Major stretch

Re: Decision to cut sports on local TV is disastrous — March 30

After reading this column, I can only suggest that Luisa D’Amato reach for her dictionary more frequently and her thesaurus less so.

To call the reduction of coverage of local sports a disaster seems to a major overreaction. Similarly, her assertion, quoting a policy of the Canadian Radiotelevision Commission, that broadcast companies have “a duty to ensure that news reporting and analysis,” and that this duty applies equally to crime and local sports seems a major stretch.

I can imagine decades ago, when newspapers dropped their society columns, there were similar fits of self-righteous handwringing among small cloisters of locals. Newspapers also once had (until not too long ago) local film critics, TV critics, concert critics, lifestyle columnists … all of whom have fallen by the wayside at most outlets to their small cluster of fans who surely mourned their loss as they grew no longer economically viable.

Local sports are a very small segment of a mainstream print and broadcast media, which are seeing its power and influence, shrink by the day. As consumers leave in droves, and advertisers follow, it seems that mainstream media are the only ones left unaware of how obsolete and impotent they have become.

Perhaps if they had discharged their duty properly in the first place, and had not reduced themselves to becoming mouthpieces of political parties, of the government and corporate interests, they would have found a future, instead of being bulldozed into the ground by Facebook and YouTube, where even the most banal users are having viewership numbers that most newspapers and local news can only dream of. Michael Fox Kitchener