Pot calling the pot Black

Criticism of mainstream media is fast becoming a staple of . . . mainstream media.

The latest spectacle of Catholic-like self-flagellation began four or so years ago when The New York Times discovered on its staff of writers a serial liar. Other lesser pillars of the fourth estate then also discovered they too harboured sleeper cells of imaginative reporters. About 18 months ago, leading American newspapers then began berating themselves for having fallen so sucker-like to the Bush administration's lies about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. The publisher of one large newspaper in Baltimore even apologized for the role his paper played in misleading the American public in the days leading up to the war. But now, what used to be confined to the shrill independent media is taken for granted by stalwart columnists in our own leading newspapers: complaints about the mainstream media's effects on the very stories they are purporting to objectively and passively report on.

Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe and Mail last Friday tore into his own industry for "misleading the public" about crime rates in Canada, and for supplying the Harper government with incorrect perceptions of crime that are then used to inform new get-tough policies. "If we adjusted our definition of news," he wrote, Canadians "would certainly be better informed." The mainstream media, he reports from the pages of the mainstream-est media of all, missed the real story about declining crime rates. Norman Spector, also in the Globe and Mail, has joined the fray. "We live in an era of leadership-dominated politics," he wrote earlier this week, "brought about by the way the media—particularly television—work." He continued on in the same vein as Simpson, tearing into the mainstream media for missing the real story—in this particular case how Carole James of the BC NDP has largely narrowed the previously big gap in polling between her opposition party and the governing Liberals—in favour of the sensational story about how wide the gap had gotten previously.

It's weird. Politicians win leadership roles in Parliament by criticizing everything government ever does, and columnists win choice space in national newspapers by criticizing everything media ever does . . . . What's next, bookstore owners criticizing everything readers ever do?

Howling at the moon at the Vancouver Sun

In a small but revealing manner, a report in The National Post about a poll taken of Canadians regarding their thoughts on the conviction of Canadian media baron Conrad Black, says "Canadians may be surprised to find the country isn't relishing his fate." If a majority of Canadians in a poll say something, how can they then be surprised they said it? It would be the media that is surprised in this case, hardly Canadians; it was the reporters and columnists who alone relished Black's fate, and once again, they have revealed themselves in this small way to be completely out of step with the audience they purport to serve.

The Vancouver Sun might be choosing to sidestep the whole problem by saying nothing about anything at all. Again on Monday this week, and hardly for the first time, the entire Op Ed page was filled not with local Sun-generated opinions and editorials but with yet more wire service editorials generated by newspapers thousands of miles, if not tens of thousands of miles, away from here. Is there really no Vancouver-specific point of view on issues of the day both local and international, or is it that the Vancouver point of view has come to contradict so completely the point of view of the newspaper's editorial department that they have to cast so far to find anyone writing what they are alone in Vancouver thinking?

Will the Internet save us?

Thank goodness for the Internet, goes current wisdom, or we wouldn't have found out about all the duplicity and mendacity going in government and business. NowPublic is a new wire service starting up in Vancouver that promises to bring even more instant information from even more sources to us as it happens around the world via 118,000 amateur reporters and videographers stationed in 3,600 cities using technology like YouTube and blogs.

No doubt more information is better. But for all that, we live in the period of seemingly least influence of information on public policy making. Basic scientific knowledge cannot ever have been more readily available than now, yet there are senior federal cabinet ministers proud of their opinion that caveman walked with the dinosaurs. There is no end of information about the roots, aims and nature of Islamist terrorism available on line, yet our minister of defence continues to justify offensive military deployments to Afghanistan based on the cockamamie notion that cave-dwellers there intend to militarily occupy Robson and Thurlow.

It's an old joke now, but it bears repeating so we never forget how duplicitous it gets out there: absolutely anyone who bothered to spend an hour online looking at the evidence had to have concluded there was likely no weapons of mass destruction being developed in Iraq in 2003. And yet, all that information caused not one ripple across the face of policy makers who created the lie to generate public war fever.

Our hopes dashed again, it now appears that information wasn't what we were lacking if we were concerned to see more rational and useful public policies. To judge using the empirical data, it would almost seem to be the case that more information in the public's hands coincides with more wrong-headed policies in their leaders' heads, especially in the more democratic nations. That seems counter-intuitive, until you remember what it felt like after two weeks of the film festival: see a whole raft of films, and retain nothing but a spaghetti plate of images; see one or two good ones, and they really stick.

There's too much information out there! says a newspaper that every two weeks tries to add yet more snow to the blizzard . . . .

Back to the future

Fans of talk radio will remember that Rafe Mair ruled the airwaves not long ago. Many mourned his untimely firing from CKNW, but had they known how milquetoast and uninformed his replacement in the morning hours would be, they would have been wailing—maybe as loud as fans of Don Cherry did when his spot on Hockey Night in Canada was threatened by Mother Corporation CBC.

If they had, they'd have done CKNW a favour. Since moving Bill Good into Rafe's spot, and putting obnoxious self-centered, out-of-touch and far too talkative Chuck Adler on the afternoon slot, and then, in the most suicidal move if ever there was one, putting shrill-to-the-point-of-being-unlistenable, and frankly as excitable as a child, Province columnist Michael Smyth, on the evening watch, ratings have plunged. The radio station that reports on traffic now outdraws what was once arguably Canada's leading talk radio station.

Smyth is soon gone (that’s what you get for writing ill of me!), so you can soon take those yellow sponge cylinders out of your ears again. Adler is soon gone from the afternoon show, but only to take Smyth's spot in the evening, so get the better quality blue plastic ear plugs ready. And the squeaky giggly look-at-me-now! girly girl Christy Clark has been hired full time to take Adler's spot in the afternoon.

Simply turn the radio off. There aren’t earplugs of that magnitude. But despair not!

Because online Rafe Mair is back, with rafelive.com, beginning in September. At first he's scheduled to go live with guests, phone-ins and emails 10 AM to 11 AM Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and everyday but Sunday if the listener audience shows up. That means that if Bill Good attempts to wrap his mind around simple concepts out loud and without success have sent you running and screaming looking for wrist-sized knives, flip over to Rafe. He may be a prick, but at least he gets it up.

How greedy are you?

Inspired by a recent Vancouver Sun front-page story about how they dropped kids’ wallets containing $10 in our different neighbourhoods to see what us peasants would do, we filled dog bowls with caviar and glued them to sidewalks on Howe Street, Point Grey, Shaughnessy, West Vancouver, and Commercial Drive to see what those people would do. Oh yeah, and we also put a bowl of Chinese dog food in front of the Vancouver Sun building on Cordova Street.

On Commercial Drive, dogs ate the caviar and the experiment there ended quickly.

But on Howe Street, men in suits were photographed getting down on their hands and knees to shove their faces in the bowl. Pushing and shoving broke out among the brokers as they tried to get as much caviar down their gullet as they could. Police eventually had to break up the fracas.

In Point Grey, the bowl and the caviar it contained disappeared.

In Shaughnessy, our surveillance camera disappeared, but when we returned to the scene, we found the caviar gone and several empty bottles of Dom Perignon lying around, some broken.

In West Vancouver, the caviar went untouched. Apparently we didn't use true Russian Beluga caviar.

In front of the Vancouver Sun building, reporters and columnists gathered around and guarded the bowl of Chinese import dog food thinking it was caviar and waited for their alpha Editor in Chief to go first, which she did, after donning her bonnet and pearls and self-importantly strutting up to the bowl on hands and knees all prissy poodle-like. We chose not to publish the resulting pictures, we're sure you can imagine the scene.