The Media vs. John Lennon

Politics for Joe 14

by Hubert O'Hearn

for Lake Superior News

December 30, 2010

Preamble:

It was on a late night streetcar ride this past March from Toronto Western Hospital where my beloved Kimberly rested in ICU following emergency brain surgery, to my sister's flat off the Danforth. Twenty years had passed since I lived in Toronto, with a girlfriend at the time with whom we used to describe ourselves as Toronto's Dashing Young Sophisticates. All the dancing and daring martinis in the then fresh nightclubs around John Street aside, one of the thousand things about Toronto I had enjoyed back then was the Streetcar Crazies.

You know who I mean. The lost souls one missed prescription dosage away from a stint in the mental hospital, or worse a frozen corpse shroud in newspaper under a Q.E.W. overpass. Come listen to us, for we are the dead and we know of many things.

And I enjoyed and enjoy listening to them. I used to comment in light sarcasm to other Dashing Young Sophisticates that, 'If the Apocalypse is really coming I want to know about it.' Ha hah. Ho hoh.

So with my eyes fixed on whatever book I was reading for review on that March night, I kept my ears alerted from the ravings coming from the man across the aisle, two seats ahead. His age is immaterial, his description obvious, so I leave those details to your mind.

But he carried on, to the woman sat next to him – I couldn't tell if she was sympathetic friend or unfortunate bystander who had lost the seat lottery – shouting in a measured calm voice.

This city is doomed. You'll see. You'll see. The newspapers and the TV and the radio, they're all behind Tom Ford. Oh Yeah. You'll see. You'll see. There's going to be the army on every street and nobody's going to be allowed downtown. Oh yeah. You'll see. You'll see. We're going to be driven out or locked up. Oh yeah. You'll see. You'll see.

Ha hah. Ho hoh.

One G8 summit and a municipal election later (he got the order wrong), who's the Streetcar Crazy: him or me?

This picture of a beautiful woman probably led you to this column. That's my point.

A Working Class Hero is Something to Be:

I've been considering this column for weeks now, which is why there has not been a new Politics for Joe column for weeks now. For much of what I am going to discuss and damn at length is based on what I will call the casual punditry that infests news media. I utterly reject the tossing out of explosive opinions (e.g. Tucker Carlson: “Michael Vick should have been executed”) just for their own sake; deadline met, audience aroused, cheque cashed.

Such opinions are the IED of journalism. The Improvised Explosive Device, assembled by uncaring fools, and lobbed or embedded in places where they will cause the most damage. The only difference is in the audience reaction – an IED is feared; an IED pundit is idolized. Why?

As soon as you're born they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all,
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,

Those are the opening lines to John Lennon's 'Working Class Hero”. You'll be seeing more of them here, but for now I just want to say that on December 8, the thirtieth anniversary of Lennon's murder, I read and heard lots of references to Beatle John, Father John, Husband John, and Victim John but darn few about Revolutionary John.

The reason? To discuss Revolutionary John would mean that followers might emerge: questioners, dissenters, those who look at the way things are and say No.

I've been reading Chris Hedges' 'Death of the Liberal Class' for a review which will be appearing in the next few days. Hedges' essential point is that popular opinion has been so narrowed and homogenized by state and corporate control that there truly is no contrary argument available for the way things are. We argue about the tailoring of the Emperor's clothes while ignoring the pink and naked man beneath.

Think I'm wrong? I'm going to play an off the cuff game. Here are the top news (sic) stories on several major news sites, chosen as the first four off the top of my head, as I write this column:

Yahoo!: 'Spring Olympics' top news story' (actual headline)

Google News: 'Graphic cigarette warnings ignore contraband problem'

The Globe & Mail: 'UAE denied new visa fees discriminate against Canadians'

The New York Times: 'Families Bear Brunt of Deployment Strains'

Well let's see: if you're a cigarette smoking Canadian serviceman hoping for a spot of skiing in Dubai while on furlough, you're going to be piss mad. Otherwise, it's not your problem.

There's room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill

What is disturbing about these headlines is how they skirt around the real issue at their heart. Let's take them in order.

1. Spring Olympics – The cause is global climate change, but let's not talk about that. Instead, let's talk about the inconvenience, the 'unusual' nature of a warm February in British Columbia that nonetheless – yay for us! - did not stop the Olympics from being an extended Canadian end zone dance worthy of Billy 'White Shoes' Johnson.
2. Cigarette labels – Again, let's approach a major issue from the point of view of a shy teenaged boy at the high school dance – we shall observe the action from the perimeter. Instead, why is the question never asked that: Cigarettes do nothing for the soul except put off the pangs of addiction while causing cancer, yet are legal. Marijuana at least makes people giggly happy while causing cancer, yet are illegal. Cigarettes are profitable and taxable. Marijuana can be grown by any fool with a heat lamp, seeds and a pot to plant in.
3. UAE visa fees – A story about the Middle East that does not add to the discussion of the distrust and cultural cleavage between the Arab world and the West. Instead, luxury travelers are inconvenienced. Slightly.
4. Troop deployment – Deployment is hard on families. Therefore, let's support the troops! For the troops are good! Families are good! Our war is good! It just needs to be managed better.

'Keep you doped with religion, and sex and TV'

Of all the things I can teach or describe to you about Politics today, what I am about to say is the most important of them all: There is no debate. None. Not in the 'major media', barely any in the minor media.

Let us take the Afghanistan War as an example – there are others, but Afghanistan is well enough known to the reader that there is no need to waste time in describing the situation. What one comes down to is a dialogue straight out of Samuel Beckett:

A: How will we know when the war is over?

B: When it is won.

A: How will we know when it is won?

B: When the war is over.

A: When the other side surrenders?

B: Yes.

A: And if they surrender?

B: Then the war is not over.

A: Why?

B: Because if they surrender, then they are still alive and not to be trusted. So the war continues.

A: And if they do not surrender?

B: So the war continues.

A: So therefore the war continues?

B: But only until it is won.

Lather, rinse, repeat. In the meantime, private contractors will rake in billions in profit, young people who want to have a career and simultaneously serve what they perceive to be their country's needs will die, and we face a situation of perpetual war that never addresses the root issues of ethnic hatred, poverty and minimal education. But all that will come, we are told, when the war is over. Except we shall never know when the war is over.

And Joseph Heller thought 'Catch-22' was a novel.

But yet, the danger exists for the controlling interests of business and their political lackeys (for the word is not too strong) that someone might sit up and take notice, that the absurdist dialogue just described might have a public life. Can't be having that.

So instead we have a false debate, a magician's distraction as it were. We instead are told to exercise our opinions on Lindsay Lohan's latest rehab, Heidi Montag's new tits, or whether or not New York Jets' football coach Rex Ryan has really, really nice feet.

Equally, we are faced with a false debate between a Right and a Left – neither of which exist. I say that debate does not exist because there are no extremes that might invigorate the left or the right. No one – no one – is advocating complete disarmament. No one - no one – is advocating a complete prohibition on cigarettes. No one – no one – is saying that perhaps Al-Qaeda has a point when in its murderous, suicidal way it says that the West is the enemy for it hates the Islamic world and supports the Israeli apartheid state.

There is no Right and Left. Such argument is no more extreme than a golfer and his caddy arguing whether to take a sand wedge or a lob wedge for the approach shot. Should we be playing golf, or militarizing the Gulf, at all? That question is not asked.

And you think you're so clever and classless and free,
But you're still f@(king peasents as far as I can see, 

The saddest set-piece of modern journalism is when it decides to anoint someone ass Radical of the Month in order to proclaim, 'See? We are intense and trustworthy!' the latest is Wikileaks' Julian Assange. All appropriately wind-swept blonde, a Liam Neeson character in training, Assange is our current Danger Man. And by re-publishing Wikileaks' stolen material, the media get to claim that they are fighting against The Man! Working for openness! Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Madness.

What is the outcome of Assange? It is this. He has done more to advance the cause of government secrecy than any man in history. They'll just be more careful about it all next time. Any further tightening of sunshine laws will be justified by pointing at Wikileaks and saying, 'We need to protect the privacy of our citizens and our state.' Assange is like God to the corporate state: if he didn't exist, he'd have to be invented.

A working class hero is something to be.
If you want to be a hero well just follow me,

No, dear friends, you're being deluded. It's ironic really that the journalists of a foregone age when the media (nee press) was actually confrontational to power that they were popularly known as a gang of brutish drunks. (My father was a columnist and my uncle Walter the editor of the Montreal Star- the description was fairly accurate.) The irony comes in that whereas the present journalistas are largely healthy eaters – they are a pretty trim bunch – they have more reason to wallow in the whisky bath of shame.

I've written about this In Another Place as they say of the Senate or House of Lords in the Commons, but I do feel the need to expand on the theme of the pap bath that modern 'news' has become. Because it should, it must, affect everything you think about politics today.

Political speech more than ever has become a language of raw slogans designed to stimulate raw responses. I'm not going to pretend that I remember an age when it was much more. I am a great admirer of the late Pierre Trudeau, but put absolutely bluntly, the average voter who swept him to power saw him as a guy with a nifty haircut, a hot car and said whatever you wanted to get up to in the wee small hours was fine by him so long as everyone involved was down with that.

But that at least, again in bluntest terms, was more than Obama. Obama was America saying to the world the Archie Bunker line of, 'Some of my best friends are Negroes', a reluctance to return to the Clinton years, a nifty poster and he had nothing to do with George W. Bush.

Except, what precisely, beyond a watery Health Care Bill and the revocation of Don't Ask, Don't Tell has Obama done that is much different from what Bush would have done in the same time and place?

Exactly.

But yet, one is led to believe that there chasms of difference between an Obama Democrat and a Bush Republican. The Tea Party is not all that different. They used to be called America Firsters and John Birchers. They're the crazy uncle that's always been part of the Republican family but they liked to leave out of the Christmas card photo.

And yet, they are alone on the fringe. The Tea Partiers – or the John Baird brand of Harper Conservatives in Canada – are truly a fringe whose message is More of the Same! More war, more secrecy, more intrusion into the lives of private citizens, and the environment can go to hell because that's going to be the next guy's problem.

So where exactly is the equivalent on the left? There is no true contrarian voice. One may not agree with arguments such as:

• pull all troops out of the Middle East and Afghanistan
• cease development of the Tar Sands immediately until there is scientific consensus
• take the starvation or abuse of any child in the world as seriously as one would take the fate of that child were he or she to be a child of your home country

But such a debate, which would in turn strengthen the more moderate members with the dialectic of ideas, is not heard. There are two reasons.

One, it is infinitely easier for the media to illuminate and re-write the positions of the current 'left' and 'right' wings (which are as different as Tweedledee is to Tweedledum) than to seek out opinions that frame the debate as a bottom versus top proposition. That, by the way, is the genius of Michael Moore. He literally shoves the powerless in the face of the powerful.

But two – it's bad for business. The 'news' so to speak approaches its audience the way Harry Lime looked at the people below the Ferris Wheel in 'The Third Man'. “The dead are happier dead.” People don't want to be disturbed. Outside of scary movies and comic books they've spent their entire lives being told they don't have to be disturbed – not for long anyway. The next Saviour will be along shortly. We'll package him up nicely: Obama shooting hoops, Ignatieff flipping sausage, Harper singing Beatles' hits. You'll like us! You'll really like us!

Ideas will only re-enter the arena when the media decides it will be so, when it re-assumes its mantle as the challenger of authority. Media must be brave, else it is just advertising with weather maps.

Media must not pacify the audience with pseudo-news of who Scarlett Johansson may or may not be married to this week. If there truly needs to be celebrity news at all within a newscast, let it be celebrity news that illuminates rather than overshadows a true issue, a real issue.

For instance, the most read posting on my website was about actress Alyssa Milano sponsoring wells being dug in arid areas of Africa. That is real celebrity news because it is about environmental victims. Bottom versus an uncaring top. (For it is an uncaring top. One week of war could bring fresh water to all of the Saharan fringe.)

So Joe, that is your politics today. Demand the truth and support it where you find it. And don't be afraid to hear a shocking opinion. Happy New Year and -

Be seeing you.

Jon Stewart and the Shame of Journalism

Inside Television 534

Publication Date: 12-31-10

By: Hubert O'Hearn

Jon Stewart named Man of the Year

As this column appears in print on New Year's Eve, I am reminded of the oft-repeated words of the late Ed McMahon: 'New Year's is a night for amateur drunks'. So therefore sir, you and I as professionals need to set an example for all the kids out there. There is both a right way of doing things or a drive off the highway way. You want to go with that first one.

For instance, just because at midnight that bottle of expensive scotch on the sideboard looks an awful lot like that jug of Mateus you lugged into the party at eight does not make it yours. You don't want to get kicked out in the snow because frankly right about now you couldn't drive a nail let alone Dad's truck. So be advised.

Now then – I used to write a column for pwtorch.com, the best pro wrestling news website. The of course there were multiple hospitalizations from our house that left me and the dog staring at each other with little thought balloons appearing over our heads that read, Who's Next? So the hobby writing dropped low on the priority list.

Anyway, the editor – Wade Keller – posted a question on the Torch website this week that I thought was a good way of approaching the New Year. He asked, What would you like wrestling to give you in 2011?

I responded to it, not that I'll belabor you with the response. Search the site and you'll find it. But I do have an answer to my own version, What would I like television to give me in 2011?

The New York Times this week stated that comedian Jon Stewart is the Edward R. Murrow of today, specifically for focusing on the issue of the lack of publicly-funded health care for the 9-11 first responders. Many of them have suffered from debilitating respiratory illnesses from the carnage they inhaled, among other sicknesses afflicting them, and Stewart essentially shamed the U.S. Congress into passing a Bill that was dying on the order paper which covered the first responders' needs.

As much as I admire and applaud Jon Stewart for this and many other actions, I think that virtually every legitimate journalist should feel as shamed as the obstructionist Congressmen. Every Western democracy, for this isn't just an 'American thing', has a reflexive belief in protecting the freedom of the press. One innately believes in this, like the acceptances that babies are cute, no one cooks like Mom, and when mice wear pants and appear in a drawing they have the ability to speak.

But press freedom is only worth defending if the press actually does its job. Its only purpose should be to challenge authority. All authority. Government, business, religion, scientific, economic, labour, ethical and overall philosophical. That's the job gentlemen.

The most ridiculous proposition in today's journalism (specifically here we'll deal with television journalism) is that somehow having a one-track attack as an editorial decision, whether its from the right or the left is somehow a breath of fresh air. Feisty! Provocative! Giving them fat cats hell!

That is a bigger load of rubbish than all the discarded trees and bags of ruined wrapping paper to be found tumbled the streets on the first garbage pick-up day after Christmas. Fox News or the upcoming Sun TV in Canada aren't revolutionaries: they are panderers. They pander to the interests of power and capital, of a permanent war mentality that cannot be challenged, and at a concentration on the glamorous or infamous figures at the top rather than the needs of the millions and the billions.

By the news – broadly stated – not challenging equally it challenges nothing. It merely reinforces the opinions of its audience, pitting right vs. left, whereas the true battle should be bottom vs. top. The audience seeks out opinions that it agrees with already. Do remember that the definition of a genius is a man who agrees with you about everything.

To close with something quite specific, News, Entertainment, Weather and Sports are all legitimate public interests. But I want them kept separate. Unless the result is absolutely of massive public interest, like Canada winning the gold medal in hockey, I don't ever want to see a sports story on my half hour or sixty minute newscast. I don't want to see or hear anything about Michael Jackson's kids unless I tune into or surf over to a place that features entertainment information.

Stop occupying our minds with bread and circuses. Even a circus can get boring after a while.

Here's the good news. We survived another year. That means we win. Be seeing you.

(If you'd like to read more of my commentary, my book review pages can be found Here.)

Alyssa Milano and The Gift of Christmas

Inside Television 533

Publication Date: 12-24-10

By: Hubert O'Hearn

Alyssa Milano, from her mycharitywater.org page

And where will you find Christmas tonight? I suppose if your eyes are looking through lenses of belief you might find it almost anywhere. For some it will be in the sound of hymns soft as Silent Night or bold as Come All Ye Faithful. It may be in the toe of a stocking nestled next to the tangerine. Or perhaps Christmas rests its head on the pillow next to a sleeping child. It can turn snowflakes to magic and a turkey dinner into something that fills not just the stomach, but feeding the soul itself.

And sometimes – rarely and most beautifully – you don't find Christmas. It finds you.

I'll let you in on a non-secret. I wanted to dump the whole thing this year. No Christmas for me, no sir. I could find no reason to celebrate the season – not this time. The show wasn't ready to open.

Then I found something on Twitter – yes, silly little 140 character at a time Twitter – that changed my mind. And wouldn't you know, isn't the irony and the opportunity just perfect, that it has a TV connection.

I'm sure you recognize the name Alyssa Milano. You're reading a TV column, of course you recognize her name. Child star on 'Who's the Boss?' from 1984-92; adult star of 'Charmed' from 1998-2006. Movies, music, a clothing line and a fanatical devotion to baseball. A celebrity.

There are those who sneer at the modern times and the cult of celebrity. If I look back at the archives of my writing, I'm sure I can find my own contributions to the general theme of, 'I'm above all that nonsense.'

But a celebrity has an advantage, a power if you will, in the ability to make people pay attention. And when lots of people pay attention, and lots of people do one little thing sometimes all those little things become big beautiful things.

Did you know that one billion people – roughly thirty times Canada's population – don't have near access to that most basic of staples, clean water? Those that don't walk an average of three miles a day to get enough water for the day, then return the next day and the next and all the days after that until their bodies break down and they die. The result is weakness, poverty; and from that anger, hate and just not giving a damn about anything other than personal survival.

Alyssa Milano turned 38 this past Sunday and she gave the cause of water...her birthday. Through mycharitywater.org and by Tweeting the request, she asked for her fans to give to the development of clean water projects in Africa; specifically Ethiopia. And her goal of $38,000 was achieved and surpassed.

Maybe it was just the timing of it all, but I felt incredibly moved by this simple act of a good person who has earned the right to sit back, relax, and wait for the servants to peel a grape.

Maybe you won't see the relationship of this simple act to the celebration of Christmas. But I remind you that there is pretty good evidence that Jesus Christ himself was an Ethiopian, and besides which, isn't 'giving' the point of this festival of indulgence?

Take a look at the mycharitywater.org link. Do something yourself. Or do something entirely different for a whole different charity. I think, I believe, I know you'll find Christmas carefully wrapped inside your heart, waiting to be released.

Give peace a chance. Be seeing you.

What to Give for Christmas?

Inside Television 532

Publication Date: 12-17-10

By: Hubert O'Hearn

You very nearly came to this space this week to find 500 words or so on the average salary ($55,000 as of 2007) of CBC employees, the resultant huff and puff of various Tory MP's ($157,000 as of 2010) and my defense of the former at the expense of the latter. But, a Thunder Bay bus driver has saved you from that dry reading.

I realized some time ago that my biggest fans are cab drivers and bus drivers. This is a good thing. 'Taxi' was one of my favourite sitcoms and Ralph Kramden one of the greatest of all comedy creations. But I was getting off the Mainline the other day when the driver asked me, 'Hey, you got something special planned for us to read for Christmas?' I of course answered, 'Yes sir!'

I of course had nothing of the sort planned. I'd thought of it certainly. For the past ten years I've done an annual Suggested Gift column with the best of TV sets, comfy chairs, boxed DVDs etc. etc. etc. A column like your morning toast and jam: easily made, easily forgotten.

But all this darn reading has gotten in the way of all that. To be perfectly honest, if it wasn't for all the reading I've done for my book reviews, I would have gone mad this year. Sincerely. Really. No exaggeration. And the reading has turned me off of consumerism. Sincerely. Really. No exaggeration there either.

You see, when you read about poverty in Africa, and struggles for survival around the world, it kind of makes what new scent of Old Spice is available just a might touch unimportant. But I am here to help, not hector or lecture.

You want to honour your loved ones with gifts. Good. Great. Lovely. Why don't you give them something different this year? – give them You. Huh?

A dear friend of mine who hates reading his name in the paper, even though he is one of the finest keyboard players this city has produced, said something interesting while we were indulging in liquid enhanced problem solving the other night. He said that because of the wretched Northwestern Ontario winter, everyone he knows is creative in some way: music, writing, drawing, crafting, woodworking, you name it. So why not do that and then give it away?

I've written my darling Kimberly a Christmas Book for this year. One of the stories is free for you to share – it can be found at thefearandloathingpage.blogspot.com. Stories, poems and essays all printed upa nd bound together. You can do the same and nobody is going to care if you're not Charles Dickens, John Cheever, or even me.

Or, if all else fails, spend two bucks and buy a blank DVD. Load it up with show clips that have made you happy, songs that have made you sing, pictures that have made you laugh, anything at all that defines who you are and who the gift recipients are to you.

There. Over. Said. Done. And if that dear person in your life was looking for a sweater, try giving a hug instead. A hug is much warmer than any sweater ever knitted. Merry Christmas to come, and to all – Be seeing you.

Turn Out the Lights, The Party's Over

Inside Television 531

Publication Date: 12-10-10

By: Hubert O'Hearn

The Dream Team

It couldn't have been more than three weeks ago that I got to thinking about Don Meredith, who passed away this week of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 72. I was wondering if the man Howard Cosell nicknamed Danderoo might ever do a one-shot guest announcer appearance on one of the football broadcasts. God knows the NFL could use a little fun this year.

Yes, even the most fervent football fan – the one whose every kitchen appliance is decorated in team colours – knows that this year has been a dog. And that's even before Michael Vick starting contending for MVP honours. There are no undefeated teams, no one chasing records, the glam offensive units of San Diego, Indianapolis and New Orleans are lurching, James Harrison of the Steelers has paid more in illegal hit fines this season than you'll make in the next two years, the Dallas Cowboys killed their coach fir all the world to see, and the less said about Brett Favre and the Vikings would be a pleasant change.

Whomever wins the Super Bowl will have fans who will claim this as the bestest ever football season! The rest of us will know better and move on to the NBA or NHL.

But that was the thing about Don Meredith. He was at his best making some godawful Monday Night Football blowouts memorable. He's the first sports announcer I can remember who was truly funny. For instance, there was the famous moment during a blowout in, I think, Denver when the camera panned to a bored fan sat alone in the stands during the fourth quarter. The fan noticed the camera and instead of waving his arms like an idiot and putting on a rainbow wig, he just raised a middle finger. To which, Meredith commented, 'That means “We're Number One” Howard.' Classic.

Meredith also did not mind revealing the side of his personality that made him the rumoured (and more or less confirmed by him) of the two best football novels ever written: North Dallas 40; and Semi-Tough. Dallas was not the media centre that New York was in the 1960s, elsewise Meredith and the Dallas Cowboys would have given Broadway Joe Namath and the New York Jets a good run for the backpage party headlines.

There was the time when the Cleveland Browns brought into the game a new wide receiver, one who actually had a decent enough career. He had an unusual name: Fair Hooker. Over to you, Don. 'Ah nevah met one of those Frank.' As it would turn out 20 years later, neither did Frank Gifford when he was caught avec courtesan and landed on the front page.

ABC, or in recent years ESPN has never been able to get that magic formula of Cosell, Gifford and Meredith right again. They tried the comics, they tried the sportswriters, they came very close with Al Michaels and John Madden, but the first Monday Night Football crew was an unmatchable classic.

The final thought is what you would think it would be. The best thing about a bad game is that Meredith would essentially tell you to change the channel. Chick Hearn used to do the same kind of thing for the Los Angeles Lakers ('ladies and gentlemen, this game is in the refrigerator. The door's closed, the light's out and the butter's getting hard') but only Don Meredith would make you want to stick around to hear a southwestern baritone that poured out like the third Jack Daniels of the night:

'Turn out the lights,

The Party's over

It is time to say good night.'

Enjoy the eternal party Danderoo.

Be seeing you.

Wikileaks Agonistes

The Wikileaks Scandal:

Where Do You Draw the Line?

Politics for Joe 13

by Hubert O'Hearn

for Lake Superior News

All right, so it has been formally confirmed that Prince Andrew is a buffoon. What else is new? Quite a bit actually, and all of it is quite, quite scary.

Once the Wikileak and Guardian (q.v.) stories drawn from an immense cache of (ahem) secret American diplomatic messages were released, I knew that this was a subject that was going to require a reasonably deep analysis. For the past several years, people have been speculating on the subject of what 'new media' was going to look and feel like – such fabric ranged from kitten-soft woolies to a corduroy impossibly charged with enough static electricity to light the New York Times Building for a year.

Who was going to win out? The old media companies like the NY Times? The newer, gauche, arriviste typed like the septuagenarian Rupert Murdoch? Maybe sexy-looking and saucy web concoctions like Slate or Salon?

Turns out it's any asshole with a memory stick an d a blog with a catchy name.

Regardless of whether you view Wikileaks 'founder' Julian Assange as a Babyface or a Heel one inquiry about him can be stamped as closed. He is a lousy journalist.

Journalism is all about editing. The classic image is of the harried and balding city desk man two coney dogs away from a terminal heart attack, slashing away at copy with a red marker, or red highlighting on a pdf as it were. All true, but there is also editing at the point of attack. The individual writer, producer, reporter is self-editing constantly. In the simplest case, in a scrum, the politician will glance at you once. You will get to ask one question. You can think of 15. Which one will you pick?

That's editing on the front-line.

But Assange didn't do any of that. Like the Hollywood scandal sheets (e.g. Confidential) of years gone by, Wikileaks has just published everything slipped to it, raw as meat cut fresh from the slaughterhouse knife.

And that's my problem with it.

Whether or not Assange is captured, prosecuted and sentenced to Devil's Island – or Terrace Bay ON – with only a Commodore 64 at his disposal for communication, it really doesn't matter. Now that he has shown the way to fame and a happy happy joy joy fleeting moment of briefly being The Biggest Story in The World, there will be more imitators than the hydra had heads.

At least the Guardian, my favourite newspaper in the world had the decency to organize the stories, release them with informed commentary, and add the codicil that 'just because Wikileaks is reporting this, its not necessarily true.'

Because – dear God – what if in the middle of all these officially acknowledged as real communications, what if Wikileaks had put out one that was absolutely false. Imagine this headline:

Wikileaks Reports U.S. to Cease Israeli Support: Cites Long-Range Oil Demands as Rationale

Who would believe the denial?

Much of the Wikileaks, er, leaks can be defended on a public right to know. For instance, why in hell is a buffoon like Prince Andrew on the public payroll? Surely there must be a gentleman's private club in London willing to pay for a Prince of the Realm to sit in an armchair and spout silly things in a shout ignored by the card players.

That's all fine.

But if you accept the general notion that a nuclear-armed North Korea run by dictators madder than anything Lewis Carroll ever imagined, then the leak that China was thinking about tossing Pyongyang into the Sea of Japan and cleansing its hands of a client state, well, that leak should make you seriously question the idea of need to know v. wan t to know.

If the story is correct, there is not a chanced that China will now follow through with the abandonment. One truly cannot imagine a greater loss of face than a supposed private communication on a delicate matter … BEING SPLASHED ACROSS THE INTERNET! And so the world will sleep a little more uneasily tonight.

This is the most fruitless proposition I will ever put forward, but I truly beg anyone like Julian Assange who is surreptitiously passed sensitive inform ation, please in the name of humanity, think before you publish.

Be seeing you.

Story of a Brain Injury - CTV's W5

Inside Television 530

Publication Date: 12-03-10

By: Hubert O'Hearn

Those who know me well, or at least regularly follow this space, will understand why I am choosing a particular program to promote this week. I hope that it won't prove a disappointment that I'm not writing about a Christmas special, although as this is a story about will and family and love I do like to think that it matches this season's purported themes.

This Saturday evening and repeated again on Sunday afternoon across the full CTV network, W5's Sandie Rinaldo will tell you the story of Captain Trevor Green. Whilst serving in Afghanistan in 2006, was blind-sided with an axe-blow to the head during what was supposed to have been a routine meeting with village elders. He wasn't killed, but was left with a massive amount of brain damage.

There is no real telling how an injury to one area of the brain or another will affect a person. The old story is absolutely true of a railroad foreman being felled by a spike driven through his skull yet got up and proceeded to yell orders and lead a normal life afterwards; or as normal as one can be with a doughnut hole through the cranium. On the other hand, lobotomies which were performed in the 1940s through the 1960s on the 'uncontrollably mentally ill' with the intent of only slightly dulling the patient's energy often left dull and empty shells where once there stood a man or a woman.

In the case of Captain Green, the axe did not sever his personality nor his will. You see, Green was engaged to Debbie Lepore and damn it, he was going to walk that aisle and stand for that ceremony.

It took four years. I'm not really giving away an ending here; television rarely features noble failures. But the story of Trevor Green's recovery is one that – well, I hope you never have to live through anything similar but if you do, you will be much the better off for the knowledge.

A brain injury is unlike any other illness or physical malady. Improvement and recovery is measured in inches, not in feet. I've recovered from open heart surgery and relatively one is leaping about like a stag from bed to chair, chair to hall and once around the floor. No, a brain injury is inches; it is syllable by syllable, thought by thought, and one second more of memory than there was yesterday, last week, last month, or last year.

As a tale of will and a demonstration of the massive amounts of therapy, community and family support required to assist the patient back into a world with a goal of love, I don;t know how this story can fail to move your hearts.

Be seeing you.