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COMMENTARY
September 20, 2008
Gotcha!
Never open a column with a sentimental aside.Good: now that I’ve made that dispassionate point, I may proceed to the sentimentality. I cannot type the word “gotcha” without remembering George Bain (1920-2006), author of the first “Ottawa column” in a Canadian newspaper, and anchor of the bottom-left corner of the Globe and Mail’s editorial page in my 1960s childhood. With Richard J. Needham, on the bottom right, and Richard J. Doyle at the top of the editorial masthead, I inscribe a mnemonic triangle. Verily: if I do an “Internet search” of my own soul, under the search-terms “Canada” and “journalism,” these three names pop up at the top. Bain was of the old school of journalistic hackery, a man who left home to adventure at the age of sixteen; and started into his trade as a copy boy. He was a “flyboy” (pilot) in the Second World War (just as my own father), later a foreign correspondent in London and Washington. His occasional “Letters from Lilac” -- columns signed “Clem Watkins,” from an imaginary Saskatchewan town -- were the conceit by which he communicated the very flavour of Canadian life and politics, and first drew for us in words such caricatures as “Pearson’s chuckle, Diefenbaker’s wagging forefinger, Trudeau’s shrug” (quoting Canadian Encyclopaedia there). For droll wit, and a serene worldliness (see his book, Champagne is for Breakfast), Bain was doyen. Miscast onto the Toronto Star editorial page, he finally retreated -- as many others have done, from the wreckage of their journalistic careers -- into teaching the subject. But as director of the journalism department in King’s College, Halifax, he remained a beacon of civility, in the broadest sense. His book entitled, “Gotcha: How the Media Distort the News” (1994), the product of his retirement to Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, will be on the course list of any worthwhile Canadian journalism school. “Civility, in the broadest sense,” I wrote. This does not consist only of good manners, let alone reduce to one of the quaint and ridiculous lists of “journalistic ethics” that are in fact taught in the schools. It is not simply methodical respect for the dignity of one’s individual colleagues and opponents, though of course that should play some habitual part. But as I would argue, true civility requires something a little higher -- a position from which human dignity itself is upheld, and in which cause, one can be no respecter of persons. Bain could be a harsh critic of his colleagues, and a painful thorn to his opponents, but he would get personal only in self-defence. His ironical humour was the means by which he kept himself aloof. He eschewed any kind of “insider” status. Humour itself is crucial to “civility, in the broadest sense,” for it oftentimes presents the only possible escape from real blind anger. That is incidentally why “politically correct” attacks on every form of public and private humour are so profoundly barbaric; why humourless campaigns against “hate speech” and the like become the very embodiment of a primitive and irredeemable hatred. Civility cannot reduce to “tone,” for it is not a pose. It is an attitude of the soul towards the whole of society. Indeed, the situational requirements of politeness sometimes stand in the way of true civility -- or “decency” as I sometimes call it. In the public order I recall from my youth, there was still some general understanding of such things. At the hint of serious public (as opposed to personal) scandal, journalistic and political forces were certainly deployed. But I do not recall the withering ack-ack and “gotcha!” that has become the hourly routine in our media. What President Clinton called “the politics of personal destruction” -- and assiduously practised -- has become the norm. It is made worse by the overwhelming left-bias of the mainstream news media, where the targets are selected consistently from one side. My impression is that the politicians caught the disease from the journalists. By now, from all sides, we have abandoned most discussion of public policy and intention, and all parties indulge in a child’s game, to “gotcha” and “[noun]-gate” one another, interspersed with expressions of hypocritical outrage when each in turn is hit. This spreads back through the media to the people, in a kind of partisanship from which all civility has been extracted. George Bain saw it coming, and now it is here. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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