The National Post is the flagship title in the Postmedia stable, a Canadian newspaper franchise that has been enjoying a death spiral for years.
Postmedia was a Lazarus play conjured up by a few money guys who bought the outstanding debt of Izzy Asper's crashed Canwest media empire for pennies on the dollar a few years ago. They stuck Paul Godfrey in the captains chair for a million a year, crossed their fingers, and hoped for the best.
Over these last few years Postmedia has tried all sorts of desperation strategies trying to stay afloat; they've sold off the corporate real estate, fired virtually everyone who gets a real paycheque, farmed out all their editing and production, and still they're haemorrhaging more red ink than the last wagon-builder in the age of the motorcar.
While rumour has it that virtually all copy across the Postmedia chain is now produced by a handful of unpaid interns working out of a Tim Hortons in Burlington, it looks like a few of the old stalwarts are still given real office space and actual column inches to carry forward the illusion of continuity in the pages of the crumbling media empire.
Which must be why we still get to read Jonathan Kay in the pages of the Post.
Jonathan's reactionary far-right opinions are often entertaining, and his fellowship with the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies gives you a heads-up on what to expect, but the sad truth of the matter is that Kay is far more often than not simply full of shit.
Here's a Kay editorial from over two years ago celebrating the imminent demise of Bashir al Assad. Not only was Assad a gonner, but he was going to take Hezbollah with him, and all these marvels were occurring "without the West firing a shot."
And here is yours truly calling the bullshit at the time.
So where should you go to get the no-shit truth on world affairs, the National Post or this pot-addled blogger?
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