Tag: media strategy

No, Carole… I really have no idea at all.

This was the CBC’s chief political correspondent Keith Boag’s response to CBC Sunday host Carole McNeil as to why the seasoned journalist and a select few were excluded from a Conservative media briefing on the now famous Elections Canada “visit” at a Sheraton hotel conference room this afternoon.

Boag expresses befuddlement and files a story about the story, something that has happened more and more in this town since Stephen Harper became Prime Minister.

They say that in this town, it can be more about who you know than what you know. Today, it seems that this is still true.

In less than one week after Boag and camera crew had an exclusive tip-off to show up and film an RCMP investigation (as Boag originally reported), the senior CBC newsman files a frustrated story but fails to speculate on why he doesn’t share the same insider access to CPC news tips that he seems to enjoy from raid tipsters with special knowledge of Elections Canada’s gameplan.

“Controversial” civil rights

In every struggle for civil rights, there is controversy. By its very definition, a right implies not permissibility, but rather that permissiveness is not only inherently offensive to the concept of rights, but that this frame is at the root cause of the struggle. When one has the right, it is without question.

Controversy has existed in every struggle for human rights, for without controversy there is no struggle and without struggle there is no assertion of rights.

In the fight for racial and gender equality there has been controversy. In the struggle for equality in sexual orientation, there has been controversy. For those fighting for reproductive choice and those fighting for the right to life there has been controversy.

If controversy is definitively intertwined with the fight for any civil right, isn’t it redundant to say?

In fact, when it is used selectively for some rights struggles versus others is there a values judgment and a betrayal of impartiality to one side of a rights debate versus the other?

Consider CTV’s eulogy of Charlton Heston:

“Now to the death of Charlton Heston. As an actor, he parted the Red Sea, painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, won a chariot race and survived an earthquake. But his most controversial role was played off-screen lobbying for gun rights as president of the National Rifle Association.”

Canadian news reports thankfully would not do Martin Luther King Jr. disservice and would not describe him playing a “controversial role” for civil rights, nor would they describe the Famous Five’s role as “controversial” when they asked the Supreme Court of Canada, “are women persons?” The fight for free speech has caused controversy, yet no self-respecting Canadian journalist would selectively describe such a struggle as “controversial”.

Since all rights struggles are controversial, why do some merit the qualifying (and effectively disqualifying) label?