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Media
You can only roll your eyes
Only a fool would take on the media, and I guess I’m that fool
by Kevin Potvin
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Dealing with the media is a lot like dealing with five-year-olds. In an interview I did some time ago with freelancer Shannon Rupp for an article she was preparing about Wikipedia, the online open-source encyclopedia, we got taking about the philosophical foundations of modern conceptions of “truth.”
Or so I had thought. In my higher education, particularly in medieval and ecclesiastical history and in the philosophy of science, the matter of “truth” has always been a complex and uncertain field. In that regard, I mentioned to her that latterly, philosophers mostly believe truth is, to put it in layperson’s terms, whatever the consensus of concerned people think it is. I mentioned this to her by way of drawing our conversation back to Wikipedia, which seemed, among all currently available encyclopedias, to most closely reflect where are philosophers think truth lies, surprisingly.
Her article appeared in the Globe and Mail. It was all about how I fabricated my entry at Wikipedia, and how I justified the act by saying “I think facts are just what people say they are.” I wrote to the editor of Globe and Mail asking for a retraction and apology for calling me a liar. The editor quoted the line back to me about how “I think facts are just what people say they are.” The Wikipedia entry has been vandalized by posters quoting me to say “I think facts are just what people say they are,” and a campaign was launched to remove the entry on me at Wikipedia on the basis of the quote. Uncountable blogs have dismissed everything I have ever written because “I think facts are just what people say they are.”
Sigh.
More recently, or should I say, years before, I wrote an article about how I felt watching 9/11 on TV. I noted how revolted I was to find I didn’t anymore seem to be affected by images on TV showing such massive death. As an example of how immune to death we are, I used my memory of hearing a small voice inside my head marvel at the symbolic spectacle of the collapsing buildings.
When I became a candidate for the Green Party in the as-yet uncalled federal election, newspapers reported that I had “celebrated” 9/11. A Vancouver Sun headline called me “pro-9/11” and a Province headline called me “pro-al-Qaeda.” The front page of The National Post asked “Would you vote for this man?” in an article calling me an “unsavoury ignoramus.” The leader of the Green Party dumped me as a candidate, citing my “despicable” thoughts. Death threats rolled in at a rate of 50 an hour at one point. Cop cars were outside the house. The line saying that I found 9/11 “beautiful” was repeated 265 times in newspapers across the country. Evidently not one reporter or journalist went to check the original story, titled by me, “My revolting confession.”
Double sigh.
At one time I was a regular on the Canadian Association of Journalists listserve where issues of journalism are discussed. I posted there once to note how articles about November 11 were inaccurate by suggesting over and over that young Canadians joined the army to stop Hitler from killing the Jews. Of course, any familiarity with history would show that outside Europe no one knew about that till 1943 at the earliest. I was also going on my own experience in talking with veterans, who all said they joined up to get off the farm (Canada in 1939 was about 80% rural) and go to exotic Europe to meet girls.
I was banned from the listserve for ten days for this insult to the memories of those who served our country in war.
I shouldn’t have, I suppose.
I later stirred up even more hostility for suggesting that Christmas wishes in the news sections of newspapers were biased partisanship since Christianity was a political construction meant to aid powerful Europeans in their attempts to subdue a continent of independently thinking pagan peasants.
I was banned for life for this insult. What can you do but shake your head?
Knowing that a bunch of professional journalists and journalism school professors were keeping tabs on me, ready to leap all over me for the slightest error in anything I wrote, I put out an article detailing how much big Canadian corporations had gotten involved in fronting up the cash for chairs and buildings for new journalism schools at campuses across the country. The effects of this largesse on journalism, I wrote, were to be seen in the growing tendency toward libertarianism in the media—a political stance that is hostile to all government, thereby favouring the interests of corporations as a whole.
Nothing. Not a peep.
I submitted it to the same Globe and Mail editor who refused to retract the line about me being a liar. He dismissed its thesis on the grounds that Conrad Black had already established that the media were all left-wingers.
Can I roll my eyes around my head that far?
I guess I got what I had coming to me when I was taken out for an old-fashioned gang-beating by journalists across the country two weeks ago, once they all had that out-of-context line about how I found 9/11 beautiful. Not one single professional journalist in the country took my side, or even tried a neutral stance. I guess I hurt their feelings when I showed how useless—for citizens, not for journalists, journalism teaches, or professional journalism schools—journalism at the corporate newspapers had become.
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