Here’s something I completely fail to understand about Canada’s CBC News Network. For 99% of the time, they’re not pals of the 1%.
Rich people don’t pay their fair share. The motives of people in positions of power are always suspect. Too much Public money goes to people who don’t deserve it while others suffer.
Conrad Black (uck-spit).
Then one of the Royals gets knocked up.
And it’s -- Global Warming? Economic collapse? Political Corruption? Wars in the Middle East? International Terrorism? Who cares!!!
Suddenly all the dour and not to be messed with news anchors are gushing over baby names, revised orders of succession and who’s betting on what arrival date with British bookies. Not to mention how many millilitres the Duchess horked up this morning.
There’s a camera locked on the doors of the hospital and B-roll aplenty of all the tchotchkes being churned out to cash in on the pending bundle of joy.
After spending a couple of weeks before the CRTC pleading poverty and pontificating on how much essential news and information the CBC provides us for so little, we’re now treated to an endless parade of royal watchers, experts in obstetrics and monarchist pundits –- most of them doing live trans-Atlantic interviews.
This Sunday (less than a week after the former Miss Middleton announced she had one in the oven) the CBC News Network will run a Prime Time documentary on the coming monarch.
Meanwhile, if you’re a Canadian documentary maker awaiting a similar CBC spot –- well, you might maybe start thinking of cutting in some kind of Royal Baby angle.
And we’re only in the first trimester.
Look, I’m pleased the young Windsors are expecting. Just as pleased as I’d be for anybody else I don’t know and am unlikely to ever meet.
But I’m also one of that statistically recorded 80% of Canadians who don’t have an acute interest in the Royal Family.
So why is the CBC falling all over itself to make sure I know every detail of this story?
And how seriously am I supposed to take the other stories CBC News will almost certainly run in the next months about the plight of homeless Canadians at Christmas, struggling Northern communities or heartless corporations?
If the wealthy and powerful elites are such a huge problem, why is the CBC so excited that they’re reproducing?
Or do I just accept that those tales and this one are all just part of the same journalistic need to pretend they know what their audience wants?
3 comments:
I could not agree with you more. It's an embarrassment what the CBC does with public funds. The Royals are probably the number one story it covers year round. John Fraser recently jumped on the bandwagon making a case for the royals on Canadian soil. Honestly it's like some insane slow, painful, backward-moving time machine. Over $ 51 million a year spent on the Royals in Canada. We actually pay for more capita than the British. That was in the news weeks ago. Insanity.
There's a strange contradiction in the culture of the liberal left. On one hand, they profess to be outraged by continuing social inequality and disparity of income, while raptly announcing the pearls of wisdom uttered by a celebrity who espouses their cause from a position of lordly comfort and splendour. Case in point: Vanity Fair magazine, which fills its front section with attacks on conservative politicians and causes like the Tea Party, while filling its glossy center features with fawning profiles of celebs, breathless recountings of society scandals past and present, and even occasional profiles of actual aristocrats. If they had a coherent political program, it would probably be a progressive regime overseen by a benevolent monarch counselled by a court of enlightened movie stars, entertainment executives and liberal philanthropists. Imagine the Queen of Sweden ruling America with the aid of the Ford Foundation and George Clooney.
And I'm with you Tony - republic now. The persistence of the monarchy is a joke with no punch line. The middle ages ended centuries ago.
The Royals are the only celebrity gossip coverage that Serious Network Journalists can get away with. Thus the overload.
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