Politicking in Anger

Many years ago I was coached not to write anything in anger. Anger allowed to chill makes for cooler thoughts and prudent words. 

I have tried to follow that advice over the past week.

What sparked my recent anger was Premier Doug Ford’s unintelligent and short-sighted remarks about mainstream journalists becoming irrelevant in today’s Ontario society. He accused journalists of being “far-left” and intent on deliberately distorting the messages of politicians. 

He said he bypasses professional news media and delivers his government’s news and views directly to the people through social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. 

That’s a common howl among the world’s demagogues – a twisted opinion that unfortunately is spreading during a time of huge change and trauma in journalistic organizations. And it is an opinion supported by little evidence, and certainly no facts, except for those that demagogues invent for themselves. 

I am a part of a family of journalists, have been a journalist all of my life, have many friends that are journalists and have worked with journalists whose health and happiness has been damaged by their dedication to doing their job. So I find Ford’s remarks insulting and hurtful. 

People could care less about how those remarks affect me or any other individual journalist. They should, however, care about how they affect journalism, a fundamental element of democracy. 

The journalist’s job can be explained in two simple words: Observe and report. And observe and report as fairly and honestly as is humanly possible. 

Journalists are not perfect and sometimes slip off track. So do doctors, truck drivers, lawyers, grocery store clerks, or anyone doing a job. But in any job, deliberate intent to distort and do damage is rare. 

And because people are not perfect, there are checks and balances in their jobs. The work of journalists is monitored by editors and by press-media councils that administer codes of practice and investigate complaints from the public. Most journalistic organizations work under some form of code of conduct. 

There are no editors, no codes of practice, no monitoring for facts and fairness in social media. Social media can be a helpful connecting point between family and friends, but generally is an open sewer often used by people with diarrhea of the brain. 

It takes zero research, little critical thinking, and just a few seconds to write a 240-character blurb on Twitter, or a fast post on Facebook. It takes hours of interviews, research and writing to produce a 500-word balanced report on government changes to autism funding.

Many politicians don’t like the traditional, professional media because it does not always produce stories they like. They want to see and hear only stories about them that have favourable spin.

John Stackhouse, former editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail, addressed this back in 2013 before the Ontario Press Council: 

“It is the responsibility of journalists to document facts that perhaps those leaders don’t want to be known. . . but the voting public and society at large needs to know much more than what elected officials want published. Ultimately it is up to the public to decide what to do with the information, but journalists need to be impartial witnesses and publish as much reasonable and defensible information as they can so that citizens, who do not have access to the same resources to question and challenge authority, can make up their own minds.”

Stackhouse made that statement while responding to complaints about Globe and Mail and Toronto Star coverage of the Ford family.

Certainly Premier Ford does not want to read or hear the stories questioning the fairness of having a buddy appointed commissioner of the OPP. Nor would he have liked the reporting of the public criticism that forced his government to back down on changes to autism funding. 

Getting the government’s news and views to the public through social media didn’t seem to help him in those two instances.

My guess is that those two cases had him angry when he stood before a convention of conservative thinkers last week and said professional journalists are losing the battle to inform people. 

I guess he never had a coach who warned him about writing or speaking in anger. Anger and bias are poor substitutes for critical thinking and facts. 

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 Read From Shaman’s Rock: www.mindentimes.ca/columns

Yellow Jackets and Health Care

It was plenty late arriving but Sunday’s first hard frost fell from the sky like George Bush’s shock and awe campaign in Iraq. It hit fast and hard and completed autumn’s Job One.

Job One in autumn is putting to sleep every yellow jacket in the county. Jack Frost got it done Sunday. He knocked all the wasps onto their backs, frostbitten stingers pointed skyward. Deader than the falling leaves.

So that’s it for another stinging insect season. The one just past was particularly nasty, starting early and lasting longer with wasps seriously aggressive in September and the first half of October.

Wasps are especially noticeable – and especially aggressive – in the fall because they are on vacation. Spring and summer they toil non-stop gathering food for their colony’s young. In late summer and early fall the queen wasps stop laying eggs and the workers are free to go about looking for carbohydrates and sweets, such as rotting fruit, to feed themselves.

More free time to roam usually means more encounters with humans. When they sting they don’t leave behind the stinger, therefore one wasp can sting multiple times.

I had two wasp encounters this fall. The second encounter, on Thanksgiving Weekend, landed me in a hospital emergency room. Two stings from a lone wasp left me looking like Pumpkinhead, my eyes swollen almost shut.

Three little bags of intravenous cocktails started to put me back in shape. No real damage done but it was a good reminder how dangerous these critters can be. And, another reminder of the contradictions in our health care system.

Allergic reactions to wasp stings can kill. Deaths from wasp stings are rare in Canada but anyone spending a lot of time outside, especially in the fall, is wise to carry a couple of antihistamine tablets. They will slow down an allergic reaction, if you happen to develop one.

Allergic reactions occur sometimes even if you have been stung before and have not reacted. Also, wasp stings can react with some medications, like blood pressure pills.

Going to hospital because of a wasp sting had a positive side. Once again I got to see the dedication and professionalism of medical staff who perform miracles in spite of the cancerous government bureaucracies that control their work.

The growth of health care bureaucracies is shocking and people need to rise up and demand a stop to it. Ontario has 14 Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) each with a CEO earning an average annual salary of close to $300,000. Then there are the COOs, CFOs, Chief Communications Officers and on and on.

Search the Internet for LHIN salaries and you’ll find eight screens of the names of LHIN employees earning the big bucks. Big buck acronyms sucking up dollars that should go into direct care for patients.

Ditto the 14 Community Care Access Centres (CCACs), which govern home care. 

Executive salaries in these questionable bureaucracies have been soaring. Meanwhile, the salaries of people who do the real work helping patients have fallen behind.

Bob Hepburn, a Toronto Star staffer, reported last year that only 40 to 50 cents of every tax dollar earmarked for home care actually reaches the health-care professionals who deliver services to patients. Guess where the rest goes? Executive salaries, administrative costs and corporate profits.

Meanwhile, back in the bush the frost has killed all the worker wasps but the queens have survived. They will hibernate below ground until spring when they will establish new colonies, build new nests and the cycle will begin again.

There is no such cycle in the health care system. The real workers survive the bureaucratic hard frosts and continue to help people with their afflictions.

Their big buck bureaucratic bosses, however, do not get to hibernate like the queen wasps. They continue to shuffle paper, improve their media relations and lobby politicians for more money and more power.

Wasp stings can be neutralized by drugs. Too bad there is not a drug to relieve taxpayers from the pain and swelling of health care bureaucracies.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
Profile: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K8FY3Y

Saviours of the News Business

   I’m sitting in the banquet room, enjoying my coffee and waiting for the Ontario Newspaper Awards ceremony to start when I gaze around the room and say to myself: “So these are the people who are killing the newspaper business?”

   That is what some desperate publishers of dying newspapers believe. They are hacking and slashing the people who produce their news because they cost money and apparently possess skills not needed anymore.

   Toronto’s Globe and Mail is hoping to drop 60 of its 770 staff through buyouts but it’s a good guess that there will be layoffs. The Toronto Star also is hoping to cut 55 jobs, many in editorial. The Vancouver Sun and the Province cite unprecedented revenue declines as the reason for staff buyouts that almost certainly will be followed by layoffs.

   It has been roughly two decades since newspapers began their steepest decline in profitability, power and influence. Newspaper owners and publishers have had all those years to invent ways of saving their businesses but have failed miserably. Their response to newspapers in crisis always has been to cut the staff that produces the news that customers value. 
   Corporatization of the newspaper world brought in many run-of-the-mill executive ‘geniuses’ who have come and gone, leaving behind much wreckage and broken dreams. None of them left poor.

   Most remarkable in the decline-of newspapers story is how the journalists have adapted to trying to produce, under increasingly miserable conditions, the only thing that matters in newspapering: news that explains who we are and how we live our lives.

   You can’t help but admire these people as you watch them walk to the front of the room to collect their awards, now sponsored mainly by organizations not part of the newspaper business. Many of the recipients are young and here on their own dollars because some newspaper operators won’t even pay the tiny awards entry fee, let alone the costs of getting to the awards ceremony.

   These are the people who will achieve what the millionaire owners and operators failed to do: restore the news business as a vital part of society, in whatever new forms or formats that replace the traditional newspaper.

The Lily of the Mohawks

So, the silliness has begun over the impending canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. The Toronto Star stirred the pot in January with a story about the ‘damned Yankees’ trying to steal away a Canadian saint.

Kateri Tekakwitha

Tekakwitha was a Mohawk child who was four in 1660 when her mother, father and brother died in a smallpox outbreak that ravaged Iroquois settlements in what is now upstate New York. She also had smallpox but survived with severe facial scarring and partial blindness. She was taken in by relatives and later began to develop devotion to Christianity brought by Jesuit missionaries.

Many of the Iroquois tribes did not like the Jesuits or the new religion. Priests were killed, and people who followed their religion were marginalized and mocked.

Kateri was among some Mohawks who moved with Jesuits to a Christian settlement now called Kahnawake on Montreal’s south shore. She became known there for her piety, acts of penance and care of the sick. She died at only 24 and those at her bedside said that as she passed away, the smallpox scars on her face disappeared and she became beautiful to look at.

The Catholic Church has been investigating miracles associated with her for well over 100 years. In 1943, the Vatican declared her a possibility for sainthood and beatified her in 1980. In October, she will officially become the church’s first native North American saint.

The fuss over whether Kateri was American or Canadian has been going on for decades. It will intensify now with her elevation to sainthood. It’s totally ridiculous. She is neither an American, nor a Canadian saint. She is a saint of the Mohawks, who were a distinct nation long before the Europeans arrived, and still consider themselves a nation despite all the attempts to assimilate them.

Kateri Tekakwitha is an interesting story, whether you believe in saints and miracles or not. More on Tekakwitha and the Mohawks will be found in Smoke Signals: The Native Takeback of North America’s Tobacco Industry, my latest book that will be published this fall by Dundurn Press.