POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JOHN DOYLE IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Fox News is literally an oxymoron.
CNN is almost as bad, often caught with its pants down playing nasty games.
ABC/NBC/CBS are all owned by huge corporations, and they all bend their tone and coverage to the needs of the Pentagon.
Americans - whom polls show get most of their news from television - are unbelievably poorly informed when it comes to world affairs.
It's a ghastly and dangerous situation for a superpower and/or a democratic country.
CBC is far from perfect in its news, but at least - and this is no small thing - it offers a different point of view, inherently different owing to its financing.
Even if one were to grant a "liberal bias" in CBC - which I do not, that being another conservative copycat line from the Newt Gingrich twenty years ago - so what?
The truth in politics and world affairs is always to be discovered. It is never presented outright by anyone anywhere.
But an interested citizen may garner a good deal of the truth by reading and listening to different sources and interpolating and extrapolating. It is the technique of the late, great independent journalist, I.F. Stone.
I regularly catch errors and biased presentations on CBC, but the situation is no better, likely worse, with private broadcasters. Indeed, the late, unlamented CanWest surely was as low in journalistic ethics and as poor in quality as we’ve ever had.
