The Moncton Pravda

The newspaper Pravda was the official propaganda sheet of the Soviet Union. Long ago, I read translations of it, and felt sorry for those millions who relied on it to tell the truth. (I think Pravda is the Russian word for "truth".) Reading it, I could at least understand how people living under a dictator could think it was the finest form of govenment ever designed. The newspaper, after all, was and is still a major source of information about the world and our place in it. It told them they were in paradise. So they believed it.

Alas! I learned in many years of writing and broadcasting for news media that one can never tell the whole truth on any news medium. Most newspapers in North America are part Pravda. The Moncton Times, thanks to its advertising and it's boosterism disguised as "news", is not completely Pravda. But it comes close.

I learned tonight that it had a report of my talk to the DEC of district two. But not a word of it appeared in the paper. They were too busy blaming the DEC and the school superintendent for closing a dangerous school; and they're still at it.

(They can certainly be excused from quoting from my talk. After all, it's by now obvious that they are so petty they will not list my current events group meeting at the library in the Weekly Events edition. That's okay. The Times decision makers are ethical as well as intellectual midgets. But they also had my 35 pages of evidence showing that the public school ranking system is invalid; and showing that the US public schools which have been using the standardized tests and rankings for thirty years were eighteenth in the UN ratings of public schools - with Canada in fourth place. Since then, the US has dropped to twenty-fifth in the world.)

The Times has been playing a propaganda game from the start. It has never raised any criticism at all about AIMS. It has never even hinted at the existence of a large body of evidence that shows that AIMS is a propaganda agency for big business. New Brunswick is making the biggest change in education in several hundred years. The Times has yet to even recognize the nature of the change. Both reporting and editorial writing on education has been ignorant and biased.

Now it is stepping up the game of blame, this time hitting at the DEC and the superintendent, and blaming them for years of neglect of education by New Brunswick's governments, years of underfunding, years of interference in school to profit private business. I might be inclined to blame all New Brunswickers. Well, I do blame them all, at least a bit.

You tolerate a press that keeps you in ignorance, and that pumps out ignorance and bias in support of the same corporate powers that are the owners of both the governing party and the opposition.

The fundamental requirement of democracy is that people must have access to information. They cannot vote intelligently in an election unless they know at least the fundamentals of what is going on. New Brunswickers don't have the foggiest understanding of the essential issues that face this province. That's why we just had an election with neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives exhibiting any sense of political philosophy, and without any platform that went beyond trivial buzzwords.

New Brunswick is not a democracy. Voting means nothing without basic information on which to base your voting choices. New Brunswick is not a democracy. New Brunswick is a corporate dictatorship as much as the Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship. The Times and Transcript is our corporate Pravda.