B E B E R E

I'd been thinking some time about what is perceived to be a left wing bias in newspapers nowadays. When I was younger, I guess I didn't notice such things as much. Or maybe things were different. When I lived in France, I generally read La Libération, for example. Here, well, I read the Globe, despite its generally poor editorial standards (can't vouch for the news, but I can say that if I was bored during lunch break, I'd go on hunts for bad grammar, poor spelling, complex, newly coined words that were substituted for perfectly good, simple ones.) My father, bless him, good conservative that he is, would take my going off on American hegemony and the evil right, like the strong, silent man he is and just give me little admonishments here and there, like, be sure to get your news from more than one source, Bev. I tried to, even if some things were disagreeable to me.

Nowadays, I generally have a hard time stomaching just about anything from Canada, from France (save for the Figaro from time to time), or from American newspapers. Have standards gone down so, has ideology replaced any notion of objectivity, or am I changing? What did 9/11 play in my mindset vs. that of the press in general? I'm told by some (mainly The Guy's family) that the media is a corporate empire that is biased to the right. I don't see this. Given that the family business seems to be academia there, I tend to take what most of them say with a very large grain of salt.

On the notion of academia and media, could it have been with the shift from journalism/media as a journeyman trade to something that requires credentials from journalism school that had something to do with the shift in ideological slant? Or the greater obviousness of this slant?

I wonder. I think about this stuff a lot while cranking my spreadsheets out. Speaking of which, I need to get a move on. The numbers await without and I've just frittered away a fair bit of time ruminating.