Last week the PM made “news” with a series of tweets featuring the Harper cat, the pet chinchilla, the government limo, the drive to work and the office meeting.
Normally, tweeting does not require a production team. But these tweets were more like a promotional video than the spontaneous one-offs most tweeters produce (the distorted picture, the banal text, the lame joke).
To me, it seemed like a successful experiment. Given the PM’s reputation for being a cold fish, it certainly had the desired effect. Here was an approachable, even a semi-sociable Harper, offering information about himself without an ATIP request or a court case.
But only part of the experiment was about offering a warmer and fuzzier persona to a doubting public. The more important part was how the media would play it — big, little, or not at all.
It made quite a splash for a fake enterprise and it proved a point: Stephen Harper could fully control his image and message using Twitter and it would appear on newscasts as a news item.
It also beats having to talk about weightier matters — like why the government is clamming up on the biggest espionage case in generations or how Arthur Porter got to be in charge of CSIS oversight.
Perhaps the prime minister’s temerity in tweeting his own image is based on the replica news model he has managed to foist on broad swaths of the news profession. Replica news is what the government wants to see reproduced. Journalism, as Orwell famously remarked, is printing what someone doesn’t want you to print.
Right now, replica news is all the rage and our PM is not the only person who would rather offer highly contrived promotional images than answer questions about important public matters.
Vladimir Putin’s annual macho photo agenda — shooting a Siberian tiger, firing a pistol at GRU headquarters, or flying with cranes in a motorized hang glider — becomes the self-selected measure of the man and the public image. That’s much better than having to explain how Alexander Litivenko came to be poisoned with polonium or Sergei Magnitsky died in a Moscow jail.
Likewise with Barack Obama. Though some of us might doubt it, the president apparently likes to while away his spare time with clay pigeons, at least when he needs to counter criticisms by the National Rifle Association about his plans for gun control. What better way to say that than with video of Obama the outdoorsman enjoying a day of skeet-shooting? (Did you see the way he was holding that shotgun?)
It should be mentioned, for the record, that image management is not without its own hazards. When former Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day stormed the beach in a Sea-Doo and wetsuit … well, it went non-viral. But back then, replica news was in its infancy in Canada. Stockwell still had to give the press the time of day.
A few highlights of our replica news landscape at this point: the PM has choked off real information and substituted bumf at the cabinet level; he has terrified the public service into silence, with one of his ministers going so far as to require loyalty oaths from staff; his rare appearances on network television are like outings to one of those farms where the kids get to pet the animals.
As for those traditional press gatherings where the questions aren’t limited by the PM and the identities of the inquiring journalists aren’t agreed to in advance with some flak from the PMO, Stephen Harper has done away with them altogether. Not one in nearly seven years in office.
There is one other major thing the PM has done. As Lawrence Martin said last week on this site, he has turned the main preoccupation of the press into endlessly handicapping the now-perpetual campaign mode of our politics. Who is winning, and who is likely to win at the end of the day? The incumbent, as everyone knows, is nearly always ahead in the polls. Imagine how all doubts are resolved.
Instead of analysis, investigation and information-gathering that resolves contentious issues of public interest, we have various substitutes that are a kind of abdication: the politician as radio host and columnist — and when he himself is not available, the ubiquitous stand-in flak or corporate cheerleader.
One of the worst examples of replica news is that exercise in sophistry and self-interest known as the TV panel. When the audience goes away not knowing what to think, it might be entertaining, it might be funny, it may even be better than the Shopping Channel — but it isn’t news.
This has consequences for ordinary people. Last week a public health issue involving the processing of commercial salmon infected with a deadly virus was featured on a national TV panel on the CBC.
The item featured several politicians, including Pierre Lemieux, the parliamentary secretary to Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, and Liberal international trade critic Wayne Easter. There was also a scientist whose work focused on infectious salmon anemia (ISA). You know the drill: three or four guests in the studio and one or two more languishing on wall monitors — a steeplechase everywhere towards nothing.
It came down to this: Lemieux said that the salmon virus posed no risk to human health or U.S. exports in the case of 240,000 fish that had been exposed to the disease. Not surprisingly, that was the position taken by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency — although it apparently represented a departure from past practice.
Wayne Easter demurred, claiming that the usual practice was to destroy fish exposed to ISA and that infected fish could not in any case be exported to the United States. The integrity of our brand was on the line.
The scientist said that no one knew if ISA-infected salmon were harmful to human health and also that other countries followed the practice of destroying fish infected with, or exposed to, the virus.
In the end, Lemieux repeated several times that the government’s policy was the right one because it was based on “sound science.” The salmon were safe to eat and to sell, including into the important American market.
Why? Because the government said so. Wayne Easter again disagreed.
As for the only person on the panel qualified to talk about the relevant science, she was never heard from again after her original assertion that other countries destroyed such fish and no one knew if ISA-exposed salmon pose a hazard to human health.
Other than persuading a few people not to have salmon for supper, the factual issues in the discussion were not resolved — except by government fiat declaring the fish was good to go. That’s what federal fisheries minister John Fraser once said about a million cans of tainted tuna.
So what’s next? A tweet of Stephen Harper salmon fishing?
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Michael Harris
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