Notes Taken While Waiting For The Outrage

                       Notes taken while waiting for the outrage.

While trying to get my head around that nosedive of Eliot Spitzer, I came across the

thought that while self destruction occurs in many walks of life, and is critically covered by

the media, the media never seems to focus its intense critical beam on itself. Journalists,

especially political journalists, are just not known for going at each other’s jugulars. They

comment and criticize while remaining safe in their métier, kind of like threatened muskox,

facing out, bum to bum, shaggy and mute whenever a critical note is struck, I can’t recall a

critical article, op-ed piece or editorial on the state of journalism itself. Sometimes vetted

criticism is allowed in letters to the editor, hardly a venue for satisfying comment on the

performance of political journalists. I think it would be refreshing to have a go in the media

at such a cosseted group, if for nothing else, than to bring their collective being into the

reader’s reality.

I want to hear some of you political journalist types say you’ve done some reflecting. I don’t

expect to hear any confessions. Forgive me, but not many of you people are known for

your ability to take a hit. Harper smacked you all a good one and what happened? Most of

you folded like a Trabant bumper. How did it all get like this? Political journalism in this

country isn’t progressive or courageous. It’s circular, like the same people tossing a heap of

pizza dough around. I don’t think many of you realize it or you’d be writing about it more

critically. In many other fields the members look at overall performance and make critical

comment seeking adjustment to help maintain integrity. But you people are notoriously

thin-skinned. And you’ll criticize everybody except a fellow journalist. Have any of you ever

considered turning that searchlight toward yourselves? To see some credentials put to the

test? Some courage? I’d like to see some reflection, some inner turmoil. I want to see less

daily game playing, more shouting and shaking of fists. Not from the politicians, from the

journalists. I want some turmoil and dust rising when a Canadian government closes an

unannounced deal to allow a foreign army into Canada to quell Canadian civil unrest (Oh

ironic déjà vu! American soldiers on our streets: we’re not making this up!). Where’s the

outrage? There’s barely a peep except in blogs. But you guys, in the public’s mind anyway,

are supposed to have integrity. I know you all have biases, and there’s nothing wrong with

that. Life is bias. My problem is you all have BlackBerrys. And with all you people fondling

your Blackberries, we’re stuck in the present moment aren’t we? Harold Innis called it

presentmindedness. It’s a disease and you people have it bad. When did any journalist last

reflect? You know, think about what’s actually happening, not the daily fecal examinations

that pass for journalism these days, but actually thinking; a stand-back-and-look picture. Wow,

is that a friggin’ meteor heading for the planet?

Yikes, there’s a meteor filled with toxic bugs heading for earth

and we’re spending our time commenting on the fiery tail and the latest push polls about who Canadians would

like to see it smite. And oh yeah, Jane Taber will tell us which toxic bits are hot and not.

Is it enough to sit and cheerily chat with a gracious and bright Don Newman when this stuff

is going down. The country is slowly going down the toilet and you’re all making gentle little

comments. Where’s the passion, the outrage? And you people are some of the better

journalists in the country! Do you think everything is just unfolding, as it should? No it isn’t.

The frog is in the pot and it’s getting hotter. The Canadian people know this. It’s why

Stephen Harper stays at 30 to 33 percent on those polls that don’t ‘randomly’ pluck their respondents from ridings which bias according to Liberal or Conservative majorities. So where is the media to talk of these things? They emerged for a while in Chile and Argentina until they were frightened or shot down. Do you think it can’t happen in Canada? What  else can’t happen? Blatant lies in advertising have ruined a person’s reputation and I’ve not heard a critical word of it from any of you. Someone asks Rick Anderson on CBC’s Politics if the attack ads against Dion will work and he smiles and says yes. No one says, “They’re lies, fraudulent, misleading and wrong.”  Hey, we’re not watching a play. We’re in a play, and it’s a tragedy.

Where’s the courage? Is it lost in paying the rent or the lease or the contacts so important

to all your job survivals? Is it in the easy phone calls and the BlackBerry tappings and the

presentmindedness that journalists seem to have like head colds. Something is happening,

and it’s sinister. There’s a hollowing out of values, with the ensuing vacuum filling with a

jingoistic, militaristic pudding, pandering to our basest levels. A kind of oil-fuelled macho

goose-stepping prance amid shouts of; “We’re an energy superpower!” Tim Horton good.

Academics bad. At what point is it possible for journalists to personally take a stand, not for

a party, but for something that defined us? Call it a reasonableness. I mean a collection of

differences, weirdly held together by geography and flexible strings of social caring. A dull

but workable premise: Sharing and caring, rather than grabbing and stabbing. It’s toast. Now

we’re exhorted to wear red on Fridays or risk being cast as traitors. Guns! Not butter!

Maybe the problem is more with the media owners. 

Not a lot of guys who own print and electronic networks are left wing. Some of them

would scare the shit out of Genghis Khan. Apart from Rick Salutin and Jim Stanford, I can’t

think of many left wing columnists either. The rightward trudging journalists working for

owners like CanWest certainly aren’t known for their courage. Well, that’s not entirely true.

The only time I read of the Canada/U.S. armed forces deal was in the National Post. But

mostly they seem a bunch of pack animals, ready to jump on anyone who stumbles, and

good at the cull. Then we have the television pundits, so very ready to pontificate,

mesmerized by the camera’s red light, freshly balded in the style of the day, horn-rimmed

and bow-tied. It’s like they’re all watching a traffic accident and dissing the moans and

shrieks of the dying and injured, then retiring to the bar to help each other get their pieces

out. These people are BlackBerry freaks too, and having no sense of critical thinking, they

run on raw political effluent and discharge, with no default facility for challenging

assumptions, especially their own, as this would involve thinking rather than reacting. 

Are we somewhat like Germany in the thirties? Swept along in a new style, I mean apart

from the Shakespearean caucus stabbings on one side of the House and the Machiavellian

caucus smotherings on the other, is something else going on? Can a reasonably sane person

actually say the word fascistization without being blogified? No one in the press would hint

at such possibilities, either because of their particular biases for such a happening or

because they have fears about their jobs and losing contacts that allow them to print the

daily minutiae. Meanwhile the frog in the pot is noticing the bubbles. A look at the

Government’s actions in the past two years shows an incremental movement toward what

might be considered a fascist perspective. Look at a few symptoms: Big military build-up; Big

lie used in ads directed against any opposition; Attention focused solely on the leader; News restrictions on government actions; Individuals pointed out in traitorous terms; Plans for a propaganda centre of Goebbelesque proportions; Scientists, intellectuals and

academics seen as enemies. Evidently, the burning of the books will be replaced with laws

cancelling funds for the broadcast arts.  All these things happened in the past two years,

with little more than passing comment from our press. The closest thing I’ve seen was

Susan Bonner actually backing Jim Prentice up against the wall on a completely fraudulent

ad smear on Stephane Dion. And Don Martin sometimes has a faux criticism of the PM, I

imagine just to get his pH factor into a lighter shade of blue. My God, bring back the

sponsorship scandal, bigger if possible, because what’s happening now is a greater swindle,

the stealing of a country by a party containing a fraudulent bunch of right wing thugs thinly-

veneered with some decent conservatives. The former who think Canadians are stupid, the

latter who think that the end justifies the means. 

I think you journalists are playing the game wrong. 

You should be more aggressive with the power holders, and less contemptuous of the

Opposition. I can’t remember anyone actually writing anything positive about Dion, yet he

has to be a very tough guy, because he spends his days being knifed by Ignatieff followers

and assorted Liberal weasels as well as having to tolerate stuff like Rick Mercer’s Jubilee

Singers delighting the Conservatives. That’s a wonderful new trait for a satirist, Rick,

cheering for the overdog. Dion’s obviously a gutsy person, but how would any of you

people know? You’re all into piling-on. You’ve bought into the ‘”not a leader” stuff because

it doesn’t require thinking or reflecting or gulping and saying; “Christ, what are we doing”?

The road is always easy to follow when it’s well lit and there’s directional signage. And

you’ve all bought the GPS political software. 

But wait, there’s more. 

Let’s look at the pathetic way many of you understand political polling research. I know

something about qualitative and quantitative research. Every word I’ve written for a living

for 43 years has been tested in one or the other of these broad methodologies. And the

lesson I early learned is a simple one. Whoever pays for the research gets the desired

results. Oddly, Harold Innis had the same conclusion in another context. He said, any

system of communication eventually influences what issues from it. (I think McLuhan ripped

that into the medium is the message). Whatever, the average Canadian thinks that this kind

of research shows what Canadians think at a given time. What it may be though, is what

the research buyer wants Canadians to think. So please don’t give me the “we’re just

reporting the facts” bullroar. The facts are that 3% 19 times out of 20 is a weasel. The real

bias agent is in the question, and the lead up to the question, and the placing and rotation

of the question in the context of other questions. Weighting is another little statistical shim

that can even out a rocking verdict. Those are facts I’ve rarely seen in a newspaper or

heard on air. What I have heard and seen are press statements like, “on verge of majority”.

As I say, who sponsors the poll gets the results desired. Yet journalists frequently imply that

poll results are truth or signs from above. 

So, political journalists, where’s the reflection? 

Some of you are excellent writers, possessed of a power to explain rather than spin and

having no need to ease off into hackneyed, packaged, explanations which coincide enough with the pack mutterings to keep you comfy talking to each other in bars. So, where’s the

outrage? Where are the journalist fistfights? You were all passionate writers once. Now

many of you just have a writing job. Where’s a Cardinal Newman? Courage. Daring. Anger.

Insight. Canadian political journalism today reminds me of the ad business today, where

everything is ironic or humorous or edgy, because everyone writing ads today is terrified of

being typecast as corny and maudlin if they move into the difficult area of persuasion, of

being seen as living in a cheesy, Coutts-Hallmark land. I think some of you people are afraid

to be yourselves in your writing too. I’m tired after saying all this and I’m sure you’re tired

too, if you got through it this far.

Let me leave you with this thought. From my perch in the Bay of Fundy’s little Sackville, I’ve watched you political journalists drifting, tide wrought and keeping up with the effluent outpouring from every political stream or freshet. Just drifting, adding to the sea’s confusion by never pausing to question the reason for the tide or the effects of wind against current and how they affect the incredible reasonableness of Canada. Even though something else is happening that’s  too big to fit on a BlackBerry.