Quote:
Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
Is it possible for a woman to sound like this?
Personally I have mixed feeling about the hosts showing signs of their partisanship. On one hand, everyone has personal views, sometimes strong partisan ones, which inform their perspective. There's this idea that media figures should represent a sort of "voice from nowhere" but in reality, everyone has their biases. The question is whether it's better to keep them hidden to maintain the illusion or is it better for the audience to know exactly where you're coming from?
I've seen some media critics condemn the "view from nowhere" as potentially being a more harmful type of bias in a couple of ways. It that can make the audience accept the content less critically since it's presented with a veneer of objectivity when content created by humans, all of which are subjects, cannot be truly objective. In other words, showing subjects who are implied to be rational and competent behaving in a detached, dispassionate manner suggests to the audience that this is the appropriate way for subjects to respond to the situation, aka with cool, dispassionate, detachment, when there are situations in which impassioned reactions would be more appropriate. Basically demonstrating the "everything's fine" bias in order to maintain the aesthetic when such an aesthetic does not represent the truth.
Personally while I'm just as capable of being drawn to or repelled by a figure on the basis of style, I'm more concerned with the content. I wasn't crazy about some of Barton's questions during the debate such as when she basically asked Singh to choose between tackling high housing prices and the people relying on their home equity for their retirement. As reducing prices is going to cause them to crash to zero, and as if home owners should be guaranteed unlimited appreciation at the expense of prospective buys. But it would have been worse had she pretended not to be a Liberal partisan lol
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That's actually how the media operates and is perceived in most of the world. Definitely in Europe which is what I am most familiar with.
In North America we still operate on the partial illusion that the media is supposed to be neutral and strives for that goal.
Whereas in reality most of our media has moved more in the direction of partisanship in the past 20-30-40 years.
Perhaps in the past they weren't as neutral as we thought they were, though.
But the expectation from the public that they will be neutral is certainly still there.
I am fine with a
caveat emptor approach to media and that we view them with a critical eye and assume bias, but it becomes a hell of a lot touchier when we're talking about people working for a state broadcaster paid for with tax dollars.
The British media is a partisan mess for the most part but AFAIK the BBC remains a beacon of neutrality. (I admit to not watching them enough to write a full treatise on that - but they look pretty good to me.)
CTV, Global, The Sun, TVA, Le Devoir, the Globe, etc. can all lean whichever way they want, but I do think the CBC should be held to a higher standard.
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