Category Archives: Media

Ramping up the Rage: You know it’s contract time when

… BC’s corporate media sector starts ramping up the rage against teachers. Yesterday, the two BC dailies – both owned by the PostMedia group – headlined two separate anti-teacher stories. The Province featured an article about certain BCTF bargaining demands, based upon the employer’s utterly compromised interpretation. The Sun then offered a College of Teachers […]

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Sun Media Brings Fox News to Canada

This is almost hilarious. It must be the most absurd media promo I’ve ever seen – as if it’s a parody made by the people at The Colbert Report or The Onion. Unfortunately, these yahoos are serious.   Posted by Colin Welch at 8:21 PM Edited on: Wednesday, April 20, 2011 5:20 PM  

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Media bias: yet more evidence

Right-wing corporate media bias is pretty strong in Canada. From the type of stories chosen and emphasized, to the spin and language used to differentiate NDP policies from Conservative, it’s hard to consistently hear and read progressive perspectives in this country. And though ownership and management are by far the most important elements of media […]

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Buffett Tells ABC Rich Americans Should Be Paying “A Lot More in Taxes”

Billionaire Warren Buffett has come out and said the equivalent of 2+2=4. Or =666, if you’re a neo-liberal hell bent on even more tax cuts. In a recent interview, Buffett said, “I think that people at the high end — people like myself — should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it […]

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Goin’ out in style!

If the boss is forcing you out, then you might as well go out in a blaze of glory! Here is Bill Bennett’s quite remarkable exit interview after being removed from the cabinet of the BC Liberal government: Bill Bennett faces the media (mp3)       Posted by Colin Welch at 8:35 PM Edited […]

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The Georgia Straight on Post-Secondary Spending in the Valley

The Georgia Straight, and its online version, the straight.com, are useful sources for news, investigative journalism and media criticism. Amid its pop culture pap and racy personal ads, the Straight can deliver articles of surprising quality on topics rarely seen in BC’s corporate media. Here’s a recent article on the imbalance of spending on post-secondary […]

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A Choice of Words

Here’s an interesting exercise. Replace one word in the Vancouver Sun headline below, and ask how the meaning of the headline has changed. Let’s replace “admits” with “argues”. Such a change makes the revealed “truth” more a matter of debate and interpretation. Yet I’d argue that this is a reasonable change in wording, given that […]

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Recognition of a Keynesian Moment

I rarely take a lead editorial from the Vancouver Sun seriously. This Canwest/Postmedia corporate entity is at the center of right-wing propaganda in BC, and is representative of the very conservative outlook from Canada’s media generally. Nevertheless, today’s editorial provides a sobering analysis of the American economy and its implications for Canada. It’s also a […]

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The HST Debacle

In todays’ Vancouver Sun, Vaughn Palmer offers a devastating critique of the BC Liberal’s handling of the HST. Palmer highlights the key revelations of new government documents from a FOI request regarding the HST. Palmer explains that senior government officials were discussing the HST well before the last election of May 12, 2009. He concludes […]

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Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Canada’s corporate media remains unchanged, even though the extensive Canwest newspaper chain has been sold (for $1.1 billion) and renamed Postmedia Network Inc. From a July 17, 2010, story from the Vancouver Sun, we see that the major players are merely changing their jackets: … The senior team, which will run the country’s largest metropolitan […]

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