Losing It

If one were to look back at this week a year from now, this most surreal of weeks, I’ll wager that the most significant moment was the one where the mayor’s press secretary started waving her arm in front of a CTV News camera.

The CTV reporter was taping a sit-down interview in Ford’s office, while Adrienne Batra, the mayor’s all-seeing, all-controlling press secretary, sat off-camera to one side. Having wrapped up an interview on a presumably serious matter, the reporter had the temerity to change topics, and ask him about the talk of the day.

You, like every man, woman and child in Canada, may have heard. Apparently, a motorist had seen Ford illegally talking on a cellphone while in traffic. Rolling down her window, she and her six-year-old daughter gave him a thumbs-down and told him to get off the phone. The mayor is said to have responded by giving the pair the finger, and mouthing a message whose particulars went sadly unrecorded.

The mayor’s climb-down from this position will not be remembered as one his more graceful maneuvers. A post on his Twitter account—written in the first person by a staffer—explained that the account was “not accurate,” and while not denying that it happened, explained that “this is a misunderstanding.”

This led many to ask exactly what kind of misunderstanding it could have been. Perhaps it was a culture gap, in which the motorist didn’t realize that in northern Etobicoke, extending the middle finger is actually a good-luck gesture, wishing the recipient fruitful progeny and smooth roads. It might have been a nasty finger-cramp, or a game of itsy bitsy spider gone tragically awry. Eventually, some journalists cobbled together a theory under which Ford thought his finger worked as a cell phone antenna, and that he’d get better reception if he extended it and waved it around a bit. At that moment, he was simply struggling to use voice dialing function. “DIAL… MAMMOLITI! (wave, wave, frown) DIAL MAMMO– ”

It was that, or Ford had totally flipped off a six-year-old and was trying to fudge his way out of it.

So it was that a CTV’s Naomi Parness, sitting in his office, tried to ask the mayor what had really happened. The mayor turned pink and started laughing. His press secretary did the only reasonable thing under the circumstances: She started waving her hand in front of the camera. Batra’s plan was to spike the footage, and render it unsuitable for air. We know this, because she explained what she was doing as she did it.

“You’re done!” she said. (Wave, wave.) “See? You’re not going to be able to use it, because I’m just going to keep talking.”

CTV aired it anyway.

This came in the midst of the parallel fiasco of Doug Ford’s foray into literary criticism. Doug Ford, we can now conclusively say, is the best thing that ever happened to liberal Toronto. After the spectre of library cuts was raised by the service review process, the mayor’s brother waded into the fray with a series of incendiary pronouncements, each one more bizarre than the last, only to end in an embarrassing climb-down of his own.

First, he variously declared that there were more libraries than Tim Hortons in his ward (there aren’t) including one in an industrial area (it’s not), which he’d shut in a heartbeat (he can’t).

This led him into a public feud with Margaret Atwood, who had been assembling a petition to save the city’s libraries. Margaret Atwood! “Good luck to Margaret Atwood,” he said. “I don’t even know her. She could walk right by me, I wouldn’t have a clue who she is.”

He added that if she wanted to be taken seriously, she should be democratically elected—presumably, like him. This did not go over well. He appeared to take Atwood as the coddled product of the downtown elite, which would make her a safe target. He missed the fact that Margaret Atwood has clout because she’s succeeded beyond his wildest ambitions in the arena he reveres most: The free market.

But those who suspect that he’s a calculated provocateur (and sometimes, I’m among them) should also consider the damage he’s done to any hope his administration had of closing libraries. Instead of taking the line that, regrettably, times are tight and efficiencies need to happen, his attention-grabbing first statements defined the administration’s position as actively anti-library, anti-book and anti-author. Many city councillors will have a hard time supporting that line.

By Wednesday night, having evidently been hauled back into line, he’d clarified his statement, explaining that he meant the exact opposite of what he said.

“What I was saying is, everyone knows who Margaret Atwood is. But if she were to come up to 98% of the people, they wouldn’t know who she was,” he said. “But I think she’s a great writer and I look forward to her input.”

His clarification, it should be noted, also says the exact opposite of what his clarification says. Misunderstandings! They’re tricky.

This kind of stuff is the Fords’ schtick. But the media’s forbearance about their goofiness is starting to shift.

On Tuesday, David Olive, the Star’s respected business columnist, penned a stunningly cutting blog post about the Fords. It takes some doing to make an anti-Ford screed stand out at the Star, but this one broke a taboo in the mainstream media: It came out and called the Fords stupid. Not just stupid: “Two mayors sharing one brain, and that transplanted from a chicken.”

As hostile as the mainstream media has often been to Ford, it has largely stayed within the lines of criticizing his actions, not his person. It has been broadly respectful of the fact that Ford handily won an election and the public trust that went with it. And it’s largely played ball with the access restrictions imposed by the likes of Batra. No longer. This is significant: Constitutionally, broadcast news is the blandest, most broadly uncritical of the news media. It’s also the most likely to reach the busy, politically disengaged citizen. When you’ve lost them, you’re in trouble.

I understand that on Global’s national news Wednesday night, the Fords were compared to the Trailer Park Boys. Even members of Ford Nation might not appreciate the implication that they’re living in a trailer park. I feel for the Fords’ media wranglers: The brothers have seized control of their narrative—and this is the story they’re telling.

Origin
Source: Toronto Standard