Throughout my life, I’ve often heard the line, “time heals all wounds” – to some extent, it’s true. And, at the same time, it isn’t.
Certainly not when history repeats itself, over and over. Suddenly, you start feeling those old daggers pinching your spine once more.
When I left journalism in 2017 (or, more accurately, it left me) the industry was already in its terminal stages; mass layoffs, followed by smaller (yet regular) layoffs, unstable work environments, poor wages, and so on.
Nearly a decade later, I see nothing has changed. I see the same cancer return with the same smile and thirst for flesh – what we know, and have always known, as corporate greed.
Just the other day, Rogers, one of Canada’s (and North America’s) largest telecommunications and media corporations, cut 230 jobs across Canada, as it’s closing the doors on six radio stations in Vancouver, Calgary, Halifax and Kitchener.
In a terrible ironic twist, the traffic reporter at News 1130, a radio station in Vancouver, was driving to work when he heard this come up on his radio.
“I’m still not entirely sure how to process the news,” Alexander Carrigan told CBC News.
Rogers said in a statement that the “difficult but necessary decision” followed a “thorough review” of its radio stations across the country.”
Yeah, fuck you Rogers.
It wasn’t difficult. No more difficult when you prioritized profits over people, every time you bought and sold another company or outlet, ensuring every single dime and dollar went to the corporate piggybank and as far away from your employees and customers as possible. Better yet, here’s some prime PR advice: Don’t bother with any statements, there’s no need to hide what you truly are.
In a tepid attempt to save some face, Rogers cited declining audience numbers and lower advertisement revenue for the decision to close six radio stations and let go of 200+ staff.
This is despite the fact that just one day before the layoffs, Rogers bought the last remaining stake in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment for $4.35 billion. In 2024, Rogers bought Bell’s stake in MLSE for another whopping $4.7 billion.
Yup, they bought themselves a fucking NHL team. But somehow we’re expected to believe the company somehow doesn’t have enough money to run six anemic radio stations.
It’s just easier when no one’s around asking questions anymore.
And like clockwork, the corporate charade of false grief and sympathy is followed by a series of empty and embarrassing commentary from our governments, as proven by British Columbia’s own, Premier David Eby.
“We all benefit from having local news outlets and this is a blow for British Columbians,” Eby wrote in a statement.
And yet, you did nothing, and are doing nothing. Not you, or your predecessors, or other provincial governments, and certainly not our federal government. Not a single person in political leadership in Canada on any level has taken any sort of initiative to tackle the country’s “news poverty” problem, and have instead allowed, with open arms, these corporate parasites to kill journalism and media jobs for the sake of profit. Because why help an industry that holds you accountable?
After all, it’s just easier when no one’s around asking questions anymore. Ask Vladimir Putin, he’ll tell you it’s a solid strategy (especially when said curious people “randomly” start falling out of balconies).
The third act happens when the journalism industry reports job losses like this – the pitiful “oh really?” look of surprise in everyone’s faces, as if it’s happening for the first time. As evidence shows, the powers that be have been whacking at this corpse for a while now. According to the Local News Research Project at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism, Canada has seen a net loss of nearly 200 local news outlets since 2008.
As well put by the project’s co-director, April Lindgren, this loss “has a corrosive effect on democracy” – in terms of keeping the public informed of what’s happening in their backyard and keeping political leaders and corporations accountable.
That’s right kids. For better or worse, those “ambulance chasers” and “vultures” (as people have often called journalists, including yours truly) are ultimately needed to keep democracy and accountability alive. You need people, actual humans, not AI, not Google, not SEOs or any other artificial shit to go in person and do the interviews, do the digging, do the vetting, do all the things that as a journalist you do to put out the most accurate, ethical, objective, and factual news story you possibly can, for the ultimate good of people and the community.
Because without these people, without investigative journalism, you have absolutely nothing. Without journalists, the narrative can be controlled with ease by whoever holds the most power and influence, free of any repercussions, whether it be corruption, environmental destruction, corporate greed, even murder. Zero accountability equals a carte blanche for anyone to do anything, and say anything they feel like. It’s in these very dark and unseen environments that oppression, dictatorships and new and better models for war, famine and destruction form, because there’s simply no one to point the public flashlight of accountability at them. We might as well give them the fucking key to our homes and our bank account numbers and revoke all our freedoms – save them the trouble.
Aftermath, and the failure of ‘citizen journalism’
You might be wondering – so what comes next? What- or who- backfills the void left behind by all these defunct news outlets and now-orphaned journalists?
What we’re left with is what I call “zombie outlets” that are scattered throughout B.C. and Canada. These are essentially gutted newsrooms, operating with either a single reporter/editor and/or producer who takes in content and pushes it out – usually regurgitating stories from other outlets under the same owner. Black Press is a fine example of this. As a means of creating the illusion that they have an army of journalists gathering news around the clock, stories from each outlet are copy-posted to other outlets. Yet the grim reality is that the company has lost much of its editorial staff over the course of the last decade through horrible executive mismanagement, corporate greed, and regular rounds of layoffs. It remains a husk of its former self, consumed by the very same forces that destroy bigger and more successful news entities.
The rest is the equivalent of nature taking back the streets, buildings and roads of an abandoned city; there’s no rhyme or reason, it just happens, much like a jungle. Pretty much around the early 2000s when the journalism industry began its rapid descent, new “outlets” emerged from the ruins, run by average Joes and Janes, regular folk with no journalistic education or background – driven to put their own form of “journalism” out there – known as citizen journalism.
For a while, it seemed to work. Audiences, long scorned by “regular media” flocked to these alternate outlets because they were fed articles that were tailored to whatever they wanted to hear. It is in this very vacuum that “alternative media” stuck its roots, usually through social media, preaching to the world that they are the real voices of reason.
But they were burned. Worldwide events like the COVID-19 pandemic and “freedom convoy” movements revealed the absolute critical need for factual, empirical-evidence-based reporting made by real journalists, not village idiots and keyboard warriors screaming into a mic whatever they think is real or fake, right or wrong, and passing it off as fact. There simply weren’t (and aren’t) enough journalists in the world to do this work and sift through what is real and what isn’t, and so an avalanche of misinformation from cultist movements like anti-vaxxers, white supremacists and other self-proclaimed “truth-seekers” flooded the airwaves and buried the voices of actual experts, specialists and professionals.
People severed ties with their families. Some committed atrocities. Many died from preventable diseases and viruses, even in their final moments still believing a total stranger online rather than their own doctor. Dictatorships rose to even greater heights. Local wars, long festering unchecked and unmitigated, spread to larger regions, some now threatening the entire world.
The final curtain
In the Alien film franchise, we learn of an antagonistic interstellar mega corporation known as Weyland-Yutani Corp, which owns everything from the main characters’ starship, the Nostromo, to your average household appliances and pharmaceuticals. The entire Earth is essentially under a single government owned and operated by WY, which had historically merged and bought countless other companies over decades and centuries, often by force and shady strategies and takeovers, extending its immense power to become what it is in this fictional 22nd century.
I mention this because we are seeing much of what leads to these monstrous fictional corporate entities – WY, Arasaka of Cyperpunk 2077 lore) and Omnicorp (Robocop) – and their subsequent actions on people and their communities – in our real world today. The Running Man (‘87 version, not that recent crap) also serves as a great example of what happens when we relinquish our freedom and democracy to corporations that can twist and influence the truth in any way they like, as long as it serves them and protects them from accountability. And in every one of those fictional stories, journalism is non-existent or state-controlled, and any deviation or push to reveal the true nature of said evil corporate entities is met with suppression, violence and death.
Am I saying Rogers, Bell, Google, Meta, Amazon, Coca-Cola, and all the rest are Weyland-Yutani? Nah. At least, not yet. But herein lies the biggest irony that we may yet still face; that the very films meant for our entertainment have become the cautionary tales of what is to come, should the status quo remain on the same rail of how we see and treat journalism as a society.
And alas, with each newspaper, radio station and newsroom that bites to dust across the world, democracy dies in darkness.
octaviauto.com 