Canadian Media, Paikin, And Failure Across The Board

Punching Down, Except, Not

I generally have avoided media criticism because, frankly, it’s cheap. Everyone makes mistakes, and media criticism generally holds the media to a standard of perfection, which isn’t reasonable on a good day, let alone a bad one. It’s a cheap target to shit on the media because “the media” is such a broad concept as to be, in some ways, indefinable, and every criticism you can levy at “the media” is true of at least somebody, which means no one’s ever lying, but it’s always a useless fight.

That said, Steve Paikin’s absolute stunner of an argument that he didn’t know his wife ghostwrote Patrick Brown’s book, because, in effect, they have a policy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, is such absurdist nonsense that I have to break my pledge to not punch down on the media, because frankly, the Canadian media can’t help themselves.

Let’s be clear – I neither know nor care whether Paikin is telling the truth about this, which is relevant because Paikin wrote a piece on Patrick Brown for TVO last week and he got roasted by the internet for not disclosing that fact. What I do know is Paikin attended Brown’s wedding, and whether or not he knew about the book is immaterial to the argument, which is that a column defending Patrick Brown is a crock of shit if you are social acquaintances, which they were, regardless of what he knew about the book.

I’ve long considered Paikin the Godfather of Ontario journalism, and the reason I’m upset about this is because of the respect I held him in until this situation, and I think if he can find some contrition, this could go away. But this isn’t really about Steve and this isn’t just about this one bad TVO column, it’s about a rotten culture from the top to the bottom.

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One of the things that every person who has any amount of editorial discretion has is a ton of leeway to shape what people care about. Why is the war in Ukraine leading the news every night and Syria never did in the same way? Why did Trump saying racist shit in 2015 lead CNN every day, but Marco Rubio saying that he would appoint Supreme Court nominees who would reverse gay marriage in the US got buried? Why does CBC use their leading political news show to ask political hacks – some of whom read me, so, don’t worry, I love you – about military strategy? No offence, but, “you used to get NDPers elected” doesn’t make you fucking qualified to talk about the military response, sorry.

The reasons for all of this are simple – western media directors care more about a war in Europe than in the Middle East, the media liked Marco and wanted him to rally to beat Trump, and because the CBC booking department is lazy – but they’re all choices made, but never scrutinized, because they’re not choices discussed in public. They’re presented to the public as fait accomplis, the obvious and correct choice. The reason media diversity matters – the reason the National Post has some value as a media organization – is that different people will prioritize different shit. What stories I would put where is different than any of you, and that’s the point. But it’s not how it’s viewed.

These choices are made by a cabal of people in 5 newsrooms across this country – CTV, CBC, the Globe, Postmedia, and the Star. Sometimes, those decisions are good, and sometimes, they’re crocks of shit, and the way that the media have fallen to their knees to inflate Patrick Brown and Jean Charest is a laughable monstrosity of what could in the past be described as news. The willingness to accept the nonsense from them about how they could beat Skippy without bothering to ask literally anyone with a brain is farcical, and it’s also what passes for news in this country.

If you think this is self-serving, it’s not – I’m not asking to be the guy the media goes to to talk about these things, but there is a group of dedicated, smart, analytically rigorous people who understand how these things work, and running the Brown campaign’s theory of the point’s system by one of us instead of printing it verbatim without checking if he’s talking out his ass crosses the line from journalism to stenography.

The thing about media in 2022 is that people are paying for expertise – whether in dollars or in their time, they are looking to find smarter people than themselves who they can trust on a topic and essentially sublet their opinions from. “Should the Liberals panic?” was the question I got most in 2021 and not “Are the Liberals going to lose?”, because people weren’t asking as a theoretical exercise – they wanted my level of emotion to replace theirs. I was unpanicked, and so people came to me so they could hear me whisper soft words to them, and insodoing, they’d be able to relax themselves.

People want to believe that if someone with a fancy title says something, they know things – this is how political consultants on all sides make money afterwards. Why did Stockwell Day still have a TV job 9 years after he left Parliament? Simple – “former Conservative Cabinet Minister” means he’s a Very Important Person who we need to Take Seriously, even though it was obvious to everyone with a brain he was a doddering old fuck who never had anything useful to say. The choice to put him on TV once a week, every week, for years, was a choice – and it’s the kind of choice that makes less and less sense, if it ever did.

Why have the Canadian media decided to rehabilitate Lisa Raitt and Rona Ambrose, two prominent female Conservatives no longer in Parliament? Raitt was the Deputy Leader of the Tories when Scheer was leader, and she once screamed at a CBC reporter the day Jody testified at House Justice for asking a very simple question – some version of “can you say that a Conservative government wouldn’t grant the DPA to SNC?” and who stood behind a leader who once compared homosexuals and homosexuality to a dog’s leg. Ambrose, on the other hand, was the Minister For Status Of Women who voted to re-open the abortion debate in 2012. Why are these women rehabilitated? It’s simple – because the media likes “sensible” Conservatives, and so Lisa gets to sit beside Gerry Butts all election night and smile and nod. It's all about choices.

Would I be as kind to a newer, less established journalist who wrote the same crock of shit as Paikin did that led this column? Of course not, and the only reason he gets my benefit of the doubt is I respect the fuck out of him, and have for as long as I remember. Why did I let Justin Thomas back into my fandom after saying faggot at the 2021 Tournament of Champions? Because I want to cheer for him, and so I found a way back. That’s the thing that’s often true, and never explicitly said – people will forgive who they want to, and bend over backwards for who they like. And if they don’t? They’re shit outta luck, as Papa Dimitroff would say.

Fundamentally, the problem with the Canadian media is they’re gunshy, in a country that has no time for the increasing populist hue of the Conservative Party. Most members of the media, even those at right-wing publications, view Pierre Poilievre’s brand of conservatism with disdain, because they view that sort of tribal fuckery as an abomination. And so, because they can’t say that, they sanitize the Tories, because to accurately describe what they’ve become is to be accused of the greatest journalistic sin of bias – but in being timid, they commit a worse one, which is reporting fiction as fact.

The Canadian media is increasing becoming a joke. I really hope that stops, but I highly, highly doubt it.