Catastrophe and whining in search of clicks

I rarely look at MTL Blog, but they’re currently screaming that we’re going to get 35 cm of snow next week, that people are furious about the city “neglecting” snow and ice removal with subhead “It’s dangerous out there” – we’ve never had ice removal – that bus service is so bad everyone is driving a car instead – “Will this ever get better?” subhead – and I could continue, but that site’s weird, whiny, catastrophized view of Montreal persists and, most irritatingly, is circulated on Google’s news page as if it’s a serious news source.

A Google search for MTL Blog gets you this: “MTL Blog is the leading English publisher in Montreal, Québec…”

Contrast the Journal’s item about parking meter charges going up in April with MTL Blog’s Street Parking Is About To Get A Lot More Expensive In Montreal For The First Time In Over 10 Years. Be frightened, everybody!

Another website, Daily Hive, doesn’t catastrophize quite as badly as MTL Blog, but consider the photo shown here to an anodyne piece about snow clearance. That’s bogus, and tells a lie by inference.

Media abhor a vacuum. There’s no denying we’ve got something of a news void here right now, with government on vacation and the US and UK drowning out most other news with their manufactured crises. Everything is so peaceful in Quebec that this weekend both a Le Devoir opinion writer and Gilles Proulx in the Journal are bemoaning different ways that Quebec ≠ France and Montreal ≠ Paris, while Robert Dutrisac in Le Devoir also works himself up into a nationalist lather, calling English the “langue de l’oppresseur national.”

Evidently peace, order and prosperity don’t sell newspapers or generate clicks.