked” – demanded an explanation. Boy did she get one. “Unprofessional journalists like you try to set disingenuous traps to attack your opponents,” Team Poilievre replied. “No wonder trust in the media is at an all-time low…Your tactic seems to demand Mr. Poilievre answer for all the words and deeds of not just everyone he has ever met but everyone they have ever met. That amounts to guilt by multiple degrees of separation.” This solicited a predictable (by today’s standards) response from the Coalition for Women in Journalism, which condemned “these tactics to silence journalists”... using dodgy logic and dubious reasoning to attack a politician whose views the journalist doesn’t share is all in a legitimate day’s work, but defending oneself against such attacks is a “tactic” intended to “silence” journalist... “Around two thirds of Canadians believe journalists and reporters (61%) and business leaders (60%) are purposely trying to mislead them, with government not far behind (58%),” states the 2022 Trust Barometer for Canada by Edelman, an international communications company that studies and reports annually on public trust around the world. The mistrust level for reporters, Edelman found, was up by 12 points year-over-year, as it was for the “leaders in government” category. Government leadership, according to Edelman, is considered to be chiefly divisive by 45 percent of Canadians. The media, at 44 percent, are rated as having an equally fractious impact. Not a good look for an industry that is willfully abandoning time-tested standards. South of the border, the situation is even more dire... One wonders whether news editors are unaware of what the public expects of the news media, or whether they know perfectly well but are so absorbed in their own virtue that they just don’t care. News consumers don’t expect reporters to be bereft of personal beliefs. They just don’t want to hear them or have them distort the news, no matter how much journalists feel the need to put themselves at centre stage, often in heroic poses. And pretty much everyone in newsrooms seems to have forgotten that the concept of objectivity was not intended to insist or pretend that individual journalists be without biases. Quite the opposite... The intriguing evolution of certain non-traditional media outlets suggests there is still a market for real news... The Western Standard... recently made a move that might shock activist reporters building their social media profiles: it has explicitly and visibly separated news from opinion. And keep in mind that the Standard and similar sites like True North are for-profit operations that, unlike most news organizations these days, eschew government subsidy. If there was no business case for straight news reporting – i.e., demand from consumers – it’s unlikely these publications would invest in changing their content balance from (generally cheap) opinion to (almost-always-expensive) news."
Criticising journalists means you're a fascist. Unless you're criticising the "right wing" press, of course
The (one hundred) million dollar question: What is a journalist? - "The best part about the RCMP’s recent street mugging of David (aka the Menzoid) Menzies was neither the uproar over the arrest nor the boost it provided to Rebel News’ bottom line. Nope. The really giggly, wincey, cringeworthy part was the huffy offence taken by so many in the legacy media after Menzies was referred to as one of them—a journalist—and by no less an influencer than the leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition... all ensured no linkage between Menzies and the J-word, a metier to which media may assign a higher social rank than the one assumed by the public... The pride of Rebel News was then handcuffed and driven from the scene only to be quickly released without charge. Many were outraged. But there was also a cohort that justified it all because Menzies, they said, is not a “real journalist.” Some went so far as to suggest the formation of some sort of accreditation body to decide who should be deemed qualified to report on current affairs. None seemed to realize the government has already appointed one, albeit to determine who qualifies for its loot. These displays of ill-informed hubris were not well-received by many independents practicing freedom of the press without government approval as qualified Canadian journalism organizations. “Mainstream media is arrogant enough to define who is a journalist while their audience shrinks to nothing while alternative media like Rebel and Western Standard explode,” grumbled a former newspaper colleague now enjoying success as an unaligned online reporter. “Many journalists now working with so-called alternative media have way more experience in the industry than those working now in the dying mainstream.” Let’s be clear: journalism is not a profession. Read it again. Journalism is not a profession. It is a trade, or a craft, requiring no more than two semesters of post-secondary study followed by years of apprenticeship. Yes, universities may have turned it into an over-priced paper chase but a quick look at most courses makes it clear a profound intellect is not a prerequisite. The greatest skill traditionally required (and it is one often abandoned due to its difficulty) involves the ability to set aside one’s own biases, eschew all assumptions, and produce truly objective work that explores all sides of issues and events. These days, though, not everyone subscribes to that, which means we have two very broad classes of news organizations. One is composed of those who aspire to tell stories through the lens of objectivity. For them, the pursuit of journalism is an end in itself. It is also the practice in greatest alignment with what most reader surveys indicate is how the public wishes to be served. I call these people journalists because they toil thanklessly to reveal truths that challenge preconceptions and leave decisions concerning what to think about matters up to the reader/viewer/listener. The other is best described as agenda journalism. Those involved in this far more romantic sphere tend to see journalism as the means towards an end, whether it be social justice, free markets, environmentalism, or Palestine—pick a cause and there’s a crusader at the ready, laptop and camera in hand. I call these people storytellers. They certainly have their fans, many of whom believe them to be true journalists because they show them the world through a lens they find agreeable... were it not for the fact Canada’s media are currently squabbling over who gets what funds provided by the government, it would be difficult to understand why it matters who gets to be called a journalist. Herein lies the inherent challenge of government intervention in the news media. If the sector was left to market forces, then consumers would decide who and what constitutes journalism. But as soon as the government established its policy regime to support the sector, it needed to set parameters to determine eligibility. It needed, in other words, to put itself directly in the business of adjudicating who is a journalist. The Menzies episode (including the mainstream media reaction) demonstrates why this is such a bad idea. Whether the entrenched players like it or not, surely a journalist is anyone with the capability and inclination to uncover and honestly distribute the news, information, and stories the public has a right to know. Little wonder those begging loudest for seats in the financial lifeboats are the ones most desperate to declare their virtue and lay exclusive claim to the title."
Why You Should Think About Shouting Fire In A Crowded Theater - "It seems every age has their challenge to free speech. The modern-day iteration of censorship now is called cancel culture by many. We live in a country where the First Amendment grants us the right to free speech, however, it’s often challenged. The usual reason for silencing a type of speech is the damage it can do. Can what you say either wound, harm, or cause others to do something terrible? Whenever one of these arguments breaks out, you’ll likely hear the “fire in a crowded theater” line. It’s a quick way to purvey certain speech as dangerous in the United States. But have you ever wondered where this comes from? Its origin is from a court case more than 100 years ago. The statement was written by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and used in a way to say all speech isn’t acceptable or permitted. But the case wasn’t about a fire. Furthermore, the language being challenged was far from the danger Holmes indicated. The case involved the Court sentencing a man to 10 years in prison for protesting World War I with a pamphlet explaining it was unconstitutional. This was the unacceptable speech; it was the fire in the crowded theater. In his article on the free speech forum Popehat, writer Ken White refers to the theater statement as: “the most famous and pervasive lazy cheat in American dialogue about free speech.” Furthermore in his article in the Atlantic, free speech writer Trever Tim refers to the overall case as “one of the most odious free speech decisions in the Court’s history”. Tim also reminds us, this statement itself was never part of established law. It’s what’s called a “dictum”. It has no legally enforced authority. The words are just an explanation of a judge’s decision on a case, not the decision itself. In fact, the more you learn about this simple line, the less appealing it is... Empowered by the Espionage Act, the government began to prosecute those who spoke out against the war. In Schenck vs. United States — the first of these cases argued in front of the Supreme Court in 1919 — a man was sentenced to a long prison term for handing out flyers. According to Trever Tim, the flyers didn’t encourage violence, just challenged the Constitutional right of the United States to impose a draft. However, certain speech wasn’t considered free — dictated by members of the Supreme Court. This is where Holmes issued the dictum on fire in a crowded theater. In a second ruling, Debs vs. United States, socialist Eugene V. Debs had his sentence for 10 years in prison upheld. He was convicted of giving an anti-war speech. In this case, his speech was the fire in the crowded theater. In a third ruling, Frohwerk v. United States, Ken White explains the Court upheld the 10-year sentence of a man running a newspaper who published anti-war views. In this case, the newspaper was the fire in the crowded theater. However, in the next three cases Holmes appears to have changed his mind. White lists dissenting opinions from Holmes mentioning certain speech we find abhorrent isn’t criminal, and defending the accused’s freedom to speak out against the war. So, after some thought, it wasn’t exactly a fire in a crowded theater. By 1920, the group of laws enforcing the Espionage Act were gone and repealed. Tim says by 1969 in Brandenburg v. Ohio any remnants of the Schenck decision were completely overturned... You might think the definition of “fire” is the same in everyone’s lexicon. But as Oliver Wendell Holmes shows, it’s not. Fire may be anti-war speech to some. To others it may be a joke. Some may even see unpopular opinion as the fire in the crowded theater. Even the author of the phrase changed his mind about it within a year. The next time you hear or feel tempted to use the fire in a theater argument, you should keep this in mind. The fire in that very theater may be the next words out of your mouth."
Six reasons why social media is a Bummer - "we are all carrying around devices that are suitable for mass behaviour modification. For example, with old-fashioned advertising, you could measure whether a product did better after an ad was run, but now companies are measuring whether individuals change their behaviours as they browse, and the feeds for each person are constantly tweaked to get the desired result. In short, your behaviour has been turned into a product – and corporate and political clients are lining up to modify it... Some have compared social media to the tobacco industry, but I will not. The better analogy is paint that contains lead. When it became undeniable that lead was harmful, no one declared that houses should never be painted again. Instead, after pressure and legislation, lead-free paints became the new standard...
A is for Attention acquisition
B is for Butting into everyone’s lives
C is for Cramming content down your throat
D is for Directing behaviours in the sneakiest way possible
E is for Earning money from letting the worst people secretly screw with everyone else
F is for Fake mobs and faker society"
Meme - "Way back when I used to play flash games on the internet for hours and think that I would never die. Today flash games no longer exist. And I'm now quite sure of my death. *leper-King Baldwin from Kingdom of Heaven*"
Meme - "Do you kick your pets out of the room when you masturbate? Why or why not?"
"Why would you masturbate if you have pets?"
Meme - "W - Tungsten
H - Hydrogen
Y - Yitrium
Ar - Argon
U - Uranium
Ga - Gallium
Y - Yitrium"
"Why Ar U Gay"
Meme - "I'M TELLING YOU, BUDDY, I SLEEP LIKE A BABY SINCE I GoT THIS MAMMARY FOAM MATTRESS *breasts*"
Christian Heckmann Engelbrecht's answer to How badly was Bruce Lee insulted in 'Once Upon a Time In Hollywood' by Quentin Tarantino? - Quora - "I’m not sure people fully understood that part of the film. We’re being shown this obnoxious Bruce Lee in a flashback told by Brad Pitt’s stuntman character Cliff Booth. Which leaves room to interpret this as an Unreliable Narrator trick, a stuntman who is pissed about the time he was fired from a production. Elsewhere in the film, Cliff Booth is shown as being very lose with the truth anyway. It was pretty clear to me on first viewing that Cliff Booth is just being full of shit, when he talks about the time he bested Bruce fucking Lee. That it’s all bar shit talk. That Tarantino doesn’t just say that to answer people’s criticism about his presentation of Lee, I suspect is because Tarantino usually just let people run with even the wildest theories about his work, ’cause that’s wonderfully inherent to cinema; that if you leave room for it, people can just interpret the baby however they want. There’s an anecdote about a fan coming up to him at some event (Comic Con, book signing, I don’t remember) and babbling at length about how cool it is that there’s a band-aid in the back of Marcellus Wallace’s head in “Pulp Fiction”. ’Cause obviously, the never explained mysterious golden glow in the suitcase that is retrieved by his two henchmen (Sam Jackson and John Travolta) is Wallace’s soul that he has sold to the devil (!). And Wallace obviously has that band-aid back there, because by tradition, the devil pulls his quarry out from the back of your head. After Tarantino has been listening to the fan rearing off all of that, he just goes, “Yeah, that sounds cool, we’ll go with that!” While the real story is that actor Ving Rhames portraying Wallace had a motorcycle accident prior to filming leaving a big unsightly scar back there that the production chose to cover up before filming the back of his head for a few scenes. And years later that spawns these kinds of random fan theories."
The power of literature and literary analysis strikes again!
