Roundup: Bored with the discourse?

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Over the weekend, I was forwarded this particular diatribe from the Globe and Mail’s generally awful television columnist, John Doyle, about how boring Canadian political shows are. And he’s right about that—they’re generally pretty terrible (even if their hosts are wonderful people), but Doyle largely misdiagnoses why.

“This boredom-with-the-government narrative is very much the story that pundits like to peddle in Canada and part of a broad-brush assumption that only furthers the dangerous idea that Canadian politics are tedious and unworthy of engaged attention,” Doyle asserts, not incorrectly, but this needs a bit more delving into where the issues are. Doyle is again not incorrect when he points out that the repetition of the same small group of talking heads across different shows is a sign that “Ottawa is a small place with a small set of people jawing on about the same topic, often using the same phrases, over and over,” but it’s getting closer to one of the problems.

“What’s missing from these political conversations on TV is the sense that Canada is socially, politically and economically dynamic,” Doyle says. “What we see is a media power structure that is entrenched and sometimes literally bored by the discourse.”

This is part of it, and while he talks about how he doesn’t want us to devolve into American-style political coverage of partisan shouting matches (which was de rigeur when Evan Solomon was hosting Power & Politics because he believed it was what led to “good TV”) and that he wants Canadian TV to make better use of the medium, part of the problem is the shrinking media environment. These shows are made on a shoestring budget with a very small group of producers, and have to fill a defined news hole every day, and in order to do that, they have established rolodexes of reliable commentators who they know will drop everything to show up on TV, even if they have little of use to say (actual experts not always being reliably available which is why they are harder to book), and talking heads to fill that airtime. To add to that, there is pressure to diversify who those talking heads are, so they wind up using the same few across all channels because they’re all trying to tick the same boxes with the limited number of bodies available.

For the rest of the airtime that isn’t devoted to the talking head panels, much of that is devoted to things like MP panels, in an age of iron-clad message discipline, so you don’t get actual insight or debate, you get recited talking points and hosts simply both-sidesing everything rather than calling bullshit on any of it. Not every host—some are better than others (particularly some that are filling in for main hosts), but when the main tactic is to play Devil’s advocate and simply recite the other party’s talking points and getting them to respond, it doesn’t make for illuminating television, and it lets the politicians get away with murder, because they’re not being challenged. I only wish we had Rosemary Barton back doing the accountability interviews on a daily basis, because she was good at it and did call the MPs on their bullshit because she knew how. But this isn’t because the media power structure being bored with the discourse—it’s because it’s under-resourced and afraid to challenge that discourse, which is a very different problem than what Doyle imagines it to be.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 257:

More Russian strikes over the weekend continued to attack electrical generation in Kyiv and other regions in Ukraine, causing more blackouts as winter approaches. In all, some 35 towns and villages in nine regions were hit, while Russians continue to dig in at Kherson in the south in advance of a Ukrainian counter-offensive, while the front line in Donetsk is now at the outskirts of Bakhmut. The good news is that the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has been re-connected to the power grid, so it doesn’t have to rely on emergency diesel generators to cool the reactors (which are currently all shut down).

Good reads:

  • Federal and provincial health ministers start their first face-to-face meetings since the Before Times in Vancouver today, and the battle lines are already drawn.
  • The federal government’s primary media agency is recommending they halt any advertising over Twitter until they get a better sense of what is going on there.
  • Canadian big banks are getting in on the carbon offset market, hoping to provide some transparency, stability, and regulation to the space.
  • Here is the tale of an old (at the time) Canadian Red Ensign that was found at Dieppe made its way to the United States before being returned to Canada.
  • The Liberals are running former Ontario finance minister Charles Sousa in the upcoming Mississauga-Lakeshore by-election, which will be on December 12th.

Odds and ends:

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One thought on “Roundup: Bored with the discourse?”

  1. All of Canada’s political fights like today’s fiasco will pale into insignificance after the US midterms tomorrow which will see the end of the American democratic experiment. The nation is headed for authoritarianism which is the fervent wish of fearful white evangelicals who see their dominance threatened by “others.” The devolution of sanity in the US will see violence and chaos and civil war, all the conditions the world’s despots have wanted. Buckle up!

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