What a difference some 50 years has made in one of Canada's most important and powerful industries!

Back in 1970, the Senate of Canada called an inquiry to investigate the exorbitant profits made by Canada's handful of media barons.

Skinflint media mogul Roy Thomson had declared that owning a radio or television station was like having a license to print money. He added that owning a newspaper was even better, because a license was not required.

Two weeks ago, nearly 100 people gathered outside of the Toronto Stock Exchange and marched through downtown Toronto to protest the North Dakota Access Pipeline and express solidarity with the blockade at the ancestral lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

The police were there from the get-go, corralling the group and blocking traffic. Led by a group of five Indigenous women, we waded through the streets, chanting, drumming and singing.

The media, on the other hand, showed up only after we proved newsworthy: when the rally collided with the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

It started with a CP24 reporter. She showed up with a cameraperson at King and Duncan, demanding TIFF guards let us continue marching down King Street.

The latest watercooler chat among many Canadians this week is speculation about who will replace Peter Mansbridge as host of The National. Mansbridge announced earlier this week that after 30 years as host of CBC-TV's flagship news program he will step down next year on Canada Day.

Now CBC executives say they are going to usher in "the next phase" of The National.

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As a journalist in my mid-20s, I should have plenty to feel confident about. After getting a masters degree in journalism from an Ivy League university, I moved to China, where I worked for a national newspaper and went on to my current job as a foreign correspondent at an international news wire.

All the big newspapers and TV networks breathlessly reported word for word what they were told at a joint political-General Motors newser.

The Globe and Mail:

"For decades, the splashy, job-creating announcements in the auto sector in Canada have been about manufacturing jobs. 

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Striking newsroom workers of the Chronicle Herald relaunched their free news site, LocalXpress.ca, as a non-profit organization on May 19. They made the move in order to expand news coverage and compete with their employer for ads. As a business model, Local Xpress is offering an unexpected test of worker-owned and controlled digital-first journalism.

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Over the years I've been fortunate enough to hear some of North America's top investigative journalists speak.

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The youngest-ever woman world squash champion is a Muslim Egyptian.

Twenty-year-old Nour El Sherbini was crowned as the new world number one player at the beginning of May. In fact, the latest ranking shows that four of the world's top 10 women squash players are Muslim Egyptians.

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Canada's mainstream media are in a state of incipient meltdown. They no longer deliver the volume or quality of news that Canadians need to be informed about important happenings in their communities, let alone to participate in a healthy democratic process.

The corporations that own traditional newspapers, seeing their revenues and readership dissolve, have opted to cut jobs and slash the content that used to provide their product's value.