by Harvey Oberfeld on Thursday Jun 24 2010
BC’s media has shown exactly why that new Sun TV News channel to cover Canadian events, issues and news with an edge is so badly needed.
““There’ll be a range of opinion. It’ll be different, it’ll be less politically correct. If you’re wondering what the presentation of what kind of news stories we’ll be interested in, and a flavour of the commentary that we’ll have, pick up the Sun newspaper, you’ll probably have a pretty good indication,” said Kory Tenycke, front man for the proposed channel when it was announced a few days ago.
Now, we don’t yet know if the new venture will truly be as awful as Fox News in the U.S., as some have suggested, or just a lot more cheeky, spirited and politically incorrect. If it’s the latter, I’d say Hooray!
“We’re taking on smug, condescending, often irrelevant journalism. We’re taking on political correctness. We will not be a state broadcaster offering boring news by bureaucrats, for elites, and paid for by taxpayers. We’ll be unapologetically patriotic,” Teneycke explained.
And NOTHING showed the need for what Teneycke and Sun News Channel promises than the emarrasing and terrible job done by BC’s old boys’ media “eastablishment” during the visit to BCV this week by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff.
The BC media played dead; the BC media let their listeners, viewers, readers down; the BC media let their province down; the BC media let the West down; the BC media delivered a message to the people, parties, politicians, and power brokers back East that it’s okay to turn your back on the West, treat the West with disdain, give us second class treatment--and the media will play along like puppies. No dobermans here!
I am referring, of course, to Ignatieff’s decision, along with the rest of the Liberal caucus, to support a New Brunswick NDP private member’s Bill C-232 that would require ALL new Supreme Court Justices to be bilingual, not just good enough to order a poutine at an Ottawa chip stand, but fluent enough to hear legal arguments “without the use of an interpreter”. The simultaneous translation we’ve had since Confederation would be no longer good enough.
No great problem for New Brunswick or Quebec judges interested in Supreme Court appointment, prestige and power because, surrounded by a sea of 375 million English speaking North Americans, most of them can already speak/undersand English. But in Western Canada and BC. such a preposterous proposal would ensure that only very few judges here would qualify for top court appointment.
The Bloc Quebecois loved it! And they, along with Liberal support, pushed this anti-Western NDP proposal through the Commons: only the Conservatives opposed it, but with a minority government, could not stop it.
The Bill passed the Commons, and is now before the Senate, the last hope for sanity and justice for the West and BC to prevail before departing Governor General Michaelle Jean gets to sign it into law.
I warned about this horrible insult to BC and the West in July 2009: the BC media ignored it; The Saskatoon Star Phoenix went after Ignatieff on this in April: The National Post raised the alarm; even the Toronto Star shone its searchlight on the issue.
And the Alberta government has filed a legal challenge of the proposed law!
