Please applaud local, independent journalism: Centralization is nefarious. Problems become particularly pernicious when dissemination of information is implicated.
Overhead and an absence of accountability catalyze outcomes which should not be accepted. Profits are prioritized rather than responsible journalism emphasizing human values, inasmuch as cashflow must come from somewhere to compensate overpaid executives and to service debt undertaken in pursuit of acquisitions.
Dross is printed in what were once venerable newspapers and action news airs nonstop on television — “There’s a traffic jam in Harlem that’s backed up to Jackson Heights. There’s a scout troop short a child…” in the words of the theme song to the early sitcom “Car 54, Where Are You?” — in order to increase circulation and viewership, through which to enhance ad revenue.
Meganewspapers have little inclination to encourage subscribers to step back from the precipice and advocate responsible action. Ludicrous suggestions are presented — casting caution to the wind — in homage to Mammon.
Nowhere has the trend been more evident than in the leadup to the Monday October 19, 2026 referendum in Alberta where Question 10 inquired
“Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”
Secession was treated as a serious threat. Yet, when votes were tabulated, suggestion that the threat was ominous, an issue worthy of coverage, was revealed to be ludicrous.
5464 of 5575 polling places have reported at the time that I write. 1,546,219 voters chose to remain part of the Canadian confederation and 517,647 voted to hold a binding provincial referendum whether to separate: 74.9% to 25.1%.
60% is a landslide. The numbers above exceed that benchmark by 25%.
The example matters because Americans witness similar exaggeration amidst threats of secession from states and the federal government in this country. Such possibility appears by tautology to be much ado about nothing.
I suspect that, faced with dissolution of the republic alongside the implications of independent existence, our compatriots would vote as Albertans did, accepting the compromises necessary to enjoy the benefits of synergy over the significant downside of diminished trade: the Devil that you know versus the Devil that you do not know.
Nevertheless citizens are expected to treat threats that a polity might dissolve as a pressing concern. “It ain’t happening” as Alberta exemplified.
Our identity as Americans and what we gain — “We hang together or we hang separately” — is ultimately more salient than what is gained if one sails one’s ship alone. Apparently only the lunatic fringe entertains a future other than the status quo. That reality does not deter seemingly credible journalists from suggesting otherwise. It is as if the tail wags the dog with an indeterminate segment of news media inferring that the impossible is possible.
Why has been explained earlier but there is more:
Those who believed that there was a fighting chance that the confederate states would successfully secede, who refused to accept defeat, and who waved the bloody flag — as some still do, to some degree or another — have seemingly demonstrated a tenuous grasp on reality over time.
Similar delusion exists among heirs of those strains of American absurdity — the current iteration could be the result of Russian disinformation: a thought requiring our respect, at a minimum — on both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum.
To the extent that the Fourth Estate plays a role in the irresponsibility, consumers of news need to demand that inappropriateness cease and desist: Enabling what ought not exist must end, once and for all.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
