The Press Vs. The People

Am I saying that Lawrence Martin, in the Globe and Mail - in a press and media regime that is increasingly repressive – has done “what almost all journalists working under repressive regimes do: they internalize the demands of the censor and understand, before anyone has told them, what is permissible and what is not"? Ask him. Martin is writing about the Paul Martin Liberal government decision “to reject Washington’s missile-defence plan.” He observes that 90% of the media “ripped the Martin government to pieces” for the decision while the “people went the other way.” In short, the Canadian media are now the lackeys of reactionary corporations and U.S. interests. But Lawrence Martin doesn’t say exactly that…. He tells us things that perceptive people have already seen or begun to see. “The conservative media tend to favour a closer embrace of the United States and its values.” The media empire formerly owned by the Southam group “is now owned by CanWest Global, which makes no secret of its pro-American, conservative tilt.” And at the Toronto Star, Maclean’s Magazine, and Policy Options, right wingers appear to be taking power. What is left for Canadians to read, from which to get a genuine range of views? Very, very, very little. Lawrence Martin’s boldness has become so weathered, however, that – skirting the issue in his column – he writes (the boys at CanWest must love him) of Canada being “locked in a statist time warp on such issues as medicare….” Aw come on, Lawrence Martin, there are problems with Canadian medicare, but to attribute them to a “statist time warp” makes you sound as if you just finished being lobotomized by a surgical team made up of Diane Francis, Leonard Asper, Paul Cellucci, and Stephen Harper. Bowing to his own honest sense of history (and reality), Lawrence Martin records that the missile shield information served by the media was not presented “on the basis of what Canadians think but on what the Bush administration would think. It was as if – after 138 years of existence – we were still strapped down to a client-state mentality wherein the driving imperative was approval from a higher authority.” Oh, Lawrence Martin. You are so bold. But not for long…. He closes his column with reference to “growing talk about the creation of a new national paper” on the Internet or some such place. “For the left,” he writes, “it couldn’t come too soon.” For the left? For what? What Lawrence Martin should be writing is that corporate concentration in the media is wringing the neck of Canadian democracy and it must be “unconcentrated,” broken up. He should be calling for drastic federal legislation to insure real freedom of expression in the country. He should be writing not only of what he calls a “conservative tilt,” but of outright news manipulation, suppression of information, and brazen propagandizing in so-called news stories. He should be presenting readers with examples of the daily - and ugly - misuse of the press and media to aggrandize vicious, anti-social, democracy-destroying corporate owners and their unlovely friends. He should be on his hind feet as a journalist sounding the alarm with every means he has at his disposal. Or has Lawrence Martin, as George Monbiot has written, learned with the other Canadian journalists to “internalize the demands of the censor and understand, before anyone has told them, what is permissible and what is not”? Nero fiddled while Rome burned. The rhinestone-clotted middle class sang Auld Lang Syne as the Titanic began to sink beneath the waves in the mid-Atlantic. Lawrence Martin gapes from the Globe with a grin on his face. He has shown that he “knows.” But he’s avoided the question by referring to a deeply sick and dangerous concentration of press and media power as a “conservative tilt,” as if it really isn’t important or threatening. When Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer reports many of Gadamer’s Jewish friends told him not to worry because Hitler “won’t last a year.” Of course a major, more left-leaning newspaper in Canada is desirable. And so is an expert personal doctor available to visit every Canadian household. But to suggest such things is to smokescreen what can be done. What can be done about corporate concentration is active legislation by Parliament to end it, to break down monopolistic media forces and to make room for genuine variety. Then a free press isn’t dependent upon the huge massing of talent and money to begin a new publishing venture. Nor is it a pretend-free press where those with riches control most of the audience, and those without riches create hole-in-corner publications. Bertrand Russell made clear – on the question of a genuine free press – that pointing to hole-in-corner publications is not pointing to the reality of what we mean by a free press; for, as he said, “hole-in-corner publications have hole-in-corner readers.” They don’t have the kind of readership we mean when we speak of a “free press.” A free press in Canada is dependent upon the democratic Parliament of Canada acting firmly, imaginatively and responsibly. Go on, Lawrence Martin, say it. Say it. I, for one, am worried that Lawrence Martin is not saying it. Because if he, too, fits the Monbiot picture of self-censored, frightened journalists consenting to the “repressive regime” that is being built by the Toxic Right neo-totalitarians in Canada, Canadian journalism is in very bad shape indeed, maybe hopeless shape. And if that is the case, our democracy is on the kind of slide that leads to stifled thought and then to enraged public violence. [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on March 10, 2005]