Is Canada Ready For Loudmouth TV?

It's about time Canadians were allowed to hear a point of view not sanitized by the Canadian media or government. Our esteemed Comissars in Ottawa are allowed to watch Fox on their parliamentary network so the Canadian proletariat should have the same privelege.


CBC Snoozeworld is probably not ready for Fox however, but that doesn't matter to them because they just take money from our paycheques.

and what is CanWest or Bell Media?

In your rush to back George Bush and everything rightwing you ignore the obvious.

Why fear FOX news? Especially if its rubbish, then the Canadian populace will see it for what it is won't they?

Here in the USA we have freedom of the press, if you're a conservative and you want to hear the 'other side' to the story, you can tune in to FOX news. If you're a liberal and/or hate Bush, you have over a dozen other news programs to choose from which have plenty of bad news about the evils of the Bush administration to report.

FOX news is the most popular news channel in the USA (by far). I wonder what the cause of this is? Could it possibly be that most of the news media slants to the left? Or maybe the USA is predominantly conservative? Or maybe us Americans are just too stupid to realize how we're constantly being 'fooled' by FOX news and their right-wing propaganda.

FOX news could be a breath of fresh air for Canada. If you don't like it, don't watch it, but denying others the right to watch it seems a little un-democratic in my view. But of course I'm an American and have grown accustomed to these types of freedoms, maybe Canada isn't ready for FOX news.

And the reason that Vive can exist is the same reason that Fox or Aljazerra should be allowed to offer their opinion - schlock or not.

No that's right, we're not ready to rot our brains.

no tv in my house, hasn't been for 2 years.

my four year old has been trained to refer to tv as the 'idiot box'

I use my 'monitor' for home movies. It's only good when YOU are the star, and that includes my wife, a porn star in the making.

Anon;
"Or maybe us Americans are just too stupid to realize how we're constantly being 'fooled' by FOX news and their right-wing propaganda."

That's it in a nutshell. FOX's "fair and balanced" tabloid style infotainment is garbage, and that is exactly WHY it is so popular in CrispyCreamLand, with its millions and millions of Homer Simpsons served.

"A 2002 poll found that 64 percent of Americans--people whose votes help determine how much you pay in taxes--could not name a single Supreme Court justice. In 2003, 58 percent--people whose votes could elect someone who starts
a nuclear war--couldn't identify a single department of the president's cabinet. Voters aged 18 to 24, whose recent schooling ought to inspire confidence in their knowledge of basic facts, are especially ignorant. National Geographic says that 85 percent of young American adults can't find
Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel on a map." (Ted Rall,
http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/?uc_full_date=20040921 ).

This is the kind of informed populace that FOX has helped inspire in the USA. Are Canadians too savvy to be taken in by the kind of dumbing-down "information" shoveled by FOX? Maybe. But that is not what FOX wants from Canada. Is that what Canada is looking for from FOX??

-Randy from RI

I have to agree with those of you who say we must not censor! Surely we can obtain many different sources of 'news' or propaganda, and then draw our conclusions. Besides, CNN, which we get in Canada, is loudmouth TV anyway. We also get BBC, and soon, Al-Jazeera, which is good! I also like how now the CBC co-operates with the Australian network with their news show 'Hemispheres.'

---
Dave Ruston

The think the end of the article says it best: the USSR had PRAVDA, and Bush has FOX. <p>PS I wonder what Anon meant by "the other side"? I can't help but think of the old "Phantom of the Paradise" movie.</p> http://www.briandepalma.net/phantom/phantom.htm<p>---<br>RickW

Every time you intoduce a load of crap on the airwaves, you eliminate something of worth. I am thinking in particular of SD Pubic Radio, who took a great literature reading program off the air to add another 30 minutes of jazz to a jazz program of already 2 hour length. My life is such that I can do more listening while I work, and I experienced hearing Willa Cather, a woman who went to the North Pole accompanied by just a dog, Charlie, a story authored by a Japanese about WWII, and so much more. I do believe that whatever wisdom I possess, I learned from reading or hearing the works of great literature. I do believe if we had more public involvement in the reading of great works of world literature, we could solve most of the world's problems.

I strongly disagree with those who say let Fox trash be shown, because trash has a way of dumbing us down to the point of no return, which is the point that America is at. Do you want to follow the leader?

Yes, we DO tend to undervalue education, or to restrict it solely to "quantity learned per dollar spent". Outside of the basic 3-r's, I can honestly say that most of what I know now has been acquired post-academia. <p>School should be used to <u>encourage</u> curiosity. But it serves largely to sedate the general public, and inflammatory media such as FOX becomes the only spark in anotherwise torpid existence. We learn to want to be titillated, and substitute that sensation for critical thinking.</p> <i>1984</i> needn't follow Orwell's scenario in lockstep. It's simply enough that the general population be quiescent, which we have become in the post-WWII boom years.<p>---<br>RickW

Fox doesn't just offer opinions; after all, editorial opinion still has to be based on factual evidence and logical argument. It is a propaganda machine run by one of the most rabid capitalists the world has ever seen, Rupert Murdoch. Unfortunately, a large number of Americans seem to be too intellectually lazy to go out and get information from other sources than Fox or their like (meaning they would actually have to go and read a nonfiction book) to be able to tell the difference between propaganda and news. Unfortunately, we already have the equivalent of Fox in Canada in the form of CanWest Media (papers and television) and the Sun Media newspaper chain. For Canadians who insist on being propagandized to they can stick with these; they certainly don't need more of the same.

In America today, we have a living example of how the Nazis were able to use propaganda to convince the German people to accept Hitler's insane ideas. The German people at least had the excuse that any other sources of information were forceably shut down by the Nazis, whereas many Americans seem to be voluntarily accepting the ideas put forth by such narrow-minded and self-interested parties without checking the veracity of their opinions.

What freedom of the press did your country have for one or two years after 9/11? You and I both know the answer is none. Why was this? All of your news sources are owned by corporate interests typically controlled by conservative-minded people. These people are not journalists, have no journalistic background, and they are not interested in informing people of the truth. Quite the contrary, the actual journalists knew there was a story to be told about 9/11 that didn't support the war on Iraq but were muzzled by the corporate owners of their news outlets who voluntarily directed their news organizations to tow the government line. True freedom of the press is a prerequisite to democracy and should not be suppressed simply because your president wants to go to war.

This applies to other areas as well that in general might affect corporate profit. As a specific example, how about the two journalists who were fired by Fox News (that bastion of truth) because they insisted on telling a story critical of Monsanto's bovine growth hormone, which in the end was suppressed. I can hardly wait to be so misinformed (lied to) by having Fox News come to Canada!

As far as being a conservative goes, most of the conservatives I have seen on TV, read in newspapers, or talked to are not interested in hearing about both sides of the but only that part that tends to confirm their preconceived notions. They also happen to be about the most logically challenged people I have ever come across, engaging in fallacy and nonsequitur argument at every chance without letting facts get in their way.

Americans like you have a strange idea about what constitutes democracy and freedom. You seem to think that democracy ends after you cast your vote when it really depends on a truly informed populace, which entails constant vigilance to ensure the truth is being presented. As for freedom, the freedom that seems to be dearest to the hearts of many Americans is the freedom to collect as much money and society's resources to yourself as possible no matter the cost to the rest of society. Maybe its your ignorance of what Canadians are about that causes you to think we don't have the same "freedoms" you have in the US. In a nutshell, Canadians on the whole believe in individual freedoms but in the context of the greater good of society. In other words, most people here are interested in having a society and not just a collections of individuals with freedom to ignore the plight of their fellow man.

I say let those people who want it pay for it as a specialty channel outside the regular cable. Likewise for other channels. We don't need another Cable fee increase.