As the campaign winds down, we are getting a slew of newspaper endorsements. On da twitter, David Akin posted a link to the full slate of endorsements. The current standing, Conservatives 31 endorsements, NDP 2, Liberal 0, Bloc 1. Take a look for YOURSELF and remember to laugh your ass off the next time a conbot talks about the liberal media. With this measure, you can cobble together reasons why we see such an overwhelming slant (you can also point to the NDP "surge" to say it doesn't matter), but when you plug the statistics into other objective measures, it really does paint an overwhelming picture of incredible challenges to the notion of apolitical coverage. When the dust settles, progressives in this country need to understand and develop ways to offset a increasingly stacked media deck. When it comes to media coverage, there is clearly as stiff, unrelenting head wind to contend with.
17 comments:
In the original, Catholic form of corporatism, there were four estates, business, church, state, labour. In democracy, the 5th estate (journalism) was meant to be the means of keeping everyone honest.
However, the business and media estates have been merged, and therefor journalism no longer has an estate of it's own: it serves the agenda of the conglomerates who own over 80% of Canadian media.
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/ownership/cht156.pdf
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/ownership/cht32h.pdf
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/ownership/cht209.pdf
It just blows my mind that 31 paper endorsed the Conservatives, but on the other hand what the fuck do I care what the likes of the Burlington Beaver and the Oakville Record have to say about anything?..lol..
And if Harper were to fail to get his majority, it will be a genuine miracle that the people, in the face of this barrage of pro-conservative coverage, were willing and able to say something different.
There is a slight discrepancy, Andrew Coyne came out for the Liberals. So technically there is one for the Liberals.
I have decided to cancel my Gazette subscription and I won't be replacing it with anything (G&M). If enough people did that, we could see failure of at least the print media. Private individuals could then take up the slack. While there is no guarantee they wouldn't be right wing, as small business owners they would have to be more aware of their readerships' political leanings.
His publication didn't :)
Taking one article of endorsement and weighting it against years of daily reporting is silly.
You could compare all the articles written on the election during the campaign and there would be a heavy slant towards negative Harper articles to positive ones.
Hell, Carson and "kicking kids out of rallies" would make up 1/3 of everything written.
The endorsements are partly a "cover your butt" by the newspapers. They just pick who they think will win so that they are on the safe side for when they want access to the PM.
That's some weak sauce Frunger
It's fun watching con supporters twisting themselves into pretzels to reconcile numerous media endorsements with their paranoid conspiracy theories.
"Taking one article of endorsement and weighting it against years of daily reporting is silly."
Oh but, the coverage also favours Harper, and has for the last FOUR ELECTIONS you drooling conbot!
Gayle
How can you respect people who can't accept facts? This isn't spin, it isn't bias, it's empirical evidence, of the same sort we've now seen for YEARS, and yet... I'm serious, you say we have a liberal media I instanteously dismiss you as a complete fucking idiot :)
Last year during prorogue, nearly all con media outlets were on the verge of bankruptcy, Harper had his meeting with Rupert Murdoch, the deathstar for independent media who put money in Sun media, then Harper used Action Plan SpincycleScam wealth transfers to send a couple hundred million dollars their way: it is not so much a conservative agenda as a corporatist one.No journalist will cover it, and no liberal seem willing to discuss it, because it seems like whining about the media.
I have said this all election and yet no body listens: this could have been predicted just by looking at the CRTC ownership charts.
Conservatives think journalism is liberal because it refuses to adhere to strict corporatist fawning messaging.
The really sad part is, we have great journalists in Canada, no editorial courage, and almost complete ownership of content within the vagaries of the stages of consolidation we're passing through.
"When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain?"
Jerry Prager is quite right. But I think that media cannot exist as an estate of its own. It will always be the arm of one or more of the others. It will be speaking for business, the state, or labour (Or possibly the church, although church isn't really an estate any more, thank goodness).
The problem really is that at the moment, pretty much all the media is controlled by just one estate. Even the CBC seems to behave as if it were controlled by business rather than the state. What's needed is more media controlled by labour, which is to say people, and to some extent more controlled by the state and behaving as such. Also for the portion controlled by business to be broken up into smaller chunks so that it doesn't co-ordinate as well.
we just need the 5 estate to be independent period. Journalists should create their own media infrastructure.
1) Newspaper endorsements reflect the opinion of the publisher or, in rare instances at larger papers, an editorial board. The editorial board model is the exception rather than rule. Also rare is the publisher who gives a damn about anything beyond the bottom line, which is influenced by business owners who pay for ads, and tend to be small- and/or large-C conservatives.
If said endorsement reflects the views of any member of the actual editorial staff, it is merely coincidence. The editorial staff in most cases has precisely ZERO say in the editorial stance of the paper.
2) If you think dropping your subscription means much of anything to a newspaper's bottom line, in and of itself, you are wrong. Subscriptions don't pay many bills for newspapers. If you're dropping subscription over endorsement, make sure you tell local business their advertising with said paper makes it so you won't shop there any,ore.
1) Newspaper endorsements reflect the opinion of the publisher or, in rare instances at larger papers, an editorial board. The editorial board model is the exception rather than rule. Also rare is the publisher who gives a damn about anything beyond the bottom line, which is influenced by business owners who pay for ads, and tend to be small- and/or large-C conservatives.
If said endorsement reflects the views of any member of the actual editorial staff, it is merely coincidence. The editorial staff in most cases has precisely ZERO say in the editorial stance of the paper.
2) If you think dropping your subscription means much of anything to a newspaper's bottom line, in and of itself, you are wrong. Subscriptions don't pay many bills for newspapers. If you're dropping subscription over endorsement, make sure you tell local business their advertising with said paper makes it so you won't shop there any,ore.
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