Courtesy of
Tuesday November 15, 2016
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OTTAWA — The bastion of Canadian establishment journalism and a pugnacious media upstart took turns ripping into the publicly funded CBC in testimony Tuesday to the Commons Heritage committee.
The publisher of the Globe and Mail newspaper, Philip Crawley, told members of Parliament who are examining Canada’s beleaguered news industry that the Globe’s ownership isn’t seeking “handouts or subsidies — but we do like to play on a level playing field.”
“It’s not level if taxpayer dollars directed to the public broadcaster make the competition for digital ad dollars more difficult. The CBC is the Globe’s largest competitor in the digital ad space amongst Canadian-based media.”
Crawley, one of more than a half dozen witnesses appearing Tuesday, was flanked by an unlikely ally — Brian Lilley of Rebel Media, an online news and right-wing opinion outlet that delights in skewering the dreaded mainstream (or “lamestream”) media, of which the Globe might be considered a charter member.
“You can’t have a level playing field when the public broadcaster … has decided that they want to be all things to all people,” said Lilley.
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If the private broadcasters and websites claim they can do better than the CBC, then why aren’t they?
The most popular websites such as Drudge, Infowars, Bourque and Rense were started on a shoestring budget and have evolved to become extremely influential to the point where “mainstream” news gathers look to these increasingly popular sites for news.
News makers have started to choose these sites and sites like these to grant interviews because they know that the interviews will be reported verbatim and will not be altered to suit the “mainstream agenda”, whatever that may be at the time.
All these sites are filled with advertisements.
But more importantly, the readership trusts these sites.
Can we say the same about the trust factor of the National Post and the Globe and Mail considering their appalling and totally made up coverage of Donald Trump?
It’s clear from the recent coverage of the election and now the ongoing negative press of the President-elect that the “mainstream” press has lost the plot.
I believe that the “mainstream” press thinks that their (declining) readership is stupid, and the readership has finally woken up and moved on to reliable sources.
I don’t quite get Crawley’s point. Is the CBC hiring print reporters to compete with real newspapers and their usually firewalled digital sites? Or is he simply moaning about video clips of particular news stories that make viewers less likely to search out text versions of the same topics?
I’d rather see Globe ownership do something radical such as purchasing PostMedia, merging operations with the National Post and selling off the individual papers to local interests. Canada, clearly, cannot support two national newspapers.