Why is this sub just CBC news stories? Does a bot add them all? They are mostly empty with no comments. Makes for a strange feed.
Edit: I think I just need to figure out which way to sort my feed. Sorting by hot gives me almost all CBC.
Edit 2: CBC is great. I am commenting on the state of c/Canada, not the quality of CBC
Unfortunately, the CBC is kinda the only game in town for news media for a lot of Canada.
In Canada it’s basically PostMedia, the Thomson family, and CBC. I think the Toronto Star is under different ownership than the rest, but lately The Star has been indistinguishable from PostMedia. And out of those only PostMedia and CBC cover local news stories. PostMedia has cut back on staff so much and are trying to do the Rupert Murdoch thing (so aren’t trustworthy).
So that leaves us with the CBC. This is what the death of traditional media looks like I suppose. Only sources of news are either government funded or are grifters. And some like PostMedia are government funded grifters.
Not good to only have government funded media be the only source of news, but there really aren’t other viable options.
There are other sources besides the big mainstream ones, such as The Walrus, The Tyee, The Conversation, Rabble, Canadian Dimension, and others I’m probably forgetting.
Yes but how reliable are the other sources? Anyone can easily set up a website and put some articles.
The distrust of “mainstream media” is a paradox. You can’t trust a brand new website for reliable information, because it could just be a random person making shit up. But once a site has been around for a while and has built up a reputation, it gets labelled as “mainstream media” and therefore also shouldn’t be trusted.
Besides that, a news site has to be fairly large to be able to afford having journalists spending time investigating stories. But opinions are cheap, and that’s generally what the indie “news” sites are. Mostly just a collection of opinion columns with little to no stories resulting from investigative journalism. Sure mainstream media is doing a lot of opinion too, because its cheap and makes money, but at least there’s going to be some people at a larger organization doing actual journalism.
Journalism never been neutral.
What do you define to be “neutral”?
If Justin Trudeau says “XYZ” and the CBC has a story quoting him as saying “XYZ”, is that not neutral?
Not sure what you mean with “reliable.” Non-biased? The articles on, I think all the ones I mentioned, are written by journalists or academics.
And when I say Mainstream I just mean the more well known ones that everyone knows already.
What I mean is, I have no idea who these people are. An established news organization relies on it’s reputation. Losing that reputation costs them.
A brand new news organization has no reputation, and I have no idea who these people are. So I can’t rely on it.
This is my point. I don’t trust unknown sites on the internet. But if any of the sites you listed become known by everyone and establish a reputation they will then be considered mainstream. Which if we don’t trust mainstream media, we need to seek out more unknown sites which also shouldn’t trusted? Basically distrust of mainstream media winds up becoming “trust nobody ever” which doesn’t get us anywhere.
I never really understood why people can’t piece together the information that is presented to them instead of just taking things at face value. Is media literacy not taught at all in schools? You can read anything on the internet and use your rational mind (if you are educated so) to filter out the truths. If you can’t verify something just find other sources saying the same thing, at least then perhaps you can work off probabilities/likelihood.
I know many people read on like a 10th grade level, so I guess I see the importance of trust, as those people likely just read headlines and not the content, and definitely don’t analyse.
Time constraints are a major factor. I theoretically could read the same story from many different sources and do a comparative analysis on them to attempt to determine what the real story was. But then it would take more time to just find out about one story. And then I wouldn’t have time to read about other things are happening and I’m less informed.
And really I wouldn’t be getting anything more than if I just read or watched the CBC. If the CBC has a quote form Justin Trudeau, what are the other sources going to add to that? Their interpretation of what Trudeau meant by that remark? How certain parts of social media is responding to it?
If Justin Trudeau says something, or a person is charged with a crime, or a piece of legislation is passed, these are facts. Things that happened.
Generally mainstream media (bad actors like FoxNews and PostMedia excepted) covers these facts fairly well. AP News for world news, CBC for Canadian news and it’s basically all covered. The mainstream sources generally won’t report unconfirmed sources, so if I’m particularly interested in a story I may seek out other sources, knowing the sources will be more unreliable. Indy media is hungrier and will be willing to publish unconfirmed information, I know that when looking into it.
But for the most part this is time consuming. If the source you’re reading in indy media today does get confirmed, I’ll read about it in AP News or CBC tomorrow. But if it turns out to be a false rumour, you’ll see it, may not see the retraction the next day, while I’ll never seeing it at all.
I mean you are reading five different sources and tracking the sources you get your information from to make sure there isn’t a retraction later, right? And then checking back on all of those sources every day to ensure there was no retraction? That’s what you mean when you say “You can read anything on the internet and use your rational mind (if you are educated so) to filter out the truths.” Because if you aren’t doing all that, how do you know that something you’ve read might be false information? Critical thinking only works if you have the time to gather large amounts of data to apply it to.
For most of us, it’s more efficient to just get news from organizations that confirm their sources and do the due diligence for us. My critical thinking tells me that the CBC and AP News isn’t going to throw away the many decades of work to build their reputation just so they could misquote something Justin Trudeau says, which would be very easy for anyone to prove they did.
Good answer and I admire your thinking here. I can think of a few times some long held beliefs got debunked or the original studies or articles were retracted.
All media is government funded. The CBC is basically public broadcasting. The fact people want to portray it as a media empire that pushes left wing propaganda is absurd. If it doesn’t align with their viewpoint, it’s fake news. At this rate, if the people screaming had their way, they’d probably call Mr. Dressup and Mr. Rogers commies.
Heh, these days, people would call Richard Nixon a commie.
I think we just lack honesty in medias biases overall. CBC has a liberal biases , NP and Toronto Star has a neo Conservative biases . Having both is healthy . Having extremist calling for blood and conspiracy and sharing fake news is bad. Also , sharing columnists’ opinions is not sharing news and we have to acknowledge that. Those are just opinions . There is too much columnist and not enough facts reporting( there are , but we focuses on opinions about facts at 90%). AP news is probably the most fact neutral IMO.
Yeah, there should be “no editorials” rule. Our comments are the editorials.