What’s the local media talking about?

Vancouver overflows with a vibrant local media. We waste too much time focusing only on the corporate media. It is important to track the local monopolies—they still have the power after all—but local media has a wider scope of subjects, is better researched, and offers a far wider array of opinion. With this in mind, here begins a semi-regular column dedicated to surveying the local media.

by Reed Eurchuk <reurchuk@republic-news.org>

Hotels and homelessness in the news

The outline of a new police-driven push to “clean up” skid row in anticipation of the upcoming Olympic games has become clearer over the last six months. They will not leave that job till 2008 or 2009. By starting now, people will not associate it with the Olympics and will largely have forgotten it by the time the Olympic circus arrives.

In September 2004, the city closed the Marr Hotel, following a police raid. In April 2005, the New Wings met a similar fate. In September 2005, the Pender Hotel barely survived an assault by the local fire department. Most recently, following a December 2005 police crackdown, three more hotels have come under police, city, and provincial government scrutiny.

Read Dylan Fraser’s August 2005 article regarding the closing of the New Wings Hotel on the Seven Oaks website (sevenoaksmag.com). The modus operandi is always the same: using the excuse of a crack-down on criminal elements, a hotel that welcomed even the most addicted and most ill in the area is closed and a set of expectations imposed upon the owners. As Fraser warned, “Rather than being an anomaly, the case of the New Wings Hotel is more a template for the neighbourhood.” The template, Fraser predicted, “will continue to be used as an essential police and City tool,” as part of the “gentrification project” for the Downtown Eastside. He was right.

A recent Co-op Radio (102.7 FM) Saturday morning Red Eye show included an interview with Pivot lawyer David Eby who is representing a number of the residents of the Pender Hotel in a court suit. Using as an excuse suspicions that the hotel harboured a methamphetamine lab, the “hazardous material” team “breached” several rooms; that is, they kicked in the doors and ransacked rooms, even though keys to the same rooms had been offered to them by hotel staff. Some residents’ rooms have still not been fixed, and some items have not been recovered.

The most recent police crackdown on hotels follows allegations by police that some of the staff and hotel residents were involved in welfare fraud, drug dealing, and the buying and selling of stolen property. Stop the presses! This has been going on for generations in many low-rent single-occupancy hotels throughout BC. It is not specific to the Downtown Eastside.

Following the crackdown, the press, forever seeking lurid stories of Downtown Eastside depravity, fell into a feeding frenzy, completely forgetting the larger picture. As usual, the media monopolies dwell on the symptoms—petty fraud, theft, criminality—without examining the root cause: the drug war. In this aspect of the drug war, addicts, forced by artificially high prices caused by the prohibition on drugs, are forced to raise money. Some steal. Some “sell” their welfare cheques to hotels; that is, the hotel gives them a small portion of the cheque back. The hotel can then re-rent a room which would otherwise be occupied. The addict can get high. Because of these “startling revelations,” the BC Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance (MEIA) announced it would no longer forward any cheques to the three hotels named in the crackdown.

The Sun editorialized, “Preying on the homeless should not be tolerated.” The outcome of this exercise, if MEIA carries through its threat, will be another one hundred or so people made homeless. Is the Sun playing advocate for the poor? Now that’s a twisted joke only the Devil could fully enjoy.

Like, hey, dude

Whatever happened to that sober, solemn cipher, the CBC radio host? His (always a “he”) neatly-pressed white shirt, tasteful tie, and obligatory English surname, with the Brit accent an optional extra, gave us nothing of his family life, his personal history or taste—let alone what he did last night.

Not so anymore.

Now CBC radio hosts are “personalities.” Their private lives are trumpeted along with their favourite pop bands, their faux pas, and their (previously) poor taste. And, where before an uptight civility (let’s hear it for uptight civility!) reigned, today a casualness, and a light, airy, cheerful patter sets the tone.

The CBC appears to be honing a lighter version of the vapid cretinism popular on corporate radio. Listen, for example, to the corporate rock morning shows, where a trio of guffawing idiots tell bad jokes and then laugh uproariously at them. These are the radio equivalents of sniffing glue.

Shorts

Big changes have taken place at the Georgia Straight, where Charlie Smith has replaced Ian Hanington in the editor’s chair. While Smith is still writing articles, he seems to be concentrating less on the local Vancouver scene and more on environmental and provincial politics. I hope he continues to write occasionally on local stuff; his was the best over the last three years.

Pieta Wooley and Republic alumnus Matthew Burrows have been writing the lion’s share of the news at the Straight. Meanwhile Burrows’s departure from the West Ender, where he’d previously worked, saw his chair filled by Sean Condon. Condon, the best writer at the old Terminal City (before it became an NDP subsidiary and subsequently croaked), has done a string of worthwhile articles.

Speaking of the NDP, read The Tyee (thetyee.ca) and David Schreck (strategicthoughts.com)— two good webzines that cleave closely to the party line. With so much media marching lock step with the Liberals, it’s refreshing to see some strongly pro-NDP media outlets develop over the last few years. Schreck’s analysis, which includes an especially sophisticated understanding of economic and social indicators, is miles ahead of the local corporate wankers.

Finally, the fairly new BC section of the Globe and Mail has had an impact already. Robert Matas is worth reading. In one or two pages they cover more local news than the Sun does most days in its two front sections.

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