The Pepsi Challenge

As a convoy of covidiots embarks upon their mission to disgrace themselves at Parliament Hill this cold day in January, many of us in the online samizdat that is the Canadian political activist scene are starting to wonder if something is finally breaking through to the utterly useless corporate media.

That there is only one party responsible for embracing these chuds, and the unpleasant truth (to them, at least) is that it's their preferred party to blame for all this. Not the Liberals, and not Justin Trudeau.

Then again, maybe not. Or maybe it's just the most visible bobbleheads who are the dumbest, chosen for their ineptitude just like ignorant cops who won't engage in the critical thinking required to challenge their overseers' authority. Forget the Atkinson Principles; Canadian media operates on the Peter Principle. (And has no other principles thereof.)

I mean, does Evan Solomon have any functioning braincells or is he really as dumb as he looks? You're a Jewish man, perhaps the most highly visible Jewish man on Canada's number one news network, and you're standing on the sidewalk and you have a frozen beer can thrown at you, by morons shouting antisemitic slurs and blaming the Jews for poisoning children with adrenochrome vaccines.

So what do you do? You go on your own show the next morning and you interview the Liberal government's Transport Minister, who is Muslim and who has suffered the brunt of the hatred coming from these kind of assholes and their preferred partisans in Parliament — and you ask him if it was a mistake for his boss, the prime minister, to have called some of them, or any of them for that matter, racists.

There's just some kinda stupid in that Ottawa bubble that Bell Media allows to float to the top.

Which is why, speak of beer cans and media bubbles, I was really happy to see this printed today in the (still hanging on to some semblance of sanity) Toronto Star.

As usual, grab a properly chilled beverage and enjoy.

Respect Your Elders

In light of the previous post on what's wrong and what's right at the CBC, one of the network's elder sages happened upon the very popular Herle Burly podcast recently, to diagnose the impaired state of journalism. When it comes to weeding out the facts from the crap, Elly Alboim is one of the great ones (Peter Mansbridge, of course, is another).

Here he is giving host David Herle an earful on how public trust in the integrity of the fourth estate is damaged when journalists set their own agenda — or that of the corporate brass. Takeaway quote:

We have blurred the lines of normal reportage and opinion and we now have people who straddle the line. They express opinions on one day and are reporters on another.

I'm saving that one for the quotes archive below the fold.

And while you're at it, pay a visit to the National Observer, where Sandy Garossino dunks Tara Henley's dirty laundry in the wash. Please spare a loonie or two to subscribe, to allow the few good journalists in Canada like Sandy to keep contributing their two cents.

I'm So Bored With the CBC

Recently, Canadian political twitter went all, well, atwitter about the "viral" introductory blog post by a "disgruntled" former employee of the CBC, Tara Henley, who quit in protest due to disagreements with its editorial direction.

The problem with Henley's supposedly heroic walkout is that her, shall we say, cheeky critique is coming from the wrong place: namely, her ass. Specifically, the right side.

The other problem is that she seems to be a plant feeding culture-war beefs to an audience that already has an appetite for them — and that she's more than willing to become a useful idiot for their further destruction of journalism as long as she gets her fifteen minutes of shame.

But there's a bigger problem, not just with Henley herself but the fact that her former employer is not above valid criticism. By ignoring these constructive criticisms, whether due to elitism or a fear of "partisanship" or just a stubborn unwillingness to admit where they've failed, "Canada's own" national broadcaster has opened itself up to a suicide attack from its avowed enemies who aren't criticizing in good faith: in other words, death by a thousand funding cuts.

So let's have a look at Ms. Henley's dirty laundry, the people she's aiding and abetting, and what really needs to change at the Cooked Bacon Corporation, lest it find itself out of the frying pan and into the fire...

 

King Rupert's Land

 

So Stephen "Cosplay Palpatine" Harper and Tucker Swanson Rittenhaus McDerpface Carlson were both in the news this week screeching about oil. Why does this matter? Well, many in "friendly Canada" don't think that the country that brought the world Care Bears has Murdoch media sending Fox into the moose house. The problem is that isn't true, and it's yet again a failing of that corrupted media not to report in earnest on the danger that the "mainstream" Tories' connections to Fox, the GOP and the global-right apparatus pose to Canadians and to us all.

Awhile ago I offered a sample of the knee-deep connections to the Koch Kleptokrat Klan propping up Canada's institutionally rotten political/media establishment. But let's not neglect the affiliations with the world's most notorious Aussie propagandist — and the worldwide fascist thugocracy seeking to undermine and overtake the world.

Tie me kangaroo down, sport, and pray to the ancients that a dingo won't eat your beaver.

Papa Don't Preach

I guess climate change is having even more dramatic effects than anyone thought it would, because it looks like hell has frozen over. Guess who else seems to be implying that the #CdnMediaFailed just like its fellow hellions everywhere else on Gaia's green earth?

 

Let me be... Frank...

It doesn't change the fact that the mother church is the whore of Rome. The Vatican sure has a whole lot of explaining to do, that no amount of penance is going to be able to fix.

But, it does lend a certain amount of "gravitas" (a favourite buzzword of the Canadian media, usually thrown about to imply that Trudeau has none) to the sentiment that #CdnMediaFailed, in terms of how the... "optics" work out. Another meaningless buzzword that, of course, is all that the slanderous, post-truth media care about, with their downright sinful attraction to scandal instead of positive contribution to policy discussion. The only fraternity they contribute to is their own Hate Club.

Someone wanna tag David Akin and Stephen Maher? I guess this guy is another Liberal Psycho.

Surf's up, motherfuckers. Repent! ...or enjoy an eternity of muckraking in hell.

 

Siri, Show Me an Example of Whiny Self-Importance

This man has a job. A very high-paying job. He is a very wealthy man whose job is to loudly and proudly profess his ignorance before an audience of thirty-eight million people. There are numerous others like him, all of whom excel in that identical job description and are paid quite handsomely to do little else but projectile-vomit wordlike constructions devoid of cogent thought or self-awareness onto their computer keyboards, and television screens all over the country. He is the Chuck Todd of George Wills. But he is not alone. He is not even patient zero. He is simply one vector of an insidious, endemic disease.

If he really wants suggestions, here's how Canadian "journalists" can support Canadians:

You are useless and so is your skill set.

Learn to code.

Reach Out and Touch Someone

When we talk about the degradation of media, all too often we're only talking about the content but not the distribution network. It's useful to think about the pollution of the informational ecosystem in the context of pollution of the environmental ecosystem. In other words, chances are whoever owns the series of tubes are the ones responsible for shoving sludge through it, and toxifying the body politic.

There's a lesson for Canada to be learned from the recent debacle over AT&T funding the creation of their very own version of Fox News — and the "trickle down" effects of that pipeline sludge down to the so-called mainstream.

But first, we interrupt this blog post for a nostalgic commercial break.

Siri, Show Me an Example of Zero Self-Awareness

In this specific context, Cousin Andy is talking about anti-vaxers getting their "medical expertise" from the University of Twitbook.

In the broader context... he's actually talking about himself.

Doing his own research by pulling opinions out of his orifices.

The same standard practice of his cohorts in the Canadian media hate club.

I should note also that M.R. Binnion, the individual crank he's quote-tweeting on that thread, is a deep-pocketed oil shill with longstanding ties to the Christian Dominionist/Prosperity Gospel apparatus that forms the DNA core of the Canadian conservative movement.

Anti-vaxers are just the latest offshoot of that mass psychosis, and they are not confined to the Bernier brigade, much as the gaslighters in Canadian media would have you believe.

A Conservative MP. That is to say, one of the "moderate" Erin O'Toole's troops, at present. Prior to that, Andrew Scheer's, but always Stephen Harper's. You know, that guy who never really went away but who the Conservative press likes to pretend Justin Trudeau and "Liberal psychos" are invoking as an irrelevant boogeyman? Kind of like how the U.S. press likes to pretend that Trump is yesterday's news? 

"Canada should be preparing a plan for the fall of democracy in the United States."

Instead, Canada is preparing a plan for if Justin Trudeau reprises the role of Clark Griswold, by scheduling eleventy bajillion pundit panels and op-eds demanding that National Lampoon's Christmas Staycation be the impetus for him to resign.

Well, not all of Canada. Just pundits and tabloid ambulance chasers like Andrew Coyne and his ilk.

If anything, the United States should be preparing for the fall of democracy in the United States. Instead, the United States is preparing for the fallout of Britney Spears ending her conservatorship and the announcement of a new James Bond.

Gil Scott-Heron was correct: the revolution will not be televised. Neither will the devolution of democracy, by weapons of mass distraction. The media class has zero priorities because they know they're insulated from the results.

Or, at least, they think they are. Time for them to get a fact-check of their own.

They Always Eat Their Own

Even as the wave of Tofinogate finally crests, the slow-building tsunami of everyday folks registering their anger that the #CdnMediaFailed is only just beginning. The absolute worst fourth estate in the G7 has angered a lot of people and only continues to do so with their bad practices, unapologetic bias, and doubling down on abuse of their would-be (and longtime) readership.

Only to then turn around and complain that they are the ones being abused — and lump Liberal Party supporters in with Max Bernier's deplorables at that.

It takes an incredible amount of hubris — not chutzpah, but hubris — to make such a bold comparison when it's the media itself who are not only guilty of being bullies, but of giving a free platform to the very same bullies they claim to be among those at fault! Which is exactly what Goebbels News reject Travis Dhanraj, now at the CBC (a pathetic shell of its former self) did when he platformed Mad Max on the national broadcaster's flagship news program.

 

 

The Canadian media are so invested in their pretzel-logic cognitive dissonance and upholding of their toxic, insular status quo in-club that they're even destroying themselves from within. They're alienating new voices and driving good people away, to hold onto the deplorable audience they claim to abhor.

Which is why I'm mildly heartened to see the occasional disillusioned dissenter calling them out.

The Koch Kommunications Konnection

The Koch network is one of the most powerful and far-reaching conglomerations of right-wing dark money and political influence the world has ever known. Most often, they come up in discussions of Republican politics in the United States, but you really can't talk about Conservative politics anywhere in the world without the Koch Kleptokrat Klan being a central figure of the story.

New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer's excellent book Dark Money tells this sordid tale very well. So does the documentary Citizen Koch, which was supposed to air on PBS but actually got axed because of heavy Koch involvement in what was once America's noble public broadcaster.

Indeed, you can't talk about Conservative politics in Canada without its embedded connections to the GOP, and in turn to Koch Inc. It should therefore come as no surprise that the Kochtopus monster has its ugly treacles in Canadian politics as well — and, yes, that includes involvement in the right-wing media ecosphere that I've been writing about here.

I want to credit the Tweep who alerted me to these stories, which I'm sharing here to keep the archive alive as more and more of Canada's media turns into an unapologetic version of Pravda North. The account @CanadaOooh posted these links to the Star and CanadaLand (which were once semi-respectable sources of truth-digging at the time these pieces were posted, but even they've since fallen to the dark side).

 

There's also a piece from the National Observer, which, for now, remains an important bastion of independent, left-of-centre reporting and analysis. It's here archived for you to read but please consider throwing a few loonies their way.