Don't Let the Facts Ruin a Good Fundraising Drive

Back to politics:

Buckdog reports that Doug Finley is beseeching the Conservative Party faithful to fight the evil CBC. This all goes back to the tempest in the teapot over a CBC reporter feeding questions to a Liberal MP about Mulroney. This is amusing because a while ago Paul Wells pointed out that this sort of thing happens all the time in Ottawa. A sample:

"I don't know whether I ever did it with Reform, Alliance or NDP MPs when the Liberals were in government, but I know it got done and if I had a story I needed advancing, I'd have done it in a second. 'Hey, you might want to ask about....'"

Anyone who has anything other than a totally, totally naive view of politics must surely assume that such things happen all the time. Of course feigned naivety is a great political tool. Stephen Taylor and Doug Finley are shocked! Shocked that the media and the opposition sometimes share information.

FLICK Rex Murphy

I really cannot believe that people are still on about this "Flick off" campaign that the government has launched to conserve electricity. Whatever taboo that the word "fuck" once held has greatly dissipated over the past decade. The Globe and Mail routinely quotes people saying "fuck" without bothering to asterisk any of the letters. (My goodness, what could they have meant by f***?) Recently, Mark Steyn wrote the following for Macleans:

"Fuck!" "Fuck!" "Jesus Christ!" "Fuck!" Fuck-fucketty-fucketty-fucking-fuck.

Seriously, look it up - even writers who drone on about our decadence and moral decay don't bother to bleep it out anymore.

It seems everyone is okay with "fuck" in just about any context. Everyone that is, except Rex Murphy who used his CBC soapbox tonight to whine about it. Someone ought to buy Rex a FCUK t-shirt. Look, the way I see it, most of tune out government public awareness campaigns because they come off as so much sanctimonious nagging (come to think of it, Rex comes off that way too). Kudos to whoever had the idea to make this effort at least a little bit interesting.

Media Bias: The Stephen Taylor Edition

Stephen Taylor of the Blogging Tories is up in arms about some report on the CBC. From what I'm able to tell the problem was that Tom Flanagan didn't get a chance to comment about the story. Thus, in Taylor's mind some kind of artificial balance was thrown out of proportion.

I'm somewhat concerned by balance fetishists because balances of opinion are artificial. Everyone's idea of a "balanced" news report is shaped by their own sense of what constitutes "balance" in the media. I'm sure that Flanagan has other reasons to be upset with CBC, and to him this is another in a long list of grievances. What is fascinating about Flanagan's letter to Taylor is that the one thing that the media needs for better balance is more Tom Flanagan.

Of course it's not as though Tom Flanagan (or Stephen Taylor for that matter) are silenced by the media. I've read lengthy Flanagan Op-Eds in the Globe and Mail and I see that Macleans has anointed both Flanagan and Taylor as two of their 50 extra-special opinion-shaping people. It is evident that there are lots of opportunities for both Taylor and Flanagan to get their opinions out there. So what if one reporter ditched Flanagan's shimmering pearls of wisdom on one story? I've seen plenty of one-sided articles emanating from both Macleans and the CanWest Global empire that I vehemently disagreed with.

What did I do?

Well, I didn't waste time trying to dig up some journalism code of ethics with which to sully these institutions. No. I accept that everyone is biased, you, me, Stephen Taylor, everyone. I criticized and/or mocked the pieces that I found disagreeable instead. There is nothing wrong with an editorial board having a point of view - in fact the media that I consider most suspicious are those that swear up and down that they are unbiased. It's humanly impossible to be unbiased, when some outlet says it's unbiased it likely means that the bias is more insidious than in other cases.

On a side note, what happened to the whole conservative pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps mentality? I mean this seems to be an appeal to have someone else fix a problem for you. Shouldn't true conservatives busy themselves using entrepreneurial energies to create a leaner, more innovative market-driven competitor to a big mushy government apparatus like the CBC?