Monthly Archive for August, 2008

I am truly disgusted by the sheer stupidity of some people out there, who call themselves journalists. Now, I’ve grown used to and kind of expect this from American news agencies. The fodder that is used on programs like “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” or “The Colbert Report” is bad enough, and I’m sure they only show a small part of the absurdity available down there.

However, I’m been noticing it more and more on Canadian news networks too. There has always been stupidity, but they seem to purposefully be putting spin on stories to try and instill a certain point of view. Take for example the following story: “Teen cyclist killed when police chase enters Mohawk reserve“.

Now when you read that story, you get certain facts out of it:

• Police were conducting a high-speed chase, of an obviously dangerous suspect
• The suspect turned into a native reserve and shortly after doing so, struck a child cyclist

Now while this is very tragic, I find it outrageous that a supposedly impartial news organization chooses to focus in on not the facts of the story, but spend over half the article on the commentary from residents on the fact that police followed the suspect onto the reserve.

The opinions and commentary they got weren’t from professionals or leaders within the native community.. just regular residents. The comments are completely off base, for the following reasons:

• The police were following an obviously dangerous criminal to conduct a high-speed chase in the first place
• If the suspect was the least bit smart, he wouldn’t have slowed down anyways if the police had broken off pursuit — he couldn’t be sure what they were doing next or if they had an alternate plan. This would not have prevented this tragedy from occurring.
• If a precedent was set that police couldn’t pursue a suspect onto a native reserve, guess where every criminal would go to get away. I’m very sure this isn’t what native people want.

Okay, so given that the opinion is pretty wackjob, we come to the major point.. why would CBC put the focus of the story on the fact that the natives are unhappy about police venturing on to the reserve? It put a very biased skew on news, which is supposed to be just the facts. There is no indication if more facts were release and just not reported, or if police haven’t released more information, but there are tons of other facts to the news story that people would find more useful then crap-pinions: suspect information like type of car, speeds that were reached, why police were chasing him in the first place.. or victim information like the school the boy was attending, if he was wearing a helmet or other safety equipment, his interests or activities he was involved in, when/where the services are being held. Now if more FACTS about the story aren’t available, then give us the opinion of someone who is able to formulate a rational thought from a situation like this, such as a native leader or representative from the native peacekeeping force. This is much better than some random person who lives nearby and is just thrilled to have a microphone stuck in their face and will spew anything that they think will get them on TV/radio/print.

Skewing the story to make it sound anti-police, focusing on how long the officers were on the reserve, and related crap is just wrong. It doesn’t matter if it was don’t to just make the story seem a little bit more outrageous, and get people talking, or if it was to support the view of an biased reporter, it questions the integrity of our national news agency to be able to effectively report on the facts and to let Canadians, who are generally intelligent creatures, make up their minds for themselves.