Canada Needs New News Icons

They’re losing it. The icons certain groups have held dear because they “tell it like it is” are falling prey to their age and their overestimation of their own importance to the country.

Don Cherry: the Most Obvious.

He has told it like he wishes it would be for a segment of the population that would like to say the same thing. But real people don’t have the nerve because they know how hateful it would sound, spoken out loud around the dinner table where you have to look at the faces of the people you are offending.

With these guys you can’t tell if they’ve just overdone it naturally or if their step outside the boundaries is a ploy to gain more viewers. Since we’re looking at the most successful of performers, we have to assume it’s calculated.

In Cherry’s case, it sounded like the incoherent ravings of a senile curmudgeon. On the other hand, its very incoherence meant that he never actually said anything specific about any real person or group, so everybody could interpret it any way they liked. Very sly. Unfortunately for his continued employment, the decent people of Canada chose to take up the challenge. He’s now history of the “I can’t believe people actually spoke like that in public” sort.

Rex Murphy

Rex has always been a favourite of mine. He often ruffled feathers, but his analysis was usually bang on, and sometimes came from a point of view that’s the rest of us hadn’t noticed. Unfortunately he has recently signed on as a shill for Big Oil, and his continued rants against Ottawa in general and the Liberals in particular are full of the usual talking points, half truths, and trigger phrases.

Rex Defending Don: the Sublime to the Ridiculous

His lame excuse is that that Cherry’s key insult to many Canadians was an “indelicate phrase that was all of two words.” He laments that Cherry won’t get a testimonial dinner. If that’s what “Canadian Hockey’s number one statesman” looks like, I think Canadian Hockey needs to take a look at itself.

It’s a shame to see a good mind go soft. Of course, there’s a tinge of self-interest in Murphy’s rant. It’s easy to be brave and mouth off all the time when you have a nice secure perch in national media to do so. It’s a rather cold draught at your back to realize that you could overdo it and lose it all.

It makes one wonder whether Rex sees himself in the same boat as Don, and therefore he has to support him no matter what. If his recent rants are any evidence, Mr. Murphy is more likely to be let go because of the loss of his journalistic instincts than to be fired for offending Canada’s sense of itself.

South of the Border…

…where we see their president Tweeting insults about a person at the very moment she is testifying before a Congressional committee about his impeachment. In any decent country, that would be called intimidation of a witness.

Bullying in Entertainment

As I keep telling my knee-jerk-reaction friends on Facebook, the kind of cowardly bigotry that these people represent is not acceptable in a civilized country. The CBC put its pocketbook in front of its morals for decades by putting up with Cherry “because he brought in the viewers.”

There’s a lot of other programming that would bring in more of those viewers (Naked mud wrestling springs to mind) that you don’t air for obvious reasons.

“It Doesn’t Do Any Harm”

I’ll let you in on a little trick I used to teach my school classes how to be a good audience. It all has to do with having empathy for the shyest kid in the class. Think what that child is going through, agonizing about having to speak in front of the class, and watching how the rest of the class treat each other and the teacher. And all the time that kid is thinking, “When I get up there, they are going to act like that, and I’m just going to die.” When everyone in the class is aware of the feelings of the weakest child, it’s amazing what a positive attitude you can create.

The Bottom Line: How We Treat Our Weakest

So when you’re deciding whether somebody’s loudmouth rant is going to be doing any harm, think of the disadvantaged people of Canada, and how it is affecting them. If you don’t think that’s important, then you can classify yourself as one of the bullies. You’re not creating a Canada we can be proud of; you’re building a power hierarchy that allows you to shove weaker people around.

So before you push the “Like” or “Share” button, before you jump to the defense of one of these on-air bullies, think what effect his “telling it like it is” will have on the people in Canada who are not so lucky as you are. That’s the standard you should judge yourself against.