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Quebec's self-proclaimed Minister of Propaganda says "unlicensed" journalists should be "controlled"...
It's the kind of thing you would expect in Nazi Germany or in a bad parody of the timeless George Orwell classic 1984, NOT what you would expect to come from the mouth of someone who claims to represent the people in an [allegedly] democratic society.
"Journalism should be left to the professionals."
That's the statement made by Quebec's Minister of Culture and Communications Christine St. Pierre, or what I will from here out call the Minister of Propaganda, since that's essentially what she's advocating.
Christine St. Pierre says that all journalists should be licensed by the government.
Those pesky citizen bloggers need to be controlled... all that peddling the unreported truth to the masses has simply GOT to STOP!
Christine St. Pierre, Quebec's Minister of Propaganda, is the very same minister who is responsible for enforcing Quebec's censorship bill, Bill 101. That's the set of laws that makes it illegal to have a sign where the English words are bigger than the French words, among many other asinine notions.
There is a reason why governments want control over the printing presses, and why they despise the internet so much.
By controlling the printing presses, they control what the people know. The less the people know, the more government can do as it pleases with no accountability.
The advent of the web log or Blog as it's now commonly known, is that anyone and everyone can become a journalist for free. If they want to really go high-end, that costs well under a hundred bucks a year... the cost of a domain name and web hosting package.
More and more often, the news stories that affect us are broken NOT by mainstream reporters, but by bloggers getting the word out on the Internet to anyone willing to read about it.
It wasn't the mainstream media that brought the [alleged] corruption and conflict of interest scandal to light in Vancouver Island's Union Bay, for example, it was a lone 60-year-old blogger named Mary Reynolds.
Only AFTER Ms. Reynolds was sued for daring to write the truth as she saw fit did the mainstream media take notice of her plight, and even then they basically just whitewashed the ongoing improprieties of the Union Bay Improvement District's board of directors.
So I find it no surprise that Quebec's Minister of Propaganda wants to license journalists, as Ezra Levant says, "as if journalists are doctors or something."
We journalists are NOT doctors, lawyers or airline pilots. We are simply people who are committed to getting to the bottom of things, of expressing our opinions on those facts, and telling anyone and everyone who will listen what's been going on and why they should care.
You don't need a license for that. You don't need government permission for that. You certainly don't need some Minister of Propaganda telling you what you can and cannot write about or she will revoke your license!
The notion is beyond absurd, which is why Christine St. Pierre will probably get her way in Quebec. Politicians routinely support ideas that have no basis in fact and are an affront to basic common sense.
Naturally, Ms. St. Pierre would hand-pick who would receive their "license", and thereby reward them with "better access to government sources."
That's not journalism, that's propaganda. When what I write is dependent upon meeting some mindless government bureaucrat's set of rules, I might as well take a sledgehammer to my keyboard.
If what I write is based upon my acceptance of a government license, then I will have sold my journalistic integrity, along with my soul, to the devil called Government.
That's simply not going to happen.
I'll host my blog somewhere the Canadian government has no control before I'll submit to that kind of nonsense.
Iceland, maybe. They've been making a lot of waves in recent years about becoming a Freedom of Speech haven for world journalists.
As Ezra Levant said during a recent edition of his acclaimed show The Source,
So much for the ancient French promise of liberte, egalite and fraternite -- liberty, equality and fraternity. Bill 101 limits speech liberty, it violates equality by forcing English speakers to be second class, and it harms fraternity among different ethnic groups.
If there's one thing I love about Ezra Levant, it's that his three-year journey through hell with the Alberta Human Rights Commission clearly taught him a lesson.
Say what you mean, precisely what you mean, censors be damned.
Ezra was a good writer before the fiasco that bankrupted his magazine, The Western Standard, but he's become an excellent one in the years since.
Long Live Freedom of the Unlicensed Press!
Anybody who writes letters is a journalist.
When men and women of letters started recording events in journals known as newspapers and magazines they were called journalists, a tag that carried on into the electronic broadcast media of radio and television.
Then out of the computer age came the new, exciting phenomenon of the Internet that revolutionized how information is presented, combining newspapers, magazines, radio and television with an added dimension of print and broadcast Weblogs which allow everybody to participate.
From the Internet emerged citizen journalists. And that’s a good and powerful thing. The government is scared to death of us.
A professional journalist doesn’t necessarily mean a person is paid by a single employer. A professional journalist can be a self-employed freelance journalist who shops material to a variety of sources.
But money and degrees do not have to be part of the equation. A true professional journalist simply means a talented, skillful, ethical person who is seriously dedicated to writing and telling the truth.
Citizen journalists are far from amateurs. They are clever and have taken over and revolutionized the long-standing news-reporting monopoly.
The presstitutes of the Marxist mainstream media, which for too long decided what was fit for the public to know and not know, have been supplanted by the Internet’s alternative news broadcast and print journalists who believe in speaking all so the public hears all and knows all.
That is the unexpected wild card that has given the government the jitters.
Exactly what Little Miss Muffet of Quebec has in mind for licensing journalists is beyond me–and probably beyond her too, other than she sounds bent on keeping her “profession” pure by doing a poor imitation of top propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, and hurling what she considers to be low-life hacks back into the Dark Ages.
I’m disgusted that anyone who once called herself a reporter prior to entering politics would stoop so low as to suggest licensing other journalists.
A license is a revocable document which gives the government power to prohibit people from their Constitutional right to work.
According to Wikipedia, “During (St. Pierre’s) stint as a political correspondent in Ottawa, she wrote a letter in Montreal’s newspaper La Presse praising the Canadian military mission in Afghanistan. She was suspended due to rule infringement because of the statement of her opinion.”
Now her instructions are to leave “journalism to the professionals”.
Under her classification, it sounds like presstitutes of the Marxist mainstream media would be considered “professionals” because they are “under control” therefore exempt from her “pay-to-work” scam.
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms doesn’t say anything about writers having to fork over money to work. Under ”Mobility Rights”, it says that every person residing lawfully in Canada “has the right to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province.”
But under the St. Pierre scam, letter-writers would have to be licensed, too, along with reporters, researchers, investigative journalists, freelance writers, freelance editors, feature writers, copy writers, short-story writers, novelists, non-fiction book writers, blog broadcasters.
Any independent who owns a pencil or a keyboard at home would have to be licensed; only journalists who have a “permanent home” to go to every morning and are handed a paycheque at regular intervals and who, protected under a blanket license of their employer, would probably be exempt.
Sorry, babe, some of us don’t like that work method because, as you experienced, we would be restrained from expressing our opinions that might differ from those of the editorial masters..or worse, the government.
It sounds like St. Pierre’s money-sucking licensing scheme–which is nothing more than another government tax grab–proposes to stop the free flow of information except for political propaganda and tear down our Rights and Freedoms by squelching freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
Hell can freeze over before I buy one of her ridiculous licenses. After more than 50 years working as a journalist without government permission, I don’t think a piece of paper is going to help me now.
But if she wants to hand out press cards that offer all professional journalists free passage into highfalutin events to observe how pompous asses come to asinine conclusions while employed in their artificial jobs…well, maybe she and I could talk.
Otherwise, buzz off.
In the age of telecommunications, I don’t think the government will be able to stop “unsavory characters” from posting on the Internet, albeit Internet journalists would be subject to prosecution for operating underground as unlicensed criminals.
We’d be keeping good company with the gun owners who operate at the behest of a 1995 firearms act whose purpose is to turn loyal, lawful citizens into instant paper criminals and inmates.
The government has the authority to pull the Internet and phone kill switches. But I believe technological wherewithal exists for independents to establish a closed telecommunications network, capture a signal, encrypt computer language, code messages into indecipherable cipher and block signals as shields against government snoops while the rest of us go about our business…until we get caught and have to move to the next underground site.
Meanwhile, Catherine St. Pierre is just another one of those useful Marxist operatives that professional Internet journalists keep warning the unsuspecting public about.