Too often, they make you look like a jerk:
The CRTC has nixed the idea of “mak[ing] us all pay” for Fox TV News for now. But a CRTC under a compliant chairman could rubber-stamp whatever sort of licence Quebecor wanted, purely for political reasons, and the Fox News-ification of Canada would be unstoppable. Would that not be outrageous?
Yes. It would be outrageous. I’d sign a petition protesting it. But Ms. Atwood seems to accept this theory as fact. And it isn’t fact. Fact is that the petition is called “Stop ‘Fox News North’ ” and refers to its product as “hate media.” In a particularly astonishing Tweet on Thursday, Ms. Atwood revealed that she hadn’t even realized the Quebecor network wasn’t, in fact, to be called Fox News North! Had she done any due diligence whatsoever?
Anyone who supports Quebecor’s right to beam its product into our homes under reasonable commercial circumstances, as Ms. Atwood claims to, would do well not to sign that petition. It’s clearly opposed to the existence of Sun TV News, not just to the Prime Minister’s hypothetical meddling in the CRTC’s affairs. She’s far from the first celebrity to embarrass herself by blundering headlong and uninformed into politics (an urge that still baffles me). But she could at least own up to the gaffe. Surely it’s not a far-fetched idea that one’s signature beneath a block of text signifies approval of the foregoing.
Because I don’t watch much TV (except for NFL games), I must have missed the mass takeover of American TV by hate mongers. Yet another advantage of avoiding TV watching, I guess.
