Gore's electricity mantra: Do as I say, not as I do
Talking of electricity use, a research group reckons the huge home of leading environmental activist Al Gore consumes more of it in a month than the average U.S. household in a year.
The Tennessee Centre for Policy Research says Gore's 20-room Nashville house used nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity last year, 20 times the U.S. average. Gore, of course, was the driving force behind the Oscar-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth, which urges folks to cut their energy use to combat global warming.
Gore's supporters says the research group is partisan and its criticism politically motivated. But the fact remains there is considerable hypocrisy in the environmental movement. And it is invariably easier to tell others what to do than to do it oneself.
Unreal. A room full of journalists, and they're taking their editorial licks from The Drudge Report.
So I, of course, shot off the usual email, informing them of the facts behind the story, and telling them that "if the editors of The Province really want to fight global warming hypocrisy, perhaps they could do the most basic bit of journalistic research and save us from this daily dose of unsubstantiated 'hot air'."
I doubt my letter will get printed (though I happily suggest that everyone reading this should send their own LTE to provletters@png.canwest.com and flood them with truth), and there's a very good reason why: The Province is part of the Canwest Global media empire, and they don't deal in alternate viewpoints.
For those that don't know, Canwest Global owns 90% of English language daily city newspapers in Canada. They also own one of the two national papers, The National Post (the other, the Globe and Mail, is very Toronto-centric and not widely read outside that city).
They also own hundreds of local papers. They also own one of the two privately-owned TV networks in Canada. They also own radio stations, and now they own Alliance Atlantis, the centerpiece of Canada's film production, TV production, and cinema exhibition industry. They also own Canada.com, the country's busiest web portal.
In short, wherever you turn for your news in Canada, be it in print, on TV, on the radio, online, and even in the local paper, chances are you're getting it from Canwest Global. And if you think that's media concentration run amock, you don't know anything yet.
In Vancouver, where I live, there are two daily newspapers: The Province and The Vancouver Sun. Both are owned by Canwest Global.
But hey, there's always the free press, right? Vancouver has two daily free papers (and I use the word 'paper' only because that's what they're printed on) - 24 Hours and Metro.
And yes, Canwest Global owns a big chunk of Metro.
They had a second free paper - the hideously named Dose - but recently shuttered it, as owning 4 of 5 daily papers in one city is a little cannibalistic.
So in case it's getting hard to keep up, here are the newspaper options in Vancouver, with those owned by Canwest denoted with an asterisk:
National:
The National Post *
Globe and Mail
Citywide:
The Vancouver Sun *
The Province *
Free:
Metro *
24 Hours
How can this be allowed to stand? Well, that's the thing with a media monopoly, if government tries to tell you what to do, you have the means to effectively end that government. The previous Liberal government knew this and let Canwest do whatever it wanted, and Canwest responded by essentially freezing out the opposition from getting any sort of reasonable press.
It took scandals and corruption to break the Liberal stranglehold on the nation, but now the Conservative government, long annoyed at the Liberal/Canwest cabal, is enjoying that same love, and they ain't looking to stir up trouble while the sun shines.
Canwest doesn't use its virtual monopoly nicely. They write editorials in their head office and send them out to newspapers in their chain, with the expectation that they will be printed, without change, and that any letters to the editor arguing an alternate viewpoint must not be published. Editors at Canwest papers who have fought this directive have been removed from their post on an all too regular basis.
Frequently, these editorials decry the 'terrorists' in Palestine, while calling any criticism of Israel's tactics in the West Bank and Gaza 'hand-wringing'. Attacks on Israel are full page news, while attacks by Israel are all but ignored.
Canwest recently bought a controlling interest in Israel's premier left wing newspaper, the esteemed Jerusalem Post, and announced it would be shifting rightward.
Canwest financed a documentary a few years ago, Confrontation@Concordia, in which a guy named Martin Himel tells the story of a student protest at a Canadian university when a Jewish student group arranged for Benjamin Netanyahu to come and speak at the campus. There was a sit-in, and someone got arrested, and a window got broken. That's all that happened - one window, one arrest. But this documentary 'delves deeper', and finds that once, someone painted a swastika inn a bathroom, and thus what we're looking at, and I'm quoting him here, is "a second holocaust."
From an online review at Hollywood Bitchslap:
Himel continues, showing footage of an Israeli student and Arab student engaging in a hallway debate, as the voiceover claims "this kind of intimidation of Jewish students is all too common..." while the Jewish student is SMILING and LAUGHING and clearly enjoying what is an every day student war of words. Honestly, it's like Himel's been using comedy reports from The Daily Show as the basis of his view of journalistic integrity.
[...]
Fortunately, Himel is such a poor spin doctor that his point is neither proved, nor supported with anything close to hard evidence. Himel will show a placard featuring a woman dressed in a US flag masturbating a man in Jewish attire, as oil comes out of the Jewish man's penis, while claiming "this is the sort of propaganda and Anti-Semetic hatred that was evident in Germany prior to 1939. That led to the Holocaust. What will this hatred lead to?"
Seriously. This is the stuff we have to put up with in Canada these days.
Now, when one company has an ideological barrow to push, usually they have a pretty narrow scope to getting that message out. Not Canwest.
When Confrontation@Concordia (produced by Canwest's production company, Fireworks) played on TV (on their national TV network), it was promoted with radio ads (on the radio stations), newspaper ads (in their national and daily newspapers), on their website (you know, Canada's largest web portal), and during ad breaks, they ran ads telling you how you could buy a copy for yourself by "calling the following number.."
Strangely, they don't run those ads for anything else.
Previously, Canwest owners have told newsrooms, upon buying a new corporate property for their collection, that staff will do as they're told because, and I quote Israel Asper, the late head of the empire, "You don't do news. You sell soap."
Why would respectable journalists put up with such crap? Simply put, if you want to work in media in Canada, you either work for Canwest Global, or you work for the Globe and Mail (which isn't hiring). There is nothing else, so you either 'sell soap' or you find another career.
And trust me, there are loads of 'ex-journos' up here who took the high road and can now do you a great deal on car insurance.
This country has plenty going for it in every respect, but in terms of the media, it is as bad as any nation in the third world, and the editorial this diary opened with is a prime example of what we live with every day.
Yes, America's media is in peril. It's dying on the rocks. It's having a coronary.
But Canada's media? Long ago passed away. Wormfood.
You still have time to save yours. Don't be like us.
How can you make change? For starters, go watch News War on the PBS website. It's an incredible look at the media, blogs, government, and where it's all going horribly wrong.
And then? Turn on your TV, call your cable company, get a package that includes BBC World, and NEVER. WATCH. ANYTHING. ELSE.
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