An anonymous missive has appeared on

“Ok, RossK, I’ll bite. As a news worker at Postmedia, I think this is an interesting and important question you’ve raised about this odd shift in the commercial media.

It was McGregor and Maher at the Citizen and the National Post who picked up the rifle first, as you note, with the robocall scandal. And now there’s O’Neill. And there are more to come. The Postmedia chain has turned against the PM. Period.

There is no way to understate the importance of that shift. It hasn’t worked its way through the whole empire; you don’t immediately change the attitude or approach of the hundreds of idiots you’ve appointed to management jobs over the years. Or all the columnists, or reporters.

But it’s started.

And it’s huge. It should NOT be underestimated.

The question for us in their newsrooms is: What in the hell can the PM have done to piss off Postmedia (run nominally by the Tory-loving former managers of Canwest, but in reality owned and funded by GoldenTree, a New York hedge fund)?

Well, here’s one theory:

1. GoldenTree invested in the chain in 2010 because newspapers are high cash generators. (Usually, anyway.) Because Canada has foreign-ownership media laws, the new company and its share holdings had to be very carefully structured.

2. But maybe that wasn’t such a big deal, because Harper was making a lot of big, loud promises about opening up ownership to foreign interests. That would mean GoldenTree could unload the chain, or parts of it, in future with relative ease. Hedge funds like to get in and out quickly, and there aren’t a lot of Canadian buyers for a property that big. Quebecor was really the only competitor that GoldenTree faced in 2010 as Canwest lay dying, and Quebecor lost out because it couldn’t put together a big enough offer.

3. Foreign ownership isn’t anywhere on the apparent radar for Harper anymore. At all. Period. Unless he’s in completely secret talks that no one has heard a word about.

4. Postmedia isn’t making money, certainly not at the rate GoldenTree needs it to. As a hedge fund, it would have wanted to move in, tap the cash flow and sell it on. There are lots of more promising cash machines for GoldenTree to move on to.

5. Postmedia executives, including CEO Paul Godfrey, toured newsrooms in BC just weeks ago to announce that while the two papers in Vancouver were still clinging by their fingernails to the black side of the ledger, red ink looms with absolute certainty in the very near future. An online-only Monday-Friday edition of the Province is widely rumoured to be in the works, with staff busy working on a new design for the weekend edition. (Yes, some of this is company trash talk aimed at turning newsroom workers against pressroom workers in talks for a contract that expired about 18 months ago. But that’s not the whole story. True, newsroom workers have taken huge hits; press workers haven’t, yet. And true, pressroom costs are high, and they were high in Victoria, where the chain used them as an excuse for selling the paper there to Glacier. But it is also true that the papers aren’t making the money they should, costs aside. That’s because the company doesn’t understand its product or its readership and can’t think of any other way to fix the problem than to continually cut costs, which in fact only makes the product worse.)

6. Quebecor, which owns the Tory-worshipping SunTV, is now the PM’s best friend and only defender.

7. So should GoldenTree force a sale of Postmedia, with foreign ownership rules still in place, well, the best and maybe only positioned buyer might be  . . . ta da! . . . Quebecor.

8. Which would result in a takeover of the majority of Canada’s news outlets by a completely right-wing company.

9. Say it all together now: Hmmmmmmmm. Can this have been the plan all along?

As I say, just a theory among some of us.

But it would be fair to say that the shift in Postmedia’s Tory coverage is significant enough to have most of our newsroom radar on full alert.

And I would add one other thing, since none of us know where this ride will take us. For everyone feeling so rightly cynical about the media, you will note that there is the odd MSM reporter left who can, when turned loose, still produce. You will note that there were others at the Globe and CBC etc who joined in after the Post kicked off the robocall-fest. I would argue that the heavy lifting was still done by the blogosphere, including you and many of those in your own circle. But I think there is still a rescue-able body of journalists left should the MSM, or any portion of it, come under new ownership that actually understands it own product, readership and social contract — something that Postmedia fails entirely to do.”

The sudden news that the Vancouver Playhouse is closing after 49 seasons comes as a shock, of course. We assume these venerable civic institutions will somehow always manage to lumber along, despite economic downturns and hostile governments and digital depredations. This, after all, was the company that gave Canadian theatre its seminal play, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, that launched numerous Canadian theatre luminaries (including playwright Sharon Pollock), that was the redoubt of the city’s grey hairs and monied class. Those theatres don’t just die, do they?

But, in some ways, its shuttering is no surprise at all. Vancouver has a distinctly pallid theatre scene, as compared with those of similar-sized Canadian cities (Toronto, Montreal) or even smaller ones (Edmonton, Calgary). It is notoriously a theatrical tough-sell. Various reasons are given for this: the weather, weak provincial funding, the vigorous local film and TV industry, which tends to tie people up in projects involving a lot of sci-fi gibberish. To these, I’d add another: a hostile and/or uninformed local media, including and particularly the city’s flagship paper, The Vancouver Sun.

For many years, the Sun was home to a critic who used theatre as an excuse for his witticisms (one problem being that the witticisms were not all that witty; we’re not talking Kenneth Tynan here). This set the tone for various media acolytes, who grew up believing what he wrote constituted good criticism. (I’m not naming the critic, by the way, because he passed away recently and, if I must speak ill of the dead, I can at least make them immune to a Google search.) It also set the tone for his successor, Peter Birnie (not dead) — one of the most flagrant examples of a theatre critic learning on the job in recent history. Birnie has now been around long enough — 15 years — that he seems to have come to know something about his beat, but his basic attitude of disdain for it, pretty neatly encapsulated here, remains. (Apparently he doesn’t much care for the audience, either.)

Like his predecessor, Birnie — whatever his opinion of a particular show, and despite his occasional resort to boilerplateisms like “a rollicking riot of fun” — is congenitally incapable of creating enthusiasm for the idea of theatre, of going to the theatre. He just doesn’t have it in him. Contrast this with, for example, Liz Nichols in The Edmonton Journal, who, though she is hardly a mindless cheerleader for anything that comes along, manages to write with an enthusiasm for her subject and, even in attack mode, an energy that suggests to her readers that theatre is something worth their while.

Theatre people tend to underestimate the impact of good or bad theatre criticism on its healthy development in any given community. They understand that a negative review will hurt the box-office for whatever show they have on at that moment, but not so much the long-term effect of a dolorous reviewer. And the critics themselves will almost always underestimate their clout, because they’re uncomfortable with the idea that they have power over artists’ careers and livelihoods. The more powerful their position, the more likely they are to claim that they have no effect. But, even in these days of fracturing media, a theatre critic on a major paper who, on the whole, would rather be elsewhere, or who regards himself as the main event, or who is simply uninteresting and without insight, can do major harm over the years.

Make that a few decades and you have Vancouver. I’m not saying lousy theatre coverage in the Sun is what killed the Playhouse. But it’s a factor among many that shouldn’t be ignored.

One is impressed by just how credulous the reading public — that would be you — can be. You see what I just did there? I just insulted you. Conventional wisdom would suggest that insulting one’s readers is not the best way to start an article. But conventional wisdom is pretty stupid, too.

It’s called “contrarianism,” and it’s what Christie Blatchford and Christopher Hitchens practise and practised, respectively, to a tee. And, as they know and knew, it’s good journalistic business, not least because readers will fall for it every time.

These thoughts — or rather, insults — are inspired by the response to Blatchford’s recent National Post Globe and Mail National Post column on man-hugging (I have trouble keeping track of who she’s writing for this week), and the recent outpouring of tweets and status updates beginning “I still can’t believe Christopher Hitchens supported the war in Iraq, but . . .”. Hitchens, of course, came out in favour of the invasion early on, and remained stridently unrepentant to the end. Blatchford’s column was on a less keen matter — the alleged sissification of the modern male, especially in Toronto — but the widespread astonishment that anyone could hold such an opinion, much less write it down, was about the same.

Dear Stupid Readers: these people don’t write broadsides and columns to be liked — they do it, at least much of the time, to rile you up. Why? Do I really have to write this? Because then you will continue to buy their books and newspapers. Thus endeth Street Journalism 101.

Readers don’t return to a writer or publication because the writer or publication is correct — they do it because, as a seasoned editor once taught me, to my own youthful astonishment, they have developed an emotional connection to the writer or publication. And outrage will do the job as well as any other emotion. The easiest way to forge this sort of codependent relationship with the reader is to look for a widely-held assumption and then argue its opposite. Babies cute? Babies suck. War in Iraq bad? War in Iraq good. Rinse and repeat.

It also gives the writer something new to say. After a decade-or-two of spouting left-wing pieties, even the most earnest of fellow-travellers is liable to hanker for a change of subject. This explains P.J. O’Rourke. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to work the other way as often — right to left — though we are currently seeing a variant in David Frum’s reinvention of himself as a critic of the Republican Party. In Frum’s case, though, it is likely a matter of survival — having been frog-marched out of the clubhouse, he doesn’t have much choice.

This is not to say that these people don’t believe what they write — I have no doubt Hitchens was sincere in his support of the Iraq invasion. It just means that, when they sit down to put their unpopular thoughts out into the public sphere, they don’t get all quivery and “Gee, maybe I shouldn’t say this.” Instead, they go, “Oh goody.” Because they know how you are going to respond.

And so, dear Stupid Readers (as well as the rest of you), you might save yourself a lot of turmoil if, when Blatchford produces her next unspeakable column about how, really, smoking is good for you or Stephen Harper is actually kind of cute, you smile and respond, “Oh, Christie” (and perhaps also observe how freaking funny and well-written her stuff is).

And by the way: Babies really do suck.

The Toronto Star just announced that you can’t trust a thing you read on their website — although that’s not quite the way they phrased it. Canada’s largest daily has joined forces with TheMarkNews.com, one of those free blogger sites, to acquire a small army of unpaid “community correspondents” to cover Ontario’s October 6 election.

A measure of how far removed newspapers are from the media of even 20 years ago can be seen in the badly written ad riddled with grammatical errors. They tell us correspondents will be expected to “use a variety of mediums with an emphasis on video and photos,” which left me wondering how anyone in the professional media doesn’t know that mediums are found only at psychic fairs and clothing stores.

But the breakdown in basic literacy skills is probably of little concern except to reporters from an era when they taught us to dread an editor bellowing across a newsroom: “Rupp! How the hell do you spell separate?” Far more disturbing is seeing the biggest (and many journos would argue the best) newspaper in Canada admit that it is planning to deploy lobbyists and political shills where once they fielded journalists.

“Community correspondents will receive no monetary compensation for their work. The value is being able to shape the debate and broadcast your ideas to the Toronto Star and The Mark’s national audiences,” the ad’s FAQ tells, without a hint of irony.

I guess we’ll have to edit Samuel Johnson’s famous line — no man but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money — to say “nobody but a shill . . .”

Shills are exactly what the Star will be promoting under a banner that once explicitly stood for good journalism, due to the Atkinson Principles. When TorStar bought the paper that published the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Morley Callaghan from the estate of publisher Joseph Atkinson in 1958, the deal came with strings attached. The new corporate owners had to continue to treat the paper as a public trust delivering journalism “conducted for the benefit of the public in the continued frank and full dissemination of news and opinions.”

I see no mention of the Atkinson Principles in the community correspondents ad. But the FAQ offers a hilariously ignorant definition of conflict of interest that makes it clear political operatives will be a big part of the “overwhelming number of applications expected.”

“A conflict of interest is defined as a formal or informal affiliation with any political party or interest group with a stake in the election. Conflicts do not disqualify candidates, but they need to be declared in order to maintain the credibility of the project.”

Uh, no. As any journalist can tell you, a conflict of interest is defined as serving two masters simultaneously. A conflict is often determined by who is paying for the service. And make no mistake, all bloggers are paid — just not by the sites running them.

Platforms like The Mark or The Huffington Post collect the copy of people who are paid to write promotional columns for a product or a cause. It’s a form public relations – copy written for self-serving reasons, rather than to inform readers. Some naïve would-be writers think they’re building a career by contributing free pieces to The Mark or HuffPo, but most readers know these sites are just publicity. Which isn’t a criticism: promotional sites have their uses. As journalism disappears, stories of genuine public interest have been ignored, and sites like The Mark provide a place for academics to advertise their books or charities to promote their beliefs.

But it’s not journalism, which is defined by journalists as newsgathering done on behalf of the public. Newspapers attract readers and lay claim to all sorts of privileges, including access to government, because they serve citizens. That’s the product they sell: independent information for participants in a democracy. Or rather, that’s the product they used to sell.

Apparently, the Star thinks there’s more money to be made in running online propaganda. For their sake I hope so, because they just devalued their newspaper by making it obvious they no longer adhere to the Atkinson Principles, or even have enough respect for their readers to bother using the words right.

We’ve been getting a lot of stories from our media lately (here, here, and here), assuring us that an equivalent to the Rupert Murdoch scandal couldn’t possibly happen in Canada.

Really? No cozy incestuous relationships? No dirty tricks?

On March 30, 2009, Stephen Harper, PMO staffer Kory Teneycke, Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, and Roger Ailes, president of Murdoch-owned Fox News and former communications adviser to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Sr., all sat down to lunch.

We know this because it showed up in the mandatory disclosures made by media consultant and former White House flack Ari Fleischer to the U.S. Justice Department. Ari, you will recall, had a personal contract with Steve to grease US media wheels for him. Teneycke had a dream of a Canadian Fox news channel.

Four months later, Teneycke had left the PMO — barely a year into his job as Harper’s chief spokesman — only to pick up a contract with Quebecor to explore a project that Ottawa insiders almost immediately described as a fledgling “Fox News North.”

Three more PMO staffers followed Teneycke to SunMedia: an issues management adviser, an advertising manager, and an issues management researcher, described as “a guy who could dig up any dirt on the opposition in a jiffy.”

Teneycke himself had to take a brief three-and-a-half month leave from heading his new project, when conflict-of-interest embarrassments ramped up following his Sun op-ed and public admission to prior knowledge of the hacking of an Avaaz petition, hostile to his setting up Fox News North.

Teneycke was back in the Sun saddle during Steve’s re-election campaign in April this year when a fifth PMO ex, Harper’s former deputy chief of staff Patrick Muttart, sent him a photo of an Ignatieff look-alike posing in full combat gear in Kuwait in 2002.

“Ignatieff linked to Iraq war planning” ran the SunMedia headline and story, sans photo, before Teneycke apparently tumbled to the ruse.

Patrick Muttart was working for the Con election war room at the time, while simultaneously heading the “Canada/US practice” at the US PR firm Mercury Public Affairs, where he works under Terry Nelson. Nelson, former political director of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, and McCain-Palin campaign manager, now a Senior Advisor to teabagger and 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, is famous for the race-baiting campaign ads and phonejamming dirty tricks done under his GOP watch, and for employing the media advisor on the original Swiftboat Veterans For Truth ads, which used lies and doctored photos to smear John Kerry’s war record during his run for US president.

Amusingly, the CTV piece, Harper immune from Murdoch-style scandal, makes extensive use of analysis from Muttart to assure us a similar scandal could not happen here. We just don’t have the same “intense, quasi-incestuous” clique of political and media elites, Muttart says, without irony.

Besides, as another former Harper Chief of Staff, Ian Brodie, explains about Canadian papers: ”So few people actually read most of them.”

Yet somehow the rightwing National Post muddles on for 13 years losing $9-million a year, no one seems to know who owns CanWest/PostMedia now (besides it being some US hedge fund  — and so much for the rule limiting foreign ownership to a third), and 99% of the papers who endorsed a candidate in the last election all endorsed Steve.

We could have a Murdoch-style scandal here and it would be out of the news cycle again the same week, no damage done.

Update: More from David Climenhaga at Rabble.

Well I must admit it’s looking bleak out there. It’s been raining for days. The traffic cones are sagging like most of the population. And the Dark Lord of Canada is working feverishly in his castle preparing to unveil his zombie cabinet under a cone of silence.

From The Globe: The pieces of Stephen Harper’s cabinet shuffle are all in place and those on the move have been given their orders – but no one’s talking and the Prime Minister’s enjoying it.

Because he would eh? Before The Thousand Year Majority the message to the faithful hog hordes was: You talk, you fired. Now it’s you squeal, you DIE. And he does so enjoy seeing fear in the eyes of others.

Meanwhile, in a hopefully secure location, the man who wrote Harperland awaits his grim fate calmly. Trying to find a flicker of light in The Great Darkness.

Liberalism has become a bore. It dims the imagination. It’s mush. By contrast, the New Democrats have some ideological teeth. They can speak with authenticity of voice for social democratic values.

But not quite succeeding.

Just like the Liberals, the New Democrats are at a huge financial disadvantage. When the Conservatives feel so inclined, they’ll strike with brutal advertising that the NDP won’t have the resources to rebut. Does anyone think Thomas Mulcair’s outburst about Osama bin Laden won’t be aired countless times when the appropriate moment arrives? Or Jack Layton’s massage-parlour visit? Don’t put it past the Conservatives.

And who can blame him for feeling down eh? When his own colleagues in the corporate media are doing the Con’s dirty work for them.

They suckle the hands teats that feed them. They know what their bosses want. The socialist conspiracy must be crushed and humiliated. So first it was Jack Does the Massage Parlour. Now it’s Jack and Olivia do Disney World.

When they didn’t do anything wrong. Or anything other MPs don’t do. And their real “crime” was daring to address union members.

But so it begins. In The Thousand Year Majority there can be only one message: Big Daddy Knows Best. The Media is Mein. And anyone who doesn’t submit will be destroyed by my mighty attack ads.

The good news? At least now even the dumbest must realize that this is an ideological war, a class war. And that Big Media is the enemy enema. So we can attack them, mock them, flush them out of our lives, and set up our own progressive new media networks.

The even better news? We’ve got four years to give the Cons a taste of their own medicine. Bombard them with our attack ads, and use the internet to encourage people to mobilize and protest in the streets.

And with the artists of Canada on our side, one thing is for sure eh?

We can do prop-art better than they can . . .

Can the mainstream print media successfully reinvent itself to become as relevant to news consumers in the digital age as it used to be back in the days when readers looked to their morning newspapers for authoritative coverage of the previous day’s events?

The question arises in the wake of Tuesday’s surprise announcement by Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach that he is stepping down as leader of the provincial Progressive Conservative party and will not seek re-election when his current term expires.

The news first broke on CBC Radio at 11:00 a.m. Tuesday, half an hour before Stelmach was due to hold a news conference announcing his resignation. At about the same time, a “breaking news alert” flashed across the Calgary Herald home page and across the web pages of other newspapers in the Postmedia network. The Herald‘s chief political columnist, Don Braid, offered a short teaser saying there was a “fuller” story to be told and that he would “lay it all out” in his column the following day.

However, with all due respect to Braid, a respected and well-connected print journalist who has been writing about Alberta politics for more than 25 years, what he served up today tasted a lot like yesterday’s leftovers. Other mainstream news organizations such as the CBC and The Globe and Mail, and political bloggers like Dave Climenhaga, had already provided the main ingredients: Stelmach was coping with a palace revolt over budgetary concerns and unfulfilled promises similar to what one of his predecessors, Social Credit Premier William Aberhart, had to deal with back in 1937. However, instead of facing down his cabinet opponents as Aberhart had done, Stelmach chose to quit.

Dave Hedley, a web producer at calgaryherald.com, wrote in a recent column about the challenges the Herald faces as it transitions from a traditional print news operation to a digital, multi-platform operation. Using the recent death of a newborn tiger at the Calgary Zoo as an example, Hedley tracked the progress of the unfolding story from the moment he first learned about the tiger’s death to the time the published newspaper account appeared on Herald newsstands. First came the “breaking news alert” on the Herald website, ending with the now-standard “more to come.” Then came a more complete story for the Herald website with photos and backstory links. It was followed by an update for the Herald‘s iPad edition after a news briefing at the zoo. By the time the most complete and most up-to-date version of the tiger story appeared in the newspaper the following day, Hedley had updated the website a couple of more times and added video content, while Herald columnist Val Fortney had written a companion piece about the emotional turmoil felt by zoo staffers after the mother tiger abandoned her sick cub.

The Herald‘s director of online content, David Blackwell, explained to Hedley that the Herald newsroom now has to “catch up with the audience” as it reorients itself around a multi-platform identity: “It’s not just a matter of skills, but also learning how to relate in a very different manner than many staffers were accustomed to back in the day when the local paper was the only real authoritative voice about what was happening in this city.”

The Herald‘s blanket 12-page newspaper coverage of the Stelmach resignation included, along with Braid’s exposing-the-entrails column, the predictably traditional mix of editorial commentary, quoted reaction from the Alberta business community and from political rivals, word-on-the-street blather, and some solemn analysis of the Stelmach “legacy.” Most of this wall-to-wall coverage was about looking back. The only looking-forward story was the inevitable speculative piece about potential successors. If “catching up with the audience” was the object of this exercise, the Herald trailed badly.

Climenhaga, Alberta’s best-read independent political blogger, was as usual ahead of the pack. Let others in the media occupy their time trying to winkle out the gory details of the Stelmach resignation, Climenhaga said in his Wednesday posting. The more important question to be answered now is where his resignation leaves the upstart Wildrose Alliance, which has been offering itself as an attractive right-wing alternative to the ruling Tories while rising steadily in the polls.

Could there be a lesson here for the Herald and its traditional mainstream print comrades? With such online powerhouses as The Daily Beast and Huffington Post now providing the daily news and commentary fix for a growing number of journalism junkies, and independent bloggers like Climenhaga showing that it doesn’t take a big newsroom budget to produce timely and informed journalistic commentary, the landscape is rapidly changing. Can the old newspapers change focus, leave some of their hidebound ways behind, and reposition themselves to connect more immediately and more engagingly with readers who quickly have their fill of what happened yesterday? So far, there is little sign of this happening.

Is BC ready for a story asking if it’s ready for a gay leader?

It’s the story that Mike Farnworth, a leading contender to replace the deposed Carole James as leader of BC’s NDP, knew would be told before he announced his candidacy. A story that I, along with NDP MLA Spencer Chandra Herbert and former Liberal MLA Lorne Mayencourt, had been awaiting as well. And, although I can’t speak for them, I’m certain that they would all agree that if the story had to be broken –– and it did — better it be done by The Globe and Mail’s award-winning journalist Gary Mason than by some lesser scribe.

Nine days ago, Gary sent me this e-mail:

“Looking for your advice on this.

Today (Jan. 13/11), Mike Farnworth will announce his candidacy for leadership of the NDP. He’s got a real shot at winning and if he does it will prompt the question: is B.C. ready for an openly (although he doesn’t broadcast it much) gay premier?

I think it’s a worthy subject, if not a little controversial. I realize that having gay MPs and MLAs is not a big deal at all in 2011. But I wonder if there are some who, even in this day and age, might have some trouble with a gay premier.

What do you think of the premise of this piece? Any advice on how to pursue it?”

I, too, thought it a worthy subject, not to mention flattering that a journalist of Gary’s skill and integrity would ask my advice on how to approach it.

In the end, it took Gary nine days to write his column. Nine. Days. I can speak with some experience that when it takes nine days to write a column, some blood, sweat and tears went into it.

Then last night, I got this Facebook message from him:

“Dave,

The piece is up. I needed 5,000 words to do this subject justice. I honestly did. I had 950 so the best I could hope for was to represent some of the thoughts of people like yourself out there.”

Since my thoughts on the subject are quoted in the column, I recuse myself from any feedback on what Gary wrote. Nor will I make wild assumptions about why TGAM decided to publish the story in its largest-read Saturday edition. To boost readership? Or is it showing sensitivity, in that, by making Farnworth’s sexuality a story now, it leaves the gadflies and gadabouts on geezer radio and TV to chew chips and watch hockey and football until Monday, when, one hopes, the topic will no longer be a headline except as digested on Bill Good’s dozy CKNW talk show.

I will, however, point out the lesson in journalism — time and care — that we in new media can learn from Gary. Most of the time, we get the subject matter for our posts from the geezer media. Then we amplify. Even if we comment that the story is a “non-issue” and that The Globe is just trying to make it one, we’re helping it to do so. So it’s a good thing that we still have some journalists out there willing to sit on a piece for nine days to get it right. In the blogosphere’s rush to be first-to-post and to always-be-trending, time and care is the element that too often goes out the window.

At the time of this posting, Mason’s story is the second most-read story in The Globe‘s online BC section, and the comments have doubled since midnight. Many do, in fact, accuse The Globe of trying to make something from nothing:

“MacKenna 2:27 AM on January 22, 2011

How about Is BC ready for an honest and ethical leader? Because it hasn’t had one for decades.
Gay shmay, who cares? A person’s sexual orientation is completely irrelevant.

But trust the Globe to focus on that.”

My reply, as posted, was:

“As enlightened and progressive as so many of you profess on the headline question, it is an issue. We gay men might enjoy our rights as Canadians in the Westend, but that does not extend to large parts of Surrey, Richmond and the bible belt in the valley. Remember that it was a pivotal issue in 2008 when Americans were deciding if they were ready for a black President? That was a story. So is this.”

The BC NDP’s membership reflects the provincial demographic, which means that large cultural, religious, and social constituencies within it are not ready for an openly gay leader. That block is big enough to keep it from happening. Go back to the beginning of this week when Adrian Dix, likely the only real challenger to Farnworth, did a last-minute membership dump that might give him the numbers to win. Most of those memberships were from party associations within those constituencies of which I speak. While voters in the cities might be progressive enough to accept a gay leader, will the mill and mining towns of the coast and interior? And, there is the gay community itself. We are, for the most part, highly educated and very political. But just because one of our “own” runs for the leadership of a party doesn’t necessary mean that we’re going to vote for that person. Politics is a numbers game not a moral ground.

As a friend e-mailed:

“It seems to me that until Mike Farnworth is open about his sexuality he will be unsuitable for NDP leader. Let him run as an openly gay man. If he loses because of this, then B.C. can be confronted with its bigotry and maybe move forward.”

While you were enjoying the festive season, a minor contretemps blew up and just as quickly away at The Globe and Mail. Both parties to the matter have been studiously decorous about it, but it deserves further scrutiny before disappearing entirely down the memory hole.

On Dec. 24th, the Globe pulled from its website a blog post by Norman Spector, former Mulroney Chief of Staff and ambassador to Israel, now living in Victoria and making his way as a pundit. Spector had remarked on the unusual fact that, for the first time, Laureen Harper would join husband Stephen when he sat down for his annual Christmas chat with CTV. In fact, it would be “her first television interview with the Prime Minister since he took office in 2006.”

Why her sudden visibilty? Spector speculated that it might have something to do with rumours circulating in Ottawa that the couple’s marriage is in trouble, and, more particularly, that those rumours had recently emerged in the Ottawa Citizen, albeit in veiled form. Wrote Andrew Cohen in the December 3rd Citizen: “In Ottawa, tongues have been wagging for two years about trouble in one political marriage. One of the partners is now said to have left the nest. It hasn’t made the newspapers, at least not yet.”

Specifically, the rumours have Mrs. Harper living in the Chateau Laurier while the Prime Minister remains at 24 Sussex. Showing more journalistic initiative than the rest of our press, Spector did some digging. “I checked out the rumour with two journalists in Ottawa. From both, I got the sense that it was likely true. And that it was not being reported because it was deemed to be a personal matter.”

Oh really?

In his forbidden post, which Spector immediately republished to his own website, he makes a reasonable case for why the matter, if true, would be more than personal. “If the PM’s marriage was in trouble, that was something that could affect his performance and lead to bizarre decisions. (Have you heard about the census being abolished?) And given the power of the office, the troubled marriage could impact all Canadians.” I’ll add another: if Harper and his wife were living apart, but he continued to issue Christmas cards like the recent one above, we would have to conclude that the Prime Minister is a big fat dissimulator.

Spector also politely allows as how zapping his post “is the paper’s right.” (I’ve had my own experience of being disappeared, in my case by the National Post; I wasn’t quite so polite.) But while the Globe may be within its rights — that is, they haven’t broken any laws — their boilerplate claim that they did it for reasons of “fairness, balance, and accuracy” is ludicrous. Does the Globe think publishing the rumour is unfair, imbalanced, and possibly inaccurate? Then let it do its job, particularly in matters of public interest: phone up the principals and ask them about it. Then do what Spector did, and phone up some informed sources and ask them about it. Then publish what you’re told. It’s called reporting.

What did the Globe do instead? Zap.

This sort of misplaced politesse is the reason that mainstream papers are increasingly obsolescent in an age of internet journalism and wikileaking, no matter how many iPad applications they produce. Readers are increasingly aware of how much the old-school media choose not to tell us, whether for political or financial reasons, or from some misguided notion that it’s for our own good. And increasingly we reply: We’ll be the judge of that. Tell us what you know, or even just what you’ve heard (where’s Frank magazine when you need it?), and we’ll decide whether it’s File 13 material or not. And if you won’t tell us, there are plenty of sources out there that will.

We don’t need mommies and daddies in our newsrooms. What we need are actual journalists — even if they must be drawn from the ranks of retired civil servants.

The Canadian news media have been engaged in a lot of hand-wringing and debate over the Russell Williams trial and their coverage of it. Should they have published photos of him dressed in his victims’ lingerie? Should newspapers have kept the photos off the front page? Should the details of his crimes have been reported, in their every lurid, sexually violent aspect?

It makes you wish for the days when the media were less punctilious. It also reveals the extent to which they’ve decided their job is to control the flow of information, especially if that information might be disturbing.

The Toronto Star got it right, by publishing a photo of Williams posing in women’s underwear alongside another of him saluting in full-dress military uniform. As publisher John Cruickshank told the CBC, “I think it’s that pair of photos — not the single photo — that tell an extraordinary, disturbing story.” Quite so. But Cruickshank really hit the mark when he added: “This is a day you hate as a publisher. I would much rather have a victorious Leafs cover celebrating their victory.” Why? Because the hockey pic would sell papers and leave everyone feeling good, as opposed to the Williams diptych, which you can bet resulted in a lot of cancelled subscriptions and ill-will towards the Star.

The decision to publish or not-to-publish, especially on the front page, was really a business decision, no matter how piously Cruickshank’s competitors explained otherwise. The Star made the hard choice; others did not.

Note, too, that the media’s squeamishness focussed mostly on those photos, as opposed to Williams’ murders. But cross-dressing isn’t a crime; if the still mostly-macho culture of our newsrooms can’t handle it, that isn’t a reason to suppress images of it. It’s a reason to get editors with more capacity for the complete range of human behaviour.

The job of the news media is to tell and show us what happened, period. It’s not to decide what we can or cannot handle, what is or isn’t tasteful, what should or shouldn’t be seen or known. And as a public, we have no more right to demand that newspapers keep shocking images off the front page than we do to insist cities remove homeless people from the streets. Reality is reality. Don’t like it? Can’t help you there.

Unfortunately, more and more news organizations do assist those readers (or viewers) who prefer not to be upset — not just in matters of human psychopathy, but more broadly as well. Prefer not to know that the CIA used drug profits to finance its war against the Nicaraguan contras? Hey, no problem. Or that the Bush Administration lied America into war? We’re on it. Or that evidence indicates foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks extended well beyond whoever hijacked the planes? Leave that to us.

Of course, these really big stories are suppressed for other reasons too, including fear of, or manipulation by, political overlords. But when the media set themselves up, not as conduits, but as filters, we’re all the poorer for it. No matter how much we might prefer to be kept in the dark.

Photo: j-source.ca