Power And Betrayal In The Canadian Media

The Canadian media system, which in many respects is this society's "meeting ground"—its public square—is in the midst of a profound shift away from the foundations on which it has rested comfortably for decades. The publicly financed Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, long the backbone of the broadcasting system, is threatened by budget cuts and by technological change. The newspaper industry has fallen into the hands of a few powerful individuals. Huge global corporations and a vast communications revolution are dramatically altering the nature of news and entertainment. This book argues that unless action is taken these changes will narrow our access to the information we need as citizens and damage our capacity to communicate with each other and reflect on ourselves as a community. Power and Betrayal in the Canadian Media is a sweeping exploration of the Canadian media system and the impact it has on Canadian society, politics, and culture.

Media coverage of the Supreme Court of Canada has emerged as a crucial factor not only for judges and journalists but also for the public. It's the media, after all, that decide which court rulings to cover and how. They translate highly complex judgments into concise and meaningful news stories that will appeal to, and be understood by, the general public. Thus, judges lose control of the message once they hand down decisions, and journalists have the last word. To show how the Supreme Court has fared under the media spotlight, Sauvageau, Schneiderman, and Taras examine a year in the life of the court and then focus on the media coverage of four high-profile decisions: the Marshall case, about Aboriginal rights; the Vriend case, about gay rights; the Quebec Secession Reference; and the Sharpe child pornography case. They explore the differences between television and newspaper coverage, national and regional reporting, and the French- and English-language media. They also describe how judges and journalists understand and interact with one another amid often-clashing legal and journalistic cultures, offering a rich and detailed account of the relationship between two of the most important institutions in Canadian life.

Reconsidering provincial and federal debates about democratic reform alternatives.

A ringing manifesto for change from Canada’s Green Party leader and Activist. We Canadians are waking up from our long political slumber to realize that there will not be change unless we insist upon it. We have a presidential-style prime minister without the checks and balances of either the US or the Canadian systems. Attack ads run constantly, backbenchers and cabinet ministers alike are muzzled, committees are deadlocked, and civility has disappeared from the House of Commons. In Losing Confidence, Elizabeth May outlines these and other problems of our political system, and offers inspiring solutions to the dilemmas we face. “We no longer behead people in Canada, but Stephen Harper’s coup d’état cannot be allowed to stand, not least because of the precedent. Any future government can now slip the leash of democracy in the same way. This is how constitutions fail.” - Ronald Wright

Politics, Society, and the Media is the first comprehensive political sociology of the media to be published in Canada. Paul Nesbitt-Larking draws upon a range of disciplines, including cultural and media studies, political economy, social theory, and political science to provide an analysis of the relationship between power and representation in Canada. The framework for the book presents a model of the mutual interaction between politics and the media. Attention is focused in the early chapters on how cultural, ideological, economic, and governmental forces shape and condition the production of media in Canada. Chapters on the work of Innis, Grant, McLuhan, and their postmodern successors place the evolution of McLuhan's theoretical argument that "the medium is the message" at the heart of the book. Canadian identity, and how to understand Canadian media politically, is the subject of a chapter on textual analysis. Two extensive chapters follow on the media’s influence and effects on politics. In addition to standard topics on politics and the media, this new edition offers much more: an examination of the media on the politics of gender and aboriginal peoples, the micro-politics of the media workplace, and an exploration of important media-related considerations. Throughout, reference is made to relevant and compelling issues placed within the context of media theory.

Groundbreaking study of cross-media ownership allays concerns of content convergence monopolization among newspapers and television.