After spending far too many years in obscure newsrooms across the country, I can now take some comfort in sitting back on my aging haunches and ponder the state of the industry I once so enthusiastically embraced and defended.
Hot lead and the ponderous Linotype spewed out the stories that filled the pages of small-town dailies in Northern Ontario where I started out. Timmins to be more precise.
My first city editor was a crew-cut sporting, square-jawed tyrant with steel-grey eyes, a maniacal laugh and unruly eyebrows who exercised absolute control over his gaggle of young reporters. They occupied the half-dozen desks facing the rim, while churning out copy on antique Underwood typewriters with 90-space carriages and ragged ribbons. It was, after all, a Thomson newspaper.
Yet, as demanding as that city editor was, he was determined to produce the best reporters in the business. Well, if not the best, then at least the most accurate. He had three iron-clad rules. They were that we spell names correctly, cover the five Ws and double check our facts. Actually, there was a fourth item on his list. Never, ever miss a deadline.
But that was then and this is now. Mercifully hot lead is gone along with the old Crown Graphic 4x5 cameras that used flashbulbs large enough to blind innocent bystanders a block away. I am thankful for today's computers, editing and layout programs, digital photography and all the rest.
My concern today is not technology, but whether journalism has improved along with the proliferation of schools of journalism on just about every college and university campus in the country. What might serve many journalists better than a degree of dubious value, is a trip down the yellow brick road in search of what the scarecrow sought but that is another issue.
Interestingly, guiding many of the journalism courses and their content are professors who have never worked in the business and who inject into the mix concepts such as 'interpretative', 'advocacy' or 'investigative' journalism.
Perhaps those labels somehow serve to distinguish any differences that might exist between plain old reporters and journalists. I don't know.
What I do know is my level of confidence in mainstream media of all stripes has been shaken to the core over the past 10 or 15 years. My level of trust in what I read, hear or see is somewhere close to zero and my suspicion continues to grow that television networks, newspaper groups and radio empires are advancing agendas that do not include honest, accurate and unbiased reports.
I take the term interpretive journalism to mean you do not necessarily report what someone actually says, but what some 20-year-old thinks the subject really meant. Advocacy journalism, on the other hand should really be renamed bandwagon journalism while the investigative types supposedly probe into dark places where, it is assumed, there lurks every manner of incompetence, misconduct and conspiracy imaginable.
The result? Well, first you publish the story then see if it can be confirmed, depending upon who runs for cover. If it can't, the story goes away. Fast.
Consider bandwagon journalism and the hysteria surrounding Global Warming for a moment. Who is it that has fed this hysteria? Scientists? Politicians? Your grandmother?
No, it has been media that has embraced the cause of activist groups who have, with the help of a loyal newsroom followings across the land, managed to create yet another "crisis" through which to lend credibility to their fantasies. What is the difference between these and propaganda or brainwashing?
Equally worrisome about media bandwagon campaigns of enlightenment, are the follow-up polls that are touted as evidence Canadians are deeply concerned about the disease of the week or the next tragedy about to strike in our vulnerable society.
What findings would one expect from such polls when large swaths of the population have been subjected to relentless fear campaigns that tout world-ending scenarios?
When was the last time David Suzuki or the Sierra Club or Greenpeace have been asked, for the record, to produce peer reviewed evidence on any of their 'scientific' studies, climate change fantasies or anything else? It doesn't happen.
Why have we not seen media play for the 17 errors of fact exposed in Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth film by a British court? Why ruin a good story with inconvenient facts?
What is also obvious is that the media recklessly embrace the smear tactics employed by eco-activists against anyone who disagrees with them. Remember how the mainstream media trotted out the term Global Warming Deniers, linking skeptics to Holocaust Deniers? Where did that term originate? From the activist camp, of course and parroted incessantly by media until various Jewish groups protested.
Another assertion, continually trumpeted by the press, is that the global warming debate is over. That it is a proven, unchallengeable fact. Okay. So where is this irrefutable evidence? It does not exist in the real world. But it sounds good and keeps editors from getting nasty calls from the eco-evangelical lobby.
And to make matters worse, newspapers like the Vancouver Sun, a veritable hotbed of greenie converts in the newsroom, has named David Suzuki as an honorary editor. Now there's a paper that is interested in balance. They might have some shred of credibility left had they offset Suzuki's pulpit with a platform for Bjorn Lomborg. We are never told that most of the doomsday scenarios being touted as fact are based on computer modeling conclusions arrived at through assumptions and statistics that may or may not be valid.
Today, media-backed causes include ending Canada's involvement in Afghanistan to allow the Taliban back in power; sanitizing the image of Islamic extremism, desperately attempting to pin something, anything, on Stephen Harper and slavishly pushing the lefty anti-U.S. agenda.
Here is a little advice. Read your newspapers or watch your newscasts carefully and critically. Watch for the subtle inflections in the tone of the television news readers. See if you can spot the body language that reveals their take on the story. The easiest to identify relate to environmental stories, especially where forestry, mining, hunting, fishing or First Nations are concerned. It can be quite revealing and disconcerting.
If I sound more than a little disappointed, the truth is I am. I am tired of being told half-truths, fed environmental propaganda as 'fact' and treated like a mental midget as if I could not see through the pretentious parade of drivel being offered up as news in this country.
I will never forget the rabid and embarrassing play Canadian media gave the Clinton/Lewinsky melodrama. That marked, in my opinion, the start of the long descent into Gong Show journalism.
What upsets me more than anything, however, is that this current crop of pretenders has denied me the pleasure of sitting down for my daily news fix with something I can actually trust. How sad. All I'm left with is the daily crossword puzzle.
If the truth is out there, I certainly can't find it in the mainstream media.
