Category Archives: Media Mix

Canadians, here’s your chance to catch the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

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Rally to Restore Sanity

Just because we’re north of the border, can’t vote in the mid-terms and at least in theory belong to another country doesn’t mean a lot of Canadians aren’t feeling a little wistful about Saturday’s upcoming joint Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rallies in Washington, DC.

Well, maybe travelling to DC is out of the question for most of us. But thanks to the folks at The Comedy Network, we’ll at least be able to catch the action online:

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert take over thecomedynetwork.ca this weekend making it Canada’s one-and-only conduit to Stewart’s Rally To Restore Sanity and Colbert’s March To Keep The Fear Alive, live from Washington, DC. Streaming live this Saturday, October 30 from 12 – 3 p.m. ET, Canadian viewers have a chance to ‘be there and be scared’ by logging onto thecomedynetwork.ca for a one-time only, online simulcast of the rallies.

Will you be attending – in person or otherwise?

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I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, HATE watching TV debates

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There’s probably some deep-seated psychological reason for it (“Mommy and Daddy are fighting again!”), but I can’t stand watching televised election debates. I’m on edge the whole time, fidgeting, finding excuses to be elsewhere and just generally miserable and anxious.

Weird, huh? Former political speechwriter, high school and university debater… but I hate debates.

Set aside whatever emotional baggage may be involved for a moment. (Ka-THUMP! Geez, sorry about the floor – man, laminate cracks easily, huh?) The thing that bothers me the most about these things is that they nearly never are genuine debates. So often, what you hear clashing aren’t ideas or arguments, but talking points. And the people in them are driven as much by the fear of a misstep (and the hope their opponent will make one) as they are by the desire to communicate.

Three more of these things to go in the U.S., and two in Canada. Eugh.

Goodbye, Frances Bula

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Frances Bula is leaving the Vancouver Sun – and, more to the point, her blog. It’s a big loss for the Sun, and for those who care about Vancouver civic politics:

This will be my last post on this Vancouver Sun blog, as I have resigned from the paper.

I wanted to tell all of you, as I go, how much I have enjoyed this new form of telling you the news and how great it has been to interact in a completely different way with a crowd of intelligent, engaged and well-informed people. I don’t want to say “readers,” because that implies you are passive and the thing I love about the blog is that you’re not – you post comments and email and phone and let me know in person about other information I should have or your critiques of what I’ve written – so it’s more like a conversation where you learn from me and I learn from you.

Her blog post makes it clear that she thoroughly understands blogging – which makes losing her voice at the Sun doubly painful. And toward the end, she makes a provocative suggestion that journalists are the original practitioners of “citizen journalism”:

Journalists, through their professional organizations, have always rejected the idea that anyone should have to be certified or have to have a required level of education to work in the business. That’s because of a fundamental belief that all citizens have the capacity to observe and report on the world, not just some elite class. So I encourage all of you to support the good parts of the mainstream media that’s produced by us citizen journalists who happen to be paid.

All of which means this last bit is encouraging:

As for me, I will be continuing with other forms of journalism, including blogging, but, unless there’s an unforeseeable turn in my life in the next few years, I won’t be embedded in a daily-news operation any more as I have been for the last 25 years of my life.

I’ll be looking forward to seeing what she cooks up, on- and off-line. In the meantime, thanks, Frances, for helping keep civic (and civil!) discussion going in this city – heaven knows we need more of it.

Some more reaction:

Raise your hand if you think the media was soft on Bush

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Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s explosive memoir lambastes the press for rolling over for the Bush administration’s sales job on the Iraq war. But Seth Leibsohn, a right-wing blogger at the National Review’s web site, was apparently on another planet at the time. He writes, “Raise your hand if you have any evidence that the press was too soft on the administration.”

So just for fun, in my little way, I’m helping the rest of us take him up on that challenge with a Facebook group: Raise Your Hand if You Think the Media Was Too Soft on Bush.

If you remember the soft-ball questions, the attacks on the patriotism or character on anyone who questioned the drive toward war, the overwhelming presence of pro-war voices in the media…

…then raise your hand. Take a picture. And then upload it here!

Happy landings, Royal Canadian Air Farce

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The Air Farce Comedy AlbumFittingly, they picked April Fools’ Day to announce it: the Royal Canadian Air Farce is coming in for a landing.

In 1978, my parents took me to see the Farce’s original lineup – Luba Goy, Don Ferguson, Dave Broadfoot, the late John Morgan and Roger Abbott – performing at Camp Fortune, in the Gatineau Hills just north of Ottawa. I was crazy for the radio show, laughing at every joke whether I got it or not, and the live concert was absolute heaven. As the night dimmed into darkness, the light on the stage only got brighter – and there, right there, were the people who hosted those voices, who delivered those hilarious lines, who did that magical thing of making me laugh.

I can’t say that’s where my drive to become a comedian began – I’d been a smartass for years – but it sure helped to kick it into a higher gear. What helped even more was just how generous they all were with their fans. I still have the Air Farce album they all signed for me that night.

A few months later, Air Farce performed again, this time right in Ottawa. And again, they were delighted to meet their fans afterward – and Don Ferguson, probably my favourite cast member at the time, was tremendously gracious when this 15-year-old pressed a typewritten, heavily-Liquid-Papered radio script into his hands. He promised to look at it, and I went home in a state of utter bliss.

You know how these stories end: a form letter, maybe a nice little note wishing me luck?

What I got back was a long, long letter filled with notes for punching up the script, tightening the story, making it funnier and faster. And if the story ended there, Don and Roger, who I seem to remember also contributed some notes, would be mere saints.

But it didn’t. Here’s what lifted these people into the status of gods to me: Don connected me with Gord Holtam and Rick Olsen, the two writers who’d joined the show a year before that concert under the Gatineau stars. And they invited me to pitch – even though the show didn’t use outside writers (something I didn’t know at the time).

That began a process of rewrites and intensive assistance on their part that ultimately saw two of my ideas combined into one tight sketch. I got a cheque for a little over a hundred dollars, and saw it performed and recorded at the CBC’s Cabbagetown studios.

My words. Performed by the biggest stars I knew. Making an audience laugh. And all in front of my extended family – after I’d been taken backstage and introduced to the cast as one of the writers for that night’s episode. And if memory serves me, I hadn’t had my 16th birthday yet.

Think about what that would mean to a kid. Set aside what it meant for my confidence as a comedian (it was huge) – just imagine the inner resilience that kind of experience builds. Imagine how long the echoes from the audience’s laughter and applause would have lasted in my mind.

Whatever time using my ideas might have saved them was easily eaten up by the time Rick and Gord spent working with me to make them usable. This wasn’t a business proposition; it wasn’t developing a potential supplier (remember, they didn’t actually use outside writers); this was sheer good-heartedness.

And the experience lasted a lifetime. I’m a writer. I’m back in comedy. And during those times when I doubt my skill at the funny, I can still conjure up the echoes from Cabbagetown.

Thank you, Don, Roger, Rick and Gord – and Luba, Dave and John.

Barack Obama’s speech on race

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Back in the 1993 federal election, then-Prime Minister Kim Campbell was quoted as saying that elections are no time to discuss serious issues. (If memory serves, her comment was actually much more nuanced, but was dumbed down to that pithy, sensational and damaging phrase – which kinda proved her point.)

Last week, Barack Obama challenged that idea – with a scope and, yes, audacity that was nothing short of breathtaking – in a speech that seemed entirely out of place in a North American election. Chances are you’ve heard or read excerpts, but as a speechwriter, I can’t urge you strongly enough to read and watch the whole thing.

This was not a speech made for sound bites, although it has one or two choice ones. (“I can no more disown him than…”) Instead of rejecting nuance, this speech embraces it – as any honest, positive contribution to the conversation about a complex and highly charged topic must.

There is a passage of particular interest to communicators, where he delivers a challenge that may prove even more difficult to meet than that of America’s racial divide: a call for a civil, mature discussion of the issue.

We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

And he continues, suggesting that the dialogue can be about issues that actually make a difference to people – and that this is what Americans really want.

Heady stuff. Heady enough that I wondered if commentators in the media – who are usually quick to condemn the politics of sound bites and cheap attacks, while consigning any politician who fails to deliver them to thorough obscurity – would rise to it.

The early metrics aren’t promising. Those fine folks at TechPresident used online service TagCrowd to create tag clouds of Obama’s speech and of the “editorial responses of the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal“.

Here’s Obama:

And here are America’s flagship newspapers:

Micah Sifry concludes the TechPresident post this way:

At a first glance, it seems as if our editorial guides can’t help but view the speech as a political ploy, first and foremost. Considering how rarely politicians choose to grapple in depth with hard and divisive issues like race, it’s hard to see how that is the best frame through which to view it. But that is the frame our media system uses to evaluate political speeches, no?

Personally, I think Obama’s speech is a great test of the following question: Are we still living in the age of sound-bite politics, where the sharp attack line, even taken out of context, can become the “truth” of an event or a person thanks to the amplifying and distorting effects of broadcast media? Or are we entering the age of sound-blast politics, where a 37-minute speech can actually be watched, read, and digested by millions of people (a million views already on YouTube!) using the abundant spaces of the internet–and the themes and meanings they encounter and absorb will be not about the “politics” of a speech, but its actual content?

In other words, are we entering an age when politicians can be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character?

Maybe, and I really want to think so – but that age is going to take a while to arrive. I don’t expect a single speech, no matter how great, to change decades of ingrained behaviour. It will take a determination by politicians to consistently respond with courage, substance and integrity to challenges such as the one Obama faced with Rev. Wright’s comments – and a willingness by leaders in the media to stop complaining about politicians who lack substance on Monday and punishing those who don’t on Tuesday.

But when the week starts with Fox News asking if Bill Richardson is playing the race card by growing a beard, the situation doesn’t look all that hopeful.