PR flaks are taking over journalism and it shows

The Great Depression of 2007-2017 proceeds unabated in February and journalism has suffered terribly along with many other professional crafts as the business cycle continues to tank. Once-successful businesses are shutting down and those that continue are cutting back. Jobs are scarce.

The Internet, including social media, has replaced printed newspapers and magazines as a main source of local and international news, if you can believe the sources. Soon printing presses will become museum objects along with butter churns and typewriters.

Reporters are being replaced by public relations types in the journalism media that still exist. Truth is nearly off the list of their craft’s mandates and flakery (akin to fakery) drives their commentaries. Yet they are increasingly seen on TV commentary shows instead of actual journalists who would be paid by the shows’ producers instead of by the flaks’ commercial clients.

There are precious few advertising budgets that include paid commercials or print ads and even fewer that include sponsorship of public-affairs programs and articles.

You’ll notice that ad-starved major media like Toronto Star, Globe & Mail, National Post, Maclean’s Magazine, et al, have taken to publishing over-long articles and third-party content to fill in around the few ads they have and the fewer staff writers and editors. Copy editing is almost non-existent as embarrassing errors become commonplace.

For ordinary people, the economic depression might never end because fewer private-sector jobs are a permanent situation. The private sector is becoming a relic. Barring a tragedy or a war which would create employment, however horrid, government eventually will have to provide an economy that sustains those permanently out of work or operate a police state to shield the elites from the rest of us.

It will challenge the Trudeau regime immediately and it isn’t a certainty that Pierre’s kid Justin is really up to the task. What did Justin inherit from his parents? Is it his father’s arrogance and his mother’s intellect? Let’s hope not! Justin’s breathless assurances that all is under control increasingly rings hollow.

His play to the international set to win praise for himself by bringing in 60,000 Middle-East refugees for us to support stacks up poorly against his government’s continued abandonment of real Canadians—our native peoples—who suffer fundamental deprivation of life’s basics like potable water and reasonably priced food.

The Liberal brand is tarnished by the two principal leaders who wield its power: Justin in Ottawa and Kathleen Wynne in Queen’s Park. Both are showing sticky fingers and unmitigated greed as they cash in on their power monopolies by selling access to their governments in order to perpetuate their positions of power. Businesses—monopolists—gobble up such opportunities. And “tarnished” is too tame a term for such barefaced corruption. It’s plain crooked and disgraceful.

— Frank Touby