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Whistle Blower’s Needed
“No one felt any obligation to anyone on the outside.”
American maverick journalist Lowell Bergman, speaking to Canadian counterparts in Toronto, was talking about the time CBS refused to air his now-famous expose of American tobacco companies and their relentless drive to hook smokers with new and improved forms of nicotine. He and whistle-blower/chemist Jeffrey Wigand later saw their unwelcome story offered to the public on the big screen in The Insider, featuring Al Pacino as Bergman and Russell Crowe as Wigand.
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Activist Video
Activists use and consume art, and artists live in a real world which they must find ways to engage and transform. The video activist movement really has tried to bring the two spheres together. Nonetheless, we have yet to take the most important step toward a truly “useful” art movement: we must correct our wrong-headed tendency to subservience.
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Vancouver Co-op Radio
For 29 years, Co-op Radio has provided its listeners with an alternative source of current events, arts, multicultural and multilingual programming free of paid advertisements. In an age of media convergence and repetitive play lists, the station’s more than 2,000 members support an independent media outlet that airs diverse content.
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Road Bloc or Building Bloc?
The Bloc Québécois is on a roll. For the last year, polling has predicted a major setback for the BQ in the coming elections owing to Paul Martin’s popularity and the Parti Québécois’ defeat in the April, 2003 provincial election. Yet, the sponsorship scandals have given the BQ a bounce by adding the injury of self-serving corruption to the insult of the sponsorship program, which believed national grievances could be overcome by papering Québec with the Canada logo. While it is too soon to predict the election outcome, the Bloc should more or less match its 2000 electoral results.
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Life in Vaginaville
Somewhere in that great pile of Junos and Emmys, I hope there’s an Elephant on the Table Award for the performer who discovers something perfectly obvious during the making of a television series.
“The elephant on the table” is how communications experts describe something carefully overlooked and unmentioned but urgently important. It may sound impossible to ignore something so striking as a wild beast lounging in the middle of an ordinary room, but if the elephant is embarrassing enough, human beings can learn to do it.
Such an award, if it exists, ought to go to Samantha Bee. She’s the sweet-faced Canadian component on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart’s wildly popular half-hour news parody, which recently replaced Mike Bullard’s nightly talk show on CTV.
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The CD Story (so far), Part 2
There were several changes of the guard at CD as we entered our third decade and with them a decidedly more diverse content. More than ever before our collective was drawn from activists in various popular movements. But the new diversity arose from more than the changing composition of the collective.
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Remembrance and Censorship
By the time this commentary appears, another mawkish, duplicitous Remembrance Day will be history. Editors, writers, producers and photographers will have looked for new ways to honor Canada’s War Dead — though not very hard — and will likely have settled for yet another shot of the dwindling parade of fragile veterans who appear faithfully every year to fill what’s known among journalists as “the November Hole.”
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