Vancouver Courier
for October 18, 1998

Is the state of journalism is like the weather – everyone complains but nobody does anything about it?

Since the invention of the printing press there’s been a symbiotic, very uneasy, relationship between the media and the people in charge and from personal experience on both sides of this relationship I can tell you it’s a strange one. Politicians and the media work together, play together, drink together and certainly bullshit together. But the signs of strain are always there.

This strain manifests itself in many strange and wondrous ways and no better example can be found than the Clinton-Lewinsky affair where the press and the politicians are both good and evil and the same time. It was yellow journalism to expose, if that’s the right word, Mr Clinton’s sexual foibles but in the best journalistic traditions to demand that Kenneth Starr bring all the evidence to the public. It was evil for politician Clinton to lie but noble as hell for other politicians use that, in an election year, to imply their own virtue. On both sides of the relationship what’s a virtue one day is a vice the next - it seems as if journalistic and political ethics are subjects reserved for the textbooks.

Knowlton Mr Nash in his recent book, Trivia Pursuit, grinds his teeth at the journalistic excesses he’s seen – though some might say that his meal ticket, the CBC, has been a journalistic excess in itself. And his myriad examples of lurid, often distorted reporting only tell a fraction of the story. Only newspapers have, occasionally, the luxury of a moment’s reflection before reporting events. The electronic media has to be faster and sexier, minute by minute, than its competitors and honesty is the casualty.

Now, because of the Internet, TV networks are drifting into that grey semi relevance the big city newspaper has long endured.

To visualize the Internet is like contemplating the universe – how big is it? Endless, you say, how can that be possible? For the Internet, to all intents and purposes, is unlimited in the amount of stuff it can make available. More and more of it will be moving pictures and there’s already no limit on the topics about which you can find information. Worst of all, it’s unaccountable. When my website (www.rafeonline.ca) is up and running next month most of you will know who the source of the information is but what about people in Turkey or Samoa who can access that site as easily as you?

The Cassandras are tearing their hair out over this problem. We must have regulations, they say. Never mind that these regulations can’t be enforced – any more than the ones in the 80s against satellite dishes could be – we must do something! The masses will be misled by scallawags and frauds (as if that were something novel) and steps must be taken to save civilization!

That layer of society which always knows what’s best for everyone else, believing that they alone are smart enough to separate good from evil, is on the warpath. Except they can’t do anything. Not a damned thing.

Far from meaning that we are doomed to untrue garbage fed into our lives by hidden shysters with websites, the very opposite’s the case. In science as in everything else, for every action there’s a reaction. Libraries will get back their funding. The book business will continue to prosper. Large newspapers will make a substantial comeback and community papers like this one will have a wider audience than ever. There’ll be pain for awhile but it will pass.

Why am I so optimistic?

Because I trust people. Unlike the "higher purpose persons" I mentioned above, I think people are thirsty for knowledge and will demand that the information they deem important meet a rigid standard for accuracy.

It’s true that people have been led by the nose in the past but that’s when information was tightly controlled and much, much scarcer than now. The relentless pursuit of politicians by microphones and cameras may have eroded our often misplaced trust in politicians but it’s also made us demand the truth and we’ve become very good at sniffing out the barnyard droppings which fooled our parents.

The turning point in Canada came with the Charlottetown Referendum when people refused to accept a deal just because the nation’s establishment told them to. The turning point in the United States occurred in 1776 when Thomas Paine cried "these are the times that try mens’ souls".

Some will always be gullible but most who access the trivial or worse, just because it’s there, will know it for what it is. The thirst for truth will become more and more important and amongst all its crap, the Internet will make that easier to find.

Most importantly, to compete at all, the newspapers, television networks and radio stations will have to provide easy access to reliable information or perish.

That will be their niche and they’ll fill it – bet on it.