Last
Fall I interviewed Dr. Warren Farrell, who was giving a talk
sponsored by the Canadian Association For Equality (CAFE) at the
University of Toronto, as part of a short documentary on the lives of
two men after divorce called “Broken.”
After
the documentary was finished, I put a separate video together about
the protest and posted it on my newly registered YouTube channel,
StudioBrule. It went viral almost immediately.
The
strange thing is, there was no coverage of the protest in the
mainstream media. City TV News had a cameraman present and filming
throughout the protest, but they did not report on it. When asked,
City News apparently said they didn't report on the event because
they could not find a narrative for the story. I found this odd since
the protest provided so much material. This got me thinking. Why
would a News station decline to do a story about a protest that was
sufficiently violent as to require police intervention?
For
starters, mainstream media companies attract huge ad budgets from
large corporations which are extremely sensitive to their public
image. These media companies will avoid, or remain politically
correct in their treatment of sensitive topics in order to protect
those dollars.
That
is good for business, but not so good for journalism, or for society.
I don't know whether this motive was at play for City News at the
Warren Farrell protest but it opened my eyes to the important role
that independent journalists, bloggers, and social medial users play
in society, not just in the middle east, as we saw during the Arab
Spring of 2011, but even here in Canada and the USA.
The
advantage of YouTube, and blogging in general, is that AdSense
becomes the intermediary between advertiser and content producer.
This third party relationship eliminates the conflict of interest,
and allows the independent blogger to earn a living while covering
important issues that are too hot or too risky for mainstream. This
doesn't mean that bloggers and YouTubers are more objective, there's
no shortage of evidence that they are not, only that they may have
less motive to hide or repress News stories and their opinions about
events.
The feminists protested subsequent CAFE sponsored events at the University of Toronto. They disrupted professor Janice Fiamengo's lecture entitled “What's wrong with Women's Studies” using the fire alarm to clear the building, and also hurled abuses at attendees of a talk by Dr.'s Nathanson and Young in April.
City TV's Avery Haines sought me out while I was filming the April protest. She had watched the Warren Farrell protest video on YouTube and wanted to use a clip in her story about the University of Toronto Student Union's efforts to have CAFE banned from campus. As a small-time YouTuber, it felt good to have made a small impact upon the mainstream media.
So Canada
Day 2013 seems like a good day to launch the Studio Brulé blog, and
I hope to provide an alternative perspective when political
correctness distorts the truth on issues that are too hot for
mainstream, and on topics that they will not cover.
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