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Huffington Post Quebec: The 'progressive' alternative?
Blog posts reflect the views of their authors.
Just a few weeks ago, the Huffington Post Quebec was born, an all-French language, Quebec-based version of the extremely-popular blog and news site founded by Arrianna Huffington. The HuffPo as styled itself as a populist, left-of-centre outlet in opposition to more conservative outlets like the Drudge Rport and Big News.
Fast forward to today: some 15,000 students took to the streets of Montreal as part of the province-wide, 62,000 student strong strike against tuition fee hikes. The protection of the right to accessible education through low tuition fees is one of the fundamental rallying points of the left and progressive activists across QUebec. With the Charest government lifiting the freeze in 2007 and announcing a furhter increase of 75 per cent over the next five years, the student movement has mobilized towards an unlimited general strike, with most of the left and centre left (and much of the centre) lending it's support.
How does Huffington Post Quebec cover it? Click the image in the top left corner to see a screen grab from 6pm today.
As a news outlet, the HuffPo surely doesn't need to line up unciritcally behind the student movement. But when its main hedline describing today's actions (a march and the blockage of traffic downtown) calls the situation "CHAOS," and that the main blog bost they are promoting on the topic is a weak attempt to deligitimize the movement by questioning whether it can be called a stirke (and not addressing the fundamental question at stake), one would wonder if they aren't simply lined up on the same side as Péladeau, Qubébecor and Sun News...
UPDATE: I didn't mean that last question to be as rhetorical as it may be, with Managing Editor Patrick White coming from Quebecor's Canoë.ca and the Journal de Québec, where from 2006 to 2009 he served as head of news at the paper (including during the messy year-long lock-out where the company was accused of using scabs [note: the courts disagreed on this, but many journalists did not]) and joined by former Journal de Montréal columnist Tamy Emma Pepin, who is in charge of blogs.
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