A Sun Media columnist has finally
written a piece I agree with.
The headline “Hey hey, ho!
ho! They don’t know” on Ezra Levant’s recent column may not scan, but as an
attack on journalists it makes some sense.
Levant, who makes his living excoriating
those who do not agree with his far-right point of view, here criticizes
journalists for simplistic coverage of protest rallies.
He writes that he attended a
recent rally of about 50 people in Hamilton protesting against the proposed
reversal of the direction in which a Canadian pipeline carries crude oil.
His analysis of the usual
news coverage of such events is, unfortunately, accurate:
The quick and easy formula for reporters is to make a rough estimate of how many protesters attend, take some pictures of the most colourful signs and costumes, get a bumper-sticker-deep slogan quote from a spokesman, and you’re done.
Levant
says he could have accomplished that in five minutes, but he stayed for two
hours, interviewing the participants and learning that their knowledge of the proposal
was indeed sketchy.
Then
he Googled the names of half a dozen protesters and learned that – shock! horror!
three of them were from London (Ontario, presumably) and another “was from out
of town too.”
So
far, this is solid reporting. Levant, though, can’t leave it there.
But it got darker. Because the more I looked, the more I realized these protesters were not just idealistic young people trying to heal the world. They were dominated by an inner circle of hard-core anarchists.
He
does not report that these anarchists attended the protest, so readers cannot
assess how they exercised this dominance.
But
Levant is right on his main point: Lazy journalism, driven by unforgiving
deadlines, presents incomplete and misleading versions of even simple events
such as a protest rally.
The
more a viewer or reader knows about an issue, the less satisfactory he or she
finds this sort of coverage.
The
solution? Journalists should stop covering protests unless they can explain the
issues involved in a bit of detail.
Yes,
stop covering most protests. After a few outraged phone calls to assignment
editors, the protesters may just wither away.
Not
so, of course, Ezra Levant.
