The Way I See It: Dubious nature of journalism

There’s a whole lot of finger pointing as of late, from both sides of the circus that is media. Liberals accusing conservatives and conservatives name calling (let’s call a rose a rose here). Long gone are the days of actual reporting. You know the kind. The kind of reporting that just gives me the facts from both sides of an issue and lets me the reader/viewer form my own opinion. No no, now we have to have opinion in my newscasts. Really, I couldn’t give a crap.

The Internet has blessed us and cursed us in this day and age. Legitimate sites that are created to report news (even the crappy entertainment sites which have no bearing on the real world because I really don’t care what Linday Lohan is doing or not doing this week) are competing with sites that have a good name, but don’t really report anything, but manage to opine their way through so called articles of news.

One of these happens to be canadafreepress.com. I went there because my fast typing fingers and my ever quick punch of the enter key missed the part where I wanted Canadian Free Press, one of many national news agencies that distributes news to radio, television and newspaper outlets. Canad Free Press does all it can to wave the maple leaf, but really, it’s an American Right Wing Editorial machine. The top heading, or slogan reads “Without America there would be no free world.” Really? Let’s be honest here, most Canadians don’t think that way. We like our neighbours to the south, but we wish they’d be a little quieter and stop having temper tantrums. We’re moving along just fine, thank you, without the American Editorial propaganda machine marching along to try and suck us in.

Yeah, we’ve got conservatives up here, but to be perfectly honest, our staunchest right winger is more socialist than anything that comes out of the States. We think differently than a great deal of Americans. We have very different values.

And we report news. Actual news. Not rehashed editorial opinion crap.

canadafreepress.com, you’d have done a lot better had you used a dot.ca name instead of a dot.com name. Then, I think I might have taken the whole thing a lot more seriously. Add to it that out of the several articles I skipped through (because I just went direct to the author bio after a while), only one was from Canada. The other tip off was the fact that out of the whole nation, Toronto was the only city mentioned. Now, unless this site was from Toronto, then I would expect this, as Toronto feels it’s the center f the universe. But not even an article from Quebec. Sorry, you lose again. Canada has two official languages, and I am proud to say they are French and English. REAL Canadian news sites would have the option of a French language link. REAL Canadian news sites would not so blatantly alienate our Francophone brothers and sisters. Unless of course, it’s written by members of the extreme right wing that would love to get rid of French completely.

I think that sites like this even make American news agencies look bad. Among the “sister sites” listed happen to be a few from other countries. I’m talking Asian countries.

I admit, I do love opinion and debate as much as news. But for sites like canadafreepress.com, please, show some integrity and stop hiding an American ideal behind a Canadian flag. You only make yourself look foolish and do a disservice to American journalists.