Uber-justice and unter-news

The cops don't waste resources but CBC does

Photo by Sebastian Olivos on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, he was hobnobbing with the Premier, Brad Gushue, and other local D List celebrities for the spectacularly overblown launch of Uber’s ride sharing service in Sin Jawns, which the townie Bored of Trade was passing off as a coup for the entire province.

Now Gary Noftall - government bureaucrat by day, cabbie by night - is on the Cee Bee Cee complaining that the Constab are not prosecuting one of his rides for flicking Noftall’s glasses off at the end of a ride the customer wasn’t happy with. Seems Noftall picked buddy up at the MacDonald’s on Topsail Road one morning and took him to George Street by a route that involved little speed and enough lights for the guy to get - as Noftall described - more and more agitated at each light.

Noftall gave CBC the dashcam video from his car and CBC obliged by giving this story the lead spot on the supperhour news from their Content Assembly Facility on the Parkway. You cannot see buddy’s face but you can see him flick Noftall’s ear and thereby dislodge his eyeglasses. You can also hear the angry passenger say “f*ck you, you little shit” as he did so. Noftall told the passenger the flick was an assault charge and pointed to the camera that recorded the whole episode, likely including the stuff CBC didn’t air that led up to the flick and the sort of language one fellow in court once called “misdemeanor words.” The passenger replied to the threat of a charge saying “you f*cked me. You f*cked me by going the wrong way and you decided you wanted to be a f*cking arrogant c*nt.”

CBC put Noftall’s episode in front of a story about chronic violence in Happy Valley - Goose Bay that prompted a public demonstration, the death of a young man from Goose Bay who died after injuries received in fox attack in Nunavut, and the story of people from Hebron and Nutak who were able to go back to the resettled communities thanks to the Royal Canadian Navy.

NTV led their supperhour news with a story on the increased number of highway deaths this year. There were a couple of impaired driving arrests up next. Ben Cleary reported on the uncertain future at the Telegram, followed by a story on the Pierre Poilievre tour of the province and another story on the latest job numbers in the province.

Two things.

First, while Noftall is right by a plain English reading of the criminal code, the police have a lot better things to spend their scarce resources on his wounded bureaucrat pride. The police officer who took the statement and now has the complaint to investigate likely has far more serious offences than Noftall’s dislodged ego on their desk. God knows with a dozen murder cases facing the Crown prosecution service - not to mention armed robberies, assaults of all kinds including sexual, and drunk drivers - in various stages of investigation the police could not be faulted if Noftall’s difficulty was not the Number One case on their agenda.

In fact we should all praise the local Constabulary for their sensibility. They likely looked at the cost of the investigation, weighed the evidence they had, the likelihood of getting a warrant to get the information on the customer from Uber Canada, waiting to get the information, then getting a prosecutor to take the file, then getting in front of a judge, getting a conviction, and then getting a sentence that was actually more than the judge scolding one or both of the men involved. Give it the attention it deserves, Constable, which is pretty much what you’ve given it.

Second, would that whoever did assignment and lineup in Tuesday at Ceeb’sCAF had as much sense. In no world Gary Noftall’s flicked ear be the first story on any newscast except perhaps in a place where literally nothing else happened. Yet, the CBC gave it the top story over real crime in Labrador. You then have to wonder about the priority given to a story about a return to a resettled community over hard news of the sort NTV covered.

There’s a reason why NTV has consistently beaten CBC in television ratings for decades and it’s reflected in NTV’s emphasis on local news versus whatever non-local considerations drive the CBC’s lineup on any given evening. By local, we mean local to the province as a whole and by news we mean news, not human interest stories.

On Tuesday, the gap between CBC and NTV was in even sharper contrast than usual because the afternoon radio show at CBC had an excellent interview with Ashley Fitzpatrick and Doug Letto about local journalism and what’s going on at the Saltwire local outlet. There’s a much bigger public conversation to have here about local journalism because frankly whether or not there’s a daily newspaper printed in St. John’s has precisely nothing to do with the existence of local news reporting in Newfoundland and Labrador.

If you want to understand the local media and what’s happened to the Telegram - it’s been functionally dead as a local newspaper since shortly after the Nova Scotians bought it and then finished wrecking it - you need to go back a few years and take a hard look at the four major news outlets in the province and how they’ve responded to the challenges of reporting news. We also need to get rid of a bunch of false assumptions about what’s happened globally in order to get a clearer picture of what the future could here look like.

But the one thing we could all agree on is that - as AllNL’s Alex Bill so rightly put it Tuesday morning - “a diverse news media market is good for society and … competition makes us better.”

NTV has far fewer resources of any kind than CBC does but on any given day the crowd on Logy Bay Road do a better job of covering hard local news in the province than CBC TV. Full stop. The Telegram has shrivelled in every sense while VOCM struggles with equally tight budgets and falling advertising but continues to produce quality news reporting.

It’s not about resources.

It’s about choices.

Those choices drive content.

Content counts.

Or to be accurate: substantive content counts.

If you want to understand what’s wrong and what’s right about local news, you just have to read, listen, or watch any of it. The choices are there in plain sight with predictable and understandable results for market share, advertising budgets, and vanishing audiences. It's all there if anyone wants to see and as anyone with half a clue would tell you, the fact people don't want to see is really the story.

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