Posted on 04/28/2004 11:54:33 AM PDT by RegT
Canadians shouldn't be denied Fox News
By ROD LOVE Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - Page A19
Canada made The New York Times last weekend, and that is never a good thing.
Whenever Canada is mentioned in the Times, it is either because something bad is happening (last month's "Sponsorship Scandal Rocks Governing Party"), or something quirky is going on -- quirky in the sense that our American friends think we are acting in a strange, but quaint sort of way.
Canada won the coveted half-page "Word for Word" column in Sunday's Week In Review section because the nationalist culturecrats at the CRTC continue to try to exercise an outdated mandate to control the television that Canadians can watch.
To recap, U.S.-based Fox News wants to broadcast its 24-hour news channel in Canada, the CRTC turned them down, The Globe and Mail's television columnist John Doyle applauded the CRTC decision and, at the same time, fired some of the usual broadsides that the political left reserves for Fox.
That prompted a flood of cross-border e-mails between supporters of Fox and The Globe's John Doyle, which appeared in the Sunday Times. Entertaining reading to be sure, but the larger issue that is at play here is hardly quirky. Set aside for the moment that Fox News is the dominant news network in the United States, leaving the increasingly dreary CNN far behind. (Never mind CBS, ABC and NBC, which have been reduced to marginal status, sandwiching tame news items between ads for new products for seniors.)
Set aside also that Fox anchor Bill O'Reilly then called The Globe's readers "pinheads," and that The Globe's TV critic responded with the cerebral rejoinder that Fox News is actually "hilarious" and its viewers "uncivil, abusive and foul-mouthed creatures."
The real issue for Canadians in all this is that in the year 2004, there is still a federal-government agency, stacked with Liberal patronage appointees and bureaucrats, that actually has a mandate to try to determine what Canadians may or watch on television, or not.
Social engineering, not free speech, is alive and well in Paul Martin's Timid New World.
You think that the sponsorship scandal is a scandal? The CRTC's budget, mandate, power and very existence is a scandal.
The global television signals that Canadians desire to watch belong to no government. A country that is secure in the knowledge of what it stands for, a society that is comfortable in the values it represents, and a culture that is robust enough to entertain criticism, would normally be strong enough to welcome the competing views of the rest of the global community.
That is not what the CRTC is saying as it frustrates a controversial but thought-provoking channel from broadcasting in our country.
Far from strengthening our so-called cultural sovereignty, the CRTC weakens our culture by essentially telling Canadians they are not mature enough to watch what they want.
When Fox first applied in 2000, the CRTC told the network it could broadcast in Canada, but only a Canadian version.
Huh?
Did anybody tell CBS to broadcast a "Canadian version" of the Evening News with Dan Rather? Did the CRTC tell that to ABC or NBC?
Did Ottawa instruct the Beeb to add more Canadian content before Mishal Husain does her BBC World News gig?
Our beloved CBC runs more clips from Al-Jazeera than from Fox News, and Al-Jazeera is not exactly a beacon of objective journalism.
Let's cut to the chase, shall we?
Fox News is applying once again to broadcast in Canada. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (an anachronistic title in 2004, if there ever was one) is applying a separate standard to Fox News than it does to, say, the woolly-headed lefties at the BBC, for the simple reason that Fox News is an unabashedly conservative news network.
You can just hear the bureaucrats in Ottawa discussing in apocalyptic terms what they fear would happen if Canadians were exposed to a steady diet of televised, pro-American, conservative debate. "They might begin to believe it for goodness sake!"
This and any future federal Liberal government will warily entertain a certain amount of non-threatening, liberal-sympathetic, non-Canadian media, but they are deathly afraid of conservative cultural competition, and they are using the state, through the CRTC, to deny Canadians the right to choose. That, by any other name, is censorship -- a new Canadian value.
The reason last Sunday's New York Times page on all this was so entertaining was that it represented an exciting and robust debate about issues that matter. Which is exactly what the CRTC doesn't want you to see on television.
Rod Love, a Calgary-based political and communications consultant, was chief of staff to Alberta Premier Ralph Klein and a senior adviser to former Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day.
A BTT for a great line.
NYC was a great setting for that particular concept in a dramatic presentation.
In reality it's been Canada that turned into a prison ~ one of thoughts. None are created, none are imported.
You guys are all supposed to be deliriously happy over this state of affairs.
(PS, I'd have gotten the satellite connection long ago, and some guns too! You're gonna' need both, particularly when we 'Muricans have to start giving you secret instructions on escape routes South ~ kind of a reverse "Underground Railroad")
The Liberals Little Red Book:
I have to say that if a Canadian News network was broadcasted here in America (and one may be, I don't wander up to the high channels too often) I'd have absolutely zero interest in watching it. It would be news from a Canadian perspective, and being an American, what would I care about that? Why would they want FOX News?
Owl_Eagle
Guns Before Butter.
I disagree with this sentence in an otherwise sensible article.
Censorship has long been a cherished Canadian value.
Canadians are the world's most obedient people
and have a deep need to be told by their masters
what to think and what to do.
Ultimately they do not need censorship imposed upon them
they willingly and joyfully censor themselves.
O'Really had a vile female Canadian columnist on last night. She was so left that she made the Merkun alphabet fraudworks look "objective".
On, Off, or grab it for a Media Shenanigans/Schadenfreude/PNMCH ping:
http://www.freerepublic.com/~anamusedspectator/
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