Is this a news story?

[HEyHEY]

Seriously. So, one kid kicks another one in the legs, the child is not hurt, there's no history of bullying with this child and the others, he wasn't chased down by a gang of kids or anything. The child who did it says he saw it on TV and it makes the FUCKING CBC NEWS?

Hey, the school admins did the right thing, that's fine. But it doesn't need to be on the god damned news. What a waste of time and money. Even if it was a bigger story, let's say they had 400 cases of this all happening in one day, fine, that's a story. But you have ONE fucking incident? Give me a break.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2008/11/20/bc-kick-ginger-day.html

[Oregone]

1. Its better the CBC has this for news...

than some asshole CEO manipulating energy prices and draining out people's retirements. Be thankful your news sucks.

[HEyHEY]

3. They ARE doing that though

The CBC used to make TV programs and all this other stuff, it was great. Now the people in charge keep slashing and burning and guess where the savings go? Performance bonuses for management!

[Cleita]

2. Apparently your news is copying our news.

These filler stories that they fill the media with keeps them from having to report the real news like the wars and what your elected officials are doing behind your backs. Now that you have a conservative PM, you can be sure that the news is covering up their deeds with distracting and sensational items like this.

[HEyHEY]

4. Well, that's partly true, except the cons have nothing to do with it

What it is is that the CBC is going in a new "direction" and shilling crappy "eyewitness news" because they hired a US consultant that told them it would boost ratings.

[Cleita]

5. My sympathy then.

You really need to keep those American corporate types out of your country. They ruined ours and now they are no longer in power, so they are looking toward yours to rob blind. Since you are semi-socialist anyway, shouldn't the news be given over to a non-profit agency, maybe even the government like the BBC used to be in Great Britain?

[HEyHEY]

6. The CBC was a government broadcaster, and still is

Owned by the government. But, what happened is they started CBC tv and allowed them to sell advertising. So, they need ratings, right? So, they realized, "Hey, CBC radio has a HUGE audience, and we wouldn't need to pay for advertising because it's our station!"

So, now they try to take the CBC radio crowd and turn them onto the crap the TV side is selling, instead of the other way around.

[Cleita]

7. There you go, you don't need the advertisers telling you what the news is.

Back in the early days of TV in the USA, the news hour was considered a non-profit part of the network news. The networks back then recognized the need to provide a public service in delivering the news. We then had the news giants like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, print journalists who pioneered the new media. I believe there was one sponsor that footed the bill on each network, like Bell Telephone or something like that, but they did it as a philanthropy and didn't try to influence the content and didn't really advertise except to say the news was brought to you by so and so.

You're a journalist. It occurs to me you could do a series of articles going down through the history of this, how it started and how it became corrupted in the 1970's when the news became part of the entertainment sector of the networks. You could point a parallel as to how this is starting to happen in Canada. Get them fired up and nip this awful trend in the bud while you can. I know Canadians do not want to be Americans, so make them object to this.