Author Topic: Canadian Islamaphobia or Free Speech?  (Read 661 times)

0 Members and 2 Guests are viewing this topic.

Offline Queefer Sutherland

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 10186
Re: Canadian Islamaphobia or Free Speech?
« Reply #15 on: February 27, 2017, 11:20:48 am »
Another example, I recently saw a story involving a sexual assault by a Syrian refugee at a New Brunswick school. The story was covered by "The Rebel Media". They did their homework, obtained documents from school staff through FOI access requests, verified that there was a real incident, a real irate parent, and that the Syrian was punished with a one week suspension.  http://www.therebel.media/exclusive_syrian_refugee_school_sex_attack

Now, personally I think Ezra Levant is a ****-head, and the Rebel Media is a scummy and slimy operation. But the thing is, nobody else is reporting on this sort of thing. Ezra claims his shitty website is the only news outfit in Canada with the balls to report on trouble involving the Syrian refugees, and unfortunately he's right.  That kind of thing contributes to the growing mistrust of the mainstream media.

If I look at other media outlets, I can see happy human interest stories about the Syrian refugees. Syrian refugees attend their very first hockey game! Syrian refugees attend Rememberance Day ceremonies. Syrian refugees help family find lost dog!  No story about Syrian refugees having problems integrating with highschool students. If you're only reporting positive news about something and ignoring the negative, isn't that called propaganda?

Kimmy you've hit on an extremely important subject.  Yes, it's absolutely propaganda. I've thought about this myself a lot, not just in regards to syrian refugees but all issues covered in the media.  They say the pen is mightier than the sword, and so the biggest war throughout history I think is the war of ideas, and news media and ALL media are important players (if not the most important) in this war.  We've seen the war of ideas for a very long time, communism vs capitalism propaganda in the media since the 1800's for example.  I find that virtually all news media outlets have an ideological bias that's easy to spot.  Some sites are more overt in their bias of what they choose to report (ie: FOX News, The Guardian), but the most important and far more subtle bias is in what outlets choose NOT to report, like you were saying.  For instance, the CBC News doesn't have a lot of op-ed reporting online compared to other outlets, but there's so many stories that may support rightwing narratives that you'll find reported on The National Post or Rebel Media (as you say) that you won't find reported on the CBC (or other left-leaning outlets).  Editors and journalists, no matter how unbiased they claim to be or even honestly think they are in their reporting, virtually all have an ideological bias and agenda in their reporting.  And we see this "objective reporting" thrown out the window come election time when newspapers all give their "endorsement" of their candidate of choice.  Virtually all media outlets are pushing their particular ideology in their reporting and are key players in the war of ideas.

I'm not even sure if there's anything wrong with that or not, since as long as we have a large variety of news outlets with varying ideological biases then as long as we look at them all, we're able to capture a large picture of all the news happening.  For instance, even though the National Post or Rebel Media are usually to the right of many of my ideological beliefs, I'll still look at them daily so that I can also find the news that the rest of the media in the country aren't reporting.  The problem with news outlets becoming more extreme and entrenched in ideological reporting is that many people don't do this, and prefer to remain in their own bubble & stick with the media that confirm their own biases (both on the right or the left) and then demonize those outlets that oppose their bias. How many people on the left demonize FOX News and Breitbart, and how many ppl on the right demonize The Daily Show and the CBC?
"Nipples is one of the great minds of our time!" - Bubbermiley