As a former junior employee of The Province, Vancouver’s morning daily newspaper, I know how hard working in the news business is. First you have to get up at five o’clock, six days a week. You have to walk the half-kilometer, or so, to where someone from just up the totem pole has dumped the bundles. Next, you have to peel the all the bale bindings, shove their inky contents into your shoulder bags and schlep the damned things from door-to-door, up and down hills, in rain and ice and snow.
When you think about it, it sounds like an ennobling profession!
As a newspaper delivery boy I brought the news, sports and a little entertainment to the citizens and residents all along on my route. At the time I was mostly only interested in The Province for Hägar the Horrible, but I presume the people I was delivering the paper to wanted to learn about all the important goings on in the society all around them.
I’m pretty sure that they don’t hire kids to deliver newspapers anymore.
They ALSO don’t seem to hire much in the way of investigative journalists or journalistic editors either.
For more than a year I’ve been scouring The Province daily. There’s been hardly a mention of the one issue that affects every single British Columbian:
—>Bill C-32, Canada’s proposed copyright legislation.
Have a look for yourself! A search of TheProvince.com‘s website turns up just a couple OP-EDs and and a couple of Postmedia News pieces.
I was willing to let it go, but then they ran one Postmedia News piece. It’s a particularly annoying article, as it features Heritage Minister James Moore claiming:
“I can say for myself, in terms of my own personal digital media consumption habit, that I personally choose to buy products that don’t have digital locks.”
Now as unbelievable as that sounds it also contradicts the facts. Moore has been trying his damnedest to keep the digital lock provisions in this bill. And now he’s turned to outright lies! Nobody that I’m aware of has called him on it. I will.
According to this Maclean’s article, Moore owns two X-Box 360s (one in his riding and one in Ottawa) and has multiple copies of his favorite games including Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. That’s DRM folks, those games have TPMs in them – he’s buying media with built in digital locks and he’s having to buy multiple copies of those games precisely because they have digital locks.
I can’t believe a professional editor, working at The Province, and running that story would be unaware of such glaringly obvious bullshit, or that an editor at a professional news-gathering newspaper would run a story that put such unbelievable guff out unchallenged – or at least, followed it up with a Google search and another story. It’s been nearly a month now with no follow up story.
I must therefore conclude that the editors aren’t reading the stories that they are buying, and that The Province is no longer capable of being Vancouver’s newspaper of record.
I would love to tell you that I’m going to give up my subscription to the The Province – but I can’t. It comes free with the purchase of a cup of coffee, and I’m not willing to give up the coffee just yet.
Apparently investigative journalism and editorial comment will be increasingly found on blogs and YouTube. Here’s some:
Posted by Jesse Willis