Canadian Media

Two incidents this year demonstrated what the media of this country really is: the Wayne Gretsky dust up and the Muslim cartoon incident.
In the first case, on the basis of rumor only, the press ran riot for a couple of weeks trashing Wayne Gretsky, his wife, his life style and his morals. It turns out that neither he nor his wife have been charged with anything. On rumor of “sources close to the investigation” a good man’s career and livelihood were trashed. Where are our fearless news hounds now that Wayne and his wife have been exonerated? Where are the retractions and the apologies? Were is the Mia Culpas from these sterling guardians of truth and the public conscience?
The second incident which highlights what the media in this country are all about is the cartoon fiasco. Some mullahs took the cartoon published in a small Danish newspaper. They published and distributed it in Muslim countries for a whole year following its appearance in the magazine. They harangued sincere Muslims in many countries about this blatant attack upon their religion. These fanatic mullahs had also produced other cartoons which never appeared in the paper in Denmark and used them to feed the outrage in Muslim countries against the West. What did our media do? They took pictures of the outrage promoted by the mullahs - and never investigated the staged nature of the whole event to see the phony nature of the complaint. Then our brave media moguls; who are supposed to give us real insight into our world, would not show us what the furor was all about. They were afraid that there might be some danger to them personally if they published the cartoons and acted as real news gatherers and publishers.
These two incidents demonstrate what the Canadian media has become. They claim to be lions who fearlessly seek to throw light into the dark corners of our society and the world. They have demonstrated that they are nothing but jackals who feast on sensationalism and run whenever real danger or sacrifice might be necessary. The problem is not the reporters who often risk their lives to get real news. The problem is the people much higher up the food chain who either take a poll to see what people want or decide what spin they will put on the news to serve their own interests.
Now to the latest crusade by our fearless media moguls: a campaign to get our soldiers out of Afghanistan. Every day we hear from the all the media a spectrum of the negative aspects of our soldiers being in Afghanistan. Why all the furor? The reasons are several. First because for the most part their philosophy of how things should be falls somewhere between Paul Martin and Mr. Leighton. Second because they want to find some means of nailing and discounting the new Conservative government. Third because they think the world runs on the same “moral” basis that they have displayed in dealing with the two revelatory news items already mentioned. Fourth and probably most important is that they do not understand the nature of what is happening around us. War has been declared against our whole society by a well funded organization whose goal is to destroy us. This is much like the blindness which muzzled soft headed politicians and “news people” as Hitler rose to power and the same attitude which called Stalin’s slaughter of twenty five million of his own people “social readjustment.”
Next time you turn on your television, pick up a magazine, listen to a radio broadcast or look at a newspaper remember what Mark Twain said, a reporter early in his carreer said about the media: “Believe only half of what you see an nothing of what you read.”