Global media conspiracy revisited

“If the disgusting and corrupt media covered me honestly and didn’t put false meaning into the words I say, I would be beating Hillary by 20 percent.” — Donald Trump

“There is no such thing as ‘the media’. … Those who work in the media don’t gather in our huddle rooms each morning and light up the teleconference lines with plots to nettle and unsettle you. There is no media in the sense of a conspiracy to tilt perception.” — Paul Farhi in the Washington Post

‘Right, we have a heavy agenda, so let’s get to it,” I said, banging a spoon on my beer mug to get their attention. “First order of business: giving Farhi 50 bucks for maintaining the conspiracy.”

My media peeps ignored me, as usual. Wolf Blitzer and Astrid Braunschmidt were thumb wrestling. Ed Bain was passed out face-down in his burger, which is what happens when you combine two rye-and-cokes with a 4 a.m. alarm clock. Les Leyne pretended to be watching the hockey game on his phone, but he had a tear in his eye, so everyone knew it was The Bachelorette.

We meet at the pub every Thursday at 7 to co-ordinate the global media conspiracy, except it’s a bit like herding cats. Peter Mansbridge always manages to slip out early when it’s his turn to pay for the chicken wings, and Sophie Lui never admits being the one who spilled the caesar on the pool table.

I finally got them to focus on the questions at hand.

“What do we want to do about chemtrails?” I asked.

“Suppress the truth,” came the reply. “9/11 as an inside job?” “Keep covering it up.” “Paul McCartney, dead or alive?”

“Hard as a carp since 1966. Still a secret.” “Benghazi?” “Was he that guy from The Big Lebowski?” “No, that was Ben Gazzara.” The next one was trickier, an Internet post headed: “Media ignors latest DOCUMENTS.” This looked like trouble. Not only did the poster adopt a creative new spelling of the word “ignores” to demonstrate his unwillingness to abide by The Man’s rules, but he capitalized “DOCUMENTS” to signal that he was, in fact, batcrap crazy and wouldn’t be mollified.

In the olden days, such people would use red felt pen, scrawled in the margins of newspaper clippings, to demand to know why we weren’t divulging the real story about crop circles or the true meaning of the birthmark on Gorbachev’s head. In the digital age, the equivalent is CAPITAL LETTERS and, bad!!! PUNCTUATION!!!

Happily for them, the digital age also means they can post “WHAT THE LAMESTREAM MEDIA DOES’NT WANT YOU TO KNOW” clickbait and pull in the gullible. That’s how, say, a terrific piece of investigative journalism such as Kathy Tomlinson’s Globe and Mail exposé of the Vancouver shadow-flipping realestate scam gets equal billing with Tin Foil Hat Monthly’s fact-free, agenda-driven piece on The Plot Against White People.

We all fish online, but saying: “I get all my news from Facebook” is like saying: “I get all my pharmaceuticals from a guy in Centennial Square.” You still have to know what’s safe to eat. To quote former Vancouver Sun writer Shelley Fralic at last week’s Webster Awards: Facebook doesn’t have reporters, it has algorithms.

So, are the media biased? Yes, yes we are, and how we always manage to be biased against, not for, your political party is as great a mystery as how the NHL maintains its bias against, not for, your team. (FYI, the referees have their conspiracy meeting at the next table to ours.)

Our role in this global media collusion is a minor miracle of which we at the TC are particularly proud, given our history. Co-ordinated secret agenda? We’re lucky if we publish the right day’s crossword puzzle. This is the newspaper that once ran a photo of a farmer and his pig where a picture of a Victoria husband and wife was supposed to be. (We identified the pig as the wife. I wish I were making this up.)

The WaPo’s Farhi doesn’t believe in our conspiracy. He argues you can’t blame “the media” when ticked off about what one person says or writes on Fox, or CNN or any of the thousands of other outlets.

“Lumping these disparate entities under the same single bland label is like describing the denizens of the ocean as ‘the fish,’ ” Farhi wrote.

So, how to explain the widespread condemnation of Trump? Put it this way: When 1,000 film critics give a movie a lousy review, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s because the movie sucks.

That the Donald is attacked by both left and right is easily explained: Trump isn’t really a conservative. Paul Ryan is a conservative. John McCain is a conservative. Trump is just a terrible human being (not a gentleman, my dad would say).

At least, that’s how we voted on Thursday.