Unbalanced News – Lance Schonberg

I don’t watch the news much.

The news I get comes from mostly online sources, but a lot of the news broadcasts I find rather very slanted or deliberate fear mongering or both even on our national news broadcaster, and perhaps that’s just the way our society works, very much picking and choosing what gets broadcast to target whoever the primary audience is.

Online, I can get a broader variety of things, I can see more of what is available worldwide, not just what the local broadcasters care to show me. No one wants to spend money, so even the big networks only have a tiny handful of people to cover international news.

Even nationally, though, things get slanted horribly to what someone thinks should be the news.

For example, I am continually frustrated by the ongoing Humboldt Broncos coverage.

Now please don’t mistake my meaning. It was a horrible tragedy: a whole bunch of young hockey players lost their lives. But I don’t see why the “hockey players” part is relevant, except because we live in Canada, it is. If I believed for a second that a bus load of soccer players or rugby players or kindergarten students would get the same level of attention, I seriously doubt I would roll my eyes every time another story about one of these young fellows triumphing over his injuries or how one of the families is carrying on after one the kids didn’t make it home. I wouldn’t be happier, necessarily, but I’d probably be less cynical about it.

The real problem, in my eyes, is that here in this country we seem to value hockey above almost anything else. Terrorism, for example. The Humboldt crash had daily coverage for months on our national news broadcaster and on the prime national news show just about every night.

But when a terrorist ran through a crowd of people in a van in downtown Toronto, killing ten people, we heard about it for a week or so, and switched back over to the bus load of hockey players. Finally, just last night, a follow-up story as to how things are doing families.

When another terrorist opened fire with a gun on a crowd of Danforth Avenue, killing 3 and injuring 14 people, a couple of months later, we heard a lot for a week or so, and than once a month for a bit, and now it’s been I don’t know how long since we had anything.

But, you know, hockey.

Quick Google News searches:

“humboldt broncos bus crash” 205,000 results

“Toronto van attack 2018” 153,000 results

“Danforth shooting” 19,700 results

Be well, everyone.