National Post Lies

Would it be too much to say that the National Post is lying to the Canadian public? No, that would be a lot kinder than what many others are saying. Like this commentator:
The National Post is reaching new lows of vulgar propaganda in its intellectually dishonest attempts to influence public opinion in the direction its political affiliations. Its downright disgusting to see such blatant attempts at dishonest propaganda, on a almost daily basis on the cover and throughout your paper...

There are huge amounts of the Canadian public that see right through your ugly and transparent attempts to manipulate and dupe the public with persuasive and distorted words. You should be ashamed of yourselves for displaying such a lack of journalistic integrity.

I'm inclined to agree, after the newspaper's take on NASA scientist James E. Hansen's take on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth:
James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist and one of Mr. Gore's advisors, agreed the movie has "imperfections" and "technical flaws." About An Inconvenient Truth's connection of rising hurricane activity to global warming - something refuted by storm experts - Mr. Hansen said, "we need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is."
What does Hansen really think? From his review:
It is hard to predict how this unusual presentation will be received by the public; but Gore has put together a coherent account of a complex topic that Americans desperately need to understand. The story is scientifically accurate and yet should be understandable to the public, a public that is less and less drawn to science.
I am in favour of freedom of the press, however, I think that out-and-out lying ought to be illegal, and that the National Post editors ought to be called to account for their dissembling.

What was that comment again?
Your paper has become simply a biased, desperate political propaganda rag.
Yeah, that's about right.

Via Deltoid, which has extended quotes

Comments

  1. I think lying would be a bit far, but there's definitely a lot of demagogy going on in this paper.

    You're right though; it's a lot worse than lying.

    ReplyDelete
  2. In Vancouver, you can get the NP delivered to your door for $5 a month. Have no idea how that makes the sort of sound business sense they like to tout in their editorial pages. It's as if they're willing to absorb a loss for people to read this stuff...

    ReplyDelete
  3. > I think lying would be a bit far

    My thinking is, when the paper says one thing, and another thing is true, and known to be true, it's a bit hard to represent that as anything other than lying.

    ReplyDelete
  4. When a new national newspaper was started in Canada, I was enthusiastic. However, after reading Stewart Bell's constant diatribe against the Canadian Tamil and community (to which I belong), I was disgusted by the sheer lack of journalistic ethics of this reporter and the paper and stopped reading it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Downes said:
    "My thinking is, when the paper says one thing, and another thing is true, and known to be true, it's a bit hard to represent that as anything other than lying."
    First off, all papers print stuff that's not true, so by your own rule (above) we could conclude that all papers are lying.

    The other is that you have to make a distinction between the paper and it's writers.

    And then there's the content. Some of the news is (supposed to be) the facts, other articles (like columns) are opinion pieces.

    Where I'm with you is that, on average, there's a lot more "funny stuff" going on at NP than say G&M or Toronto Star. And wouldn't it be interesting to have a team of people (researchers) actually compare those three papers (papers all from the same date) on the amount of factual errors?

    Brian said: "In Vancouver, you can get the NP delivered to your door for $5 a month. Have no idea how that makes the sort of sound business sense they like to tout in their editorial pages."

    The bulk of the NP's revenue is made from their advertisers (including classifieds), not their subscribers.

    So see it this way:
    Where "good" papers have advertising to make the paper an affordable product, "bad" papers add news to their advertising to make it more attractive. And with the latter one the quality of the news isn't really important, is it?

    Make it sell!

    ReplyDelete

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