Wednesday 27 July 2011

Does The CBC Give A Shit About Local Women?

A quick one.

The title of this post may be a bit confusing, but follow me here. If you're a Canadian citizen (poor you, I know, me too) your major news networks/news sites probably include the CBC and CTV. So, I invite you to click away for a minute and view the local news about your town or city on both those sites. Do you see any difference? I do. CTV local news usually makes it a point to report any kind of sexual assault or rape that happens in their local news. The CBC... not so much. Why is this? I can only speculate. When I Googled "CBC is sexist" or "CBC hates women" I didn't get much. But, take a look at the difference in local stories. Obviously there's a lot of overlap, but let's use our nations' capital as an example, especially due to the alarming number of sexual assault and rape cases in Ottawa.

While CTV, in their latest news column is helpfully making women aware of two daylight sexual assaults in as many days, the CBC mentions these attacks no where. This isn't the first time I've seen this trend. Unless a rape or sexual assault is unusually violent or involves a minor (and even this fact is debatable), the CBC won't bother with it. This is folly, at least, and dangerous omission, possibly fueled by misogyny and the "bro code" at worst. I believe the reasoning lies somewhere closer to the worse end of the spectrum.

Women have the right to know what's going on in their communities, and our news sources should be informing them about possible threats to their safety. Rather than the ever-increasing amount of fluff news garbage and entertainment and sports, the status of our communities should be priority one. Some regions of the country are in danger of losing local news altogether. It's hard enough to get straight answers about the city around you even with our so-so local news coverage. What'll happen when it's gone altogether? 

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