Skulking to the Right

Most thoughtful Canadians are concerned by what they see as the “dumbing down” of our major news media in recent years. As competitive pressure mounts, once-serious newspapers have replaced international analysis with articles on personal health, set aside a portion of Page One to report on subjects such as cosmetic surgery for the vagina (the headlines are still dull, but perhaps we can soon hope to see “Underemployed Cosmetic Surgeons Declare Vagina Ugly. Millions of Men Amazed!”), and create entire sections devoted to vapid commentary by young columnists whose universe consists of themselves and their close friends.

This phenomenon has repeated itself through- out North America and Europe. In a New York Times Book Review essay last July Richard Posner, an eminent professor of law and media analyst, provocatively contended that this is because newspapers are at last giving readers what they truly want. “Increased competition has not produced a public more oriented toward public issues … these are not the goods that most people are seeking from the news media. They are seeking entertainment, confirmation, reinforcement [and] emotional satisfaction.”

Posner demolishes journalists’ favoured belief that citizens want to be better informed. Newsroom idealism, he plausibly argues, was an artefact of a short post-war half-century in which people read newspapers because there was nowhere else to go. The monopoly was first cracked by network television, then fractured by cable TV news and finally demolished by the Internet. Now journalists “are forced to give the consumer what he or she wants, not what they, as proud professionals, think the consumer should want.”

Central to Posner’s argument is his belief that people are “uncomfortable seeing their beliefs challenged on issues bound up with their economic welfare, physical safety or religious and moral views.” Newspapers tiptoe around these issues and do not challenge “areas of social consensus.”

How much of Posner’s argument applies to Canadian newspapers?

Psychologically speaking, Canadians also have strong views that create no-go areas for media commentary. But they are often not the same as those of Americans. In the U.S., for example, Posner mentions religion and patriotism as two areas where the social consensus is powerful enough to intimidate the media. The example he cites is the teaching of creationism in schools. Bowing to the power of fundamentalist Christianity, journalists who know better pretend that creationism is a scientific theory in the same sense as Darwinian evolution.

Canada, too, has its media taboos. The one most peculiar to us is Quebec separatism, which causes fear and (dare we say it?) hatred because it threatens the country’s future and the English-speaking majority cannot control it. When separatism is ascendant, as at the time of the 1995 referendum, the media cater to these feelings by demonizing it. The Toronto Star, for example, reported that Vancouver East Liberal member of Parliament Anna Terrana had compared Parti Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard with Hitler. To the National Post’s Diane Francis, separatism was “a racially motivated conspiracy.” As the referendum receded, tempers cooled. But two years later Barbara Amiel in Maclean’s magazine was still calling the PQ a “neofascist” organization with a “dirty totalitarian tendency.” Canadians as a rule do not tolerate this kind of public language.

Other no-go areas are generated by historic guilt. Why do the liberal media support Native reserves that will never generate a modern standard of living? Because the reserves mitigate guilt about the historic eviction of the Native people from their lands. Interestingly, even conservative commentators who assert that the economic future of the First Nations lies in the cities shy away from acknowledging that this would ensure their eventual assimilation.

Posner makes a further argument that the proliferation of alternate media catering to particular political views, especially e-zines and blogs, has forced newspapers to be more clearly liberal or conservative. Newspapers used to include columnists of both persuasions in order to reach readers in the “middle range” of views. But now that readers can go to websites that cater to their politics, and have made it clear that they do not really like to read views they disagree with, newspapers are moving to political extremes.

This leads, in the U.S., to malevolent conservatives such as Ann Coulter, who in a column in the National Review Online advocated that America should invade Arab countries, “kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Instead of marginalizing her, this kind of commentary has made her a much-in-demand host and guest on major TV talk shows. There she joins other popular right-wing bullies such as Bill O’Reilly, Chris Matthews and Laura Ingraham.

There is, of course, an answering liberal media in forums such as the New York Times and a few magazines such as Harper’s. But Posner errs in assuming some equality between the two. As Eric Alterman documents in his book What Liberal Media?, in the past three decades formerly independent or family-owned newspapers have been taken over by publicly traded corporations that naturally tend to support business politics. Today, six corporations control all major American newspapers, magazines and TV outlets.

To the extent these corporations allow liberal views to be expressed by writers and on-air pundits, it is strictly to capture liberal readers and viewers. For this reason liberal pundits are timorous and carefully managed, while conservative pundits endorsing the owners’ interests are permitted to be as abusive as they please. They also occupy much more newsprint, in line with the principle (known to every journalist) that the individual who gets to repeat his or her views the most has the most influence.

How much of this applies to Canada? You would think very little. On most issues, from state-sponsored medicine to religion to military adventurism, Canada is closer to the social democratic values of Europe than to the red meat exceptionalism of the United States. The editors of the Atlantic Monthly (in its recent State of the Nation issue) observed that America’s political spectrum has been displaced so far to the right that it is out of step not only with Europe but also with advanced industrial democracies everywhere in the world.

For that reason, one would expect Canadian newspapers to be clearly more liberal than those of the U.S., and until recently they were.

But no longer. With the exception of the Toronto Star, there are no large, clearly liberal newspapers left in Canada’s cities. As Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin bravely argued, in a piece published in January 2003, today’s Canadian newspapers are heavily stacked in favour of right-wing commentary. He enumerated nine armour-clad rightists at the National Post and named six at his own employer, The Globe and Mail. While the Globe still maintains a number of liberal columnists, such as Rick Salutin and Jim Stanford of the Canadian Auto Workers, its editorial policy on litmus issues such as the Iraq war, the Middle East and foreign take-overs of Canadian business is now farther to the right than it has historically been.

Conrad Black purchased the Southam newspaper chain specifically to take it to the right, a policy continued by its current owner, CanWest. Maclean’s magazine, that reliable barometer of middle Canada, has taken to bashing Muslims and mocking medicare under its new editor, the neo-conservative Ken Whyte.

This is why a majority of Canadian newspapers supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq at a time when a majority of Canadians opposed it. As a European diplomat quoted in Martin’s column put it, “Your media are not representative of your people.”

This situation has arisen because in the past three decades Canada’s business and political elite have become convinced that the country cannot survive unless it is “deeply integrated” (their slogan) with the United States. Even current Prime Minister Stephen Harper was quoted in the National Post several years ago as saying that “Canada is not a sovereign nation.”

To those who sincerely believe this doctrine, the longing of ordinary Canadians for a sovereign and liberal nation is naive. It endangers the country’s prosperity and may provoke serious American interference. To stave off this disaster they have turned their newspapers into a forced seminar in political reality as they see it.

This is a risky situation. It violates Posner’s prime rule that a newspaper cannot stray too far from its readers’ views.

To succeed in this delicate balancing act, Canadian newspapers have cocooned the political pages inside a colourful, gauzy confection of lifestyle, home decor and consumer product features. It is true that this is a phenomenon seen across the U.S. and Europe as well, but in the Canadian market it has the additional task of sugar-coating political commentary disagreeable to the readers. For that reason it is highly developed and even inventive.

To start with, we find the infamous “chick columnists” in The Globe and Mail and the National Post, writing at length about their adventures in sex and motherhood, and capable of a doctoral thesis on bikini waxing. The Toronto Star has gone so far as to install an actual sex columnist, though she is still a bit shy about taking it all off. In the race to the bottom, where we have seen major feature articles about the oral sex habits of 13-year-old girls, shyness will not last long.

One could also go on about automobile sections whose SUV worship contradicts the pieties of the editorial page, and real estate writers left breathless by the over-decorated homes of local cable TV celebrities.

All this froth is supposed to free up the first section, still the serious part of any newspaper, for the hard-line political messaging the proprietors wish to deliver. But this can be overdone. The National Post was founded explicitly to deliver a Republican message to Canadian readers, and it has lost money since the day it appeared. It is in the Post that the dreaded Ann Coulter’s column appeared (and disappeared two years later). It is the Post that has long published Daniel Pipes, who believes Muslims intend to stage a revolution in the U.S. and replace “the Constitution by the Koran,” and who has stated that “all Muslims… are suspect” as terrorists.

Canadians are clearly not reactionary enough to drink this stuff straight up. But neither are we angelic. There is a good deal of anger and mistrust toward Muslims in Canada, for example. There is an audience for the kind of divisiveness promoted by Coulter, whose print vocabulary prominently features words such as “moron” and “traitor.”

And our newspapers, which in the past understood that overcoming this kind of Hobbesian behaviour is essential to a civil public conversation, are now conducting experiments to see if a Hobbesian tone can help reverse their dismal financial figures.

Toronto is the major nexus for the experiment, because that is where four newspapers are fighting in a market that can only support three. That is perhaps why The Globe and Mail has occasionally published Daniel Pipes, defying letters from outraged readers who describe him as a bigot. It may also be the reason why the liberal Toronto Star has given former sports writer Rosie DiManno the privilege of becoming a sort of Ann Coulter Lite.

In fact DiManno, along with Margaret Wente and Christie Blatchford in the Globe, represent an attempt to Canadianize the abrasive style of right-wing U.S. pundits. They are less extreme, because their readers are more liberal; and they alternate bullying columns with touching and sometimes slightly lachrymose pieces about their personal lives. But they fearlessly beat up on people who are outside what Posner calls the “areas of social consensus.” In Canada this includes Muslims, Native people, French Canadians, troubled immigrant groups and publicly subsidized artists.

The texture of this kind of journalism can be illustrated by the example of 9/11 and subsequent treatment of Muslims.

Wente, The Globe and Mail’s most successful columnist, hero-worshipped George W. Bush in the wake of September 11 and wrote extensively in support of the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. Her background in business writing left her with little knowledge of the Muslim world. She imagined, for example, that Palestine and Pakistan, 2,000 miles apart, had similar cultures because both were Muslim. Later she was sent on a costly tour of Iraq where, judging by her coverage, she spoke almost entirely to members of the American military.

Muslims were insulted by this, but they are not numerous enough to be her intended readers. Those readers she placated by getting involved with a small charity to help abused Muslim women, and returning frequently to the subject of female abuse—thereby allying herself with liberal readers who might otherwise object to her views on Islam.

DiManno was also sent to the war zone, in her case Afghanistan. She has not been to Arabia, but she recently characterized Arab society as one where “wickedness is bred in the bone.” For this she was censured by the Ontario Press Council, as giving offence to an identifiable community.

Blatchford recently wrote that there could be no comparison between the beheading of a U.S. businessman by terrorists in Iraq and the mere “humiliation” of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib prison. She neglected to mention that these guards also killed Iraqi prisoners. And she sympathized with those who would defend them as “simple souls ill-trained and ill-equipped for the jobs they had at the prison.” During Toronto’s SARS crisis she compared Canadian nurses unfavourably with the heroic New York firefighters of 9/11: “an unsettling number of nurses” were “outright shiftless or worse,” which she attributed to their being members of a union.

These writers are highly popular. One reason is that, unlike traditional political analysts who were trained never to speak of their personal lives, they frequently invite readers into their hearts and households. Wente, for example, reported on how deeply hurt she was when her “girlfriends” made fun of her affection for George Bush.

The personal intimacy is not always connected to the political commentary. Blatchford, a very able court and crime reporter, will stop to spend a column chatting about her dog, or how appalled she is by the condition of her middle-aged breasts. Wente shares her agony at getting old, and has written a number of pieces about the recent installation of an artificial hip. Rosie DiManno has tearfully reported on her father’s funeral and her guilt for disliking him.

What readers get from them, I think, is an ersatz sense of community. To read these writers is to be in a warm pub with bibulous friends who share one’s human failings. If the fellow on the bar stool suddenly roars that those Israeli pilots refusing to do service in the West Bank should be hanged (as Blatchford has written), or the lady from the bakery tips back a Guinness and opines that that liberal film maker Michael Moore is a “fat flick fulminator” (as DiManno has written), well, don’t we all need to get it off our chests every now and then?

Looking at these particular writers merely illustrates a tendency that is now general in the print media: an impatience with careful thinking, a yielding to the temptation of the snarky remark or the logical slide that is not quite convincing.

I am not sure I agree with Richard Posner’s idea that this is what most readers most of the time really want. Leo Braudy, in From Chivalry to Terrorism, notes that in times of genuine crisis the demand for serious public discussion is great. After each world war there was at least a decade of general dignity and high-mindedness as people sought to ensure that the disaster would be not repeated. There was even a brief dusting of seriousness immediately after 9/11, when a demand for books about Islam and Muslim history suddenly appeared.

But in times of comparative peace and prosperity, such as we are now enjoying, the print media in this country are being pulled in the opposite direction. Since they are now part of large publicly traded corporations, their owners are seeking annual profits of 20 percent—far more than newspapers earned historically. It is a profit that can only be reached by debasing the product.

It is also true that there is a split between Canada’s elite and its general population. There is a sense in both political and corporate boardrooms that the country must go in a certain direction regardless of what its citizens desire.

The print media provide daily evidence of this unhealthy sense of hubris.