I did something old-timey with my hotel breakfast today: I read a newspaper, an actual newspaper, the Friday edition of the Calgary Sun.
For a guy who got his start in the newspaper business in 1972, and loved the things from the get-go, I’ve barely touched one for 20 years. So it was interesting to hold in my hands the October 11, 2024, edition of the Sun, all 18 of its tiny, uninformative, and heavily biased tabloid pages.
“GREEN LIGHT,” screeched the Page 1 headline, “New life for LRT project >> Dreeshen: ‘They caved’ BELL. P.5”
Well, it’s not quite, “Sticks Nix Hick Pix,” the most famously incomprehensible example of what once upon a time was known as “headlinese,” but it was enough like it to make me chuckle audibly, startling nearby breakfasters, especially since it was obviously going to be about the same story covered by this blog the day before. (Just sayin’.)
I had written: “In what had to be a humiliating climbdown, Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen issued a joint statement this morning with Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek explaining that the Green Line LRT project is back on again, sort of.”
By contrast, according to the headline atop the morning screed by Sun political columnist Rick Bell: “Gondek and crew cave on Green Line, game of chicken is over.”
Bell, in addition to his role writing columns attacking Mayor Gondek with metronomic regularity, seems happy to pitch in nowadays as the opinionist of last resort when a United Conservative Party (UCP) narrative has unraveled to the point it needs mending.
Dreeshen’s effort to undermine the popularity of former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi, who is now the leader of the Opposition NDP, spectacularly backfired when it killed the largest infrastructure project in Calgary’s history. This obviously upset enough rich contractors to make it necessary for someone in the UCP to tell the youthful minister to find a way to bring it back to life again.
Bell, in turn, appears to have taken on the difficult challenge of making Calgarians forget that Dreeshen is responsible for this financial and political disaster.
Now, thanks to the minister’s shenanigans, the Green Line has turned into Schrödinger’s train* – alive and dead at the same time!
As told to Bell, Dreeshen explained: “To say I somehow backed down. I said the money is here if you guys choose our alignment. I don’t know what game of chicken they were playing, they 100 per cent caved. We didn’t flinch and they came on board.” (Not a typo. Too long for a mere “sic.” Sorry.)
Yeah, right. The intemperate Dreeshen’s self-serving yarn, delivered through the medium of Bell, completely undermines the narrative the government sensibly tried to establish the day before in its “joint statement,” supposedly from Dreeshen and Mayor Gondek.
That narrative tried to suggest the UCP is run by adults, Dreeshen among them, capable of getting along with the mayor for the good of the taxpayers of Alberta’s largest city, which is home to a lot of folks whose votes the UCP is going to need one of these days.
Dreeshen’s snarling printed riposte this morning suggests that the kid from Innisfail, a half hour south of Red Deer, isn’t even capable of acting like a grownup for 24 hours!
This got me thumbing through the rest of the Sun. Not much there. One story carried water for a right-wing candidate for mayor; a column by Toronto Sun drivelist Brian Lilley predictably attacked the prime minister; and an editorial reflexively went after the Liberals for the federal carbon tax.
Additional commentary was devoted to National Newspaper Week. (National Newspaper Week was not a thing when I worked for newspapers. Why would it be? They made money hand over fist without celebratory calendar events.)
“News you can trust,” said the main headline on the page, in heavy black type, but sounding plaintive just the same. “Day after day, Canada’s journals publish content you can count on.”
Canadians, said the column beneath it – by former Edmonton Journal and Montreal Gazette editor Lucinda Chodan – “continue to look to newspapers for credible information they can trust.”
They do?
Chodan, who appears to have sensibly all but retired from the newspaper business, is a fine journalist and it’s not her fault where her column appeared. Just the same, the effect is ironic, to say the least.
Another column on the same page, also supposedly celebrating National Newspaper Week, complains about the CBC’s digital advertising revenues and Canada Post’s junk mail regulations.
But don’t blame the CBC or Canada Post for the state of Canada’s newspaper industry – which, increasingly is no longer an industry but a boutique sideline of the online clickbait machine.
Notwithstanding the nostalgic picture painted by Chodan, the current state of Canada’s newspapers is illuminated by the easy opinion columns and constant right-wing propaganda found in the pages of the Sun.
Readers, it would seem, aren’t buying what they’re selling.
And how does this moribund “industry” stay afloat? The occasional advertisement – “New Sex Pill Grows in Popularity With Recent Approval in Canada,” says the advertorial story on the back on Friday’s Calgary Sun – and federal subsidies from the very Liberals it attacks every day.
Go figure! I don’t get why they do that either. Hope you had a great National Newspaper Week, I guess.
*Credit where credit is due, this line was the inspiration of The Progress Report, which forever has my gratitude.
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