The Globe and Mail is reporting that Quebec billionaire Pierre Karl Péladeau has plans to create a new, right-leaning 24-hour cable news channel in Canada modeled on the success of Fox News south of the border. I shouldn’t have to explain how serious this is, or how dangerous. But it’s my blog, so I will.Canadian media today is more concentrated than it’s ever been, with a handful of corporate monopolies controlling virtually everything we see, read or hear. CanWest Global controls Global Television as well as such conservative-leaning national newspapers as the Vancouver Sun, the National Post, and the Ottawa Citizen (essentially Canada’s version of the Washington Post, that paper employs odious chickenhawk David Warren as a regular columnist). The CBC reported in 2004 that CanWest papers had been ordered to change the words in Associated Press stories from “insurgents” and “militants” to “terrorists”, a perfect example of its propensity to embrace conservative memes.
Next up is CTVglobemedia, which includes both the CTV television division and the leading national daily, The Globe and Mail. Broadly “centrist” in their political orientation, these sources offer a fairly conventional pro-business viewpoint.
Finally, there is Quebecor, the communications empire that controls Sun Media, which publishes national tabloids in Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Montreal, etc., as well as local papers like Fort McMurray Today and the London Free Press. It also bought out Osprey Media, which owns the Kingston Whig-Standard, my hometown paper where I briefly worked as an intern in 2009.
Prior to today’s announcement, I knew little of Péladeau’s political leanings, although as the head of a major corporation I could assume that they were broadly conservative. Now that I know this billionaire CEO plans to establish a conservative cable news network in Canada, that fact – as well as Quebecor being the nation’s preeminent tabloid publisher – establishes once and for all his true status: Pierre Karl Péladeau is the Rupert Murdoch of Canada.
The precedent established by Murdoch’s vast media holdings is well-established. Trashy conservative dailies like the New York Post are now a mere sideshow compared to Murdoch’s main contribution in the Slow Death of American Journalism: Fox News, the right-wing propaganda network that has had a devastating effect on public discourse in the United States. The effect of Fox News on the collective American intelligence are well-known by now and the statistics speak for themselves. Substantial numbers of American citizens still believe Saddam Hussein played a role in 9/11, yet the numbers among Fox News viewers are even higher.
Where American media had previously served elite interests primarily by omitting certain stories and playing up others (check Noam Chomsky’s Thought Control in Democratic Societies for an illustration of this phenomenon in the case of Nicaragua during the 1980s), Fox News represented a crossing of the right-wing Rubicon. Despite the ingenious pretense of objectivity via its “fair and balanced” slogan – "How could this be propaganda? They just said they’re fair and balanced! – Fox set a new low for the corporate American press corps, which slavishly followed in its footsteps. The network trafficked in blatant lies, demonization of opponents, skewering of the facts to fit a predetermined narrative, and mindless partisan hackery that, following the election of Barack Obama, rapidly began to descend into subtle and not-so-subtle racism, alarmist pandering to right-wing militia movements, and, in general, the most well-managed, effective, outright dangerous propaganda since the heyday of Joseph Goebbels.
Alongside the deliberate disinformation and fact-challenged demagogues like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, the network also embraced the most shallow elements of standard corporate news and cranked them up to 11. Fox provides a non-stop flow of pneumatic blonde “news babes”, delights in stories centred around sex while its anchors feign outrage, and more than any of its competitors, revels in making itself the story: Bill O’Reilly and Beck regularly document their ongoing controversies with other public figures and replay clips from their own shows. It never occurs to them to ask the question: what about the actual news?
This is not what we need to see in Canada. A conservative cable news channel will only skew public discourse further on terms favourable to wealthy Canadian elites. The intelligence of the public at large will only decline, and it’ll be much harder for us to look down on misinformed Americans when we have our own source of disinformation. Canadian media is already corporate-friendly and “centrist” enough as it is. The CBC, while government-owned, rarely airs controversial stories about the war in Afghanistan. Like CTV or Global, unless faced with an unavoidably tragic story such as the death of a Canadian soldier (always justified as part of our neverending struggle to bring freedom and democracy to the people of Afghanistan), they prefer feel-good stories such as the opening of a Tim Horton’s in Kandahar. A conservative Canadian news channel will only amplify this unfortunate tendency.
The prospect of “Fox News North” is horrifying and underscores the need for greater funding of independent media that will offer Canadian citizens more direct and representative control over our national conversation.
No comments:
Post a Comment