John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS
"Can Morneau keep his G7 gathering from being entirely about Trump?
"The meeting of finance ministers threatens to turn into a G6 gathering of nations offended by Trump's actions"
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Response to a comment, “If the CBC spent less time on conjecture, hypotheses, opinions, and more time on actual fact finding maybe we all would know a bit more about this issue:”
You are right, for sure.
But CBC does what all mainline journalism in North America does, and it’s not a set of practices they can avoid, even if they wanted to.
First, real journalism costs money, lots of it, and all of the traditional press and broadcasting are under great financial pressure. Old-fashioned investigative journalism, for example, is extremely costly, and that’s why we see none of it except from independent sources. Putting a qualified person on all kinds of expenses for weeks or months at a time in hopes of getting one big story which may never come is a bet that is no longer made.
Wherever you look, you see newspapers stuffed with opinion pieces, feel-good fluff, and promotional material. It's what book publishers used to call "filler." It's cheap to produce, comparable to cheap reality television shows versus shows with teams of writers and actors and directors and technical support. Indeed, a good deal of it is free, some of the promotional stuff is even a source of revenue, but the value of any of it as information is thin. As any economist can tell you, information is not free, and good quality information is costly. That general principle applies to any field you care to mention, and not just to journalism.
CBC today is quite terrible on some subjects, every bit as bad as any corporate newspaper, especially when it comes to international affairs. It writes stories, for example, about what is going on in Syria without ever having anyone there to investigate. It never interviews the important actors there either, but somehow it keeps doing stories that are supposed to tell us what it does not know itself, and that is what is happening. That’s as far removed from journalism as you can get.
Which brings me to the other huge force working on journalism in the contemporary world, the geopolitical maneuvering of major countries, and especially the United States. America has wars and dark projects - Syria is just one of them - going on in a dozen places. Publishers are under great restraint against investigating and reporting the truth about any of them, even if they were able to do so.
It would be viewed as unpatriotic or dealing with the enemy or even treasonous, and the publication would very much be made to feel the consequences. It would, at minimum, result in losing advertising revenue and the future helpful cooperation of the national government, not something to be taken lightly.
At the really dark end of things, we have the not-uncommon killing of journalists who go where they are not supposed to go. We think of this as the kind of thing which happens only in third-world countries, but that is not accurate. There’s quite a list of unexplained deaths of independent journalists in the West. And just in recent weeks, you could see Israeli soldiers brazenly shoot and kill several journalists who were wearing identifying vests in Gaza.
Journalism-school notions of the principles and practices of the profession are just that, notions, and they literally find no home in today’s mainline news business. They are about as real and applicable as discussing modern politics in the classroom terms of political science.
So, an old truth is truer than ever: if you want freedom of the press, you must own one.
