The Province is a newspaper that essentially makes fun of itself or perhaps a better way to describe it is to think of the editors as trolling the people of BC.
I espied this headline while walking past a pair of newspaper boxes. The box on the left was The Vancouver Sun and featured the headline Goodwill gone at Occupy: VPD chief. The Province carried the same story on its front page but with the headline that can be seen below.
Let me explain. Occupy Vancouver is a tent city at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the people gathered there railing against various societal ills, primarily how the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and something about 9/11 being a conspiracy for good measure. The city has been agitating for them to move and after a fatal drug overdose on the grounds started the legal paperwork to get the occupiers out. This has led to what some might term a tense situation. The Province headline has cleverly played on this by using the word ‘tents’ in the headline instead of ‘tense’ because it sounds just the same (that’s a homonym; relax, Province readers, it has nothing to do with homosexuality). See? Tents standoff. Ho ho.
It starts here, indeed.
I actually think this pun is an improvement over their usual front page stories, most of which are about assault victims, the headlines of which are written in the first person and usually along the lines of I thought I was going to die and he laughed like Hitler.
So, good work, The Province. You are slightly less deplorable on this day!
Perhaps they are priming their readership for Halloween and getting in the spirit of all things ghoulish by presenting three unrelated stories about various bad people who are ON TRAIL, ON TRIAL or ARRESTED as noted above. Why are these three individuals lumped together and slapped on the front page of one of the city’s daily newspapers?
I don’t know.
Maybe it is because fear sells. Or it could be more prurient than that — there is a fascination with bad people and The Province is simply tapping into that for the public’s benefit. Certainly, there could be no news actually worthy of the front page in an urban area of two million people and a province of over four million, so it’s understandable the paper would have to scrape the bottom of the barrel, as it were, to put this motley crew front and center.
Speaking of the public, it’s time to poke into the brackish depths of reader comments on cbc.ca’s website again to see what nuggets of wisdom are being passed along by the people who voted the BC Liberals into power three times in a row.
In a story titled Tory logos on federal cheques draw fire we learn that several disbursement cheques of the novelty oversized photo-op variety were presented with not the Government of Canada logo but the Conservative Party logo. This is a no-no as it’s not money provided by the Conservatives but the federal government. Now, the common sense take on this is the Conservatives have demonstrated a penchant for what might be called sleazy, American-style campaigning and tactics, with an emphasis on negativity and doing things like this in the hope that they won’t be caught outright so that little logo can do its subliminal thing of associating the Conservatives with “free” money. This is a cynical line of thought but not particularly conspiratorial. They’re basically seeing what they can get away with and willing to shrug off whatever fallout may occur. Heck, they’re leading the polls, after all.
Here is one of the cheques in question:
The story dutifully notes the expected outrage from the opposition parties and the Conservative pictured above is unrepentant. But lo, look at the first reader comment from “CAN_Becket”:
I am getting really sick of the childish behaviour from both the Liberal and Conservative Parties….in fact, ALL parties.
If you ever watch Parliament it’s like watching a bunch of 5 year olds fighting with each other.
There are more important things to worry about these days than whether a conservative logo is on a novelty cheque…..man….get back to work!!!
Sick of the childish behavior. Well, that seems reasonable enough. Politicians are never the most best-behaved people around, that’s for certain and Parliament does resemble a playground during Question Period (or circus, depending on how your preferred analogies skew). But then we get to the last part:
There are more important things to worry about these days than whether a conservative logo is on a novelty cheque…..man….get back to work!!!
And here we see the typical knee-jerk reaction, the abandonment of critical thinking. Yes, there are more important things to worry about. The beauty of a news website is that it can accommodate stories of varying importance rather than arbitrarily decide what is or isn’t worthy of public discussion. There is a disconcerting use of the ellipse here, as if it was having babies, and an all-too-predictable three exclamation points, all the better to convey the reader’s apparently agitated state. “get back to work!!!” implies that someone (the story writer? The novelty cheque maker? The Tory MP? The opposition MPs? The investigating ethics commissioner?) is doing “this” (whatever it is) instead of some kind of work. In other words, this story is a trifle and should be ignored, which is exactly what the Conservatives would have wanted. Instead, our estimation of elected officials has dropped yet another notch and I’ll tell you, there ain’t a lot of room left for more notches.
This is not a grand scandal but it is something the governing party should be held accountable for. It’s a legitimate news story and the fact that the first person (and second and others — have a read) to respond wants to dismiss it in favor of more “important” things demonstrates how far politicians have fallen from grace, that we apparently no longer need to bother with the little stuff. Boys will be boys or something. As noted above, I am prone to being a tad cynical myself but there are still lines that must be respected.
Mostly I just wish people would think more and care more. And that the people we elect wouldn’t be such self-serving, power-grabbing scumbags.
And that The Province would get drummed out of business.
And that the world would be filled with puppies and rainbows.
The story is about how Google Street Views has come to Vancouver (as I noted yesterday) and the front page tries to paint some scary picture of privacy being invaded. The Google images automatically blur license plates and faces, so the privacy concerns seem minimal at best. But that’s not something you put on the front page to evoke paranoia, is it? Anytime you get cash from an ATM, fill up your vehicle with gas, stroll though a mall, train station or airport, you are already being recorded, so the notion that you have any real privacy whilst out in public is unrealistic at best. It’s not news and hasn’t been for some time. Sure, there could be a thoughtful column pondering the increasing intrusion of cameras into public life but where’s the hysteria angle in that?
While grabbing a quick snack before attending a play last night, I picked up a copy of The Province that was handy and thumbed through it, finally landing on the op-ed pages. There was a signed editorial piece about how everyone loves Stephen Harper after his musical debut at a gala a few nights back. A pro-Harper editorial. Quite the shocker, it must be said. On the opposite page was the Letters to the Editor except it’s now called Backtalk (with the B cleverly reversed; alas, I cannot reproduce the effect here). Each letter, though given the brevity, it might be more accurate to call them letterettes, is presented under a sentence referencing the original story (ie. “Council plans to install nuclear warheads on city hall roof”) and is signed by, well, whatever the person wants. One letterling was signed by Joe the Plumber. There is no indication of location, so I’m not sure if Joe hails from Vancouver, Surrey or Madagascar.
In essence, The Province letters section, apparently culled from submissions to their website, amounts to anonymous soundbites of unknown origin. I remember some years ago I had several letters to The Vancouver Sun published, back when I was a regular reader. One of them was in response to a screed by their resident homophobe, Trevor Lautens. Lautens had written a typically despicable column and being full of youth and outrage, I penned an objection that they saw fit to put in the paper. They verified my name and address first. Yes, back then, The Sun not only put your name to what you wrote, but your actual street address (the last time I checked, they had modified that to simply your city). Today in The Province the reader comments are little more than worthless filler and even the page’s name — Backtalk — seems to acknowledge an expected tone of anger or dismissal because thoughtful responses that demonstrate an open mind and critical thinking are silly!
I am not hoping for a Canwest bailout that includes saving The Province.
