Persona not full reality...in media

By Susan Delacourt, Toronto Star, Friday August 27, 2010
Brian Kilgore was one of them —an uncommitted voter, who showed up to see Ignatieff in Oakville at the end of July. Though the crowd was smaller than he anticipated, the Liberal leader was not what Kilgore been led to expect either.

“As a photographer, I watched his eyes and he was constantly scanning the crowd, making eye contact as much as possible, and working his way to people who seemed to ‘connect’ in some way,” Kilgore said. “This behaviour was very much in contrast to his pre-bus persona, as delivered to me by the mainstream media .... He really did seem like someone you could have dinner with on a patio in the summer, without having to be a party big shot or a major contributor.”
"This behaviour was very much in contrast to his pre-bus persona, as delivered to me by the mainstream media"...
One photog watching the eyes of a wannabe prime minister, quoted in a blog by a national reporter who accompanied the Liberal leader... and another layer of the "image" is peeled away from the severe beatings administered by the Harper gang...and in the meantime, the "mainstream media" is considered the messenger by Mr. Kilgour.
And it is that messenger, at all levels in Canadian politics, that in the small towns, and in the editorial rooms and in the coffee shops, takes a deferential stance in the face of the power of the politician. "Who knows just who puts cash in the coffers for this guy/gal?" is one of the questions running through the reporter's head. Another is, "If the story I write is favourable, in the terms of the journalism class, "balanced," what will my editor think of for my next assignment?" And also, "Will I hear and write something that will influence the vote on this issue, which is the topic of my conversation?" And..."What is the future of my reporter's career, and how will it be shaped by this interview?"...
It is the adage taught to all reporters that traps them in a "superficial" or even "infantile" or at best, "adolescent" simplicity in order not to confuse the reader, considered archetypally to be approximately twelve years of age.
"Dumb it down!" "Keep it simple stupid!" "Throw out the big words!" "Keep the sentences simple, straightforward, clear and uncomplicated." These are some of the guideposts that reporters are taught to follow.
And, for the most part, they are necessary. However, I recall one national politician, from the Trudeau government who commented, "Everything I say has to be reduced to a 30-second sound bite, in order to have a chance to make the evening news."
And then, there is the "herd" thing about the media. Those who form the national press corps or the provincial press corps, or even the municipal press corps want to be considered "mainstream" so they have to know what the public will consider "mainstream" so the conventions of the political culture, including the messages from the power-brokers who shape that culture, become even more important than the specific information that is the core of the message.
If for example, the dollars being allocated for a project is the subject of the press release (conference, interview, phone call) then that is the story...and the reporter is expected to document the statement. Of course, s/he is also expected to ask pertinent, cogent and relevant questions...like "How does that figure compare with last year's budget line for that item?" and "Your critics say your are doing a 180 from your previous position; what do you say to them?" and "In X (another similar jurisdiction in another province, or country) the figure for that item is "Y" as compared with your decision; could you explain the reasons for your decision?
What is not included in the reporters questions is one that compares that budget item with another budget item for a different project in another file and the politician knows that going in to the interview. S/He has to be prepared only for questions about the "file" and even if the question pushes the boundaries of that file, the politician can always change the topic, or perhaps more credibly request time to prepare an answer and provide it later.
Picking up on the tenor of the questions from other reporters is one way for reporters to intuit where the coverage may be going in other media organs and thereby set the tone for the listening, intuiting reporter who is preparing to write the report.
It is left to the analysts, the columnists, the pundits and the politico's to put out the "interpretative stuff:" about the story and here we get into the talking points produced by the "press office" of the particular candidate, party, or even government. And every one of them is known for the perspective normally taken to the point that some politicians actually refuse to be interviewed by certain reporters from certain media outlets, because they know it will be a hostile report. They would be venturing into enemy territory, and only if they are running as an established candidate would they have the confidence to venture into such a risk.
So when a professional photographer whose is both trained and experienced, and also without "ties" to a particular party makes an observation that says "reality is very different from that presented by the mainstream media" we can take that as a grain, or even a pound, of salt to pour into our every reading of every news report from every news reporter and organ, to render that report levened, tempered and balanced.
And when this blogger calls Harper "an attack dog" I am expressing a negative perspective of the PM's tendency to attack the jugular of his political opponents, in a mean-spirited and unprovoked manner, as his way of taking the power position. It is a tactic of war moved into the political arena. I prefer disagreements over policy rather than "ad hominum" attacks verging on character assassination. And, I would venture that most Canadians also have a similar preference. We are not raised in a war culture, with a war mentality, where the complete destruction of our political, corporate, academic or religious opponents is our only goal, as is more the case in the U.S.
Call that "more respectful" or "more gentille" or "more wimpish"  or more "civil" or (as some in the U.S. far right would say) more "pinko-socialist/communist" or... on the other hand, call it more "mature"...and more "open to ambiguity"...
And every word, just as every photo, contributes to a public "persona," an image of what the public is given of a personality and once rendered, it is often very difficult to change because the images are indeed simplistic, and embedded in our perceptions and in the age of "social media" the social image of an individual, even a political leader, is subject to a different set of criteria...based on likeability, and not on policy choices.
We are judging the image, and not the person.
We are all committing a collective "reduction" of each person, in our families, in our classrooms, in our council chambers and in our provincial and federal legislatures and that simplistic reduction is a form of  unconscious "violence" rendered by the court of public opinion...and the media feeds on that like a rabbid fox on a piece of road kill.
We have a "tabloid press" mentality that  judges violently every word, and every act of every individual and we have become, all of us, members of the paparazzi, now with cameras in all cell phones but without the same compulsion for cash for salacious photos of celebrities (is that next?). However we certainly have the appetite for the sensational, and the reduction to the simplistic is part of that appetite.
And we are all the poorer for that!
And finally, here's a quote from Michael Valpy in The Globe and Mail, August 27, 2010:
There's no doubt at all that a new political Michael Ignatieff is on stage. And no doubt at all – after 27,000 kilometres travelled and 110 events staged across the country this summer, with more to come on a tour intended to reintroduce Mr. Ignatieff to Canada – that the people he meets are responding to him with what looks to be a lot like enthusiasm.

His robotic body language has gone, along with most of his leaden phrases. He speaks with a lively cadence; he has lost the faux dropped g's. He can be genuinely funny. He shows a keen curiosity in what people tell him and feeds back what they say in his speeches.
He now sounds like the 17 books he has written, warm, engagingly anecdotal and authentic.

Of trinkets, widgets, images and disconnects!

The latest stock quotations continue to crawl across the bottom of the TV screen; the news "anchors" (as if they could provide some stability in a cataract of floods, oil leaks, wildfires, derivatives, booming unemployment figures and bombing home sales figures), detail the latest medical advance, perhaps into the potential of stem cells to cure some serious malady offset by another legal ruling that stops an executive order to permit such research. And the news chatter is interupted frequently for more 22 second commercials to sell another miracle drug whose negative side-effects far outshine the positive purpose for which it was engineered.
We are, all of us, locked in a constant, continuous and seemingly unstoppable river of current, extrinsic data about some drama or other, happening to somebody or other, in some part of the world we may never have heard about. The data flows through our eyes and ears from our blackberry, our radio, our TV screen, our newspapers and magazines, and our fragmentary snippets of conversation about the latest in this or that criminal investigation: a former military officer charged with murder and other offences, a premier charged by an opponent of fixing judicial appointments, a Prime Minister dancing in the Arctic, while a block of ice drops off Ellesmere Island, making denial of global warming a little more difficult for a PM in denial, another burp of insidious hate from the mouth Limbaugh calling the President, "Imam Obama" with impunity in the land of free speech, another voice of another pundit predicting another outcome to another "primary" race, as if there were no "secondary" ones, and as if all this static actually meant something, over which humans had a modicum of influence.
Short-term fixations on this or that widget, on this or that game, on this or that movie, or party, or dinner or...all substituting for human connections, and all of it commiting everyone to a dance of Eliot proportions... "In the room the women come and go talking of Michaelangelo" and "shall I part my hair this way or..."
and the dance, itself, is like a drug in its scintillating attempt to drown out the utter depression that we don't give a damn about 20 million people being left homeless, starved and without hope as monsoon winds and rains flood over one-fifth of a country (oh, that's right, they're Muslims and we don't trust them!) while we find millions for psychiatric counselling for the victims of Katrina, and BPslick, not that they don't need such support, but there is no, absolutely no connection between any of the responses to these flash points of trauma.
We see the world and the events and the people and hear their words as some kind of "black noise" without real meaning, rendering each of us a little more meaningless in the process...and each of the presentations of each of the stories is grasping for our attention, like another barker in another midway, in another bazarre where the trinkets are the thing, or now the "bling" ....another hotcake in another syrup, for another warm fuzzy moment of inspiration and modelling of how we came out of poverty to riches, or how we overcame failure to be redeemed, or how a family rift over a "crack in the perfection" was "healed" through an off-hand intervention....
And even the clerics are barking for more money, and for more peole to convert to the "right" religion...in another vain attempt to legitimize our (their, everyone's) existence...as if our extra efforts could achieve such a goal. And we wonder why the kids are covered in tatto's and died hair and wearing empty faces as they walk empty streets looking for some way to find themselves, and to make themselves meaningful, and to make their families proud and happy, with another "story" of success...in a universal sit-tragedy of images, both visceral and digital...like billboards passing along the highway each seeking another purchase and another sale.

Ontario Schools....political ostriches?

Simcoe County parents, in the Barrie/Orillia area of Ontario are complaining to their school board officials that, since the board adopted wireless internet applications in their schools, students have been complaining about headaches, memory loss and various other physical ailments which they experience during the week, while in school, but do not experience on weekends when they are away from school. The parents claim that board officials do not even respond to their petitions for an audience.
Some researchers indicate that students are susceptible to radiation from wireless connectivity, and recommend returning to the wired portal system of internet connectivity.
In a recent story in the Toronto Star, one Ontario Ministry of Education official was quoted as recommending that local area boards and schools should be dealing with this issue. However, it is the province itself that has money for research into such issues that could be affecting students across the province. In fact, Lakehead University has banned wireless internet in the Thunder Bay campus and their Orillia campus until more research can be done to determine the relationship between wireless and its impact on students.
The Ministry of Education has, on another front, taken a stand on late assignments, granting the right to assign a zero for late assignments to teachers, in an attempt to standardize provincial practice.
It seems passing strange that a provincial government would have to step in to make a ruling on such a matter. When I had the privilege of teaching in Ontario public and private schools, for two decades plus, I faced the issue of late assignments daily. One simple approach was to deduct 5% for the first two days, 10% for the next three days, and then assign a zero.
However, I do not concur with the "zero intolerance" approach, since there is no attempt to work with the student in coming to a place where the student realizes s/he is penalizing himself by not attending to assignments.
However, when the students explained specific circumstances in their lives, I would even waive the late penalty, because I believed their story, and accepted the late assignment.
Schools are very complex organizations with many stakeholders representing various groups and their respective interests. Political considerations have far too much impact on decisions affecting students, including the "preservation of the public face" of the board officials. While they are not elected, superintendents and directors are the most politically sensitive jobs in the system. They report to the elected boards, and answer to the public media, and supervise their own appointees in the principalships, and vice-principalships.
I recall the words of one director who told his principals, "Deal with the problems in your school; don't let them come to my office!" as his way of saying, when they got to his office, those same principals might not like the results, because now the problem had become public, and had become part of the "dirty laundry" the board had to address. On the minor issues, he was probably wise; yet on the larger issues, leadership is required.
And the Ministry has a fundamental role in establishing the implementation of sound judgement in the practitioners in the field, both in demonstrating effective listening to all constituents, and in providing effective and credible processes for action, even if that includes additional research, and the suspension of a "wireless" policy until such research can be conducted, by objective, non-industry-funded laboratories.

Fox News CA? Petro-dollar? And what other nightmares are in Harper's bag of tricks?

With news that Stephen Harper wants both Konrad von Finkelstein, and his deputy removed from the head of the CRTC, coupled with news that the P.M. in 2009 lunched with Rupert Murdoch, owner, and Roger Ailes General Manager of Fox News, the right wing's broadcast facility in the U.S. is it any wonder there is rampant speculation that Harper supports a bid by Quebecor to bring a "Fox-North" television channel to Canada, for broadcast to cable subscribers across the country?
True, Harper does not directly appoint the Head of the CRTC, but there is little doubt that the PMO will have undue, and unmeasureable influence on any decision at that rank in the civil service. And he clearly wants a CRTC that supports the granting of a license to Fox News, Canada.
True also that Harper is documented as supporting the religious fundamentalists in their attempt to wrest political power and influence from the small-l liberals, (See Marci MacDonald's The Armageddon Factor).
True also is the theme of "vandalizing Canada" in the words of Jim Travers, Ottawa columnist for the Toronto Star in his analysis of what Harper is actually doing in his decisions...
And the sum total of all of these (and likely many more still to be revealed) is that with a Fox-north Canadian television channel, Harper's ideological stance, including his long-term goal of making the re-election of the Liberal Party of Canada a virtual impossibility, stands a much more likely chance of success, than it does without such a broadcast outlet.
The current federal Conservative Party looks more like the Mike Harris Conservatives of Ontario infamy than it does the Stanfield Tories, or the Diefenbaker Tories, or even the Mulroney Tories, or the Joe Clark Tories. And with the news that the Koch family (oil magnates) in the U.S. supports both the heavy crude from the Canadian Tar Sands, and the U.S. Teaparty movement, along with the lobbying against the Health Reform Bill that passed congress in a weakened state, it is not hard to draw a line between the dots of a Fox News North outlet and the Koch money flow into the Canadian lobbying scene, for convergent purposes to those of Harper and his neo-con cronies...and  just watch the death of Canadian health care, as we now know it, and the rise of the Canadian military from its honoured and honourable history of peace-keeping to entering the war movement with the U.S., and the phony war to secure sovereignty of the Arctic, amid the plethora of national interests vying for hegemony there, and the virtual demise of the middle class, as anyone wishing to notice will see has already happened in the U.S.
Andrew Nikiforuk, in a stunning piece in The Tyee on-line journal, points out the fact that the Canadian dollar is now already a petro-dollar, pegged as it is not to manufacturing but to the export of Canadian Crude from the Tar Sands, exported to the U.S. at the rate of 1,300,000 barrels a day, up from only 600,000 barrels in the last year alone. Nikiforuk compares the increase in jobs in the Tar Sands at 100,000 with the concomitant loss of manufacturing jobs in Ontario and Quebec of 300,000...to which the Quebec financial giant, Desjardins pointed a nervous finger as they noticed this frightening trend, and were paid not a whit of notice for their concern by the federal Conservatives under Harper....
Canada...quo vadis?

Aislin's got it, again!

  Aislin, Montreal Gazette, Aug. 24, 2010





                                                                                                             

Bigotry, intolerance...hurt feelings?

Watching the protests between the two opposing factions in the fight to build an Islamic Cultural Centre some two or three blocks from Ground Zero, reminds me of a wrestling match, where the fight is more for theatre than substance.
Religious tolerance, George Will, is not the same thing as "hurt feelings" on the part of those whose religion is the one experiencing the intolerance. Will announced on ABC's This Week, Sunday, that no one is entitled to go through life without having his feelings hurt. To which, to his everlasting credit, Robert Reich, sitting just to Will's "right" (as if there were any room to Will's right) retorted, "It's not feelings, George, it's about tolerance!"
And therein lies the crux of the debate. Whether feelings equal tolerance...and one can only try to deconstruct Reich's perspective by noting that the debate is not about hurting the feelings of the other, in this case the Islamic faith leaders who want to build the I.C.C., but rather about tolerating the faith, religion, right to worship, of a large group of Americans.
The building permits needed for expansion of mosques across America are being blocked by the same people who were carrying placards opposing the building of the centre "so close" to Ground Zero. And the New York opponents, just as their rural colleagues, are hiding their bigotry under the cover of "honouring the families of those who lost loved ones" in the 9-11 attack.
And the rabbi who represents the Jewish Cultural Centre, built in the early 1990's, recounts, on the same ABC program, a storied history of opposition to their centre.
Putting the appropriate words into the constitution, guaranteeing religious freedom of worship and of expression, and then blocking the application of that "right" is sending a message out of both sides of the nation's mouth. The founding fathers wrote the constitution; the contemporary intolerance is the expression of a different time.
Ideals everywhere are tarnished. Churches no longer wear the mantle of "holiness" they never deserved in the first place. And only those churches prepared to acknowledge their imperfections publicly and honestly will have any chance of survival. Those clinging to a "perfect image" will burn in the fire of their own pride and denial.
Banks, likewise, are the greedy graspers their board members would like hidden from public view. In the words of a radiologist, in a conversation just last week, "I have come to believe that if all the medical specialists were taken out and shot, the world would be a better place." Corporations hide their secrets from public view, even, and perhaps especially when those secrets would demonstrate their conscious choice to put profit ahead of human lives, both workers and clients/customers. Sports franchises, also, have members on their rosters who would find it troublesome to work in a normal work environment, given their lifestyle and self-interest.
Our's is a sullied world, with the reputations of those placed on pedestals inevitably falling back to "just like all others" and thereby much less than perfect.
What has, however, gone the other way, in an inflation of the desire to hide, is our tolerance of the failures, sins and attacks of others. We have become a society of intolerance, of even the slightest imperfection.
And George Will's perfect argument about no one having the right to go through life without having his feelings hurt, is precisely the opposite of the more appropriate, "No one can deny his own imperfections, and no one is entitled to the perfect intellectual argument, or the perfect faith, or the perfect holy writ, or the perfect mask in any sense!"
And because we are all imperfect, and all sinners, it is time to stop pointing the fingers thereby demonstrating our own lack of tolerance.
Bigotry, as Joe Biden once put it while running for president, has become so highly sophisticated that it no longer can be detected as what it truly is, in most cases. Nevertheless, the bigotry of some is only the sign of the bigotry of all, perhaps toward different targets. And we choose the objects of our intolerance...and were we to choose bigotry instead of another faith to fight against, we would at least have climbed up one step on the ladder towards maturity.

Harper Conservatives sliding down the opinion polls

The exit of mandarins, those senior civil servants, whose appointments come from the government, is causing some ripples in the calm of the Rideau Canal this long hot summer.
Not getting along with your political masters is lesson one in a rather short list of imperatives for mandarins, unless and until the integrity of the post one holds is being sacrificed to the political agenda of those same political masters.
Ottawa has a history of depending on the mandarins; successive governments of all stripes have counted on their objectivity, their willingness to bring "truth to power" and their discretionary and confidential memo's to their respective cabinet ministers, and especially to the Prime Minister.
These are not the "nobodies" of parliament, as Trudeau once dubbed the members of the House of Commons, when they were one hundred miles from the "hill". These are the lynch-pins of the political system. It is the respect for and from these civil servants that has guided many governments through often turbulent waters, in the middle of the night, amid circling storms that could have brought those governments down.
Watching so many of their number become "ghosts" in the night is like watching the rats leave a sinking ship....and to mix our metaphors, while their leaving provides orchestral symphonic music to the ears of Liberal operatives. The silence of Ignatieff, while he munches on backyard hamburgers and sipps Molson Canadian, complete with the built-in maple leaf on the bottle (and can), has been seen by some evidence of his missing some golden political opportunities. One such view came from Haroon Siddiqui earlier this week in the Toronto Star over the census fiasco.
Maybe, just maybe, the Ignatieff advisors have got this one right: let the civil servants leave, under various clouds of disagreement with their political masters, the Conservatives, and particularly Stephen Harper, and let the chattering classes talk about the potential embarrassments to the goverment, while it continues to provide fodder for its own demise, and wait until the fall winds begin to blow when parliament returns and then use all the accumulated "evidence" for a massive attack, using the Conservatives own stupidity, arrogance, isolation and self-inflicted wounds to create a sizeable shift in public opinion away from the government and in favour of the (legitimate) alternative, under Ignatieff.
Who knows? It is certainly time for the Liberal Party of Canada to demonstrate that is has the smarts and the kohones to form a legitimate government in which Canadians can have trust and confidence...something the Conservatives are demonstrating every day they are losing, in poll numbers dropping like the rogue Jet-Blue flight-attendant, down the escape slide. And the analogy does not stop there: like him they started this fight, and like him they have been angry for a very long time, and are only now letting their true colours show to their own demise. And like him, when he asks for his job back, the employer, in this case the Canadian people, will not comply with his request.