The Rightening of the Fifth Estate

I don't really need a newspaper I suppose-in this day and age, who does? But I've been a daily subscriber to the Edmonton Journal for quite some time now. I still get most of my news online and drop the dead tree edition on one of the lunch tables at work, where I know it gets perused. It's nice being able to get local copy on my iPad from behind the paywall, and I don't mind paying for the privilege of having and using a free and independent press, but lately, I've been thinking of cancelling my Journal sub.

Most of my news consumption now is focused on national and international events, which I get from visiting The Washington Post or other major American dailies in Incognito mode or from The Guardian, to whom I pay a small pittance every month by direct deposit. My local news fix I get courtesy of the CBC.

All of my favourite columnists from years gone by have gone on to bigger and better things now: Todd Babiak (fellow Augusta alumnus!) is now a successful novelist, Scott McKeen is a city councillor and Paula Simons is a Canadian senator.

In truth though, things have been trickling downhill in my eyes ever since Postmedia bought the Journal back in 2010. Fewer and fewer local writers and reviewers for things like movies and books, more and more direction from an increasingly conservative head office. And the lack of competition has done them (or the citizenry) no favours either.

I mean, the Journal is no stranger to monopolies, having enjoyed one in Edmonton for over a quarter-century until the Edmonton Sun started up in 1978, but Postmedia solved that by first buying Sun media in 2015, then amalgamating the two Edmonton newsrooms a year later, cutting 35 jobs. That was followed by proclamations to all the Postmedia papers to endorse the Conservative Party in the last federal election, a decision that saw at least one editorial board resign.

Even the editorial cartoons done by the brilliant Malcolm Mayes seem to have taken on a crueler, more partisan tint in recent years, although, to be fair, it would undoubtedly be a sin to waste all the material Trudeau is providing him with.

This month the Journal hired a new editor-in-chief (despite having one already who is apparently still on the premises) and Postmedia has a new political news director who is an old colleague of Ezra Levant and founding editor of The Western Standard. The American-owned media conglomerate's hard turn to political starboard is the subject of an article on Canadaland called "You Must Be This Conservative to Ride."

It all sort of came into focus for me yesterday, when the front-page headline, "Battlefield Conversion," directed me to the Insight section to read about how "As politicians demand a ban on the controversial practice of conversion therapy, there isn't even a clear definition of what it is."

In the article, food blogger Liane Faulder (of whom I consider myself a fan), takes two broadsheet pages to present an in-depth look at the difficulty in banning something notoriously difficult to label or quantify. This is all well and good, but what rose my hackles was the implied notion that conversion therapy could be a continuum, with faith-based tortures at one end and science-based treatment at the other, all with the goal of making sexual minorities "better."

Now, I will not speak for a community I'm not a part of, but I am reasonably confident that gay folks have all the same hang-ups and neuroses as the rest of us, plus whatever you want to pile on in terms of additional oppression, discrimination, homophobia and the rest of it. But the idea of homosexuality et al as a deviation or mental illness that people need to be cured of has been discredited for quite a number of years now. We don't need to be giving even the slightest bit of credibility to this outmoded idea with phrasing like:

Even as conversion therapy is being banned in St. Albert, for instance, it’s not altogether clear where people living in St. Albert would find such a remedy, should they be so inclined.

Seeing the word "remedy" there was disheartening, to say the least. Faulder leads off with the very valid inquiry as to why this issue is coming to a head now, and the possibility that it is yet another tool of division to pit liberal against conservative, urban against rural, modernist against traditionalist. But no matter where it might fall on the spectrum she suggests, conversion therapy, in general, is not designed to help people cope with difficulties that arise from them being who they are, but to make them into other people. Even if they go willingly (which I know many do), I'm not sure remedy is an appropriate expression to use.

Anyhow, this is not really about that. It's about how I feel about spending $30+ dollars a month in an effort to keep journalism from slipping even further into torpor and irrelevance, but simultaneously lining the pockets of a foreign corporate media monopoly no longer interested in even maintaining the illusion of being non-partisan.

And I'm not at all sure how it is going to shake out.