Country Guide fires Tim Ball

**TOM4CWB** · Dec 15, 2007, 12:18

Kodiak,

AMEN.

**Fransisco** · Dec 15, 2007, 13:36

I agree the farm papers are getting worse. The Manitoba cooperator and the western producer are so far to the left that I don't bother reading them much anymore. There are so many other sources of information these days, I can get my news elsewhere.

Looks like country guide is heading down the same road. It's too bad, I always liked Tims articles.

**Fransisco** · Dec 15, 2007, 13:47

Kodiak I'm looking for the details on the website and not finding them. Can you point me a little more in the right direction?

**Kodiak** · Dec 15, 2007, 18:33

Fran, I'm not sure what details you're looking for.

**Fransisco** · Dec 15, 2007, 21:28

The details on Ball getting canned.

**Kodiak** · Dec 16, 2007, 00:56

If you read the Country Guide, the last issue has a parting message in his column. While he doesn't say in the column why its his last one, he has indicated the reason by personal email.

It’s too bad we live in an age where journalists and editors eschew honest investigative reporting, and fail to provide balanced editorial content. It’s not that most of the mainstream farm papers have been up to the standards they should. For years they pretty much all had the same consistent and predictable political bias. The Country Guide, as much as any farm journal ever did, refused to go down the same path as the rest in its journalism, and brought a different editorial viewpoint. Since virtually all prairie farm newspapers and magazines are now owned by one company, and run by the small cadre of ideological clones, there isn’t much of a choice in the print media to pick from.

If we were to depend only on the print media for our news, we’d miss an enormous amount of relevant news and be fed a steady diet of the same flavor of editorial pablum. Thankfully through the world wide web, its relatively effortless if one wants to spend some time, to find a diversity of news sources, and some refreshing and differing viewpoints.

I'll be dropping my subscription to the Country Guide. It's too bad. It's been a fixture in our mailbox for nearly 3 generations. But it really has little if any value left. Tim Ball's page was a favorite. Instead of parroting the trendy and fashionable perspective that is being promoted by an unquestioning, subjective media and by the entertainment establishment, he dared to bring objective science into his interpretations of weather and climate.

**bgmb** · Dec 16, 2007, 18:42

I agree our in print and television media is going down hill.

If its not mainstream it can't carve out enough of a market to survive classic example is the western standard magazine.

It seems these days everyone is afraid to say what they are thinking out in the open.

nut not on agriville haha

**Fransisco** · Dec 16, 2007, 20:11

I'm thinking the bogus Human Rights case against the standard may have had something to do with it.

Lawyers aren't cheap.

**Kodiak** · Dec 16, 2007, 21:34

Frankly, I think part of our problem with the print side of things in prairie ag papers, is there hasn't been a decent newspaper to compete with the poor ones that are there now. The only paper that has a different approach is Grainnews, and that one, despite its name, isn't a newspaper.

I'd still very much like to see a strong weekly farm NEWSpaper, but I'd like one that doesn't slant its selection of stories and the way it reports them. The options we have at this time are more intent on promoting a political agenda than objectively reporting on relavent news. I can't be bothered to read them. They are so predictable and their agenda is so transparent they're just a joke.

Country Guide fires Tim Ball