Government support for moderate mainstream media good news
Amidst a fear- and hate-based culture rampant in the U.S. and growing also in Canada, including describing journalists as “enemies of the people”, and after the lamentable President Trump’s indirect approval of the Saudi murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, as Trump failed to promote CIA findings of Saudi royalty responsibility for that political assassination, we do well to welcome the Canadian government’s recently-announced support for independent journalism.
As described in National Post online, “…the government wants to protect the ‘vital role that independent news media play in our democracy and in our communities.’” The program includes support for “non-profit news organizations”, “charitable journalism operations” and “a new refundable tax credit for labour costs at both for-profit and non-profit news organizations”. To determine eligibility, “the government plans to create an independent panel drawn from the ‘news and journalism community’, which will also ‘define and promote core journalism standards (and) define professional journalism.’”
A need for protection and promotion of moderate mainstream news media amidst the bizarre helter-skelter of social media is evidenced in the ill-informed reflex reactions to that government announcement dominant among readers’ comments on the National Post article, and also in Conservative MP Michelle Rempel’s ‘Live’ online reaction and the comments posted there. Comments have the Trudeau government as all of “communist”, “fascist”, “dictatorship”, “globalist”, “death of free speech”, and “leftist enemy elites (mostly Jewish)”, along with much else of similar poor quality — apparently whichever negative epithet first occurred to the unfortunate writer.
Social media both allows and amplifies opinion regardless of information. It seems that that cultural and social malfunction will be among us for some time to come; and so, it seems important that core institutions such as professional journalism, conducted according to agreed-upon practical standards, with a view towards a just and civil society, are needed for our fractured society to maintain any central stability, while the frightened and angry run shrieking around its edges.
John Mowat Steven
Duncan