Dear rabble readers,
Among the most disheartening phenomena of the past two decades has been the retreat of mainstream media from a tradition of genuine balance in news and commentary. Another has been the diminishing resources media organizations are prepared to commit to reporting, investigating and analyzing the news and issues that matter most to Canadians.
rabble’s coverage of the stories and voices that Canadians need to know – on health, climate change, Indigenous rights and the labour movement – are often skewed or ignored altogether by corporate media. rabble’s work is more important than ever – I hope you will join me in supporting independent progressive media.
Commentary and analysis in particular have come to be openly dominated by a corporate agenda that has little tolerance for opposition voices and ideas. The resources devoted to news are so limited that many journalists do little more than rewrite press releases. It doesn’t help that the people calling the shots at English Canada’s largest newspaper chain are today U.S.-based venture capitalists with strong ties to the Republican Party of the United States and its ideology.
These trends magnify the bias toward conservatism that has always been prevalent in mainstream Canadian media, notwithstanding the long tradition of complaining by mainstream political figures (and some prominent journalists too, who certainly know better) that media is dominated by “liberal” views.
This doesn’t mean there’s no “balance” in the news, if one is prepared to make liberal use of scare quotes! For the bias of mainstream media in favour of a neoliberal worldview, and the moribund journalistic tradition that “balance” and “reaction” must nevertheless always be provided, propels media toward a kind of false equivalency in news.
We see this clearly in Alberta where, no matter how outlandish or extreme the policy advocated by the United Conservative Party (UCP) may be, the party is usually presented as if it were the moderate Progressive Conservative Party of old, and its positions as examples of moderate centrism.
At the same time, in a nod to the notion of “balance,” and despite a cautious and incremental NDP provincial leadership, the risible claim that NDP policy proposals are radical, extreme or, ludicrously, “Marxist,” are given far more credence than they deserve.
This leaves Albertans – and Canadians generally – in a bad space, journalistically speaking, and one that isn’t getting any better. Nor can we rely on federal subsidies for newspapers now totally dominated by neoliberal ideology to do much of anything to protect or enhance Canadian media democracy!
These realities are a big part of why rabble matters.
rabble is one of the few places where alternative voices can be heard, and where a better future for Canada is permitted to be publicly imagined. This is important in an era when the lie that There Is No Alternative has been so deeply etched into our psyches.
rabble provides a vital archive of two decades of news and commentary seen and analysed through a progressive lens. rabble upholds and invites progressive public discourse.
In other words, rabble is an antidote to media that’s forgotten how to do its job, and even what that job is.
Please help rabble do its important work – for Canadian journalism, and for Canadians. I invite you to support rabble’s annual fundraiser.
David Climenhaga
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Nick Seebruch, editor
