Will The Canadian Media Get Out Of The Ditch?

We Need It. Please God.

“All those people, they think they got it made/But I wouldn’t buy sell borrow or trade/Anything I have to be like one of them/I’d rather start all over again”

What do you do when the thing you’re supposed to be good at, you’re not very good at?

It’s a question I grapple with, given my lack of US electoral prediction success, and it’s one that’s very important to answer if you want to be good at your job. What happens when you’re not good at the thing you’re supposed to be good at in many ways defines you – because you have to decide your future, whether to hang them up, keep going on your path, or change your ways.

In my case, the US forecasting business has become a smaller part of my portfolio and I have revamped my 2022 forecasting methods to be more reflective of reality than my 2021 work was (at least, I hope) – but it’s not just the loss that prompted reflection, it’s also the victory, because to only focus on your losses means you only do introspection every so often. And that’s just not plainly enough.

Has the Canadian Liberals won the 2021 election by 5 seats, and had the Tories won wide swathes of seats in Brampton and Mississauga, I would have been right, in a sense – I would have correctly called a Liberal government, which happened. I would have also been horrendously wrong, because my whole argument the entire time was that the suburban firewall, in effect, guaranteed a Liberal government. I was right in the end, but it’s worth making sure that not only was I right, but that I was right for the right reasons.

That level of introspection is important, because how I projected Canada in 2021 informs how I project Ontario in 2022 – and how my Ontario projection goes will impact how (and whether) I project Quebec 2022. I’ve been honest about this, but I fucking suck at projecting insurgent parties’ vote totals to seats, and so, if the Quebec Conservatives loom large in the summer, I’ll probably tap out, because I’m just not good at it. It’s not some miraculous statement, but it is a statement of truth – and one that most people in public-facing places won’t ever say out loud.

If you haven’t noticed, this is the problem – there’s no willingness to be as aggressively self-critical from the establishment media, and nobody will ever say they’re not qualified to do something, so the same shit keeps happening, day after day, week after week, month after month. And it’s got to stop. I swear to God, it has to stop.

…

Turn on Power Play or Power & Politics on any given day, and it’s the same shit, day after day.

It’ll start with the news story of the day from some reporter covering it, it’ll transition to either a panel of MPs to discuss the topic or an interview with an expert in the field, they’ll cover a couple other smaller stories, and then the panel of partisans will come on to analyze the three stories they’ve done earlier in the show.

Does it matter that none of the people who show up on these panels have literally zero expertise in military strategy? Nope, if the top of the show was Ukraine, we must have the Power Panel weigh in on whether Ottawa’s military strategy is enough, as if any of these people know shit from a hole in the ground whether our money is better spent sending them arms or cash. Inevitably, the next segment is about the political story of the day, so it’s mostly Conservative leadership questions, and the panel is asked a version of “So, is it gonna be Skippy, or is this still a race?”, to which the panel dutifully hedges and acts like Charest or Brown still have a chance.

I’m not saying any of this to demean or malign the people who appear on these panels, but that’s what it is, day after day, week after week, on both networks. Read the three National (or, at least, National-adjacent) newspapers in this country, and you see a similar staleness – the Star is more interventionist on COVID and economics, the National Post wants a return to normal and tax cuts, and the Globe is suffocatingly pretentious in every way. What about this is new, interesting, and most importantly newsworthy?

It is a failure that I know what every person will say on a panel just based on who is on there and the topics that will be discussed. It is a failure that moments of honesty are never broadcast, because it’s the same “experts” who show up and the same partisan panelists every week in the same slot. You know who is never asked to be the Liberal on Power & Politics? Wayne Long or Nathaniel Erskine Smith, because those two have brains and spines, and the Liberal Party doesn’t want their representatives on these shows freelancing when the time comes. It’s not news, it’s what passes for good TV – and it’s time it fucking stops (or, at least, they stop pretending to be news channels).

The lyrics at the top of this piece are Neil Young’s Motion Pictures (For Carrie), and the notion of wanting uniqueness so badly is one that animated Young’s entire career. After a #1 hit in Heart Of Gold, Young went crazy, releasing three albums that are universally known as the Ditch Trilogy – an attempt to not become the predictable after finding his success. It’s worth thinking about that parallel here, because Young could have just continued to make hits like he had on his first four albums, but his desire to do what he thought was necessary outweighed what he thought was commercially correct.

Here, the Canadian media faces the same choice – to continue to do good TV at the expense of our democracy and the nation they supposedly love or serve, or to do the news in a proper and unbiased way, even if it means pissing off some conservatives in the process? I think of Young driving his career into the proverbial ditch instead of being the same, because for him starting all over again was better than doing the same old shit again and again. The Canadian media has to make the same choice now. Will they prioritize truth, or easy to make content that they pass off as news? I don’t know – and that fact fucking terrifies me.