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The miserable state of Canadian TV news


Argus

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Thank God the Olympics are almost over. Maybe I'll be able to get some Canadian news again.

You'd be forgiven if you didn't know 50 people died in a bombing in Turkey last night, or that the Taliban took over a district of Afghanistan. The Canadian 'all news' stations didn't cover them. Instead their entire newscasts were on the Olympics and yet another endlessly long story on the Tragically Hip. Do I need to point out that neither of these is 'news'?

It's been that way for two weeks. The already rock bottom quality of Canadian television news has dropped still lower. CBC has canceled its six O'clock news the entire time, which shows how important they think news is compared to ratings. Ottawa used to have three nightly newscasts. But the station owned by CHUM was sold to CTV and canceled its. Then CBC basically canceled our local news in favor of news from Toronto.

So Ottawa, with a million people, has one local news station. Meanwhile, Rochester, just across the border in NY (pop less than a quarter million), has three regular nightly newscasts. You'd be hard pressed to find any American city even a third the size of Ottawa that had just one local news channel.

As far as national news goes, that too is pretty low quality. Virtually all the international news on CTV and CBC comes from the American networks. Most of the non-news stories do too. You know the kind, where a farmer in Kansas teaches his goat to dance or something like that.

What is wrong with the way we license networks and stations in Canada that the Americans (who are far, far, far from perfect) are doing so much better?

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Virtually all the international news on CTV and CBC comes from the American networks.

I had little use for TV news even when it served a useful purpose. Now it is dying like the corner video rental store as more and more people realize that sitting down at a prescribed time to watch one sided commentary on a subset of stories is so outdated. News websites are the future.
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  • 5 months later...
On 8/21/2016 at 11:36 AM, Argus said:

 

What is wrong with the way we license networks and stations in Canada that the Americans (who are far, far, far from perfect) are doing so much better?

Britain has a big state broadcaster more on the Canadian model. The BBC is still streets ahead of the CBC, certainly in reporting its own news from around the world.  

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 2/2/2017 at 1:11 PM, betsy said:

Without public funding, CBC is dead. 

With all the other non government supporting media outfits out there why does the government have it's own CBC media outlet? This seems like a waste of tax dollars to me. A Billion tax dollars as a matter of fact. The governments at all levels should not be in any business of any kind period. Imagine if the governments decided that they now want to have their own newspapers? Maybe I should not have said that. :mellow:  

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On 2/2/2017 at 0:24 PM, SpankyMcFarland said:

Britain has a big state broadcaster more on the Canadian model. The BBC is still streets ahead of the CBC, certainly in reporting its own news from around the world.  

I happened to be channel surfing yesterday morning while eating my morning cereal. There being nothing else on, I surfed between the all-news channels. On the two Canadian channels we had Trump, how Canada should deal with Trump, poor dual citizen Canadians who were afraid to go across the border because of Trump, and lots of snow in BC.

On the BBC there was a riot in Turkey, Trump, an earthquake in the Philippines, German presidential election, the shutdown of a military inquiry, and the Greek bailout.

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20 hours ago, Argus said:

I happened to be channel surfing yesterday morning while eating my morning cereal. There being nothing else on, I surfed between the all-news channels. On the two Canadian channels we had Trump, how Canada should deal with Trump, poor dual citizen Canadians who were afraid to go across the border because of Trump, and lots of snow in BC.

On the BBC there was a riot in Turkey, Trump, an earthquake in the Philippines, German presidential election, the shutdown of a military inquiry, and the Greek bailout.

Agreed! It's not as exciting as US at the moment.

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5 minutes ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

Yes....it appears that Canada and Canadian media has had Trump on the Brain ever since he shocked his critics in Canada by winning the election.

It's Trump...Trump...Trump....and then more Trump.

You have a cool avatar man. Very intelligent!

Trump is the best president. He knows how to shake thangs.

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  • 1 month later...

So I woke this morning to a CBC radio report that a man with a long criminal record had shot at police and then attacked a soldier at Orly airport and tried to take his gun, and got shot for his problems. 

Of course, I'm a nasty, cynical conservative. So when I hear someone attacked a soldier at an airport in France, well, you know what I suspected. I suspected our crummy national broadcaster was tiptoeing delicately around trying to be 'discrete' and 'inoffensive'.  So I check he Citizen and get the same story. Ah, but wait, BBC news says the man was known to be radicalized and was on a watch list. Gee, I wonder what that means. Go to Euroenews and we discover two elements missing from earlier stories. First, the police officer he shot at a roadblock was a female officer. Second, the soldier he attacked at the airport was a female soldier. Okay, I think we know who we're dealing with now. But let's go to the devil itself - FOX news, where we're told the suspect was a Muslim terrorist on a radical watchlist. At last, unvarnished truth.

And I don't even LIKE FOX news. But come on! How about a little honesty and stop trying to hide the truth?!

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