A globalist’s guide to media

Opinion

Historically, it’s been a common belief that an informed and educated public is a primary bastion protecting democracies — along with a perhaps naive assumption that pretty much everybody in society follows an honour code to obey commonly agreed-upon laws and to generally behave in civilized fashion.

This assumes news media capable of and willing to do that informing and educating. Sad to say, for the globally minded, the international media is now about the only place to find it: Al Jazeera, BBC World News, and the Guardian, for starters.

North American media hasn’t been cutting it for some years now, and it’s getting worse. The CBS settlement that coughs up US$16 million in cash to Trump, promising another US$20 million in free propaganda, and hanging Colbert out to dry is just the latest example.

Social media has been overwhelmed by AI bots generating truly colossal levels of horse manure in the guise of conspiracy theory truth. Once the bots figure out human hands don’t have seven fingers and Rachel Maddow does not and never has had a baby, we won’t be able to tell what’s bot and what ain’t.

If we’re watching or reading North American media, most of us know very little about the larger issues we need to understand. Eventually (or sooner), it’s all going to come home to roost, and it would be nice to have a little warning before either the natural environment or the political one blows up in our faces, or perhaps to be able to somehow do a little something about either or both, before it all blows to hell.

Example: if the tiny South Seas island of Vanuatu sounds familiar, it’s likely because seasons of the Survivor TV series — an ironic allegory for the innate viciousness of the American culture if ever there has been one — have been set there. But unless you’ve been watching Al Jazeera, you would not know that tiny island recently scored a huge, though admittedly entirely symbolic, victory in the International World Court. It ruled on a suit brought by Vanuatu against — well, the industrialized world — that countries contributing to global warming and the rise of sea levels really ought to quit doing that and, further, should ante up compensation to the tiny sea level nations that are right now grappling with the permanent flooding of their immediate environments as a direct result of the rude behaviour of the greedy First World human piggies.

The video is alarming.

Nor would you be aware, though BBC World News reported it in detail, that more than 150 countries met in Guyana recently, hoping to grapple with the climate change issues facing their low-lying nations. The prime minister of Barbados was particularly concerned, because her nation is among those being slowly subsumed by seawater.

Sea levels are rising. Wildfires are peppering Europe and Asia just as they are devastating large swathes of North America. Deforestation is proceeding throughout Central and South America as fast as humans can chew up and spit out forests for profit. BBC has been covering that. Burn down the forests and you no longer have the carbon sink capacity that helped buffer us against our own environmental stupidity. Not to mention decent air to breathe. Not to mention blistering heat.

Similarly, unless you have been watching BBC News, you would not know Volodymyr Zelenskyy is fighting, not just a war with Russia, but rising protest over corruption in Ukraine, which was sparked by his removal of an anti-corruption law.

And if you haven’t been reading the Guardian, you might not have grasped the full severity of the man-made famine in Gaza. Children are dying daily by the dozens. There are pictures, they’re not AI, and they’re ugly.

You will also be unaware that only nine per cent of the developed world’s plastics is being recycled. The rest, which we are still madly producing and throwing out, is piling up in Third World countries in Asia.

While American media giants hasten on one hand to kowtow to Trump, and, on the other, seem incapable of extricating themselves from the sucking maw of Trumpian dystopia tinged by Epstein angst and a sprinkling of oh-gee-where-has-our-democracy-gone, Canadian media struggle to maintain a degree of focus on matters deemed to be of domestic significance.

None of them is doing their job: to educate and inform. Not that I’m overly thrilled about being informed and educated. Frankly, it’s a little depressing. But then, so is stepping outside and trying to breathe while your eyeballs pour tears from the sting of the smoke. I’d rather not have to get used to that. I guess we’d all rather not.

It might be too late. But it might not be, if only we knew enough to stop it.

Judy Waytiuk is a retired Winnipeg journalist.