Social media doesn’t just censor one political view
By Lethbridge Herald on January 6, 2023.
Editor:
For all the prominent conservative proclamations implying otherwise, including Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files”, I’ve found social media also silences left-wing environmentalist voices critical of the fossil fuel industry. It’s not just right-wing opinions being censored.
Also, my own Facebook and Twitter accounts were disabled without any explanation a little over three years ago; the relatively few dislikes I received while the accounts were operational originated from pro-fossil-fuel sources.
Still, social media have enabled far greater information freedom than that allowed by what had been a rigidly gatekept news and information virtual monopoly held by the pre-2000 electronic and print mainstream news-media.
Frank Sterle Jr.
White Rock, B.C.
7-6
What many of us true Conservatives have found is that a lot of Editors are finding it smart to protect these phony conservatives, reformers and are refusing to print anything bad being said against them. Watching them put Alberta in financial ruin, by giving away our oil and tax wealth to buy votes while all the other oil rich areas of the world enjoy their oil wealth is just plain stupid. But as we know easterners who own these newspapers are mainly conservatives. The king pin behind it , Conrad Black, even tried to get elected as a conservative and failed.
Mainstream journalism has largely become a profession motivated more by a buck and a byline — i.e. a regular company paycheck and a frequently published name with stories — than a genuine strive to challenge the powers-that-be in order to truly comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable in an increasingly unjust global existence.
Perhaps such journalism has become so systematic thus normalized — i.e. the ethical (and sometimes even the moral) standard has been further lowered — that those who are aware of it, notably politicians and political writers, don’t bother publicly discussing it.
Meantime, there still are reporters and editors who will (as though with big innocent fawn-like eyes) reply to such critiques as this with, ‘Who, me? I’m just the messenger.’ Whatever the news media may be, they are not ‘just the messenger’; nor are they but a reflection of the community — or their consumership, for that matter — in which they circulate.
Maybe there’s also an informal/unspoken agreement amongst the largest mainstream news-media: ‘Don’t dump on me, and I won’t dump on you.’
In addition, newspaper and other current-affairs websites, including the Washington Post’s website, are increasingly converting to (what I call) pay-to-say formats, where the reader is allowed to consume the article without charge but must buy a subscription in order to comment on the article.
Money talks and that’s what it’s become. Watching some of these reporters deliberately spread the UCP lies is sickening. While the owners of sun newspapers have been forced to lay off employees over the years due to a drop in support they allow these stupid reporters to encourage ignorant Albertans, mostly seniors, to hurl sarcastic comments at anyone who isn’t as dumb as them. Yet no one I know still supports them because of this stupidity. One prime example is David Staples a reporter with the Edmonton Journal who was dumb enough to suggest that Danielle Smith is a lot like Peter Lougheed, you can’t be any dumber than that. She is nothing like Lougheed. He cared about the well being of all Albertans, collected proper royalties and taxes and ran this province properly. The MLAs I knew considered Reformers to be their worse enemy and that’s what they are to all of us. They destroy jobs, not create them, and help the rich steal the people’s wealth in an effort to buy votes, and don’t care who gets hurt by what they do. Treating doctors, nurses, teachers and students like third class citizens has become their favorite sport. They don’t care who died from Covid or what it’s done to our doctors and nurses. Let’s fire the ones who complain and privatize the system to make the stupid people pay for it so we don’t have to deal with it, is their attitude.
i would say that yellow journalism has never appeared as much like urine as it does today.
So tell me FC what is a true Conservative??? As I have read many of your posts over the years I never even got a sniff of anything that resembles conservatism in any form.