New CBC Broadcast Promo Highlights Everything That is Wrong With Mainstream Media

A promo that is hitting the airwaves on CBC television is highlighting what is wrong with mainstream media.

One of the things I do as I conduct research on pretty much everything is that I take a cursory look at what is being broadcast on old media – specifically, traditional television. If I happen to have access to it, why not? It is, after all, helping me understand what disinformation the mainstream media is pumping out to try and scare old people into believing that the internet is a massive threat to society.

While there are instances in the news programming itself pushing disinformation (such as the time the CBC tried to push experts to falsely blame social media for human smuggling), sometimes, it’s what is said in the advertising that can be just as problematic as it pushes similar propaganda.

Recently, I began noticing advertisements pushing the narrative that the internet is “noise” while CBC is the “news”. While there isn’t an online source that I could find that shows this particular ad, the advertisement itself is pretty problematic.

The ad itself flashes random pictures with an ominous narrator saying “choose noise”, “choose the algorithm”, “choose news that screams”. Then, the random flashing ends with text that says “or don’t”. Then, softer pictures flash of CBC reporters with the voice calmly saying “choose news that is accountable”, “choose fact checked news”, etc.

This advertisement is a pretty good example of everything that is wrong with mainstream media these days. It pushes the narrative that everything on the internet is disinformation and not accountable while the mainstream media is the only source for truthful reporting. The reality is that in a lot of instances, the exact opposite is true.

Specifically, for the accountability, it is often the mainstream media that is left unaccountable. The reason for this is that whenever mistakes are made in reports, very often, the mainstream media just ignores it and gives comments an uncaring shrug. For instance, I have never seen any accountability from mainstream media when they pushed the lie that platforms “steals” news content or the false claims that the platforms are “censoring” them. They lied in a very blatant way and despite the numerous complaints about the false or misleading claims, there has been no accountability at all.

Conversely, people who produce news content online have an up front and personal relationship with accountability. This is generally in the form of the comments section. When someone produces something that contains even the slightest error, particularly popular creators will immediately get a flood of complaints directly on the page this was published. Not only that, but there are other creators who are known to latch on to errors as they create their own content to say how wrong they are on something – regardless of how small the error may or may not be.

As a result, in scenarios like that, the creator that makes the mistake has that risk of people dropping their support for that creator. This can directly impact their livelihoods.

Moreover, there are plenty of online only news organizations that are properly accredited journalism outlets that produce news content. As a result, the advertisement basically paints those outlets with the same brush as some random disinformation troll account. Obviously, those are two completely different things.

On a more fundamental level, however, the advertisement gets the nature of the internet completely wrong. Specifically, it essentially tries to frame the internet as the enemy and that they are in a locked battle of “us vs them”.

The reality is very much different. The internet is simply a medium. You can make it however you want. Viewers can choose what they want to create and if there is a void, they even have the choice to become the creator that fills that void. Traditional organizations are obviously free to join this ecosystem and put out news on this medium, but they seem to choose to continue to be adversarial towards the internet, constantly attacking it as if it was a massive threat to society (when they know full well it is more of a threat to their bottom lines because they refuse to adapt to the modern age).

That leads us to audience behaviour. Very clearly, this ad is in response to viewership leaving mainstream media for online sources. Why is that? Simply put, the quality of mainstream media has dropped significantly over the last decade. In a world without the internet, that wouldn’t matter because mainstream media has an effective monopoly on information dissemination. That’s not the world we live in now. Others can research the issues that shape our world and find out things that happens to be politically inconvenient for the political establishment. That monopoly is lost.

As a result, people are moving away from traditional media outlets to online sources as they find better quality information from other sources. Traditional media outlets do not have a monopoly, but behave as though there are no alternatives to them anyway for reasons that have grown increasingly stupid over the years. One reason seems to be just pure denial of the reality we live in today.

Sadly, it seems that the mainstream media will, to this day, refuse to get it. I like to think that, over time, mainstream media will finally understand that the world has changed since the 70s and 80s. Unfortunately, that change still hasn’t happened to this day.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.