Refreshingly Canadian
Hard to believe this was written in a Canadian newspaper – although the writer was smart enough to hightail it to Tulsa, OK.
From the pride of Nova Scotia, The Chronicle Herald:
The things you don’t read about Barack Obama
Will Rogers famously pleaded that all he knew was what he read in the papers. If all a person knew of Barack Obama’s first 100 days as president was what they read of them in this newspaper, it would seem to be a very charmed young presidency.
The Chronicle Herald recently made space for an urgent Associated Press dispatch from Washington informing readers the Obamas had chosen a Portuguese water dog. Not original reporting, of course, but an AP rephrasing of a White House-arranged scoop in the Washington Post online.
That was followed by a crack Canadian Press report, drawn from such gumshoe news-gathering as reading the Huffington Post, on the “hillbilly” Republican governor of Alaska: her “family and political theatrics that would do Jerry Springer proud,” like “the arrest and indictment of her sister-in-law on break-and-enter charges” and “the sordid revelations of her daughter’s ex-boyfriend.”
The Portuguese water dog and Alaskan “hillbillies” news beats apparently leave little time for anything remotely skeptical of the president of the United States. And they wonder why folks aren’t buying the papers like they used to.
So here is a small selection of news on the most powerful man on Earth which has been deemed unfit to print:
It ends with…
Fox News Channel is the butt of jokes and the target of attacks like no other media outlet in the English-speaking world, not least by people who fancy themselves the guardians of a free press. But Fox News is today the lone television news service in the English-speaking world capable of serious skepticism and scrutiny of the sitting president and the Congress of the United States.
Fox News is also the second most-watched channel in all American cable television. It long ago became by far the most-watched cable news channel; more Americans watched Fox News than CNN and MSNBC combined in every time slot from 6 a.m. to midnight in April. Now, while The New York Times is $1.3 billion in debt, Fox has expanded its operations with a business channel and a juggernaut Internet presence.
There’s a lesson there, though Fox News will be just as well pleased if the impeccably “mainstream” news business remains clueless about it.
The people need a Fourth Estate, not yet another adulator of Barack Obama, yet another smearer of Sarah Palin, yet another patrician editor to keep out anything disagreeable to progressive sensibilities, yet another laptop-and-latte journalism-schooler to spit on everything pre-dating 1968.
And they wonder why the news business has come on hard times.
Andrew W. Smith, from Cape Sable Island, N.S., writes and resides in Tulsa, Okla.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
And you also have to wonder why the canadian CTV is loosing business; CBC has hit the soil already ready to be used as fertilizer. Ctv has sold two of their stations for three dollars. And you are right why no one buy the newspapers; no substance there. Unfortunately very good reporters depend on sales for their income but putting their article that delivers front page trash and constant gloom and doom can turn people away.
“Headliner that can grab your eyes.”HOW PROUD ARE YOU AS PM STEPHEN HARPER PROMOTES OUR GREAT NATION TO THE WORLD…”
OR
“PM STEPHEN HARPER IS RESPECTED IN EUROPE; HIS VIEWS ON/AGAINST PROTECTIONISM GETS GREAT REVIEWS’
OR
“CANADA IS LUCKY TO HAVE A PM LIKE STEPHEN HARPER AT THE HELM quoted by the american business.”
Positive Headlines grabs people eye.