The Role of the Canadian Media During the Initial Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Topic Modelling Approach Using Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News Articles

Background Beginning as a local epidemic, COVID-19 has since rapidly evolved into a pandemic. As countries around the world battle this outbreak, mass media has played an active role in disseminating public health information. Objective The aim of this study was to get a better understanding of the role that the Canadian media played during the pandemic and to investigate the patterns of topics covered by media news reporting. Methods We used a data set consisting of news articles published on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) website between December 2019 and May 2020. We then used Python software to analyze the data using Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling. Subsequently, we used the pyLDAvis tool to plot these topics on a 2D plane through multidimensional scaling and divided these topics into different themes. Results After removing articles that were published before the year 2019, we identified 6771 relevant news articles. According to the CV coherence value, we divided these articles into 15 topics, which were categorized into 6 themes. The three most popular themes were case reporting and testing (n=1738), Canadian response to the pandemic (n=1259), and changes to social life (n=1171), which accounted for 25.67%, 18.59%, and 17.29% of the total articles, respectively. Conclusions Understanding the Canadian media’s reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic shows that the Canadian pandemic response is a product of consistent government communication, as well as the public’s understanding of and adherence to protocols.

PUBLIC SPHERE DISRUPTION: PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING AND THE CBC AT THE DIGITAL CROSSROADS

Public broadcasting is traditionally thought to be an essential element to public spheres. This paper charts how this relationship is formed, and then demonstrates how it is threatened in the Canadian context. Canada’s public broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, has digital policies like Strategy 2020: A Space for Us All which suggests CBC is pivoting away from its relationship with the public sphere, and in some ways weakening the Canadian public sphere. Accordingly, this paper looks at the claims charged about this policy, particularly from Taylor (2016), and considers how it and similar digital policies affect the CBC as an element of the Canadian public sphere. While the paper finds CBC digital policies benefit the public sphere, the majority put into action hinder CBC’s relationship to the Canadian public sphere. Overall, this MRP highlights the importance of considering the philosophy of the public sphere when developing public media policy.

PUBLIC SPHERE DISRUPTION: PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING AND THE CBC AT THE DIGITAL CROSSROADS

Public broadcasting is traditionally thought to be an essential element to public spheres. This paper charts how this relationship is formed, and then demonstrates how it is threatened in the Canadian context. Canada’s public broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, has digital policies like Strategy 2020: A Space for Us All which suggests CBC is pivoting away from its relationship with the public sphere, and in some ways weakening the Canadian public sphere. Accordingly, this paper looks at the claims charged about this policy, particularly from Taylor (2016), and considers how it and similar digital policies affect the CBC as an element of the Canadian public sphere. While the paper finds CBC digital policies benefit the public sphere, the majority put into action hinder CBC’s relationship to the Canadian public sphere. Overall, this MRP highlights the importance of considering the philosophy of the public sphere when developing public media policy.

Rooting for the home team: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Canada's national sports culture.

As a cultural institution, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is meant to connect Canadian citizens from coast-to-coast in ways that would otherwise be impossible. With regards to the collective memory of Canadians, it is thus imperative to address the media narrative that has undoubtedly assisted in the construction of a 'national psyche' in Canada. Following interpretive logics of inquiry, this intrinsic case study will explore the creation of a national sports culture in Canada, and how it has manifested through the CBC's broadcast television operation. In particular, the primary objective is to analyze the position of the CBC in the cultural production of hockey in Canada. By exploring the CBC's television program Hockey Night in Canada this paper strives to better understand how hockey has emerged as a social phenomenon, and how identity-building organizations such as the national broadcaster· have institutionalized hockey lore and tradition in Canadian culture. Through Canada's obsession with the sport of hockey it may be possible to better understand the dynamics at play in the nation's cultural, socio-political and economic realms.

Rooting for the home team: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Canada's national sports culture.

As a cultural institution, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is meant to connect Canadian citizens from coast-to-coast in ways that would otherwise be impossible. With regards to the collective memory of Canadians, it is thus imperative to address the media narrative that has undoubtedly assisted in the construction of a 'national psyche' in Canada. Following interpretive logics of inquiry, this intrinsic case study will explore the creation of a national sports culture in Canada, and how it has manifested through the CBC's broadcast television operation. In particular, the primary objective is to analyze the position of the CBC in the cultural production of hockey in Canada. By exploring the CBC's television program Hockey Night in Canada this paper strives to better understand how hockey has emerged as a social phenomenon, and how identity-building organizations such as the national broadcaster· have institutionalized hockey lore and tradition in Canadian culture. Through Canada's obsession with the sport of hockey it may be possible to better understand the dynamics at play in the nation's cultural, socio-political and economic realms.

Distributing CanCon: CBC strategies for international distribution

This article tackles the evolution of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation international distribution strategies at the intersection of the contemporary television landscape, by providing a context and definition for Canadian content (CanCon) rules, so as to consider more recent debates on the positioning of foreign streaming services in Canada in relation to existing broadcasting companies. The aim is to problematize media policies, by outlining the present state of the debate and updating the conversation to include global streaming TV players. Key questions are explored, such as whether CanCon rules are outdated forms of cultural protectionism or still represent viable answers to the risks of media imperialism.

Shared Space: How North American Olympic Broadcasters Framed Gender on Instagram

The Olympic Games offer scholars the opportunity to better understand how broadcasters visually frame male and female athletes to their large audiences. Traditionally, scholars have focused their efforts on the televised Olympic broadcasts and photojournalism coverage in newspaper and magazines. Scholarship has historically found that female athletes were underrepresented in event coverage and framed along gender stereotypes; however, in more recent Olympic Games, research has shown the news media has provided more equitable coverage between the genders. Yet digital and social media platforms (SMPs) play a significantly larger role in how Olympic broadcasters share content and engage with audiences. Utilizing media framing theory, this study examines how gender is framed on the Olympic Instagram accounts of the two official North American rights holders: the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Researchers collected a cross-sectional sample from the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Results indicate that NBC and CBC were generally equitable in SMP coverage of men’s and women’s athletic achievements.

Films on Demand Master Academic Video Collection

Streaming media has reached a ubiquitous threshold, easily accessible in a variety of platforms for the general consumer in pursuit of entertainment. Streaming media in the educational context is not far behind. Films on Demand Master Academic Collection (FODMAC), an Infobase product (<<ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://www.infobase.com/">https://www.infobase.com/</ext-link>>), is a popular option for many academic institutions. FODMAC’s content partners include many highly acclaimed and award- winning content producers such as PBS, BBC, TED, Bill Moyers, ABC, NBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Geographic, HBO Documentary Films, and Films for the Humanities and Sciences and features over 1,000 subject categories from 25 core academic subject areas that range from Anthropology to Engineering, Health and Medicine to Music and Dance, and Business and Economics to World Languages. Ease of access and convenient features such as sharing, customizable playlists and embedment in course management systems and other digital platforms make FODMAC a competitive resource as demand in educational streaming media grows.

Elsie McLuhan's Vocal Science

Full out the plug in order to get back to the physical body.—Marshall McLuhan, 19 December 1978Four Years Before a Massive Stroke Took Away his Ability to Speak, Marshall McLuhan Advised his Son Eric To “Develop the power and habit of listening. It is not a power that I have, and nobody ever told me how to go about getting it.” A notorious talker who would “lecture and discourse nonstop if anyone else was present” (Marchand 273), and who frequently telephoned his friends and colleagues in the wee hours of the morning to discuss his latest idea, this English professor turned media theorist was also one of the first academics to recognize and seize the opportunities offered by the new media of popular culture to reach audiences wider than the readerships of scholarly journals. From the 1960s onward, McLuhan made dozens of appearances on radio and television and even made a cameo film appearance: in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, he silences an arrogant Columbia University professor by declaring, “You know nothing of my work.” At once a raconteur and an aphorist, he was most alive when processing his thoughts aloud to a live audience, whether in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recording studio, at his family dinner table, or in his office at the University of Toronto, where he dictated many of his later writings (books, articles, and correspondence) to his secretary, Margaret Stewart (“Marge”). “Telephone conversations with Marshall would turn into miniature symposia,” recalled the University of Toronto president Claude Bissell (qtd. in Nevitt 284). Ironically, given his own wee-hours use of the telephone, McLuhan theorized this medium of secondary (or electronic) orality as “an intensely personal form that ignores all the claims of visual privacy prized by literate man” and as “an irresistible intruder in time or place” (Understanding Media 296).

Entrevista com Tully Ehlers

Tully Ehlers é uma tradutora literária brasileira. Atualmente finaliza o bacharelado em Tradutor e Intérprete na Universidade Nove de Julho (Uninove) enquanto traduz, para a Pedrazul editora, os oito livros sobre a personagem Anne Shirley de autoria da canadense Lucy Maud Montgomery. Esta obra de Montgomery foi adaptada para cinema e televisão, sendo a adaptação mais recente a série Anne with an E, produzida pela Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) e disponibilizada em streaming pela Netflix.