Bruce Dowbiggin
How Trudeau Media Skewed The Battle Of Bouncy Castle
“From a positive and unifying approach, a decision was made to wedge, to divide and to stigmatize. I fear that this politicization of the pandemic risks undermining the public’s trust in our public health institutions. This is not a risk we ought to be taking lightly.”— Liberal MP Joel Lightbound
It’s perhaps fitting that Toronto Star publisher John Honderich passed away during the Battle of Bouncy Castle. The paper he and his family fashioned defined Canadian progressivism in the modern age. “With ink running through his veins and a bow tie ’round his collar, John Honderich was one of the titans of Canadian journalism” went the obit.
Give him props. He and his family defined the message in the post-war era, tilting Canada left. Enamoured by American liberal deities such as the Kennedys and Clintons— and welcoming to tens of thousands of Viet Nam deserters and draft dodgers— they (and CBC) created the Eugene McGovern state that Americans rejected in the 1970s.
Canadians now love feeling superior to Americans with their messy, tumultuous politics (even as Canadians took their free defence). Cheering on even the most embarrassing Democrats gave them a sense of identity versus their noisy neighbour. Canada’s worship of the American left drove right-wing competition out of business (Sun TV) or pushed others (The National Post and G&M) hard to the left. To say nothing of what they did to Conservative leaders Erin O’Toole, Doug Ford and Jason Kenney who defied the Star’s agenda.
Their slanting of the Convoy drama is a perfect example of Canada’s aversion to right-wing thought. The media, writes Jen Gerson, “is presenting a version of reality that is wildly at odds with the protesters’ own self conception. It’s also not in line with people who have attended protests in other cities, and have reported to me that the vibe of these things is in fact mostly positive and welcoming. This further erodes trust in media, pushing a faction of the public further into information bubbles and away from mainstream reporting.”
Thus the Globe & Mail, formerly the paper of record for business in Canada, is now the conscience of Avenue Road and Lawrence. In a florid editorial it vilified the mostly peaceful protesters destroying the NIMBY dreams of their Ottawa subscribers. “The Ottawa occupation is the October Crisis revisited. Justin Trudeau must be bold“.
Forget that the 1971 FLQ crisis involved two kidnappings, a murder, escape to Cuba, threats of insurrection and people stoning Trudeau’s father. To the Globe that’s just the same as Bouncy Castles, hot chocolate and some yahoos honking their truck horns in the Glebe and Sandy Hill. Besides there’s a narrative to maintain.
Ottawa’s mayor Jim Watson has seen to that. In one cringing example he linked the protesters to thugs trying to set a fire in an Ottawa condo building. Even when corrected by Ottawa police he has not apologized. Anything to protect the PM’s wobbly authority.
On his behalf Family Compact Media want you to hit the protesters. Hit them hard. Drive them off the streets. Get the law to take their fuel and hotel rooms. Because we can’t let these… things.. make light of us with their impertinence and flannel shirts! This is seasoned with overheated university professors writing tripe about “a dangerous fringe element terrorizing our capital” and not be laughed off the faculty.
While the Mop & Pail gaslights a Costa Gavras political thriller in the PM’s refusal to meet unkempt middle-class truckers, it memory-holes Trudeau taking a PMO meeting with Joshua Boyle— under investigation by the police on multiple criminal charges.
Or that while he calls tax-paying protesters merchants of “antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia” he bestowed $10.5 M big ones on a convicted ISIS terrorist when he came back to Canada. Which is more than unvaccinated Canadians are entitled to.
As Sun writer Lorrie Goldstein asked on Twitter, “As I understand it in Canada, there’s a ‘right’ and a ‘far right’, but there’s only a ‘left’ and not a ‘far left’. Why is that?”
It’s why a prime minister who hides from protesters is now pushing for more restrictive rules on social media content (read: censorship). Having bought off the floundering legacy media he means to move his control to the internet next. All the better to push climate change and gender dysphoria as top agenda items— even as Canadians’ heating bills double, their gas pushes toward $2/ litre and inflation erodes their life savings.
No, the enemy of the state is the Convoy. But as @jengerson points the majority of the participants are not politically sophisticated. “The Freedom Convoy is not setting up a tyrannical blockade by their own lights, but rather an extended street protest-ey party, complete with DJs, bouncy castles, BBQ pits and saunas. They’ve organized camps for themselves, cleared the roads of snow and, by their own reports, ejected racist elements.”
This clashes with the PM’s fever dreams. Liberal MP Lightbound says this dismissal of average citizens has been divisive. “I’ve heard from a lot of people wondering why just a year ago, we were all united, in this together. And now that we have one of the most vaccinated population in the world, we’ve never been so divided.”
Should we be surprised by left-wing victim media love? You probably have noticed that it’s Black History Month in Canada and the U.S. Our one-note media uses it to build a narrative about whites’ oppression of blacks. None of the Jimmy Olsens ever dare to ask the radicals, why it is that almost every murdered black person in Canada is killed by another black person?
Their bias on behalf of Trudeau is inescapable. In a testament to how liberal media have created a no-go zone for social-conservative issues, consider that a whopping 77 percent of Canadians are unaware there is no law governing abortion in the country.
But the Convoy’s persistence has threatened that security. The weakening of Omicron is running out Trudeau’s strategy. As the WSJ writes, “The lesson for the Covid-19 police is that when you’ve lost even Canadians, arguably the most law-abiding people on the planet, you’ve lost the political plot.”
For now it remains to be seen how far Trudeau will go to smash the Bouncy Castle people that he and his purchased press have demonized. Or whether the Liberals finally get off their power trip and move on from vaccine shaming.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
After rummaging about for two months to no great effect the NHL has now embarked in its traditional Xmas break. Under the NHL’s collective agreement, no one plays any games from Dec. 24-27. This comes after a roster freeze that forbids trading a player during said holiday season. The annual World Junior champions, too, doesn’t crank it up till Boxing Day.
It’s a throwback to a more tranquil time when most of the Western world went home to eat too much and fall asleep on the sofa for three days. Then go shopping. So props to Gary Bettman’s NHL for keeping to their family stance. In such frenetic times there’s something to be said for pausing to sniff the frozen roses.
But catching your breath in the sports world is now an anachronism, driven by the massive dollars paid by networks and digital providers to sports leagues. In a time when the NFL rakes in $105 B ($2.1 billion a year) from its broadcast partners while the 32 teams collect a tidy $300 million each it’s no wonder the equity in NFL franchises has soared of late.
And that means using every minute of the calendar to schedule games— especially on days like Christmas when hundreds of millions are sitting at home after opening the prezzies, itching for something to watch besides It’s A Wonderful Life. So the Xmas break this year features two games on the day and another on Boxing Day. Followed by a full weekend of games on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
In doing so it big foots the NCAA CFS’s new 12-team playoff and bowl-game format which also uses every day but Sunday this time of year. On the past Saturday FS games were given a head start before the NFL stole eyeballs with its own games an hour later. Tough luck college boys. It’s unlikely to change as the CFS is eager to expand the playoffs in the future.
The NFL is not the first to exploit this previously virgin calendar break, of course. Th NBA broached the prohibition against Xmas Day in 1947, first placing a single high-profile game that day. Later it expanded to an all-day menu of games. Anything sacred about the family day went bye-bye as folks either went to the TV or the kitchen for the rest of the day.
The reason that pro sports is creating also many windows for their product is the sudden arrival of so many new outlets for games. Where legacy TV/ cable networks had exclusive dibs on buying rights for decades, cable cutting has now exploded the bidders. As GTM expert Rhys Dowbiggin told us in our July 29, 2024 column the model was UFC. Yup. UFC. “ESPN+ (Disney) has been working directly with the UFC for a number of year and packaging their events on the streamer.
And let’s not ignore the monkey in the room: YouTube, which dominates all the streamers for eyeballs – YouTube (Google) has more live sports than any of the other streamers. Just for context, there is a massive amount of money in these deals: the recent NBA media rights deal is going to be 70B+ – split across a number of media partners. All the streamers took a similar GTM strategy – and they’ve led us back to 2001.”
Disgruntled consumers dumping cable/ satellite carriers sought other outlets for their spots viewing for NFL, NBA, NHL and NCAA. Leagues responded so we now have special placement games for YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple, Disney and Google. And the Xmas season cornucopia of games. Watching whatever you wanted. The strategy was to compete on bidding for original content to bring in the subscribers.
Then a funny thing happened. It was now only some of what you wanted. The expansion of carriers pissed off viewers just as much as the arbitrary cable companies. the magic solution of cable cutting is now the tragic solution. Explains Dowbiggin, “The original product fit for streaming was the promise of all the content you could need was in a single place, on-demand. You only needed Netflix (in a sense) and you never had to wait or choose what to watch. Once the market fragmented into multiple players, the fit evaporated. Half the problem that was solved by streaming was now gone:
Watching whatever you wanted. It was now only some of what you wanted. The streamers GTM strategy was to compete on original content to bring in the subscribers. But creating content and not consolidating content exasperated the issue.”
The latest strategy is to bundle services across outlets to give consumers easier packaging. Says Dowbiggin, “Will bundling partnerships change things? It can’t hurt. But unless it drastically shrinks the numbers of players at the top to 2-3, the problem of ‘watching whatever you want’ won’t be solved, because I’ll still need Disney for my Star Wars.
All I know is, I’ve kept my library card for years, because I always saw this coming. And I don’t plan on getting rid of it anytime soon.”
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
MLB has seen parity and proclaimed, “We don’t give a damn!” Okay, they didn’t say that. In fact they insist the opposite is true. They’re all about competition and smaller markets getting a shot at a title. But as the 2024 offseason spending shows, believe none of what you hear and half of what you see in MLB.
Here’s the skinny: Juan Soto‘s contract with the NY Mets — 15 years and guaranteeing $765 million, not a penny of which is deferred. Max Fried signed an eight-year, $218 million deal with the New York Yankees. Later, Nathan Eovaldi secured a three-year, $75 million contract to return to the Texas Rangers. Blake Snell (five years, $182 million with the Los Angeles Dodgers) and Matthew Boyd (two years, $29 million with the Chicago Cubs) added to the splurge.
There’s one more thing that stands out. MLB has no trouble with the financial big boys in New York, Los Angles, Texas, Toronto, Atlanta and Chicago shelling out money no small market dare pay. In the MLB cheap seats, Tampa, Pittsburgh and Miami can’t send out quality players fast enough. But MLB is cool with that, too, as those paupers get a healthy slice of TV money.
So yes, they’re all about talking parity with their luxury tax system. But to keep the TV, digital, betting and marketing lucre flowing they have to have large media markets swinging the heaviest bats come postseason. The question is, do MLB fans care the way they used to about parity? It says here they don’t. More want to seed best-on-best more often. Which is brutal but refreshing.
Their sister leagues, married to draconian salary cap systems, are still pushing parity, even as they expand beyond recognition. In our 2004 book Money Players, legendary Boston Bruins coach/ GM Harry Sinden noted, “The problem with teams in the league, is that there were (then) 20 teams who all think they are going to win the Stanley Cup and they all are going to share it. But only one team is going to win it. The rest are chasing a rainbow.”
And that was before the expansion Vegas Golden Knights won a Cup within five years while the third-year Seattle Kraken made a run in those same 2023 playoffs. There are currently 32 teams in the league, each chasing Sinden’s rainbow of a Stanley Cup. That means 31 cranky fan bases every year. And 31 management teams trying to avoid getting fired.
Maybe we’ve reached peak franchise level? Uh, no. Not so long as salary-capped leagues can use the dream of parity to sell more franchises. As we wrote in October of 2023, “If you believe the innuendo coming from commissioner Gary Bettman there is a steady appetite for getting a piece of the NHL operation. “The best answer I can give you is that we have continuous expressions of interest from places like Houston, Atlanta, Quebec City, Salt Lake City, but expansion isn’t on the agenda.” In the next breath Bettman was predicting that any new teams will cost “A lot, a lot.”
Deputy commissioner Bill Daly echoed Bettman’s caution about a sudden expansion but added, ”Having said that, particularly with the success of the Vegas and Seattle expansions, there are more people who want to own professional hockey teams.” Translation: If the NHL can get a billion for a new team, the heck with competitive excellence, the clock might start ticking sooner. After all, small-market Ottawa just went for $950.”
It’s not just the expansion-obsessed NHL talking more teams. MLB is looking to add franchises. Abandoned Montreal is once more getting palpitations over rumours that the league wants to return to the city that lost its Expos in 2005. Recent reports indicate that while MLB might prefer Salt Lake City and Nashville it also feels it must right the wrong left when the Expos moved to Washington DC 19 years ago.
The city needs a new ballpark to replace disastrous Olympic Stadium. They’ll also need more than Tom Brady to fund the franchise fee and operating costs. And Quebec corporate support— always transitory in the Expos years— will need to be strong. But two more MLB franchises within five years is a lock.
While the NBA is mum on going past 30 teams it has not shut the door on expansion after seeing the NHL cashing in. Neither has the cash-generating monster known as the NFL where teams currently sell for over six billion US. The NFL is eyeing Europe for its next moves.
The question that has to be asked in this is, WTF, quality of competition? The more teams in a league the lower the chances of even getting to a semifinal series let alone a championship. Fans in cities starved for a championship— the NFL’s Detroit Lions or Cleveland Browns are entering their seventh decade without a title or the Toronto Maple Leafs title-less since 1967— know how corrosive it can be.
Getting to 34, 36, maybe 40 teams makes for a short-term score for owners, but it could leave leagues with an entire strata of loser teams that no one—least of all networks, carriers and advertisers—wants to see. Generations of fans will be like Canuck supporters, going their entire lives without a championship.
In addition, as we’ve argued in our 2018 book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports and How The Free Market Can Save Them, watering down the product with a lot of teams no one wants to watch nationally or globally seems counter productive. The move away from quality toward quantity serves only the gambling industry. But since when has Gary Bettman Truly cared about quality of the product? So long as he gets to say, “We have a trade to announce” at the Draft, he’s a happy guy.
When we published Cap In Hand we proposed a system like soccer with ranked divisions using promotion and relegation to ensure competition, not parity. Most of the interviewers we spoke to were skeptical of the idea. But as MLB steams closer to economic Darwinism our proposal is looking more credible every day. Play at the level you can afford. Or just watch Ted Lasso. Your choice.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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