Izzy Asper, Barbara Frum, Warren Davis And The Robot Right

From the maggoty flesh of the National Post rises Catechism for the Robot Right – almost always fawning on the U.S.A. Only the most generous would call what rises off its pages ‘news’.

Journalists in Canada love the d’Izzy Aspers of this world, especially if they are rich. The papers had as much concentration on Asper as they would if a Prime Minister or Canadian monarch had died. Asper, we were told, made a great contribution. Contribution? He loved an argument they told us – which is doubtless why major journalists resigned his employ. He would go into a room and – to everyone’s surprise – he was willing to talk to anybody; he wasn’t fussy or proud. What humanity! Newspaper inches and hours of media time were spent on such gigantic irrelevancies. Very, very little was said about d’Izzy Asper’s destructive role in Canadian democracy.

That reminds me of Barbara Frum about whom we hear – almost tirelessly – still: eulogies, encomia, praise, adulation from people in the communications trades. Barbara Frum is never weighed for what she really was – the Ice Cold Mama of the Robot Right. My first encounter with her was on a TV show she shared with Warren Davis for the Ontario Region. It was the beginning of her climb, Ontario’s Seven O’Clock Show on public affairs and timely events. James Steele and I went on the show for several minutes.

We were working to break down discrimination against Canadians of all colours and creeds in the cultural institutions. Canadians were not being hired into colleges, universities, museums, galleries, orchestras, and so on. U.S. people were being hired heavily. Brits were, too. And East Indians were – anybody, in fact, who wasn’t Canadian. Canadian textbooks were as rare as Dinosaur bones. Courses in colleges and universities dealing with Canada were even rarer.

We had a conversation with Frum and Davis and went back to our hotel. Next day we met Toronto graduate students who wanted jobs in Canada. They were alarmed. When we’d left the show, Warren Davis had tacked on a statement that “we” certainly didn’t want what Mathews and Steele advocated because that would take Canada back to having quotas on Jews in medical schools, and other such bad practices. He was suggesting (obviously with Frum’s approval) that Mathews and Steele were anti-semites (and probably racists). Great broadcasting.

Steele was deeply grieved. He went to see the producer, who refused to see him. That pulled me in. I phoned the executive producer, met him, told him he had to act or we’d sue if possible and that, anyway, we’d begin every public event (on a national tour) reporting on the slime factor in Warren Davis and Barbara Frum.

A few hour later I was invited back to the show. Not Steele. I told them we worked as a team. They said there wasn’t time for two people. I’d be on three minutes. Davis would explain our distress; I would make my case for two minutes. That’s all. “Three minutes off the top” as they say in the business. In and out.

But they were lying. I was being set up to be wiped out. When I finished my two minutes, Warren Davis went on the attack, determined to prove I was an anti-semite, racist, bigot. (Frum sat demurely looking on.) I was – as intended – totally unprepared.

But it didn’t work. The more Davis attacked, the more stupid he looked. At mid-show and ‘commercial break’, the producer announced that segment over. “I’m not finished”, Warren Davis shouted angrily – and the show went on. Without a murmur from the Ice Cold Mama of the Robot Right sitting beside him, Davis tried again to show me a racist, anti-semite bigot.

When the show stopped, Frum slipped away without a word. Davis turned on me and told me he’d never met anyone as despicable as I was. As he was leaving, the loudspeaker announced a telephone call for him, but he flung himself from the studio shouting, “I’m not here”. Not one member of the TV team spoke to me or acknowledged my presence. I made my way back to the make-up person to be un-pancaked. She filled the very lowest place on the TV totem pole. She told me the show was terrific, that I’d been great. (Ah yes, the people….)

I left, unnoticed, walking through the CBC parking lot to get to our hotel. A figure loomed up in the darkness. It was Warren Davis. “Mr. Davis”, I said. He stopped. “Civilized people,” I said, “can debate and disagree without rancour and slanderous behaviour.” He looked at me with contempt and said: “I don’t want to talk to you. Crawl back under the rock where you came from.”. I responded mildly that there was no room because the space was reserved for him. We parted. Subsequently, I reported the scandalous behaviour to CBC headquarters. Only Davis was “punished” by being taken off the air for a week. No inquiry was made about how such a set-up could happen. No public apology was made. No media commentator ever referred to the amazing TV show. The event disappeared and, doubtless, will never be shown on any “memory lane” TV re-run.

That night Steele and I telephoned the CBC reception desk where the person on duty regularly recorded responses to shows and sent reports to headquarters. She was reticent. But, finally, she told us the phones began ringing (no e-mail then) ten minutes into the show and went on ringing until after eleven p.m. People telephoned long distance and paid to wait in line so they could express their indignation at CBC and the Seven O’Clock Show. She said to us that evening (and repeated the statement several years later when being interviewed on the day of her retirement) that more calls came about that show than any other in her many, many years on the job. She told us, also,the calls were overwhelmingly in my favour. (Ah yes, the people….)

For such a display of stellar broadcasting technique Frum became the famous female half of the hosts on As It Happens. I heard her interviewing the head of a union on strike at the Toronto Children’s Hospital. She didn’t ask about the need to strike. She didn’t ask about working conditions or wages. She berated him for putting his workers on the street. How did he feel removing them from getting their salaries? Didn’t he feel like a chump? The Ice Cold Mama of the Robot Right was still learning how to sink the reactionary dagger without it being seen. That interview was a mess. She hadn’t learned yet.

Several days later I was telephoned and asked to be interviewed by Frum on As It Happens. I said I wouldn’t appear with such an anti-labour shrew, and I’d tell others to keep off the show. Doubtless, responses like mine encouraged Frum to sharpen her Robot Right interviewing techniques. She couldn’t always be silent and let someone else try to sink the knife. Nor could she show her Robot Right face very often as obviously as she had done with the union leader. She had to get smooth. She got smooth.

After 1970, the magazine Canadian Forum celebrated its 50th anniversary by publishing an anthology. As It Happens would have ignored the event but The New York Review of Books reviewed the Forum book. That made it important for As It Happens. The New York Review of Books didn’t use a smart Canadian, but a U.S. academic, ignorant of Canada, very recently arrived here. His name was E. Zed Friedenberg. He began his review by dumping on Canada and didn’t stop dumping all the way through. Would I debate him on As It Happens? Yes. I read a few of his very bad books and got ready.

He was in the Halifax studio. Frum and co-host were in Toronto. I was in Ottawa. Freidenberg and I debated. I called him on his bottomless ignorance. He couldn’t answer. He stormed from the Halifax studio, his heavy footsteps being heard all over Canada. “Will he be back?” Frum asked the Halifax producer. “Not by the look on his face”, he replied. We closed the interview on a light note.

A week later Frum reported that there had been some response to the show. Then the hosts read a few comments supporting me and an equal number of comments supporting Friedenberg. Like other listeners I thought nothing was amiss until by total accident I fell into conversation with one of the juniors on the As It Happens team a few weeks later. She told me they were swamped with responses to the Friedenberg/Mathews show. (Frum said nothing about that.) And the junior told me that more than 90 percent of the responses supported me and commented adversely on the behaviour of E. Zed Friedenberg. (Frum didn’t tell the audience that either.) As It Happens read responses as if they had arrived in an equal proportion, plainly falsifying the real response to the event. Frum was getting smooth.

As It Happens couldn’t show that Canadians objected to a dumb yankee trying to put them down unfairly. Barbara Frum certainly couldn’t, the Ice Cold Mama of the Robot Right. For the large majority of Canadian journalists U.S. people are superior by definition. You don’t knock them. Frum went on honing her skills and passing them on to people like Mary-Lou Findlay, Barbara Budd, and Michael Enright. They are never as happy as when they can interview someone from the U.S.A. They are even more happy if that someone is a reactionary U.S. General from a reactionary U.S. think-tank. Other foreigners are also attractive as long as they are working at U.S. universities or think-tanks. Canadians just don’t measure up, ever, to chest-thumping, Robot Right yankees.

Times have changed. Most Canadian journalists (being essentially anti-Canadian) have always been suspicious of Canadians who are outspoken about Canadian legitimacy. They used to ask them on to shows occasionally and then “do a Friedenberg” on them – falsify audience response or practice some other kind of double-cross. Now they don’t even ask those kinds of Canadians at all, or very, very rarely. When the umpteenth reactionary yankee General from a reactionary yankee think-tank is interviewed, the audience begins to think maybe he represents “Canadian reality”.

When Frum is remembered, (as with d’Izzy Asper), she calls forth, still, eulogies, encomia, praise, and adulation from people in the communications trades. No one asks how such a shining advocate of decency and democracy could produce a son who reached Robot Right Paradise as writer for president George W. Bush and created – it is said – the hate-phrase “axis of evil”. No one has really looked at Barbara Frum’s politics. As with d’Izzy Asper, they tell “chuckle” anecdotes about her; they say what a professional she was. So was d’Izzy Asper a professional. No one asks: “Professional at what?”
---------

Robin Mathews publishes on culture, politics, the arts, and Canadian Intellectual history. He lives in Vancouver with his wife, a potter. His column appears regularly on Vive le Canada.

Comments: rmathews@sfu.ca

Note: rmathews@sfu.ca