I’ve always been pretty cynical about the media, so it was no surprise to me when the federal government decided to start explicitly subsidising the rest of the media (they already fund the CBC), and part of the fun was deciding who qualifies for those juicy subsidies. I mean, “journalism” today is a pretty broad category that covers a lot more than the traditional TV, radio, magazine, and newspaper formats. I’m sure everyone is shocked — Shocked! — to discover that the government is playing favourites among the many media outlets over not just who gets subsidies, but even who gets accredited to cover political events.
Jack Layton, leader of the federal New Democratic Party of Canada, on January 2, 2006 in a media scrum outside a campaign rally at the Kent Street legion in Ottawa, Canada.
Photo by Thorfinn Stainforth via Wikimedia Commons.
As we’re in the late stages of a federal election campaign, the question of who is considered to be a “journalist” merits closer attention, as Colby Cosh explains:
Two media outlets of a right-wing character, Rebel Media and the True North Centre for Public Policy, have been denied accreditation for post-debate press appearances at the last minute. The Parliamentary Press Gallery, acting on behalf of the federal Leaders’ Debates Commission, has somehow decided that their delegates are advocates rather than journalists. Oh-ho.
Here, an agent of the state seems to have pushed the “So who’s a journalist?” question really to the forefront, and introduced a distinction between journalism and activism that may not be tenable. The history and practice of journalism, even at the highest levels of public and professional esteem, includes entities and activities that fall into all of the following categories: “activism,” “advocacy,” “partisanship,” “satire,” “hoaxing,” “unbearable self-promotional bluster,” “pranks,” “torquing of facts,” “invective,” “demagoguery” and “stunts.”
If we must march toward state licensing of journalism in double-quick time, and this seems to be happening whether I like it or not, arguments about the definition of journalism will have to recognize these realities. But, of course, the word “journalism” as used from day to day is mostly just a status marker (really, a label concocted for academic use). “Journalism” will resist any historically aware attempt to bound it with a list of scientific-type taxonomic criteria.
This, of course, does not rule out an ignorant or fanciful attempt to set criteria. But most of the concepts in the list I made above, a list of things some people would like to exclude from journalism, are themselves ideas founded on fuzzy judgments of value, or of mere taste.
The media outlaws who found the debate gates shut in their faces got together and sought an injunction requiring the commission to allow them to appear in the magic chamber of questions after the debate. No one had really explained the decision to exclude them; no one could point to a solid pre-existing definition of journalism that they did not meet (surprise!), or to a relevant formal policy of the commission. It really gets the attention of a judge when the state behaves in an arbitrary way, and this proved to be the case, foreseeably, at the oral hearing for the injunction. Which was granted.
But an injunction is a temporary emergency remedy that does not require a full hearing of the facts — only the possibility of immediate incorrigible harm. The question haunting the Dominion — the question of who is a journalist — remains athwart our path.
