I've been thinking for weeks that the only way to turn the tide on the human rights deal regarding free speech is to change the focus. Not freedom of speech, but freedom of the press.
I notice that Mark Steyn has linked to a Toronto Star piece which shows that the Star has finally thrown their hat in the ring. It comes as no surprise to me that the Star only woke up to the HRC debate with these fateful words from the Ontario HRC: "Islamophobia in the media."
The word media changes the argument and brings the papers, magazines, and TV shows into the fray. These are the people with money, and the people that the politicians listen to.
The Star article plays it close to the vest. They say that readers should have been rightfully "repelled" by the Steyn book excerpt which appeared in Maclean's. Then the editorial goes on to to say that the human rights council should not have gone after Maclean's for running it. They make no statement of Steyn's freedom of speech, only the media's freedom to print that speech.
That's an interesting shell game: Steyn's a repellent bigot, but hey, Maclean's has rights. And that's my point: the media will rise to the defense of press freedom much more readily and vocally than they will freedom of speech. If it had just been Steyn charged with some hate crime or other, the Star probably would have let him twist in the wind. But question Big Media? Battle stations.
People that spend all day on the internet need to get their heads out of the box. Bloggers (including me) make no real difference. Five years ago, I didn't even know what a blog was. Two years ago, when I started blogging, I felt somewhat embarrassed by it. It had a kind of "geek factor" that I didn't want to advertise. Fast forward to the present day, and blogging is certainly more popular, but it still isn't in the same league as Big Media for influence and power.
It's getting there: most magazines and newspaper websites have a blog section, and the Toronto Sun provides a 100 word "best of the blogs" piece each day. Yet notice who the blogs are written by: mainly print writers with time on their hands, with only a smattering of "real" bloggers thrown into the mix. Until blogs have the same power as Big Media, blogs will still be seen as a fringe element: lonely people in basements, wanna-be journalists, American Idol fanatics.
Make no mistake: if you have a blog with a readership of 10 000 per day, that's a pretty good readership. But it's on the internet. It isn't real. People can click to the baseball scores, or simply turn off their computers and ignore it. The reason the papers and mags have more influence is that readers know a writer was paid to write it. Web MD vs. going to the doctor. Until a number of big-time popular writers publish their stuff exclusively on the internet (and readers follow them there), you can forget the power of blogging beyond the ability to merely entertain or irritate.
Papers and magazines are physical things. They sit on tables, they are delivered to doors. Their weight gives them weight. And most importantly, they are local. A blogger may have a million readers a month, but what difference does it make when half of those readers are in the US, another quarter in Australia, and another 10% in the UK?
You might say, "No way, Sean. I have thirty thousand Canadian readers per day, man. Powerful stuff."
And I say, "So what?" Emailing a politician a screenshot of your Google Analytics page is meaningless. First, it's lame. Second, it could be fabricated. A screenshot of statistics is nothing compared to a politician waking up, opening his door, and finding his name on a front page. Now he knows that the entire city is reading this over their morning coffee. That kind of power trumps a blog's "counter" every single time.
Somehow, someway, bloggers must get it through their heads to change the focus. They must change the culture of media, and define themselves as journalists. If, as is happening now, they are going to be sued for libel or dragged into a commission's tribunal, then they must start to act and talk like part of the Big Media. If newspapers and magazines have websites and are considered "media," then why aren't you?
Bloggers must remove the word "speech" from the argument, and insert the word "press." It may hurt their moral pride to do it, but it is the winning strategy. This will silence the crowd that chants, "Free speech is not yelling fire bah-blah-blah." Make it about the press, and you will find allies with bigger pockets and mightier pens, the people that can bring truly great pressure upon politicians, tribunals, and judges. Until then, you a simply one small person that can be picked off with ease.
One more time, this is not about freedom of speech, no matter how much you want it to be. It is about freedom of the press.
Use that strategy, and you have a shot. Otherwise...log out.
2 comments:
Good point. The MSM with I would say the exception of the Post - especially of late, have been slow to recognize the threat.
It's true that nobody paid much attention to censorship as long as the respondents were people like Doug Collins and North Shore News - or, for that matter, the Neo-Nazis on Stormfront. Now that it's Maclean's in the dock, though, the big media outlets have taken notice.
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