Goldtent TA Paradise

THE “LEGACY” MEDIA ACCELERATE THEIR OWN DEMISE

1. Fullgoldcrown says:

   December 5, 2023 - 11:43 pm at 11:43 pm

   According to much of the legacy media, Pierre Poilievre just had a ‘bad week’ followed by a week in which he was kept on the defensive by the Liberals on the Canada-Ukraine free trade deal update, and a spat over which language government ministers should use to answer questions. And yet, Poilievre’s lead in national opinion polls has remained as strong as ever. Poilievre’s so-called ‘bad week’ and defensive posture also coincided with his release of what may be the most effective Canadian political/policy video released in a generation – the 15-minute-long “Housing Hell” documentary that has already been viewed millions of times. We’ll look at what why the gap between the media’s perception of Poilievre’s performance and the public reaction to his performance as CPC Leader continues to widen, and why this shows how the media is accelerating their own demise.

   After, we’ll look at where the parties stand in the latest national polls.

   The legacy media accelerates their own demise

   If you were to believe the legacy media, Pierre Poilievre just had a ‘bad week,’ and was then put on the defensive by the Liberals for the first time in a while.

   With the Liberals seeking to further deepen divisions in Canada on a carbon tax in the Canada-Ukraine free trade deal update, demonizing the Conservatives as ‘Islamophobic,’ and making a huge deal about a CPC MP asking a Liberal Minister to answer a question in English – as is the convention – the Liberals surely ‘gave it their all’ when it came to putting the Conservatives on the defensive.

   Unsurprisingly – over a week removed from the Liberals announcing an expanded media bailout – the press jumped on every Liberal narrative against the Conservatives and repeated it as if it was the unchallenged truth.

   The At Issue Panel on CBC had a whole segment on Poilievre’s bad week and the supposed ‘outrage’ against French that occurred when Conservative MP Rachael Thomas asked Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge to answer a question in English. CBC tried to dress this up as objective coverage, but it absolutely reeked of pro-Liberal ‘wishful thinking.’

   Surely however, after two ‘bad weeks’ for Poilievre according to the media, there would be some sort of shift in the polls, right?

   Well, there indeed was a shift.

   But yet again, not in the direction the Liberals would have wanted.

   The Liberals have fallen even further behind the Conservatives in the least Nanos poll – a poll which had once been one of the more ‘positive’ ones for the Liberals.

   They have fallen to just 23%, barely ahead of the NDP at 21%.

   The Conservatives meanwhile are at 40%.

   Another poll by Innovative Research shows 70% of Canadians saying it is time for a change in government, compared to just 13% who disagree.

   And that was before Poilievre’s “Housing Hell” video.

   As of now, the video has been viewed 266K times on YouTube, and viewed/seen millions of more times on Twitter/X.

   Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau released a video on housing – much shorter with no deeper analysis of why housing is so expensive – that has just a fraction of the views of Poilievre’s video.

   Making this more amazing is that Trudeau has many more followers on Twitter/X than Poilievre (6.5 million vs 812K), and Poilievre’s video is a full 15-minutes long – far longer than most think anyone is willing to watch ‘political’ or ‘policy’ content.

   Poilievre’s video thus simultaneously bypassed the media by getting his message directly to the voters, exposed Trudeau’s online following as largely illusory (many followed Trudeau early on when he was a newly elected-PM yet clearly don’t care about his content) and demonstrated how little understanding the press has of what is happening in Canada.

   The more the media becomes dependent on government funding, and the more it seeks out that funding to survive instead of adapting to the market, the more disconnected it becomes. Most Canadians can’t just ask a for a bailout from the government, so most people have little regard for legacy media institutions that feel entitled to our tax dollars.

   Even more problematic for the media is that relying on the government completely breaks any connection between production and reward.

   Just look at CBC President Catherine Tait, who had a disastrous interview – on CBC ironically – where she confirmed that bonuses may still be sent out to executives despite the network cutting 10% of their workforce.

   This about perfectly encapsulated everything wrong with both CBC and the legacy press in Canada more broadly. CBC has received massive infusions of funding under Trudeau, yet their ratings have gone down. They’ve kept paying executive bonuses – a reward for failure – even as they cut staff. And at no point – not even once – did they consider looking at why they have failed to win viewers among the public, and instead just asked for more government money.

   Even with Bill C-11 & C-18, even with all the media bailouts, the press finds itself unable to stem the tide of the surging independent media, and unable to control the narrative now that Poilievre is reaching voters directly.

   The media is stuck in a vicious cycle: The more they become dependent on the government, the less Canadians relate to them, the more their ratings and narrative power goes down, and the more the media becomes dependent on the government.

   This vicious cycle is accelerating the demise of the Canadian media, and – just like the Liberals – there’s no sign the media can turn it around.