By Daniel Velarde
They wear their poverty as a badge of honour. They curse. They hurl slogans against those they think have power.
And last month, the country’s independent media stopped by Ottawa for Media Democracy Day; presumably, the press became just a little more democratic.
Media Democracy Day aims to strike a blow against a mainstream press “driven by marketing and commercial pressures rather than an ethic of public service.”
Public service? Journalists seldom give a thought to the public service. Ottawa is a city where the sex, sports, and blood of the local dailies are squeezed together with calls for family values and tougher crime laws.
Today’s objective, professional reporter is as far removed as can be from the pamphleteers of the 18th and 19th centuries whose pens inspired real debate in society, and whose lives could be forfeit as a result.
Stories crafted by self-styled professionals are by no means truthful or accurate. They’re simply easier to manage, more consistent and therefore palatable.
Much of the commercial media are so consistently unimaginative, so prudently dissenting and so bland in their half-formed aspirations that the “issues” that blot out their papers come in predictable cycles.
Mainstream journalism is a deeply self-serving and un-democratic trade. Under the spell of the lens, any Tom, Dick, or Harry will aspire to be a light in the sky, a folk hero, a titan, his image replicated a million times over.
But, come now; are the indy gurus really any different? Corporate ownership is not as dreadful, and alternative news not as shining, as the crayon stroked picture would have you believe.
This obsession with the corporate Goliath masks a pervasive inability to live up to one’s responsibilities. It’s always the other guy. The system. “The Man.”
What needs to change, above and before all, is the journalist’s thinking.
In many ways the indy presses are just like the big news organizations. They write under the same influences. They try to force their own ideas on the readers whose interests they fancy they defend.
Yes, it’s time the media corporations were challenged. Don’t they deserve it for muscling their neo-liberal agendas into the homes of honest, hardworking Canadians?
Like all left wing papers violently contemptuous of their middle class audiences, Ottawa’s alternative papers entrench themselves behind the political agendas they serve or else imitate the true journalists without doing away with their flaws.
Reading Capital Xtra, for instance, it is often apparent that their news stories copy what the depraved corporate giants turn out every day. These are, in effect, partisan presses whose calls for “positive social change” ring out from a product essentially the same as that manufactured by their enemies, the media giants.
The indy figures have their own act: scruffy, cynical rebels, outsiders who like to set themselves up as the nation’s conscience. They are progressive. They are farseeing. They are skeptical. We, the general public, buy into the media’s fraud.
We believe the incantations. We transform corporate stooges into modern pharaohs, priest-kings, all knowing, all wise. We, the legions of dupes, are easily seduced, unable to shoulder democracy without a Media Democracy Day trotted out for our benefit.
News consumers – and, by extension, voters – are powerless, gelatinous, thinking nothing, and liable to follow, to be shaped and whipped up, by anyone more dynamic or clever than themselves.
So their argument goes. The failed Guevaras and coffee house intellectuals, self-styled keepers of the public good, buoyed by a misplaced confidence, put on a good show. They might occasionally ignite flames of public outrage that are rapidly consumed and forgotten about.
But something is missing. They fancy themselves David, and like David they toss stones. They huff and puff, but the walls aren’t falling.
It might be worse than even the Media Democracy Day organizers imagined. The alternative presses dream of toppling the corporate Goliath. And then what?
The idea of a power-hungry, maniacal Philistine brought down by a slingshot doesn’t mean much in today’s media world.
It is no longer enough to discredit the mainstream press. Journalists manage that well enough themselves.
Canadians aren’t interested in another angle or a new point of view. Those are no alternatives. What we need is a new kind of journalism. Without it, the reader, finding no real truth in the labyrinth of contradictory “facts,” scuttles the stories of the day and retreats into a state of passive spectatorship.