In My Opinion! - A Parer Mio!

|Monday August 27, 2001 | BACK | NEXT

HYPOCRISY EXPOSED!!
by Angelo Persichilli
THE HILL TIMES

"Hypocrisy exposed" was the headline of the main editorial in the Toronto Star last Wednesday. It was referring to the action of MP John Bryden, the federal Liberal MP who "has exposed the hypocrisy of Chrétien's promise to 'make open government the watchword of the Liberal program.'" In the same edition there was another editorial whose headline was "Corporate agenda ranks high with PM."
How perceiving they are!!

Having worked hard to destroy the opposition, it seems now that The Toronto Star is trying to destroy the government as well, hoping to transfer the power to govern the country from 24 Sussex Dr.
in Ottawa, to 1 Yonge St. in Toronto.

I don't want to give much blame, or credit, to The Star for destroying the federal opposition, but definitely media has to wear some of it. In their parochial fight against Conrad Black, they have destroyed Stockwell Day, the institution of the opposition in Parliament and, in the process, media freedom. Yes, Mr. Day has made mistakes, but his mistakes has been blown out of proportion while the mistakes of other leaders are ignored. The rebellious voices inside other parties have been left hanging dry, while Chuck Strahl's summer appearances in the media have likely outnumbered ads for Coca-Cola.

Now media are crying foul that the Government is not what they hoped for, their freedom to access information is restricted and, even when they have got it, they don't have much room for
publishing it.

It all started when Conrad Black decided - what a sin! - to create a second national newspaper. Such an initiative would have been hailed as a positive step towards freedom of speech in every democratic country. However, in Canada, it was greeted with hysteria.

The Star, with its ideological obsessions, demonized Mr. Black for his Alliance-promoting activities and for becoming the new voice of the right (never mind that the Star is the voice of the left). This led the Globe and Mail, a fiscally conservative paper with a tendency of promoting some social issues, to move immediately on the government side in order to isolate the Post in the devil's land. The Sun, with its neutrality, has become almost politically irrelevant.

So the fight against Mr. Black, not Stockwell Day, completely destroyed the opposition, and gave the Liberals complete control of federal operations, including Canada's media.

Now that Conrad Black has decided to withdraw from Canada, the competitors realize that they have accomplished a Pyrrhic victory. After the months-long frenzy of phony scoops against Mr. Day, the Post's competitors are now feeling dizzy: they don't have an enemy to fight against; they don't have the opposition to kick around and unload their frustrations, and they don't have the power to take on the only institution left in charge: the government.

In fact, while the Ottawa journalists were busy rioting with Mr. Black and Mr. Day, the CRTC has decided that plurality of information is related not to the number of sources, but to the number of news departments. In other words, plurality of information is guaranteed by the number of buildings where the news departments are located, not by the number of journalists. That means that the next watchdog for the Freedom of Information Act is going to be a real estate agent.

Oh, the Star. Yes, they can still take on the government, and they have started already. The problem for the paper of 1 Yonge St. is its ideology: they keep believing that in Canada there are only two groups, the rich and the poor. Which is what they tend to see on their lunch hour walks in downtown Toronto: Big banks and squeegee kids.

But they are wrong. There's actually three groups in Canada: the rich, the poor and the people paying taxes. These are the people who wake up in the morning to take their children to school and on the way to work, they pay taxes, pay the mortgage and at night they go home to rest. They are not rich, they are not poor and they are definitely looking for a national newspaper ready to defend their case.

Unfortunately this is a subject that needs much more space to elaborate. And we will.