Back in 2006-ish, now-city-councillor-then-activist-and-columnist Gord Perks took some flak for maintaining his regular column with the weekly entertainment paper, Eye.

Peter Kent, apparently, also maintained his media presence while running for politics circa 2005.

There’s a long list of names, but the gist is generally the same. Should a political candidate give up his/her soapbox when running for office? What about in the hazy days before the election begins?

The other question that I have is whether the John Tory example is a bit different. There’s an article that suggests broadcasting is Tory’s “first love” dating back to the 1970s, but I think it’s fair to say that Tory, unlike Kent, is not primarily known as a broadcaster. He is known as a businessman and a political operative. In fact, he landed the role on Live Drive primarily for that reason:

“John brings a wealth of inside knowledge to both political and business discussions, which is what our audience wants to hear,” CFRB said in a statement.

So … assuming he does run again for mayor, will John Tory give up his on-air role in January 2010 when the campaign truly begins? Are there advantages to NOT declaring until later in 2010?

Are we comfortable with media outlets being so overtly political? To me, providing airtime or inches to a candidate is a really strong endorsement. It also helps to set the tone for an election, frame the issues, start the dialogue. I don’t know how I feel about CFRB, Eye, Global etc. being so closely connected with electoral politics.

It’s something to watch.

“My, how the camera does love Conservative MP Helena Guergis.”
“… she shone as Miss Huronia …”
“She dazzles for the lens.”
“She was a sexy little snow bunny …”
“… tossing her tawny hair …”
” … vamping …”
“Young and energetic …”
“… zesty …”
“… scintillating …”
“… casting a flirty sideways glance … from big almond eyes …”

The articles spends about 2/3 of its time describing how hot Guergis is, and then ends by describing how both Guergis and her husband have made some mistakes in their careers. It hints that, despite her hotness, Guergis may lack “substance”.

Yawn. Feminist theorists, do what you want with this - the wife isn’t responsible for her husband’s behaviour - the wife was never a good politician, no matter how close she may have been to becoming Miss Oktoberfest - the article would never have been written if Jaffer’s wife wasn’t so darned hot - the article never would have been written about a husband if it was the wife who had been busted - and so on and so on.

Democracy Watch tried to challenge the Harper government’s 2008 election call, claiming that it was contrary to the Harper government’s fixed-date election law (which it was). There’s an article in the Toronto Star here, and presumably oodles more available via Google.

It’s an interesting case to wonks like me. I haven’t read the Court’s decision. But I’m kind of glad that the challenge failed. I was never a fan of the fixed-date election law in the first place. To me, it was the legal equivalent of, say, banning hockey or beer or snow. I love that elections can be called at any time. It’s the most spontaneous and unpredictable that Canada ever seems to get. It’s the closest thing to true accountability that we get, as well.

I hated the idea that a government would pass legislation that changed something that had been so much a part of our constitution, history, tradition etc. I hate even more the idea that other parties and/or citizens groups might be able to sue government for being political. It was an uncomfortable blending of two branches of government, so I like the decision.

Coverage of former Attorney General Michael Bryant’s case is a crash course in media literacy. Mr. Bryant, behind the wheel of a car, ended up in an altercation with a cyclist. The cyclist ended up attached to the moving car and died after he collided with things like mailboxes and trees along Bloor Street.

That was Monday night. It’s now Thursday. The media is trying to find ways to keep covering the story without repeating the same information over and over. The difference between the various outlets is interesting and quite marked, based on this morning’s headlines.

Pick up the Toronto Star, and you will see a headline that suggests Michael Bryant received preferential treatment after the police took him into custody. Read further, and you’ll find an arguably inane article about Mr. Bryant’s “dream date” with his wife, just prior to the accident.

Turn to the Globe and Mail, and you see a different angle altogether. Gone is the focus on Mr. Bryant. Instead, the Globe focuses on the victim. The Globe seems to be suggesting that the police may be partially responsible. They had the victim in one of their cruisers just an hour before the incident and apparently refused to drive him home.

Meanwhile, the National Post focuses on the issue of biking in general, arguing that bike lanes would not have saved the victim’s life. For what it’s worth, the Post also paints a ridiculous picture of what it’s like to drive in Toronto or to meet a bike courier:

Torontonians unfortunate enough to have to navigate the city’s confined and congested streets knows that any conflict with a courier risks immediate escalation to shouts, threats and fists pounding on the hood of their car. Fear is the operative word.

Sherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe’s first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy of New York in the last years of the twentieth century, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab It Now.

Adam Radwanski at the Globe and Mail made the connectiont - only AR’s coverage of the Bryant story injects a twenty-first century twist: Michael Bryant, the accused, has got himself a PR firm. If you are the accused, especially if you are a public figure, this makes sense. The media reports of the incident paint an awful picture, the quotes from witnesses graphic and disturbing. You can practically hear every PR-nut in the city growling, “C’mon, we have to get out in front of this thing!”

If you are a reporter, what do you do with this? How do you cover the “news” when the “news” is what a team of spin-doctors tells you it is? Even Mr. Bryant’s letter of resignation was man-handled by the spin doctors.

If you are a lawyer, how do you represent the accused? I can’t imagine being a lawyer in a criminal proceeding for a client with a PR firm behind him. All the press conferences and media releases we’ve seen so far are exactly what every lawyer I know tells their clients - innocent and guilty - not to do.

Who knows how Michael Bryant will come out of all of this. He could be Wolfe’s anti-hero - a rich, powerful, and arrogant tycoon who believes that rules are for other people and some lives more valuable than others. Or, presumably if Navigator is successful, he could come across as a terrified, innocent, and unfortunate participant in a chain of events with a tragic outcome for everyone. It’s not a question of *if* there will be bias; it’s only a question of whether the bias will work in Bryant’s favour or not.

Meanwhile, there’s no PR firm to save the deceased man’s image. I don’t even know him, but I know he came from a broken home, that he is a visible minority, that he has a history of drug and alcohol abuse, that he’s the unmarried father of several children, that he had no formal “career”, that he had more than one interaction with police in more than one city prior to his death. None of this is really relevant to the public interest. Mostly it’s just prejudicial detail that helps some people imagine a man who lived on the edge and was bound to experience violence of some kind at some point.

(h/t to @UnionSt for making me think about this)

Meanwhile, a group of individuals have launched the “I want a tax refund” campaign. There’s a website, where you can send your request directly to the mayor, as well as a Facebook page with 28 fans. The gist is that, since the city is not providing certain services during the strike (er, labour disruption), we should get our tax money back.

For what it’s worth, I do *not* want a tax refund. Here’s why: Taxes are not user fees or fees for service. They are not tied to specific programs. They are a general pool of money that our elected officials may choose to spend however they want. If we don’t like how they spend them, or if we want to give them more or less money, we can elect different people.

The difference between paying taxes and paying user fees is the difference between being a citizen and being a customer. I am a citizen of Toronto, not a customer of Toronto. As such, I ask for accountability. Not refunds.

I was more surprised to hear the way that spokespeople, reporters, bloggers, and water-cooler colleagues are talking about the strike. To many of the people I’ve spoken with, or in many of the articles I’ve read, the strike is regarded as a typical labour dispute, with the union fighting for the rights/needs/wants of its workers and the city fighting to protect its bottom line.

To me, the strike is anything but a traditional labour dispute. The city workers are government workers. It’s not like the compensation they are seeking would otherwise be finding its way into some owner/manager/shareholder’s pocket. There IS no profit in a government organization. So where will the resources come from?

This is not to say that the union’s position is wrong. But it is to say that the media coverage and debate about the strike has been woefully superficial. Instead of articles about the city’s financial health and public policy decisions, we get fluff about union tactics, picket line squirmishes, and men-on-the-street.

To cover the issue like it’s a private sector labour disruption is to miss the story completely. City workers want a larger chunk of our tax dollars. Is it in our interest to give it to them? Maybe yes, maybe no - it’d be nice if some reporters and pundits would weigh in on this with facts and insight. It’d be nice if the policy context wasn’t lost completely.

I couldn’t find the video clip, but the headline shocked me when I heard the newsreader solemnly declare that a summer election had been “averted”. Averted? Really? As in, “gosh, we came so close to disaster but luckily it was averted”?? Some people - like the Bloc and the NDP and a posse of Liberals for example - actually wanted a summer election. They want the government out and the sooner the better. For them, the election wasn’t “averted”, it was “ditched” or “lost” or “sacrificed”. Yet here is CTV boldly informing Canadians “not to worry, summer won’t be ruined, the pesky democracy votey thingy won’t interfere with your cottage plans or your softball tournaments. We’ve held off on that until the weather is more suitable.”

So watch your verbs, CTV, your biases are showing.

You really do need to watch out, though, when there’s a hidden agenda behind information. Sometimes it’s the informant who has the agenda, sometimes it’s the original source and the messenger is innocent. Two pieces of messaging have been flying around the media and the blogosphere lately that raise my eyebrows.

First, this business about the Maple reactors. It is AMAZING that a lot of left-leaning enviro-friendly folk have become staunch defenders of the nuke industry. This Chalk R. scandal has turned out to be a boon for nuke industry lobbyists who are wasting no time playing on our fears about cancer to try to restart a dead project. The MAPLE project was the very first time the Cdn government said no to the nuke industry, and the industry is fighting back. The cry to restart the project is not a grassroots movement. What’s more, the argument that the nuke industry is now going to save us all from cancer is so riddled with irony that I can’t believe no responsible journalist has given that pause for thought yet.

Second, I’ve been watching for years as various journalists (think Royson James in the Toronto Star) and political operatives have blasted Toronto Mayor David Miller for his supposed incompetence. I’ve always been a bit baffled by that because I lived in this city for years under Mayor Mel Lastman who was a terrible, terrible mayor. By comparison, Miller isn’t bad; he’s literate, not racist, capable of stringing a sentence together, and not an embarrassment when he ventures onto the world stage.

If you watch closely, whenever Miller is criticized, there’s never any evidence offered to explain why he is supposedly so terrible. It’s not like, say, Flaherty underestimating the federal deficit by like $50-billion or whatever. It’s random stuff like blaming Miller for a potential garbage strike, when the pundits know full well if Miller gave the union a raise in this economic time he would be equally criticized for being a union stooge. Or, just to use a random example, Kinsella on his blog today somehow blaming Miller for the Taste of Little Italy, a street festival that’s been going on forever and ever. I have no issues with criticizing the mayor about policy, but the debate needs to have some facts if it’s going to be worthwhile.