It's time to welcome Canada and the CBC to the wide world of media bloopers, planned or unplanned, malicious or haphazard, which now seem to dog the airwaves.
The Canadian Broadcast Company (CBC) recently apologized for last Tuesday's juxtaposition of what appeared to be the word "heil", normally associated with the unsavory regime of adolf Hitler and the Nazis, over the name of the new Prime Minister designee, Stephen Harper.
Now, whereas terms like Nazi, fascist and slave master are routinely bandied about by the eminently sensitive and unusually concerned liberals and Democrats in america, where they are daily fare in descriptions of President Bush and members of his cabinet, they remain rather rare in our neighbor to the north. and the CBC must be commended for their immediate apology in the matter, something we in america are certainly not used to.
Having grown up in an america which viewed the visual media as the final arbiter, ruled by Newton Minnow and his medium as the message credo, many of us believed Walter Cronkite when he said, in the wake of the overwhelming Vietcong defeat in their disastrous 1968 Tet offensive, that america had lost the war. Only through the lens of time did we come to realize his bias and the enormity of his sellout--of our country, our troops and the Vietnamese.
The rise of the venerated Dan Rather, and his ilk, replacing Walter Cronkite, and their trading of latent bias, talent and voice for overt zealotry, marks the arrival of clearly discernable, palpable and easily calculable media prejudice, coming to fruition in his early and disastrous call on the critical 2000 Florida elections, which, Dan clearly knew, covers two time zones. This activity clearly contributed to the close election and the incredible series of suits and counter-suits and the enmity which resulted.
Rather's lucrative, open and avowed left-wing lunacy reached its zenith with the utterly preposterous phantasm concerning the hawking of indisputably fraudulent documents, by he and his socialist producer, Mary Mapes, concerning President Bush's National Guard service both as real evidence of preferential treatment and as a story worthy of mention despite the records' early, repeated and simple refutation and demonstration as frauds.
But the denouement of big media's big anchors, and their relatively large following, will result in the use of glitches and technical malfunctions to increasingly mark conservatives in an uncomplimentary fashion.
Back in November of 2005, during a live speech broadcast by CNN, an enormous black X appeared over Dick Cheney's visage while the phrase, "I do not believe it is wrong to criticize," appeared below in the dialogue box.
Was CNN trying to tell the viewing public something by this outlandish bit of obvious liberal censorship? Were they attempting to skew political views of Dick Cheney? Or was it just the insensate activities of a few problematic simpletons fumbling around in an area requiring a level of expertise far higher than they possessed, laboring on systems that were far too complicated for them to operate, all coming at a bad time when a senior member of the current administration was speaking live? and if the latter, who was doing the hiring, what the heck was going in the control room and who was providing the supervision?
Initially, CNN failed to return phone calls about this difficulty, but later apologized for this unique technical malfunction, blaming it all on some tenebrious software problem which occurs only when a Republican of note speaks live in the morning before a surfeit of coffee is consumed. although no one in the production staff was chastised for this egregious activity, a telephone operator was later identified and fired for some sort of communication problem noticed while answering calls from outraged viewers.
It's interesting that so far there hasn't been an X or Y or Dope or a Mutt subliminally overlaid over the imposingly dour visage of John Kerry or the bug-eyed foaming mug of Howard Dean, even on the detestable, often middle-of-the-road, too often fact filled Fox News.
With this gap in mind, I'm surprised that CNN hasn't demanded that Fox News commit a commensurate gaffe to even the playing field and to show their openly right-wing tendencies. although, in retrospect, Fox may have a more highly trained production staff, use a more user-friendly soft-ware package, provide an adequate amount of coffee to their staff, combined with more courteous operators. Who can say.
and now poor CBC is on the hot seat for a simple and nearly recondite "heil." Unlike CNN, CBC didn't back peddle, hide and fire someone unconnected with the impropriety in an attempt to look "concerned" to the viewing public. But still, for a few moments, CBC had Harper in the subconscious crosshairs.
Canada, you're catching on.
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