Media

In days gone by but still in living memory, my living memory, journalists were the staunch defenders of democracy and free speech. The media was forever in the dogged search for wrong-doing by the government, by the police, by the corporate elite, by the gangs, by the people smugglers, by the drug lords, etc., but you get the idea. Investigative reporting seemed to be the pinnacle of journalism. If a citizen was wronged by any of the list of power brokers, including their own government by overt action or benign neglect, then a journalist was sure to dig up facts and say, in public, "Wait a darn minute, that's not right".

Today's media, by and large owned by the corporate elite, is quick to run from controversy. Dissension doesn't fit into the corporate agenda nor does it fit into the "sound byte" that defines the new digital age. So I am not greatly surprised anymore when a lot of the reporting happens after the fact. Take, for instance, the death of the whole fishing industry as we once knew it on the west coast of Canada.

The government, both provincial and federal, muzzled their own scientists who already knew that the fishery was in drastic decline because of the accumulation of foreign owned fish farms on the very routes that our wild salmon fry and smolts had to travel to get to the open ocean. Over time it became crystal clear that the young wild salmon were being attacked by, first, voracious penned salmon through which they had to swim, and secondly, by the lice and vermin cultivated by an over-populated farm fish pen.

Both levels of government denied jurisdiction, accountability, actuality and continued to maintain the fantasy that the decline of wild salmon stocks was a mystery of nature. The media bought this fantasy whole-hog or at least refused to research the matter further. The mainstream media, as a whole, refused to report the findings of independent scientists and fishermen who were trying to alert the population to the ecological disaster happening on our coast. The government and media seemed to be under the spell of the Norwegian owned corporation who owned the fish farms. Let's just abrogate our responsibility to the people of this province in favour of foreign-owned global corporations.

Finally, after independent scientists have shown that our wild salmon stocks have contracted the ISA virus that has decimated Atlantic Salmon stocks elsewhere do we finally get a small report on the evening news about it. No mention, however, that the fish farms owned by this company in its own country of Norway had been banned because of the collapse of wild stocks. No mention of how both levels of government tried to deny the facts and even in the face of a judicial enquiry tried to obfuscate what was documented in the reports of its own scientists.

Shame on the government for not standing up for our collective rights in favour of a greedy corporation. A big shame on the media for meekly standing by as government and corporate greed does away with our birthright and a renewable resource that could have continued indefinitely. Is it too late for the salmon? Only time will tell. Is it too late for the media? Yes, your credibility has gone.