National Post (National Edition)
— REX MURPHY,
WHY DOES THE CBC CARE WHAT MARY TRUMP HAS TO SAY?
Whatever happened to the grand idea of a unique Canadian perspective on the world? Of getting our own fix on things? Of standing aside from the dominant view?
In ancient times there was a strong, even intense current of thought among the Canadian clerisy — magazine writers, leftist academics, some fictionists — that it was very necessary for Canada to find its own cultural orbit. That tracing the same ellipse as the giant below us would dilute Canadian nationalism, make us but the faint silhouettes of the larger, stronger, aggressive cultural machinery of the United States.
It was vigorously maintained that to ape or succumb to (those horrid) American styles and values was in effect to dissolve or smother our own, variously and endlessly parsed, national identity.
It was, is, a worthy idea this, that Canadians should have a different aperture, a dedicated window, through which to view the world, themselves, and indeed the dynamics and patterns of the huge country adjoining us.
It was upon the fear, more properly dread, of our national presence being occluded in that of the U.S., that cultural policy, the push for Canadian writing, film and television as a cultural priority, emerged. Let us be different from the Americans was the bugle call.
Hence, and hardly by the way, the existence of the CBC. We must tell our stories was more than a mantra, it was a raison d’être, it was a summons to national individuation.
Am I allowed to jump forward here? It was a treat this weekend to see massive numbers, peacefully and without burning anything down or smashing windows, gathered in Washington to support and thank the demon Donald Trump. It was quite an event, highly significant in the context of the very great stresses in the American political system at this trying moment. There is a deep and possibly dangerous fracture in American politics today. The mass rally was the voice on one side of the divide. It was little covered, and barely explained, by the big American news outlets.
The hundreds of thousands gathered were unequipped with “pussyhats.” This thoughtless failure, almost as much as the consideration that the rally was — can you believe it? — in support of Trump, probably evacuated it of interest to the nation’s news editors. And the absence of rioting or looting was probably another reason to mainly pass it by.
The identical news void played out in Canadian media. In terms of tone or extent of coverage, a good contest would be to distinguish, say, CBC’s coverage, or non-coverage, of the rally from that of CNN or MSNBC.
Now a real Canadian take might have been to ask: why are all these people supporting this man? Why is a full half the nation still enthusiastic over his leadership? Is there anything for Canadians to learn from the Americans’ great divide at this time? Such would have been matter for a worthwhile report.
We might call such an approach news analytics for a Canadian public.
Instead, our one public broadcaster, dedicated by statute to the defence and sustaining of Canadian identity, sought out an “estranged niece” of Donald Trump for a feature interview. Why of all people, it is more than fair to ask, Mary Trump?
Ms. Trump’s view of things shouts out from the title of her family memoir Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. Now her differences with her uncle may very understandably be of deep interest to her, and possibly of some to Mr. Trump as well.
But by what logic of Canadian news, or simple balance, does our national broadcaster seek out a publicly estranged branch relative of the American president, who has an extremely personal interest at play, as a useful guide to the present fraught moment in U.S. politics?
Whatever happened to the grand idea of a unique Canadian perspective on the world? Of getting our own fix on things? Of standing aside from the dominant view?
What, I ask again, in the name of Canada’s distinct cultural identity, is the national broadcaster doing sleuthing through the outer bloodlines of an American president? Are we stuck for news at home? Is there not a WE scandal being buried? Is not every small business in the country about to fold? Are we not dizzy with conflicting, desperately unreliable and inconsistent advice on the plague? Are we not $400 billion in deficit? Is Alberta not bleeding?
The ruminations of Mary Trump can probably wait a while. Only a national broadcaster with a mandate to uphold and sustain our national identity could wander so carelessly away and so far from the idea behind its existence, as to mimic the excesses of American cable coverage.
It is well argued down south, that regardless of any other impact he has had, Trump’s presidency revived news and broadcasting. It certainly changed it, and for ill in my view, but that’s another matter. But there is no reason for the Canadian news establishment to take its cue from American obsessions and flood the zone with every hot Trump hit — to blend in, in other words, ever so neatly with the example and substance of American news.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE GRAND IDEA OF A UNIQUE CANADIAN PERSPECTIVE?