Are Sun readers morons?

Is Flaherty going to "borrow" from all the business big wigs he is inviting to his forum?

First he gives them money he is now going to have to borrow it back and pay them ineterest I guess. The new latest ponsey scam.

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"watching the tide roll away"

Aw, I'm disappointed. I thought this was going to be a new "rhetorical questions" thread. Hm, maybe I'll start one.

oldgoat wrote:

Ah, but with the decline of print based media, we'll have Rabble to fill the void. 

 I think the "death of print" hype is exactly that - and the working class, who don't spend their days sitting in front of computers, who often don't even have computers, are going to be reading the Sun in their breakroom for years to come. And listening to crap like CFRB.

I don't want to be fatalist but I don't think we should be too optmistic either. I think the Left needs to think very hard about how we get past talking to the converted and figure out how we communicate with our co-workers.

I think genstrike and mojoroad1 nailed it: Sun readers aren't really "readers" at all. They mostly just look at the pictures and check the scores.

I see no problem with discussing it, which is what we are doing.

Personally, I would never date a man who read the Sun. Says a lot about his outlook on life. BTW, most of the Sun readers do not just read the sports section. They also read the small columns filled with anti-union right wing crap. Then they go out and discuss it with their buddies, with not a care as to the accuracy of their information. These men want small bite sized pieces of "news". Nothing more.  The scary part is that they cannot see how much the paper they love thinks they are all morons. 

"And while I don't hold with Sunshine Girls, I'd like to know what's particularly WRONG with enjoying professional sports. "

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For Marx's time, religion was the opiate of the masses.

For today in Canada, it's sports - and in 'Merica, it's sports and religion.

(See Joe Bageant on the place of religion,  beer and sports in redneckville, USA.)

And, of course, beer as an enabler of  polite political discourse is not in itself a problem.

Mojoroad1 wrote:

Despite its populist right wing crap, I think most readers
of the Sun don't go there for the "news", they go there because the (now some
what mythical) consensus that it has the best sports section. So for Joe Hockey
Fan, it's the paper of "record". The fact that they are indoctrinated with right
wing vitriol is a sad shame. Honestly (& I believe I said this before in another
thread), IF there was a populist left wing media outlet, PRIORITY #1 would be
the best damn sports coverage in the country.

You hit the nail on the head there. The way a newspaper or any media racket
becomes huge and influential is by pandering to the lowest common denominator
and by providing info for basic needs and wants. This gives the media outlet a reader base and revenue, which then serves as a vehicle for spreading a biased point of view on other less objective topics. So cover the sports, the
weather, local sales, entertainment really well... and then throw in slanted coverage
of politics and economics. The Globe and Mail does the same thing, spiced up
with a few token lefties.

____________________________________________________________

http://www.gandhiserve.org/information/questions_and_answers/faq7/faq7.html

"You hit the nail on the head there. The way a newspaper or any media racket
becomes huge and influential is by pandering to the lowest common denominator
and by providing info for basic needs and wants. This gives the media outlet a reader base and revenue, which then serves as a vehicle for spreading a biased point of view on other less objective topics. So cover the sports, the
weather, local sales, entertainment really well... and then throw in slanted coverage
of politics and economics. The Globe and Mail does the same thing, spiced up
with a few token lefties."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What a twisted take on the Globe and Mail. If you had read the editorial page the last few days you'd have seen nothing but letters of  praise for Danny Williams, for the protection of Canadian resources, and praise for the fella who threw the shoe at Dubya- the Globe had tut-tutted the act, editorially.

The op-ed page is the most politically varied you will find anywhere.

The news coverage is complete with the exception of Canadian politics - don't expect to see a helluva lot about New Democrats.

The "lowest common denominator" rag is exemplified by The Sun.

Your generalizations are meaningless blather (that's a word invented in the New England countryside a couple of hundred years back, when they would not dare say bullshit. )

"I think the left can't put together a paper or media outlet that working people would read because the people on the left who have that ability don't really like working people. "

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Robertson Davies, Ken Thomson, Conrad Black...those people had "the ability" and "the money" to put something together.  They sold out their writer/workers when they couldn't make enough bucks.

People on the left with the ability to write for newspapers are legion - but they tend not to enjoy selling ad space by hob-nobbing with chamber of commerce types. And they can never survive by selling subscriptions alone.

But tell me, TP, would you say George Monbiot "dislikes working people" because he talks about the need to wind down our lifestyles ?

Or discuss any leftwing columnist you'd care to.  

Tommy_Paine wrote:

I think the left can't put together a paper or media outlet that working people would read because the people on the left who have that ability don't really like working people. 

Slumberjack wrote:

The Sun chain has been losing money for years.

"One thing I will never forgive the Glib and Snail for, is for taking so long to recognize the facts about global warming, in their editorials and their choice of articles published. Not many years ago, this rag considered talk of global warming to be "blather." "

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That's right, they were damned slow on that score.  But they continued to publish the stories by Michael Valpy who wrote about that and other environmental questions at a time when no one was even ready to publish David Suzuki's column.

Hell, the NDP wasn't ready to go with environmental questions back then. The unions made sure that Walter Pitman and others got no hearing.

Look it up.

Frustrated Mess wrote:

Quote:

The scary part is that they cannot see how much the paper they love thinks they are all morons.

Exactly! The publishers know and treat them as morons. We're just discussing a market segment here. Nothing more. 

Question: who can tell me the name of the publisher of the Toronto Sun without looking it up?

This is babble.  We use the honour system. 

I know the answer because we grew up together in Windsor (he lived over my back fence) and went to the same grade school, high school and university.  I just found it odd that babblers could discuss the Toronto Sun for over thirty posts without ever mentioning the publisher's name. 

This wikipedia article gives the orign of the Sun as the voice of working class conservative Ontario.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Telegram

Toronto Telegram
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The Toronto Telegram (previously the Toronto Evening Telegram) was a conservative, broadsheet afternoon daily newspaper published in Toronto, Canada, from 1876 to 1971.

[edit] History

The Toronto Telegram was founded in 1876 by publisher John Ross Robertson. The Telegram's Editor from 1876 to 1888 was Alexander Fraser Pirie
(1849-1903) who was a native of Guelph, Ontario. Pirie had previously
worked for the Guelph Herald which was his father's paper. He was
already well known throughout 1870s Toronto as the "Sun Skit Urchin" -
a newspaper column consisting of humorous political commentary.

The newspaper became the voice of working-class, conservative Orange
(Protestant) Toronto. The daily was famous for being printed on pink
paper until the 1960s, when the advent of colour photography made it
necessary to switch to standard white paper. The Tely strongly supported Canada's Imperial connection with Britain as late as the 1960s.

It was purchased in 1952 by John Bassett. The newspaper had a reputation for supporting the Conservative Party at both the federal and provincial level. In the 1960s, the paper had increasing difficulty competing with the liberal Toronto Star and suffered a strike by its typesetting union in 1964. The paper was linked to the new TV station CFTO-TV via Telegram Corp from 1960 to 1971. The Bassetts finally shut down the money-losing paper in October 1971.

A number of the Telegram's key writers and staff started a new conservative tabloid, The Toronto Sun
the Monday following the Telegram's last issue. As there was no time
gap between the two papers, the Sun is today generally considered as
direct continuation of the Telegram, and is the holder of the Telegram's archives. York University's library holds
about 500,000 prints and 830,000 negatives of pictures taken by the
Telegram's photographers. Only a small number are searchable on line.