Category: media

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Miscellany: November 18, 2008

  • Ingrid is approaching world domination. Her plaudit-winning reinterpretation of the cover for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has not only received international online acclaim (Bookninja, The Guardian, Boston Globe), but her work was featured in Sunday’s New York (bloody) Times Book Review. Print and online editions (with the unfortunate misspelling of her last name in the print edition – needless to say this took a little of the shine off of the accolade. They will, however be printing a correction in an upcoming edition and the online version has her name spelled correctly).

  • I’ve sent the first revised draft of my novel to a few selected readers. Unofficially looking for feedback and consensus that what I’m doing is worthwhile. Nervous. Anxious. Perhaps as a result of this and other things, I’ve been struck by some interesting what-if’s regarding a new book idea. I must be a masochist. At least it doesn’t hurt.
  • I turned 38 on Saturday. I share that day with Ed Asner and Tilda Swinton (they were not in New York, unfortunately – I tried).
  • Two films I worked on opened within two weeks of each other. One is a franchise horror film (of the “moral error leads to violent suffering” kind) which traditionally draws massive audiences and box office gold (if not good reviews). The other is (wait for it) a gore-Goth rock opera which is only receiving an eight-theatre release (if not good reviews). They represent what I’ve been working on for the last twelve months. Working in film/TV is “what I do for money”, a distinction I wish I didn’t have to make, save for the fact that the quality stuff (often Canadian) doesn’t pay my rent. It’s a quandary punctuated by background horror-movie funhouse screams.
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Damn you, Harper’s

About eight years ago, I read my first copy of Harper’s. Up until then, I’d never been a magazine person (not counting the subscription I had, at the age of 16, to Psychology Today…and then later, Spy for a brief period, while they were struggling with bankruptcy). Okay. Let’s just say that, from my twenties onward, I wasn’t a magazine person. But one day I picked up Harper’s and I fell in love. I discovered something densely intelligent, funny, and with such a variety of content that one could spend countless hours reading (nay appreciating, savouring) every morsel it served. Lastly, for someone who was much more interested at the time in non-fiction, it was a godsend.

Then, after 9/11/01 [sidenote: it took a tragedy for people to officially confuse the order of the month and day when writing the date], I fell out of love. Not immediately, mind you – if anything, out-of-the-gate, Harper’s was one of the few mainstream voices of sanity in the aftermath. While everyone in the mass media seemed to conform to a dangerously singular mindset (i.e. being complacent), Harper’s was honestly critical and asked the necessary questions. But, over time, I found then-editor Lewis Lapham’s essays too predictably left-wing (and I think the fact that they were predictable was perhaps the greater sin). The magazine also began to suffer from the same Americentric cocooning as the rest – I believe the turning point for me was an essay on how pragmatism was a uniquely American concept. Oh, really.

I felt like I was reading something written by people who had never left their homes, or who didn’t want their presumptions challenged. In other words, for reasons arguable or not in hindsight, it became a magazine like any other.

Flash-forward to 2008: with the hell-job in its trailing throes, I found myself in a bookstore itching for something different to peruse – something less weighty (literally) than a book. And sure enough, as if face-t0-face with an ex-girlfriend, I was staring at a copy of Harper’s on a magazine rack. I picked it up, flipped through, and seeing a lack of blatant political indignation, sighed, and proceeded to the cash register.

Sure enough, I found myself addicted once again. The Readings section, with its immaculately edited selection of essays, fiction, poetry, and miscellaneous news items. The ubiquitous Harper’s Index. A fascinating piece on the possibility of transmissible cancer, by David Quammen. A report on the raw-milk controversy (with a Canadian angle, no less). Last but not least, a series of 22 short fiction pieces by Paul Theroux – each of them excellent.

While I am delighted at what seems to be the return of a full-blooded Harper’s, I’m equally despondent: it’s almost too much of a good thing. I can’t pick it up without devoting hours to reading every bit of it. As a result, I worry that everything else I’m reading (or promising to read – hello, Ulysses) will fall by the wayside.

Damn you, Harper’s. Damn you.

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Intolerant Alternatives

For those who don’t live in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), there are two papers which demonstrate the zero-sum game of “providing an alternative voice” in mass-market traditional media.

The first, which I submit as The Intolerant Right, is The Toronto Sun, a daily newspaper distributed through most of Southern Ontario. In short, pro-conservative, pro-law-and-order, pro-military, anti-liberal, anti-big-government, anti-humanist. They regularly publish op-ed pieces which make numerous references to City Council as being infested with socialists. They once published an editorial “cartoon” which allowed you to paint-by-numbers a portrait of Toronto’s mayor, David Miller, which ended up portraying him as Adolph Hitler.

The second, which I submit as The Intolerant Left, is NOW Magazine, a weekly news/community paper with wide distribution including outside the GTA. As opposed to the Sun, NOW is pro-socialist, pro-community, pro-union, anti-police, anti-military, anti-corporate. NOW operates under the impression that the world’s problems can be solved with townhall meetings. The recent clash between the Chilean U-20 soccer team and the police was, without bothering to investigate, blamed squarely on the police who were identified as racists.

Don’t get me wrong, NOW has a good arts section. The Toronto Sun, for that matter, excels in sports coverage. However, as regards editorial thrust, both papers are heinously biased and often responsible for stoking the coals of hatred.

And thus we come to that auspicious moniker: the “outsider” or “alternative” media voice. People who devour the Sun feel that everyone else is too liberally biased and that their paper “tells it like it is”. Those who fawn over NOW feel as if every page uncovers the organic truth, conspiratorially cloaked by the interests of Big Business. Yet, despite the obvious differences between the two, faithful readers of both feel as if they are getting the inside track on enlightenment.

This is one of the pernicious problems with being the “outsider” or the “alternative” in the traditional media market – it’s bullshit. You know it. I know it. Yet – and kudos for consistency to both the Toronto Sun and NOW – one can predictably ascertain the editorial reaction of both papers without as much as a few seconds of applied imagination.

Me? Generally, I’m left-of-centre, I do think there is a clear history of corporate greed which has threatened to extinguish individual rights (let alone entrepreneurship), and I don’t want our laws to be dictated by the tenets of any organized religion. However, pure socialism is a Romantic Dream – it assumes everyone is the same, which is the summit of naivety if we must include the criminally violent or the unfortunately stupid. Yet, I believe that culture needs federal funding and should not be treated like an elitist nice-to-have. Also, I would rather have another 4 years of David Miller’s ineffectiveness than yet another malicious, vindictive clown like Mel (The Black Cauldron) Lastman or a ruinous corporate-minded manipulator like Mike Harris at the provincial helm.

The problem with any form of media claiming to the be an “alternative” is that “being alternative” (as opposed to say, trying to approach the complexity of the average person’s viewpoint) becomes a ball-and-chain by which they have to editorially tow the line, whether or not it devolves into predictability (or self-parody).

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The Vocabulary of Conflict: Afghanistan and Iraq

If there are two things I’ve avoided mentioning since the inception of this blog, it is Iraq and Afghanistan. For anyone who has casually surfed a blind selection of blogs in their spare time, I think you can understand why I’ve chosen not to get involved in the often mephitic atmosphere of this debate. It’s chaotic and reflects the lack of clarity in the wars themselves.

Six Canadian soldiers were killed yesterday by a roadside bomb. The media refers to these bombs as IED’s (improvised explosive devices), following the vocabulary of military spokespersons. In response to these latest deaths, here is an excerpt to more effectively demonstrate this vocabulary, from the Globe and Mail:

The Taliban’s increasing use of roadside bombs has also taken a toll on civilians, Brig.-Gen. Grant said. “They have managed to kill six great young Canadians today, which is an absolute tragedy,” he said. “The other part of this is that they’re killing lots of Afghans. They’re attacking the weak, they’re killing women, they’re killing children, they’re killing policemen. These are not the tactics of anything other than terrorists.”

[…]

Asked whether this represents an “Iraqization” of the conflict, Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Trudel, who serves as chief of staff for the Canadian headquarters in Kandahar, shook his head.

“Not particularly,” he said. “It indicates a loss of control by the insurgents.”

Canadian troops faced insurgents in the farmland southwest of Kandahar city last year in the largest battles Afghanistan has witnessed since the collapse of the Taliban regime. Those fights have taught the Taliban that it’s fruitless to openly confront the Canadians, Lt.-Col. Trudel said.

“The fact that we’ve lost a lot of soldiers from IED attacks indicates a success, in the sense that our conventional operations have succeeded against the Taliban,” the chief of staff said.

Where to start…

1) These roadside bombs – sorry, IED’s – are not, historically speaking, the “tactics of terrorists”. They are the tactics of guerrillas. Crashing planes into buildings and floating boats laden with explosives into aircraft carriers are tactics of terrorists. There is more than a semantic difference between the two classifications; when you paint civilian-based militias as terrorism you are admitting a loss of control and belying a critical problem with the military operation at-hand. See: Corsica.

2) If by “Iraqization”, the journalists mean “people who were under a tyrant who barely kept a fractious mix of misplaced ethnicities (largely due to Western colonial folly) under control and who now are now occupied by Western forces (yet again) whose motives increasingly speak more about global economics than humanitarianism” then there are some similarities. However, the way in which the term is implied in the article suggests that the “tactics of terrorism” are being imported from Iraq, which itself is an interesting bit of circular logic given that Afghanistan is the only one of the two countries that had anything to do with the destruction of the World Trade towers.

3) To suggest that the killing of six of our soldiers (along with civilians and police) represents a “loss of control” by the insurgents is perhaps one of the more grotesque distortions of military logic I’ve read (recently). Sounds to me as if the insurgents are in control if by their actions they are disrupting the lives of its citizenry and the work of the soldiers who have been put there to resurrect what is becoming the Romantic dream of a post-Taliban Afghanistan.

All things considered, no matter how passionate or well-reasoned your opinion, it simply isn’t enough to oppose either of these wars, at least not anymore. Three or four years ago, perhaps. However, there is a marked difference between the two conflicts. With Afghanistan there was, at the very least, a reason for NATO troops to get involved; it was, after all, the training ground for Al-Qaeda and, considering the devastation of 9/11/01, arguing for a military response was not an irrational (ie. purely emotional) action. Iraq, however, was and is a debacle of historic proportions. It would depress me to recount just how ill-conceived (and corrupted) the decision to invade Iraq was. There are many other sites out there which can do a better job of summing up the horrible negligence of the latter invasion.

One thing I will mention, and I do so on behalf of my countrymen who are stationed in Afghanistan, is that, failing “success” – itself a contentious ideal in any war – the blame for the lack thereof can be directly attributed to two factors:

1) Iraq. If the United States and Britain had not diverted (and thus fragmented) their troops so that they were intervening [or invading, whichever way you wish to see it – I’ll leave the Semantics of Conflict essay for another day] in not only one but two countries, NATO would’ve had the maximum available response in order to accomplish whatever goals there were in the Afghanistan mission. Instead, by pulling troops out of the latter and into the former, they hobbled the efforts of the only justifiable military action of the two and endangered both.

2) Although there are 37 countries involved in the NATO/ISAF deployment in Afghanistan, there is a disproportionate amount of Canadian troops on the frontline in the most tumultuous areas (read: Kandahar), despite repeated calls for other participating countries to commit troops for support. Say what you will about the Afghanistan mission (and again, a lot of contentious arguments are to be had), it angers me to see such reluctance on behalf of other participating countries: either you’re there and fight or you should rightfully leave. You simply can’t have it both ways on the battlefield.

Canada has a tragic history of its soldiers being used as gun-fodder in armed struggle, most notably in the trenches of WWI. This perhaps explains why we did not involve ourselves in Vietnam or Iraq; though we have our share of military controversies to deal with (much of it due to financial stagnation and federal meddling), we have generally learnt not to follow into armed conflict when the goals of the coordinating military power (usually the US and/or England) are suspicious. The difference this time is that our public is looking very critically at the war in Afghanistan, asking the right questions, and putting pressure on our politicians to ensure that this latest involvement does not devolve into the sort of pandemonium currently underway in Iraq.

I would be lying if I thought the current plan in Afghanistan was particularly clear or that our politicians (and some of the bureaucratic upper ranks of our Armed Forces) had the best interests of our soldiers, Afghanis, or the reputation of Canada in mind. The former Soviet Union went bankrupt as a result of their involvement in the 80’s, with the U.S. funding, arming, and training the civilian insurgency. The shoe is on the other foot, with Russia and China supplying the insurgency via Iran. Whether we call them terrorists or not, vocabulary alone is not enough to soften the blow of rising casualties in a conflict sorely in need of clarity.

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Comments on Media Bias

I don’t like to mention American news channels, for the very basic reason that I’m not American and that I don’t live in the U.S.. As a Canadian, however, I have an advantage in that I have easy access to American news programming. It’s easy to get swept up in what happens down there and you forget that it doesn’t even concern you (or if it does, it’s by example, not by fact).

Tony Burman, of the CBC, posted an interesting comment on a current controversy over something CNN personality (anchor? those days are gone, sorry) Lou Dobbs said. Something about attributing a studied increase in leprosy to a less-than studied association with increased immigration from Mexico. Oh my. You understand why it’s important not to get swept up in another country’s news now?

I like Tony. He’s not a bullshitter, and as a result, doesn’t have the sheen or explicit eye-grabbing “savvy” of more recent newsmen. He makes some interesting observations (which, as a Canadian, we are experts at providing to a world which doesn’t listen):

News anchors — at least in the U.S. — are increasingly revealing their own personal opinions in an effort to ‘connect’ with audiences in this very competitive media environment.

[…]

As I wrote in a column last September, the line between ‘news’ and ‘opinion’ is gradually becoming blurred, and in many newsrooms this is challenging conventional journalistic views about ‘objectivity,’ ‘bias’ and ‘opinion.’

If the patterns in the U.S. take hold, there seems to be a greater desire on the part of audiences to ‘relate’ to news and current affairs anchors whose views and perspective are known to them. The mask of journalistic ‘objectivity’ can seem forced and false to growing numbers of people who revel in the wide-open environment of the Internet.

However, what really struck me were some of the comments to Tony’s article. In particular are two:

Joe Chip from Saskatoon [responding to *yet another* accusation from a previous poster that the CBC is some sort of liberal star chamber, and should be ashamed of casting aspersions on the likes of Mr. Dobbs]

[…]As someone who actually follows media sources from around the world, I can assure you that they are an (relatively) objective news source. As living beings, we cannot avoid bias – we need to interpret the world around us in a meaningful way. The CBC reports in almost as professional a manner as the BBC, which is, despite what you and others may think, the gold standard for broadcast news. Have you noticed how their “At Issue” panel has one person on almost every week from the National Post and one from the Toronto Star? That’s not an accident, it’s about balance, and Andrew and Chantel accomplish that nicely.

Finally, I suggest that you do a comparison of how the three national leaders (Martin, Harper and Layton) were covered in the past election. You will find that Harper got the most positive coverage, while Martin was largely panned, and Layton often ignored. This was consistent throughout most major Canadian media, with more positive portrayals of the Conservatives in right wing papers and media (i.e. the National Post, etc.), and more flattering coverage of left wingers in media such as the Toronto Star. The CBC remained fairly balanced, though I thought they were a bit hard on poor Martin.

and…

Charles Barrett in Florida

As a Canadian citizen living in the US, I have perspective from both sides.
The question being dealt with here isn’t so much about Lou Dobbs [whom I do like and agree with on a lot of the points he discusses on his program].
Traditional media sources have long ago lost their way. In paying attention to a broadcast or the written story most times I’m struck by either the wrong question being asked or the answer given is either inadequate or no answer at all. The reporter/interviewer doesn’t follow-up to hold the respondant [sic] to task about their evasive answer.

It’s seems that the truth/answers are just commodities and any response to a posed question will do. Media sources, particularly television media, are just production houses.

We, the public, need start thinking of what is not asked and also hear what is not said, in a response to a question/interview.

I thought it was the media/journalists job to obtain the truth whereever [sic] it was rooted. Not just report answers.

As for Lou Dobbs and his cohorts, opinion is just that, opinion. You don’t have agree with what anybody/everybody says/believes. It’s his opinion not yours.

That is what makes it GREAT to live in the part of the world that we do, we have the FREEDOM to disagree and NOT pay with our lives.

I think my previous posters would all AGREE with this.

Both of these comments are very insightful. I didn’t want to waste your time regurgitating what they said into some sort of personalized polemic, but rather show that there *are* thinking people out there who show just how complex our seemingly left vs. right society truly is. And I absolutely LOVE the line that “media sources are just production houses” – zing!

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Thoughts on Truth & Medium

I’ve been reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Intimidating little book. Seems to be written in its own language: cold fucking logic. Still, there are some fascinating ideas relating to how we choose to define the world around us. It’s easy to see how revolutionary this book may have been for some people, as concepts of truth and falsity take a back-seat to the greater question of a proper logical confine for the philosophy itself – in doing so, Wittgenstein is saying that the structure of a philosophy is greater than the veracity of its content.

Gleaning from this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s 1 observation, “the medium is the message” (which was also the name of the resulting book he published 2), which seems resonant of Wittgenstein’s approach (if not somewhat parallel).

From Tractatus:

3.332 No proposition can say anything about itself, because the propositional sign cannot be contained in itself (that is the “whole theory of types”).

3.333 A function cannot be its own argument, because the functional sign already contains the prototype of its own argument and it cannot contain itself.

It would be rather trite to pit Wittgenstein against McLuhan based upon a couple of sentences (foundational though they may be). However, from this discourse I’m curious to take a closer look at what McLuhan was trying to say – I suppose I carry a vain hope of tripping over a Unified Theory.

You know you’re part-geek when things like this really interest you. However, I swear, I’m also part-superhero 3.

1. I always get this guy’s name mixed up with the guy who created the Sex Pistols (Malcolm McLaren)…if only they were the same person.

2. Although, technically speaking, due to a copy-edit error, the book was first published as The Medium is the Massage. I shit you not.

3. …as opposed to the Nietzschean concept of the Superman (*chortle*)

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Media Linguistics: What the hell?

I was reading the following post on CNN (from Reuters news service):

——

Kenya’s first lady: Abstain, don’t use condoms

Risks anger of anti-AIDS activists in her counsel to young people

NAIROBI, Kenya (Reuters) — Kenyan first lady Lucy Kibaki risked the wrath of anti-AIDS campaigners by advising young people against using condoms, saying they should practice abstinence instead.

——

However, I have to ask: what the hell is an “anti-AIDS activist”? Furthermore, an “anti-AIDS campaigner”?

Aside from the story itself (which is troubling enough), why does Reuters insist on using this ridiculous terminology?

In a similar story on a cholera outbreak in Angola, I see no reference to groups such as Medecins Sans Frontieres or the World Health Organisation being “anti-cholera activists”. Why? Because it’s bloody obvious that the distinction isn’t necessary, unless of course I’m wrong and there is a burgeoning tide of “pro-cholera” and “pro-AIDS” campaigners in our midst*.

Particularly considering how tragically difficult it is to stabilise the AIDS epidemic in certain parts of the world (via basic medicine and education), there’s no need to further complicate the matter with ridiculous qualifiers such as “anti-AIDS” – it only serves to compound an already embattled cause.

* (conceivably, any politician who supports abstinence alone as a means of battling AIDS is probably the closest thing to a “pro-AIDS campaigner” as we’re likely to see)

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Darfur – A Range of Opinion

You know you’re looking at a real-life problem (as opposed to the more easily-digestible choices portrayed in television dramas…who am I kidding – television news as well) when its tangled complexity clogs the drain of your ability (or desire) to “solve” it.

Take Darfur.

The way in which this conflict is rendered has been a hotly debated topic. A recent analysis showed that, in 2005, the Darfur story was covered for all of 10 minutes on the three major American networks; this would imply that the television-drama ER (in an upcoming episode) will have covered 6 times as much as them…again, in a single episode.

The newsmedia is sometimes the only means a tragedy has of reaching the eyes and senses of those who are too distant to know about them. Speculatively speaking, I have to wonder if some in the newsmedia – the above mentioned networks who all but avoided this situation for years prior – are now reluctant to spotlight it because doing so inherently implicates past apathy. An extreme interpretation, perhaps, but considering the media’s tepid hold on our trust – post 9/11 – this seemingly bizarre behaviour is not without recent precedents.

On the topic of how the situation in Darfur has been rendered in the media,Guardian journalist Jonathan Steele, describes in this bloggish-commentary what he calls the Darfur Disconnect:

[…]
Commentators thunder away at the need for sanctions against the regime in Khartoum and denounce western leaders for not authorising Nato to intervene.

Last weekend the outrage took a new turn, with big demonstrations in several American cities, strongly promoted by the Christian right, which sees the Darfur conflict as another case of Islamic fundamentalism on the rampage. They urged Bush to stop shilly-shallying and be tougher with the government of Sudan.

The TV reports are not wrong. They just give a one-sided picture and miss the big story: the talks that the rebels are conducting with the government. The same is true of the commentaries. Why demand military involvement, when western leaders have intervened more productively by pressing both sides to reach a settlement? Over the past few days the US, with British help, has taken over the AU’s mediation role, and done it well. Robert Zoellick, the state department’s number two, and Hilary Benn, Britain’s development secretary, have been in Abuja urging the rebels not to waste the opportunity for peace. Sudan’s government accepted the US-brokered draft agreement last weekend, and it is the rebels who have been risking a collapse.

[…]

An interesting, if divisive, point of view. I say divisive because it drags into the debate an almost unnecessary contention that there is some cabal of the (increasingly journalistic cliche) Christian right to portray this as a spectre of Muslim imperialism against Christian Darfurians – the truth of that particular matter is certainly more complex. I can certainly say that the rally I attended in Toronto had no religious overtones or other types of self-investment.

The more salient argument in this excerpt is whether, in pushing for military intervention, NATO/UN forces could unknowingly apply the wrong type of pressure and drive the conflict deeper or perhaps fragment it along ethnic/political lines – in this regard, it’s not as if there is a single Darfurian rebel organisation sitting at the negotiation table. There are several – some small, some large, and inevitably one would assume each may have their own agenda.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to spin this into something that it’s not – ie obfuscate the conflict to the point where inaction is seen as an option – but rather, I’m trying to see different points of view because I really don’t feel we’re getting it from the media.

On this note, the CBC is having a Foreign Correspondents Forum on June 1st. They are taking questions from viewers regarding international events/affairs. I’ve taken the liberty of posing some of the questions raised above. If you would like to do the same (about Darfur or any other area of the world), visit this page for more information.

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The Not-So-Great Debate

With every year, particularly since 9/11, it’s harder and harder to find reasoned debate. By ‘reasoned debate’, I mean a discussion where arguments are backed up with reason, a bit of logic, and some semblance of research/understanding of history. What doesn’t pass for ‘reasoned debate’ – what we currently have before us – is hyperbole, name-calling, grand-standing, and ridiculously partisan follies paraded in all forms of media.

Before I go any further, I encourage you to look at the dictionary definition of debate. The important word repeated throughout is discussion. I don’t think this word needs defining, though some days I think it should be printed on t-shirts and handed out to school children so that it’s not forgotten. But I digress.

Two reasons for the lack of true (as in useful) debate come to mind, although I’m sure there are more:

1) The replacement of individual thought with self-invested group-think.

2) The perversion of language and its subsequent use as a weapon.

– – –

The first point is as clear as it is demonstrable. Increasingly, individual citizen input (from either the public or private sector) is bypassed in favour of specialists from advocacy groups and so-called think-tanks. Some examples: in Canada, The Fraser Institute, the C.D. Howe Institute, and the Canadian Taxpayer Federation. In the U.S., examples include the CATO Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.

Whether leaning towards a particular side of the political spectrum or specialising in a particular avenue of advocacy, all of these groups have one thing in common: self-interest. In corporatist style, think tanks and advocacy groups have been propped up as representatives for a discussion which should take place within the public arena but doesn’t. It doesn’t because the public arena is seen as messy; in an increasingly corporatist society, messy doesn’t compute. Messy needs to be streamlined. The rise of advocacy groups, think-tanks and (increasingly) NGO’s often has nothing to do with the public and everything to do with establishing each group’s predominance in their field. Indeed, the first and last thing both the Canadian Taxpayer Federation and the CATO Institute have in common is making sure their organisations keep running – certainly not fostering independent thought.

One thing you can count on is that advocacy groups and think-tanks are consistent: everyone tows the line, everyone knows the script. Their facts, usually half-sided, are provided-for internally and what research they do is with the sole intent of reaching a pre-conceived conclusion that suits a pre-defined format, whether it be economic, social, or political.

When these organisations are inserted in place of the citizen’s voice, democracy becomes Kafka-esque. Often, one ideological think-tank is pitted against another, and what is discussed has no relation to truth (as either the citizen sees it or would like questioned) but to the safe consistency of “staying on-message”. Thus, there is very little debating in lieu of ideological advertisement.

It’s tempting to admire projects like Media Matters for America, which can be very effective at spotting media bias, but my frustration is that its interests are inherently one-sided: attack Republican bias, but support/protect Democrat initiatives. Indeed, it would be daunting for an organization devoted to highlighting media bias if it was looking at all sides of the media paradigm – and this comes to my concluding point: vested interests are easy to finance. Complexity is not.

– – –

The second blockade to real debate is the perversion of language. Media pundit Bill O’Reilly is probably one of the most accomplished when it comes to the distortion of language. His polemic style, his bullying aggression towards dissenting opinion, and his partisan hatred are broadcast every weekday to an audience of millions. He begins and ends most of his addresses with the well-worn cloak of false common-sense: everyone wants to protect freedom, everyone is concerned about terrorism, everyone knows that there are far-left extremists among us. Everyone. His consistent target is a group known previously as liberals, but most recently goes by the moniker secular progressives. In O’Rielly’s words, they are elitists and only Bill O’Reilly can identify this imminent threat to our safety. Obviously this is all very partisan and prejudicial and not dissimilar to what has been said and demonstrated throughout the 20th century by both fascists and Communists – but everything about O’Reilly and FoxNews is paradoxically draped in the opposite: his show is called The No-Spin Zone and his channel’s mantra is Fair and Balanced. The paradox continues the more attention is spent on their language: leftists are compared to Nazis…actually, that’s wrong: everyone who takes a different side ends up being portrayed as a Nazi…or alternately a Communist. (I suggest FoxNews create a doll that, on cue, devotees could raise and shake towards the TV screen at opportune times, whilst shouting “Ooogey boogey ooogey!”.)

A less outraged sentiment is echoed by newspaper columnists such as the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente, who habitually tut-tuts those who question authority (save for when she decides to). Her approach, albeit certainly less vitriolic than O’Reilly’s, is to portray dissenters as part of a privileged latté-sipping middle-class elite. Her motto seems to be: shut up and live with it – ostensibly the antithesis of debate itself.

Again, we come back to the word elitist. Elitism is, we are told, our enemy. It’s an easy way to cast aspersions on dissent – let’s face it, there are always going to be a smaller percentage of people who ask disinterested questions (that is, questions that are not self-serving but serve the ideals of the community). In her book, Prisons We Choose To Live Inside (reviewed here), Doris Lessing is philosophical about the word elitism and it’s accusatory usage. She goes so far as to determine it a necessary evil if it means the freedom to ask important, if unpopular, questions aloud. In other words, if painted an elitist – so be it.

– – –

From a local perspective, the debate disconnect was driven home – literally and figuratively – when in 2000, Toronto broadcaster CityTV refused to hold an election debate between the incumbent mayor, Mel Lastman and his opponents. This was the first time CityTV had decided to do this since they began hosting televised mayoral debates*. While it was arguable at the time as to the feasiblity of any of Lastman’s opponents winning (and it should be noted that Lastman won with 80% support), it was shocking to see a local broadcaster that wraps itself in a mantra of street-level community-building refuse to even go that simple distance. I remember watching an evening call-in show on CityTV, hosted by Lorne Honickman, whose guest was mayoral hopeful Tooker Gomberg – this took place after the announcement that there would be no debate. I clearly remember the disbelief, bordering on contempt, that Honickman displayed as caller after caller phoned-in to simply ask: why? Why no debate? His retisence to discuss the subject was as obvious as his clear disdain for his guest.

– – –

Debate is inclusive, not exclusive. Its aim is perspective – not the promotion of canned answers or unmovable positions. The object of debate is not disgracing dissent, but putting forth reasoned arguments. I think there’s a long road ahead as regards our ability to communicate, to argue respectfully, and to share ideas. These things happen at a smaller scale all the time in our communities, but I think we’ve forgotten how important they are, thus it’s going to take a while for citizens to feel attached to it again; to take command of their own voice, as it were.

The responsibility to restore true debate falls on civilians – when the citizenry abdicates responsibility for public discussion, we shouldn’t be surprised when the gap is filled by self-interested interest-groups. When societies forget about their social responsibilities those responsibilities are often annexed as anachronisms, and replaced by the empty comfort of technology (ie televised think tanks). The Internet is a good tool for the restoration of debate, but it’s only a tool and not in and of itself anything more. What’s needed is the will to reform, reason, and a sense of responsibility to society as a whole.

* (I can find no record to refute this, but I’m open to correction)

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