The Media

A company that owns nearly two dozen newspapers in Atlantic Canada has debts of almost $100 million and is filing for creditor protection.

SaltWire Network made the application in the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, according to court documents filed on Monday.

The court documents said SaltWire has more than $94 million in debt, with roughly a third of that owed to its lender, Fiera Private Debt.

CNN has been desperately treading water for years now. The former king of cable news has been bleeding ratings for years, with Fox News typically topping all the networks night after night. CNN still fancies itself the “most trusted name in news,” yet, even former CEO Chris Licht admitted last year that that trust — assuming at one point they actually had it — is long gone and they need to restore it. He didn’t last long.

I’m a former anchor of the CBC News program The National and I have an uncomfortable confession to make: I don’t watch the news.

This is really hard to say but I don’t watch The National any more. I can’t tell you the last time I watched W5. I don’t get news from people who do what I used to do for a living. It’s sad, but it’s much more than that.

It was a “garbage decision.” That’s how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described Bell Media’s recent announcement that it was laying off nine per cent of its workforce, selling nearly half of its regional radio stations, and eliminating many of its newscasts.

I didn’t like the announcement either. Giant corporations such as Bell have made a mess of journalism. There’s no question that their decisions over the years to systematically cut back on local newsrooms has led to a decline in the quality of news coverage, which of course leads to people cancelling their subscriptions and to companies pulling their ads. And the downward spiral continues.

On a warm Ottawa day last June, reporter Jessica Wallace cozied up to Governor-General Mary Simon in Rideau Hall for a celebratory photo.

She smiled and held up a plaque recognizing her employer, Kamloops This Week, as a finalist for the Michener Award, Canada’s top journalism honour.

Today, when Ms. Wallace thinks of that photo, the smiles are gone. “What did it mean?” she says. “Did anyone care? They still closed us down.”

Only three days after BCE Inc. announced its deepest job cuts in 30 years, including the elimination of hundreds of posts at Bell Media, Sunday’s Super Bowl provided the company with a good news story to tell – for a change.

The National Football League championship game, which went into overtime and attracted hordes of Swifties eager to catch a glimpse of their pop-music idol and her Kansas City Chiefs (maybe) boyfriend, produced bonanza ratings for Bell Media, which holds the Canadian rights to the Super Bowl under a multiyear contract with the NFL.

They dropped objectivity and with it credibility

The Pew Research Center reported on November 10, “Newspapers are a critical part of the American news landscape, but they have been hit hard as more and more Americans consume news digitally. The industry’s financial fortunes and subscriber base have been in decline since the mid-2000s, and their website audience traffic has begun to decline as well.”

The far-left Atlantic’s Paul Farhi is calling on taxpayers to save the corporate media from an “extinction-level event.”

Farhi was once the left-wing media reporter for the disgraced Washington Post. During a recent round of layoffs at the failing Post, Farhi accepted a buyout. Now he believes that the same people the corporate media insult, demean, and misinform (you and I) should bail out this fascist institution…

American media’s preeminent Mean Girl, Taylor Lorenz, would like all us plebs to know that things are, like, really, really hard for her and her fellow mainstream-media journalists right now.

Earlier this week, in a video breathtaking for its profound lack of self-awareness, Lorenz decried a ‘really dark’ period of mass lay-offs throughout the media industry. ‘Tens of thousands of journalists have been laid off in the past year’, she said. ‘Pretty much the entire digital media ecosystem which myself and a lot of other millennial journalists came up in, has been completely hollowed out.’ ‘If you’re a young journalist today’, she continued, ‘there’s almost no on-ramp to traditional journalism’.

We’ve all heard about the LA Times fighting for its life. The recent VP Harris interview with CNN drew 332,000 in total viewers and just 72,000 in the coveted 25-54 demographic. In other words, nobody watched.

The Public Broadcasting System is often exposed for what it is: a publicly-funded hotbed of progressive propaganda disguised as news. Left-wing biases hard-baked into its editorial lines and delivered with calm tones. But if you look hard enough, from time to time you’ll find a report that exemplifies what news delivery should be.

Our own media rises to the occasion from time to time.

Back at the end of the 1980s, I had the opportunity to tour the Soviet Union. Upon disembarking from our Aeroflot plane in Moscow, we were ushered into customs much like we would be in any other country. Where things differed was with what the customs agents were searching for. It wasn’t drugs or firearms they were concerned with as much as magazines, books, and newspapers. The Soviets didn’t want to allow unfettered information to reach citizens and it was seized if found.