Thomas wrote:See, blatham --
that's the pity with you Canadians. Now you've made me a defender of Fox News.
the author of blatham's article wrote:The barking-mad Fox News Channel is something that most Canadians have only heard about. It's time we saw it for ourselves, and made up our own minds about the phenomenon. We'll find out if this Bill O'Reilly fella is as stupendously pompous and preening as he appears to be in the rare clips we see of Fox News.'
I wholeheartedly agree with this. And I find it deplorable that the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission disagrees. It doesn't believe in Canadians making up their own minds about Fox News, so it won't let them. If Fox is really so beneath the Canadians that nobody's going to view it anyway, why bother rejecting their application for a channel?
thomas
Well, on occasion, you and I disagree. Normally the context will be government regulation on trade, and here it is regarding government regulations on communications.
The CRTC has traditionally (for a couple of decades at least) forwarded a policy of promoting Canadian-sourced communications in publishing and in TV. The rationale has been 'cultural protection', that is, to promote Canadian cultural identity in the face of the huge inflow of communications from down south. We have, too, a similar notion internally, where French Canadian culture has certain 'protections' against the larger English media. I'm quite happy with both sets of values/regulations, certainly in their intent.
I'm a big fan of the traditional Millian understanding of multiple speech sources. Where we'll probably disagree here is on how, in the present world of 2004, it might be best to achieve that.
You'll note in the piece I linked above that O'Reilly describes the Toronto Globe and Mail as 'left-wing'. That's quite ironic, really. The Globe, until a bit more than a decade ago, was Canada's single national paper (as opposed to a local city paper) and was (accurately) considered the paper forwarding the business view of things (that is, not left). It's editorial leaning has not, in any noticeable way, changed. Twenty years ago, had anyone labelled the Globe as 'left wing', they would have been gently patted on the arm and walked away from, carefully.
Then Conrad Black (Hollinger) begain buying up Canadian newspapers...small local dailies, many large city dailies...until he controlled some 70% of Canada's papers. At which point, he also began a new national paper, the National Post, to compete with the Globe. Vancouver, where I live, has three papers in town, the Sun, the Province, and the National Post. All were Conrad Black papers.
You know something of the fellow, I'm sure. His editorial control, and his push of that content to the right, led many editors and staff to leave the papers he had taken over. It changed the whole face of Canadian print news, pushing it so far right that someone like O'Reilly could (and who'd ever have thunk it?) consider the Globe to be left wing. Personally, he was/is a thug, who would launch his deep pocket legal suits against pretty much anyone who said anything negative about him. A legal challenge to his overwhelming control of Canadian print media was lost, on a point of legal procedure. A few years ago, he sold these holdings to the Asper family (CanWest), who have continued Black's particular political notions (for example, I'll pay you ten bucks if you can find in any Asper paper a single empathetic comment on the Palestinian problem).
This shift rightward in Canadian press is matched by a similar shift in US media (see Alterman's "What Liberal Media" for enough specifics to likely give you cause to wake screaming nightly, and your wife to divorce you).
That would be perhaps ok, if such a shift was merely the consequence of a pendulum swing in general viewpoint. But only a numbskull would argue that one. This is coincident with the consolidation of media outlets in fewer and fewer hands, and those hands being corporate (naughty, naughty corporations...get thee behind me). These owners, and Conrad is a paradigm example, typically consider media properties to be most fundamentally, just one more means of income/investment gain. And they are a particular type of community member with a particular set of policy priorities associated with their income/investment goals. "Comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable" isn't likely to be a motto they'll post on the wall and to which they will genuflect each sunny morn on arrival at the office.
Murdoch is, of course, probably the sleaziest of them all. The fellow would do his own grandmother with a weed-eater if there was a buck in it. As Dennis Potter, the late Brit screenplay genius, opined, "No single individual is more responsible for the decline of political discourse in Britain than Murdoch." I think Potter is right, as you may have guessed.
The JS Mill argument is for multiplicity of voice. The increasing domination by a few corporate entities over media in North America is not productive of such multiplicity. The reverse is becoming precisely the case. The common arguments put forward by the sorts of folks who support, for example, the further reduction of ownership regulations through changing previous policies of the American FCC..."look at all them web sites and blogs...sheesh...there are more voices than ever!"...are either dull-headed or disengenuous. One person out of a thousand in the US may have read a Slate column, but one perhaps one person out of a thousand has NOT watched Fox.
You have a far greater faith in the marketplace than do I when speaking of economic/social improvements. But likely we share the Millian notion of an idea marketplace and the values that accrue. I just think that the first doesn't get us the second. A proof I offer is the present American electorate, reflected on this board.
