Ezra Levant, who now runs the Rebel Media online empire as a successor to the deceased Sun News TV network, has a long-running joke/critique about a “Media Party” that croons in unison on every public issue. Every time he mentions the “Media Party,” we, the Media Party, all fall into the same cross and scornful mood. We commiserate ironically with all our old co-workers at rival titles or channels about how there’s totally no such thing as a Media Party.
Ezra knows how to market, whatever else you want to say about him. He is out to devour our audiences and show, if mostly by loud assertion, that we in the Party are all lazy and lily-livered. He is not afraid to say that all the parts of the Star-Globe-Post-CBC-Maclean’s ecosystem are inferior to his thingamabob. We don’t compete with each other like he does: we lack the spirit of the feud. We all sense there might actually be some kind of unified, monstrous Star-Globe-Post-CBC-Maclean’s publication one day. And we want to be able to work for it. So even Posties are reluctant to say that the Globe on most days appears to have been edited by a dead Tory prime minister and printed on cobwebs, or that the Star sometimes seems to regard personal nastiness as a social-democratic credential.
The National Post was born in a spirit of newspaper war. If you tried to start such a war today it would seem absurdly counterproductive, almost suicidally stupid; and maybe it was. Now we are all just hanging on for dear life.
Colby Cosh, “Go ahead, hate the media – we deserve it”, National Post, 2016-07-25.
April 16, 2018
QotD: The Canadian media
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