Canadian media is full of galaxy brain columnists. Luckily there is a show who reads their crap so that you don't have to: Big Shiny Takes, aka Jeremy Appel, Eric Wickham and Marino Greco.
We're featuring this episode because your esteemed host and editor Gordon Katic made an appearance to discuss the latest unfathomably smart take: Matthew McConaughey has a moral obligation to run for president of the United States. It's stunning intellectual work like this that has led Big Shiny Takes to become the world's first anti free speech podcast.
It's a different vibe to our usual programming, but we think you'll like it because Big Shiny Takes is witty and anarchic and smart. The team really deserve a lot of recognition for doing the lord's work: shit-talking columnists.
If you eat, use a cell phone, connect to the internet, open a bank account, down a pint, or pick up a prescription in Canada, you’re probably experiencing the country’s familiar brand of oligopoly and monopoly. It’s arguably worse than the US. We’re basically three corporations in a trenchcoat. This arrangement means we unfortunately have to follow the moves of our corporate overlords–because really, these folks run the joint. Recently, the Succession-style drama surrounding the Rogers family, owners of one of the country’s major telecom companies, has at least provided us all some entertainment. This week on Darts and Letters, we look at monopoly and anti-monopoly, how corporate concentration affects Canada’s communications system, the global supply chain, and politics on both sides of the border.
You can’t have a functioning democracy without a trusted media. That fact explains the state of U.S. democracy, at least in part. The United States has the lowest rate of media trust in the industrialized world, with just under a third of respondents in a 2020 Reuters poll saying they trust the media they consume. But whose fault is it? And, is the media even trustworthy? A string of failures suggest otherwise: weapons of mass destruction, the global financial crisis, Brexit, Russiagate, and plenty more. This week on Darts and Letters, we talk to two media critics about the shortcomings of the fourth estate.
In recent years, the left seems to have ceded the issue of free speech — or, rather, flipped on it. For years, it defended against censorship, stood up to global imperialism, decried efforts to silence resisters and renegades, and mocked the right for culture war stodginess and pearl-clutching that whined ‘won’t somebody please think of the children?!’ But much of the left has retreated on speech. That turn may have implications for those who work to hold power to account in a world full of fallible human beings who often get stuff wrong, and powerful actors and institutions who use censorship as a cudgel.
Journalism is in crisis. Of course, there’s no shortage of rescue ideas. Sometimes it’s billionaires buying newspapers as vanity projects. Other times it’s techno-utopianism. Or plucky startups pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Maybe blockchain will save us?
Victor Pickard says the problems are deeper than we think, and they require a more radical solution. He offers a structural critique of the commercial news industry and offers us a utopian vision for a publicly-funded, democratically-controlled news media.
