jsburbidge (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jsburbidge) wrote2025-04-13 07:19 am
jsburbidge) wrote2025-04-13 07:19 am
Entry tags:
Active and Passive
In journalism, the use of the passive voice, usually discouraged elsewhere stylistically, seems to be endemic in headlines.
The problem is that the impact of the headline becomes very different when the agent is omitted. The CBC has a headline: "Carney attacked for wanting 'free ride,' 'hiding' from public amid latest campaign break". It would leave a different impression if it said "Leaders of the CPC and Bloc attack Carney for wanting 'free ride,' 'hiding' from public amid latest campaign break", which is in fact what the article is about.
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"But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life."
I don't think the CBC we have is fixable.
The constitutionality of media taxes has been established; I would be starting with six regional and several (if cities greater in population than 500,000, 12, but this has got some subtlety to it) media entities with requirements to do no entertainment, no ads, and no opinion.
They report the news entirely factually -- no reporting what someone says without fact-checking it right then and there, every time -- and the weather. They communicate via several channels, one of which is the public internet we will have to create for the purpose. They can do in-depth explainers as long as the whole "dry, factual" constraint is observed. Nobody working for them can have a side gig. They can't take money from anybody except their public purse allocations.
(News? worker owned collective, no ads, no opinion, strict diffuse subscriber funding model.)
(Entertainment? Some public entertainment seems appropriate, but it's a different organization and it's a completely different logo, branding, and public presence.)
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As far as I am concerned the CBC basically did itself in in 2008, when they gutted the old CBC-FM.
So that would be a place to start...
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That is when they started pursuing market share goals rather than common cultural understanding goals, yeah.
(You are not the only person I know who has that opinion, either.)