Canadian Media, Cultural Comfort, And A Tastemaker’s Revolution

Change Is Gonna Come

One of the underrated aspects of the last two years – unless you’re a reader of mine, in which case, you’ll have seen me bring it up a dozen times – is the effect of the lack of social occasions for the upper classes. The pandemic-era death of the charity dinner circuit has meant that people have just seen each other less, which has had a fairly profound effect on the Canadian media, without anyone knowing it.

It’s, of course, not just charity dinners, but galas, fundraisers, events, luncheons – all the places where business leaders, lobbyists, reporters, and the otherwise rich just end up in the same room and talk. Live in Ottawa, Montreal, or Toronto long enough, be friends with the right people, and you end up being the kind of person to fill a seat when a table’s about to go empty. Hell, I was that as a University student. It’s the kind of soft interactions that have huge, outsized influence.

These kinds of events were why so many people were tricked into thinking Jeb! Bush could win the 2016 GOP nomination, because the DC and New York reporters class kept going to events like this, and everyone at those kinds of events hated Trump and had written $4000 checks to either Jeb! or his Super PAC (or both).

We see the legacy of it in Canada, amongst those insisting that a new moderate, centrist party could be a solution to this country’s ills, because literally the only people who want a new centrist party live in downtown Ottawa, downtown Toronto, and the non-Jewish parts of the Montreal west-end, and yet, there’s this complete belief that it is a vision with public support, for reasons passing understanding, of course. Well, actually, no – we know why, it’s very simple – the media knows a lot of rich centrists who want a tax cut for them and don’t want to vote for a party of lunatics.

Why it matters that these dinners haven’t been happening is because the media members who write columns and make choices haven’t had to face those choices in a while, because when it’s faceless trolls on Twitter, or me, criticizing those choices, it’s easy to dismiss. When reporters and columnists write a bad column and they have to go to dinner that night with a room full of people who hated it, they hear about it, and it can change their thinking.

The Canadian media is incapable, right now, of covering the Conservative Party properly, because they’re covering Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party in their minds, and this ain’t the same fucking party anymore. We ain’t in Kansas anymore, and the Tories aren’t the same fucking party anymore. It’s just not, but they can’t get there yet. The thing is? There’s a decent chance they’ll get there soon.

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One of the things that’s often said to me is that my columns are good, but they’re wasted, because either the Tories won’t change who they are, or the media won’t. I agree that the Tories won’t, but they’re not my audience – I am not articulating their failure for their sake, I’m doing it for the sake of everyone else. With the media, I am doing it for everyone else too, but I’m also doing it because there’s a non-zero chance that what I have to say might change some minds somewhere.

Last night, in my head, I was thinking about how to talk about what will change the Canadian media, and the term “Tastemaker’s Revolution” popped into the void. What will change the media will be a tastemaker’s revolution, not one of the public at large. What will change the media is the views of the people the media respects – and the thing is, while I’m absolutely not arrogant enough to think of myself as a tastemaker, I’m only one step away from being one.

I don’t actually know the number at this point, but something like 2 or 3 dozen people who work for the Big 6 Canadian media companies – CBC, CTV, Global, Postmedia, Star, Globe – follow me on Twitter. How many of them actively read my work? No idea, but there’s a chance that something I write will stick with them. And this is going to be how this changes.

We are in a time of great upheaval, with the right fleeing for what passes for conservative news and the left starting to build institutions genuinely worth reading and supporting – namely, for my money, the National Observer – but we’re also at a time where information is as decentralized as ever. For whatever you think of the work of Fournier or Grenier, it’s undeniably the case that both made big names for themselves from nothing because of the ability to get an audience despite a lack of formal credential or employer pushing you there. Hell, the fact that this site exists, and that the number of people who support me do is incredible, and it is how this ends.

Either the Canadian media will continue to chase for the approval of a right which hates them – especially the CBC, which Skippy pledged last night to defund – and faceplant repeatedly while places like the National Observer rise and rise into the conversation of the Big 6, or they will realize that there is no virtue in consistent failure and they’re start to do the news properly. Think I’m a hopeless romantic? No, I understand money – and I understand that once the legacy media in this country loses the educated, well off center, they’re gonna run out of money.

The reason I keep thinking about the charity dinner circuit is because it is the most influential institution in this country that nobody thinks of as influential – or, as an institution. But it is. The way that the viewpoints of the rich and successful shape this country and their media is profound, and it is the thing that will stop the backslide, because these people will never vote for a Conservative Party that is as vicious, as nasty, and as openly hateful, as the modern Conservative Party, and once we get back to those kinds of events and people have to live with the real world consequences of doing a big thing badly, things will change.

At some point soon there will be a revolution in Canadian media, as the legacy institutions decide how to handle the dual threats of Tory extremism and fear of media bias. If they ignore the former to avoid the latter, they will all go bankrupt, and we will be up shit’s creek without a paddle. If they choose to be honest and tell us who the Tories are at the risk of accusations of bias, they’ll survive and thrive.

I’m optimistic, actually, they’ll do the right thing, but not because of any rose coloured dream that they’re doing this for the right reasons. No, they’ll do it for one reason – legacy media would rather a Tastemaker’s Revolution than a real one.