“Disinformation”

Unless they can serve a broad cultural and geographic cross section of the nation, NPR and PBS don’t merit taxpayer support.

Concern about media bias — specifically politically liberal bias — has moved center stage thanks to the cri de coeur by National Public Radio’s Uri Berliner in the Free Press. The network’s business editor, who resigned in the aftermath of his speaking truth to power, wrote that “politics intruded” on a wide variety of coverage, from Covid to “Russiagate,” connecting what he regards as the network’s movement to the Left to the fact that he could identify exactly zero registered Republicans in its D.C. newsroom.

The same can be said of our CBC. Most of what they produce seems to be for CBC staff and their transgender, social justice friends.

This classic case of false alarmism ties back to a single tech company.

The loss of bees puts the entire global food supply at risk, and because of this, the race is on to save them,” states a December tech newsletter. “Save the Bees reports that bee populations have decreased by more than 50% in the past 75 years, while human populations have increased by over 130%.”

Elections Canada is trying to insulate Canadian voters from false narratives and information during the next federal election by launching an online tool to help voters cut through misinformation and disinformation about the electoral process in Canada.

The ElectoFacts website, launched this week, provides factual information to debunk the most common misconceptions observed by Elections Canada officials in recent years.

“Building resilience against inaccurate information helps strengthen the overall health of democracy,” Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault said in a statement.

Much that is happening in the spectacle of America’s legal-political life today reminds me of some pages in Johan Huizinga’s great book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938). In a chapter on “Play and Law,” Huizinga distinguishes the unfolding of legal proceedings in advanced cultures, where strict adherence to process and abstract notions of right and wrong prevail, from the situation in more primitive cultures, where the ultimate criterion is victory. “Turning our eyes from the administration of justice and highly developed civilizations,” Huizinga writes, “to that which obtains in less advanced phases of culture, we see that the idea of right and wrong, the ethical-juridical conception, comes to be overshadowed by the idea of winning and losing, that is, the purely agonistic conception. It is not so much the abstract question of right and wrong that occupies the archaic mind as the very concrete question of winning or losing.”