Getting played - the Conservative 'Bias' of Canada's Liberal Media

Fans of the West Wing, or just political junkies generally, know there are a few time-honoured ways to manage the press. For instance - releasing bad news on a Friday was called 'taking out the trash' on the West Wing. In the UK in 2001, a real politician was fired for stating that the attacks on the World Trade Center provided a good opportunity to hide bad news stories.

There are, no doubt, many other such games. Whether you view them as legitimate political gamesmanship or an 'abuse of the democratic process' will usually depend on whether the party playing the games happens to be your team.

What is currently annoying me is the frequency with which the Conservative government plays one of these tricks, and the so-called 'Liberal Media' (and the Conservative mouth-breathing crew too, of course) fall for it hook, line and sinker. Last year at around this time there was suddenly a whole lot of manufactured outrage about the banning of the niqab during the citizenship oath. A great little story for the Tories, as it plays to their core support, and it is guaranteed to fill up column inches as the progressives and conservatives overflow with moral outrage.

It dominated the news cycle in the same week as a much bigger story that was negative for the Conservatives. I remember that distinctly. Unfortunately what I don't remember is what the more important story was. BUT THAT WAS THE POINT. The niqab story knocked the actual important news off the front page, and we can be sure that was exactly what was intended.

I don't mind the Conservatives trying that game - but do the press have to fall for it so easily?

This week we have the 'storm' of 'outrage' over Justin Trudeau's 2010 comments about Alberta.

2010. So ... public comments, made in a television interview, on the public record for two years, are news this week? Now why might that be? Might it be because the Conservatives have been sitting on it for two years, or went looking through old speeches last week to coincide with David McGuinty's resignation, and they found an optimal moment to release it? Sure.

Again - you can't blame the Conservatives for trying this stuff, but what gets my goat is how the press simply swallows it without ever asking the next question: 'why now'? And then ask the question 'are we getting played'.

Sure, after all that, if you still think it's newsworthy that Mr Trudeau pointed out that the current government is dominated by politicians who originate from the Albertan Reform movement (a movement notorious for its antipathy for Eastern Canada and its need to build a firewall to protect Alberta from the rest of the country), write the story, but at least make a nod towards the larger picture while you're doing it.

The problem I have is with the lack of inquisitiveness of the media. The failure to 'ask the next question'. Maybe it's the lack of staff and lack of money from which the media now suffers in the age of the internet. Whatever. Combined with the media's fear of being labelled 'liberal' by the government, and the culture of fear and paranoia that pervades the entire CBC, it creates a situation where the 4th estate can be easily and swiftly put to work en masse by the government against its enemies.

David Cooper - phenom

This article (commenting on how, basically, all major league players start of as shortstops when they're kids) reminded of a chapter in ‘Fever Pitch’ (excellent soccer book, not crappy baseball movie) that goes through the numbers of exactly how mind-bendingly awesome of a baseball player you have to be before you can SUCK LIKE A WHIRLWIND at a major league level. The fact they’re all shortstops is a symptom of that.

So (because I feel like writing an essay), if we use David Cooper as our symbol of an archetypal ‘not very good’ major league player:

• There are 750 players on the major league rosters (25 man).
• There are 11.5 million baseball players of all ages in the USA alone. Perhaps double that worldwide.

Therefore a generous estimate is that for every 15,333 player who pick up a bat, David Cooper will have been better than all of them. A fairer global number might be nearer 30,000. And not just a bit better. He will have been incredibly, mind-blowingly better than nearly all of them. He will have been the best player his high school ever saw, by a huge margin.

In fact, Cooper went to a good baseball school, that’s had at least 8 players drafted (thanks Baseball Reference), in the perhaps one of if not the best places in the world to grow up if you want to get drafted (California), but Cooper was much better than any of those earlier high school stars had been. Probably outstandingly better. Only one other person made it from his school to the MLB – who played in a total of 26 games over two seasons.

In fact there’s evidence of how good Cooper was: http://www.lodinews.com/sports/article_ff187a90-42a8-11e1-b3d0-0019bb2963f4.html?mode=image&photo=1

Then, he went to college, posting .359/.449/.682 with 19 home runs and 55 RBIs in his junior year, got drafted high (one behind Brett Lawrie) and stormed through the minor leagues, breaking records and winning titles.

In other words, the guy has never known anything but success at everything he’s done in baseball. By any normal criteria, he is more than a phenomenon. David Cooper is, as far as people like me are concerned, as close to the perfect baseball machine as I am ever likely to encounter.

But David Cooper is not very good. David Cooper’s career was being written off by most even before he got to the major league level, and he’s done nothing much to alter anybody’s opionion of him since he arrived.

Why? He’s ‘weak’ defensively (by which we mean he’s incredibly strong and talented defensively, but not quite as good as about 500 other people in the known universe), and doesn’t hit with enough power to be a first baseman (by which we mean he hits with a huge and astonishing amount of power, but not as much as the 30-40 other people in the entire universe who also are not great defenively, and who are therefore competing for first base/DH jobs).

All of which qualifies me, an out-of-condition, fat, middle-aged ass sitting at home, to say:

a) Cooper, you suck.
b) What moron ever drafted that piece of useless shit.

Life is not fair.

Burn Down the Hall of Fame

All round good-egg and thinking-man's jock Stephen Brunt commented on the Clemens/Steroid/Hall of Fame issue yesterday, saying "Halls of fame aren’t churches. No one is asking anyone to declare Clemens a saint."

But the problem is, it is. MLB and baseball writers have made it that since the beginning. Although the Hall may be full of cheats and bums, they are cheats and bums whose dark sides were often hidden from the public during their careers. The writers, at least until Jim Bouton's 'Ball Four', conspired to protect fans from the truth about ballplayers, because it was deemed too corrupting to our sensitive souls.

American Heroes with Feet of Clay

The Hall of Fame was designed to be a Hall of American Heroes who happened to be successful athletes as well. That's why Shoeless Joe is not there; that's why Pete Rose is not there. The movement that will try to keep out Bonds and Clemens out (and I suspect eventually fail) is the last dieing gasp of American Baseball Hero-worship, whereby a player's moral cleanliness was as important as his athletic performance.

The writers have always known it was baloney - they were always complicit in covering up the cheats, drug abusers, philanderers, peeping-toms and drunkards. But as long as that was all hidden, everything still worked. Players were exemplars for American youth, symbols of moral and physical purity and the American Way, and the myth that anybody can achieve their dreams if they just try hard enough. Was any baseball journalist surprised or appalled that Alex Rodriguez visited a strip club in Toronto? I doubt it. They were surprised and appalled because it was reported.

The players have never been hypocrites. From the dawn of baseball they've done what humans do - they've cheated and striven for success at any cost; they've been human and frail and weak; they've combined incredible physical success with awful personal failures. When faced with a sport that preferred to turn a blind eye, they've done what competitive people will always do - made the most of it.

The real sinners here are in the Commissioner's Office and the Baseball Writers of America - just as they have been ever since Baseball became a symbol for America. It's their collective work of fiction - the Baseball Hall of Fame - that is the problem. Burn it down.

A modest proposal.

In 1729, Johnathan Swift wrote a satirical essay suggesting that the problems of the Irish poor could be solved if they sold their children as food to the wealthy. The satire's power derives in large part from the straight-faced detail with which it argues for the eating of children as a way to alleviate suffering. It also works to an extent because it is a reductio ad absurdum. It is clear to even the coldest-hearted reader that eating infants is ridiculous, but it showed the hypocrisy of genuine but patronising solutions often proposed by the wealthy for the poor. Just because something can be argued logically doesn't mean it isn't abhorrent.

All of which I mention because of the stories in last week's press about so-called 'after birth abortion'. On seeing the story first in the Daily Mail I assumed that the story was probably exaggerated to the point that it was untrue. On the knee-jerk basis that the UK media are evil, I pitied the poor researcher (for some reason only one (the female one - draw your own conclusions) of two authors has been targeted) and the inevitable deluge of hate she would receive.

The deluge of hate has certainly been unleashed, and it hardly needs saying that hate of this sort is disgusting, disturbing, and no doubt terrifying for the recipients.

The catch is, though, that the Mail's report of the content of the academic article is not, in essence, wrong, although the Mail was no doubt delighted to give the hornet's nest a good kick. The article, entitled 'After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?' does argue that there is no moral difference between a foetus and a newborn baby. The abstract of the article speaks for itself:

"Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled."

Following the storm that arose, the Journal of Medical Ethics, which published the article, strongly defended it's decision to publish, pointing out that it is not even a 'novel' argument. The novel aspect is the proposal that it is just as ethically acceptable to kill a healthy newborn as a severely disabled one, because the the newborn is only a potential person, and not a person. This 'novel' aspect of the paper is by far its very weakest point. While it could be argued that it is a compassionate act to end the lives of people with extreme and terminal illnesses - as is widely viewed as tolerable at the end of life for adults - the article makes the case that killing a newborn could be viewed in some cases as preferable to adoption, because a dead infant might be less psychologically damaging to the mother than an adopted one.

'However weak the interests of actual people can be, they will always trump the alleged interest of potential people [ie non self-aware newborns and foetuses] to become actual ones [ie self aware humans], because this latter interest amounts to zero.' (Comments in parentheses are mine.)

"However weak the alleged interest of actual people can be". Let's analyse that phrase. Elementary maths tells us that anything times zero is zero. So something ridiculously small that can be considered a benefit to self-aware person (eg, 'I'm hungry', or even 'I'm inconvenienced', or 'I'm bored') is argument enough to kill a 'potential person'. O, as the saying goes, MG.

Dr Minerva, the author who has received the lion's share of the hate, has defended the article by saying that 'This is not a political paper - this is not a proposal for law, .... This is pure academic, theoretical discussion.' Personally, I don't find that a remotely satisfactory defence. Academics spend much of their time arguing that that they don't live in ivory towers, and I don't believe for an instant they do. The point of ethical discussions is, ultimately, to shape the development of global opinion far outside the academic world. The article, although intended for an academic audience, and not intended to - directly - shape policy, of course has the objective of persuading people that, were infanticide legal, it would be both morally acceptable and indeed have benefits for parents and society.

All of which brings us back to Swift. If we were to accept that a newborn baby is not a person, and is therefore disposable at the convenience of it's parents or society (because 'adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people', and because it's interests will always be summed to zero when put against 'actual' humans), then we also must accept that morally a baby is no different from food. According to the authors' own logic, there could be no moral objection to eating babies, at least so long as it is a self-aware human doing the eating.

So what is my ultimate objection? On one level, simply that infanticide is 'just obviously wrong'. A very weak response. But why go further than that? It was good enough for Swift to make a point that has stood the test of 300 years' reading. 'Just obviously wrong', though, speaks to our shared cultural, ethical and moral make up. Millions of years of history and evolution have brought us to that conclusion: that a world that does not care for its infants, even it's poor, disabled and those who face a life of suffering, is not a world worth living in; that the 'milk of human kindness' is what makes life tolerable, even though it is often illogical, foolish and inconsistent.

Is it stupidity or something worse?

The most disturbing facet of the Conservative fight-back against the 'Robo-Calls' scandal is the one that says 'this is a storm in a teacup because no result was affected'. That's the argument being made by the hilarious-if-it-wasn't-so-disturbing Sun Media today by Ezra Levant and Michael Coren.

To summarise, the sanity-deniers over at Sun Media are arguing a) that Liberals and NDPers are making a storm out of nothing and b) this is actually a conspiracy to discredit the election and somehow 'steal' a result for that Tory bogeyman, the 'coalition' of the left.

It's disturbing because they can't tell the difference between, on the one hand, general political sleaze (which is bad enough, but not illegal), such as an unfair or distorting attack ad, or the political 'economy with the truth', of which, although undesirable, every party is guilty, and on the other hand the serious criminal offence of voter interference. Worse - perhaps Levant and Coren can tell the difference, but they just don't care. Of the two possibilities, the second is infinitely worse.

Let's get this straight - whether the election result was affected by voter interference is completely irrelevant. The ability to vote unimpeded is the basis on which democracy is built. There is no more fundamental right, not even freedom of the press, or freedom of expression. The idea that there were 'a few bad apples' within the Tory ranks who thought misdirecting likely opponents was worth doing is bad enough - in fact it's already a very serious accusation. But we know it went further than that.

1. We know by Elections Canada's own evidence that multiple ridings were affected, and that automated calls were used.
2. Ipso facto, the fact those calls were made requires at a minimum a party worker with database access beyond riding level to the national database of canvassing results.
3. We know, and I know from experience working campaigns, that only party insiders have that level of access - no small-time riding operative is trusted with data like that - for obvious reasons. In fact, only a handful of people can typically access canvassing results, even in their own riding.
4. We know that ordinary people can't just set up robocalls. You need to do them through specialist companies, with specialist software and equipment. You need to work with party-trusted suppliers, probably from a list of approved companies. You need to have quite a lot of money.

So something bad is at work here. Something illegal, and something in a different league from the vicious, counter-productive and stupid smearing of Vic Toews.

All of which is not the same as calling the election into question, it's not to question a single result in fact. It is however to point out, as Andrew Coyne did on the CBC, that there is preliminary evidence to suggest a scandal that would put the Sponsorship Scandal in the shade.

Far from the 'jury being out', the evidence is only just beginning to be presented, but if - and it is a big if - evidence is found that points higher up the party hierarchy, then yes this is a scandal of Nixonian proportions.

Just when you thought the Murdoch era was over ...

... he reminds you just why you despise him so much.

Yesterday Murdoch launched a strong defence of The Sun, simultaneously announcing the long-suspected launch of the Sun on Sunday.

Murdoch closed the News of the World on the basis that some journalists had been involved in phone hacking. While the guilty parties deserve everything they get, a large staff of entirely innocent parties were disposed of at a whim when the newspaper closed.

Journalists at the Sun are being investigated for what would seem the far more serious crime of bribing the police. Yet those under suspicion are reinstated to their jobs on the basis of 'innocent until proven guilty', and their legal fees paid by News International. There is no question whatsoever that the Sun will ever be closed down. 'Innocent until proven guilty' is not a principal that the Sun has often been willing to extend to the targets of its journalism.

The - deliberately provocative - announcement of the launch of the Sun on Sunday gives the explanation for these different approaches. Murdoch was given an excuse, on a plate, to close the News of the World, and jumped on it.

No businessman wants to produce two identical products using all the expense and manpower of two separate companies. The News of the World in essence WAS the Sunday Sun - it's existence was to be made redundant by the new paper.

Phone hacking enabled Murdoch to close the News of the Screws and greatly increase the profitability of the Sun on Sunday from day one. Don't confuse a cold-hearted business decision with an ethical response to the phone hacking scandal.

Wag the Dog? Being forced to war on a timetable

There seems to be the terrifying prospect of Israel and/or the West engaging in another war in the Middle East before the year is out. The 'window' apparently is the summer or just after the US election. When the British government gets hawkish, you know you're in trouble. William Hague, the UK Foreign Secretary is waffling on about a new 'cold war' today, while the Guardian reports Obama insiders saying "the US will be left with no option but to launch an attack on Iran or watch Israel do so", surely a case of the tail wagging the dog if ever there was one.

Personally, I don't see that one sovereign state trying to develop weapons that other sovereign states already have can ever be a provocation for war, however much we might wish they don't have them. You can only argue that it is 'provocation' if you believe that Iran is somehow less of a state than the rest of us, and that we have a say in its internal affairs ... and that has a million uncomfortable implications. But that's not an argument you'll see coming even from progressives.

Finally, as with Iraq, I don't believe that Iran is much of a threat to anyone, except its own people ... a judgement this article seems to support.