Off in the Wrong Direction

In his 1999 biography, famed anchorman Walter Cronkite writes of being on assignment on D-Day in 1944 and, encountering the “redoubtable” Canadian journalist Charles Lynch.  Journalists like Cronkite had to wait to file their stories by radio or wire later in the day, but Lynch opted to do it the old-fashioned way by using three homing pigeons.  He typed out his first dispatch on the special light paper provided by his employers, Reuters News Service, and tucked it into the special capsule affixed to pigeon number one.  He went through the same routine for the remaining two birds.  The pigeons lifted into the air, circled twice, and then flew off, not in the direction of England, but Berlin.  Flustered, Lynch labeled them “feathered turncoats”.There is something symbolic in that story, I think, considering how today’s political media frequently files stories that have the opposite effect to what was intended.  Such coverage is turning people off democracy, not engaging them.  The view of some that journalism should be an arena of objective truth devoid of opinion has virtually never been the case; there must be room for the writer’s own leaning to show through.  As John Burns of the New York Times put it: “I have to be accurate; I don’t have to be impartial.”  That pretty well sums it up.  Especially in political coverage, commentators, in all media venues, only carry true weight when the former outweighs the latter - objectivity should always be more vital than slant.But times are changing and political reporting has suffered on two related fronts.  The first is the growing bias within political coverage that gives the writer or media commentator a certain “inevitability” in their reporting.  Some columnists are so predictable that you know the slant their piece will take just by seeing their names associated with it.  They reserve their rancor especially for political leaders and in plying their trade they sadly play to their select readers, listeners or watchers - just like politicians themselves.  Media personalities end up mirroring the very thing they despise in politics.  This isn’t true for all, naturally, but the increasingly biased nature of political reporting has raised similar suspicions in citizens as they feel towards politicians, and politics in general.Recently deceased author and provocateur Christopher Hitchens, when asked by a student why he chose to write, answered, “I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers or television for information.”  More and more of us are developing a similar aversion to modern political coverage.The second troubling trend has been the move towards the incidental as opposed to the  essential.  The greatest challenges of our generation are facing us head-on, but what we read is mostly of scandal and partisanship.  These are newsworthy but not at the levels of saturation they presently attain.  Journalists counter with the reasoning that such things are what Canadians desire to hear about.  There’s truth to this, but covering such things is, more often than not, the easy side of coverage.  Much harder is the ability to resonate with readers about the things they need to hear about the fate of their nation, of the citizenry, of their communities. Senate accounts, mayoralty scandals, and blinding partisanship are everywhere, but what Canadians require are members of the Fourth Estate to discern, research and unfold the deep failures of certain policies - climate change, aboriginal injustices, economic erosion, immigration, unemployment, lack of research and innovation funding, declining democratic tendencies -  and to highlight possible solutions.  Surely this isn’t too much to request.Democracy and financial equity are in decline around the world and we require serious journalists to confront serious challenges.  The media is always at its best when it labours under a sense of collective responsibility towards its audience and their importance to the hope of tomorrow.  We don’t need more of what author David Baldacci was referring to when he wrote:

All you have to do to win a Pulitzer Prize is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see.  The civilized world reads it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and give you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.”

That’s just the thing - we need to change and that can only come when the modern media digs deeper, not merely in Senate expense accounts or a leader’s speaking fees, but in policy, approaching economic danger, the threat of a politics without meaning, citizens without hope, and journalism devoid of urgent insight.  We experience great difficulty in creating such instincts in the country as it is; should the media remain distracted, we shall never be prepared for what is about to come upon us.While still an MP, I had the good fortune of having the occasional lunch or a phone call with esteemed journalist Jim Travers, whose death a few years ago left a void that has yet to be filled in official Ottawa.  He presented me with a small book just prior to his death, along with a personal note that I still cherish.  He said that no journalist is unbiased, but that there were those were biased and fair.  He feared that the penchant for journalism to chase the scandalous instead of the serious would leave democracy impoverished - their messages heading in the wrong direction.  Even from the grave he reminds us how we suffer when we lose much of the conscience of an effective Fourth Estate.