In 1969 Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau made a famous remark to the DC Press Club: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
In more recent times, the sensation-monetizing business model of the American broadcast industry is morphing Trudeau’s even-tempered beast toward playing the role of a body in Virgil’s tale of King Mezentius, who bound living victims face-to-face to corpses until both were dead.
Canadians are uniquely placed to slow America’s accelerating slide into “mediacracy.”
However, for Canada to help, and for both countries to benefit, the present situation’s ancient cause needs to be understood.
1844 And All That
The American roots of commerce’s power to limit available knowledge to “whatever is most profitable” reach back more than two centuries.
The principle of electromagnetism, which made telegraphy possible, wasn’t discovered by Hans Christian Ørsted until 1820. It was 1844, 57 years after the First <printing press specific> Amendment to America’s Constitution, when Samual F. B. Morse commercialized electromagnetism into telegraphy.
America’s fathers—polymath sons of the European Enlightenment—drafted their guarantee of press [sic] freedom before rapid information at a distance was conceivable. They couldn’t possibly have imagined that rapid one-to-many information transfer (broadcasting) would ever exist. That timing misfortune menaces American liberty today and, via proximity, Canada’s.
If real-time media had been conceivable in 1787, everyone—not just “Congress”—would have been barred from constraining public access to knowledge. The public’s right to access knowledge through all media, not just press printing, would have been guaranteed. No entity, civil or commercial, would have been empowered to limit information to shape public beliefs for private advantage or gain.
But, as communications technology evolved, business self-interest empowered commerce (broadcasting) to distribute whatever mix of feeling and fact however cash flows may indicate. The present flood of anger and trickle of fact south of our US border has been the result. Unchecked, it can prove lethal to liberty and freedom both there and here.
The unfeeling telegraph, clicking pure textual knowledge, soon sprouted human modalities. Voice inflection rode on radio words and soon televised faces integrated words with urgency and indignation. Persuasion to act supplanted knowledge transfer as broadcast communication’s “cash cow.” Broadcasting and electoral politics attracted each other like rare earth magnets.
Good intentions, run amok
Eli Whitney, visiting a Georgia cotton plantation, pitied the slaves he saw picking the valuable lint off seeds. The cotton gin he perfected to ease and speed that work removed a limiting bottle neck from the cotton industry’s supply chain.
Soon the plantation economy, and the enslavement industry which powered it, surged ahead. The American Civil War that followed took some three quarters of a million lives. Many more enslaved Africans died during the dreadful Middle Passage sailing to the New World.
In the Caribbean and Virginia, America’s First Peoples kindly offered colonists a smoke. Over centuries since then, millions around the world have died of mouth and lung cancer and from emphysema.
Television’s cotton/cancer moment occurred on the evening of September 26, 1960, when US presidential candidates Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy debated onscreen. The historic broadcast was viewed by some 70 million Americans. Most viewers saw Kennedy as the winner but radio listeners tended to believe Nixon had prevailed or thought it was a draw. Fast-forward to the last US Presidential election primaries and televised reality debates in which TV producers largely decide whose ideas are interesting enough to be aired. When have you ever seen or heard of heads of state debating in public to decide a geopolitical outcome?
By monetizing combat, TV is morphing US governance dialog into vaudeville content.
Commerce replaces knowledge with emotion
By 1985, educator, cultural critic and media theorist Neil Postman could see where this trend was heading. He described it in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves To Death. Probably thinking of the telegenic John Kennedy, Postman feared emerging politics, with its sharp edges sanded off, would be stripped of critical thinking. Smooth and slick would carry the day at the expense of sharp ethics and logic based critical thinking.
But there Postman proved wrong. He wrote Amusing before “Reality TV” made it wildly popular and profitable to paper-over distinctions between fact and drama.
Writing to a pro-education colleague in Kentucky, First Amendment champion James Madison, after two terms as US President, said Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. But feeling and belief sell products, services and candidates on television far more effectively than knowledge does. Madison’s book-era precept has been turned on its head.
International Policy, Scripted on the Cheap
Quoted in America’s Wall Street Journal, Anthony Scaramucci, a former ally of the present US Administration, described the “Reality” TV approach to national policy: “…create conflict, you create absurdity, you create drama, and then you create resolution.”
In light of the “annex Canada” and “seize Greenland” brouhaha, most Canadians and Danes probably see America as having become a rude, ungrateful ally. But that would be to flatter ourselves. We were only Reality TV props—useful in the transient creation of conflict and absurdity.
Repeating History
Anyone who remembers WWII or has studied it, or has studied Friedrich Alexander Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom or Steven Levitsky’s and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die will have little difficulty connecting the dots between the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol; the pardoning of the those involved on January 20, 2025; and ongoing attempts to compensate the participants.
But there’s no sinister plot by US media in play; only the glacial flow of history.
Because the telegraph arrived a half-century too late to shape the 1787 press amendment to the US Constitution, it shot down First Amendment author Madison’s attempt to guarantee popular information to empower popular (elected representative) government.
Madison famously wrote in 1822, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.” Sound familiar?
The inexorable harm took over two centuries to worm its way through the transitions from telegraphy to radio and television and finally into “reality foreign policy.”
The Blame Game
No one is to blame. Blame is a marketable toxic substance excreted by entities unable or unwilling to help fabricate correcting solutions. Someday AI will probably get a handle on complex causality streams. Blaming specific politicians for historic situations will be seen as quaint as blaming Zeus for lightning or Poseidon for earthquakes.
But blame fuels anger and anger to sell airtime and adverts. Gravitas and behaviour predictive of the ability to govern don’t draw as many eyeballs as sensationalism. They get “disappeared” to make room for what does pay salaries and dividends.
Democracy’s demise is not a target of this trend, but merely collateral damage from the profitability of political sensationalism. The boosting of authoritarianism is not a purposeful artifact—only a waste byproduct of TV for-profit content generation.
Indulgences and Anchor Persons
American moral philosopher and educator John David Garcia (1935-2001) explained how any system of power or influence which gains the ability to limit public feedback to itself or about itself (a) will do so and (b) will degenerate continually as a consequence. TV owns the biggest podium. Critical thinking about its content choices and their outcomes isn’t up for discussion.
TV news professionals who read this may be shocked and offended. But consider: On the eve of the Protestant Revolution, many of the Vatican’s minions probably believed the indulgences they flogged kept parishioners out of hell.
TV producers should read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death. US TV journalists would probably be thrilled to see more of their filed real news coverage aired. What if working US journalists could be polled by Canadians and asked about aired content choices and their opinions made public?
Facing Out, Facing In
The premise of Chinese/Canadian/American author Dan Wang’s best seller, Breakneck, is that China has become a nation of engineers while America is a nation of lawyers. But at the executive level, rather than a law office America is staffed more like the set of a “reality TV” show. Wang points out that Xi Jin Ping’s Politburo is mostly staffed by politicians whose background includes engineering and science. The proportion of America’s current administration who came from TV shows, or TV news, is shocking.
What’s the intent? It’s been 14 years since author Suzanne Collins’s novel, The Hunger Games, and the movie it inspiredgave us a preview of the unholy matrimony of government’s police powers with television. Today Hunger Games may be breathing down America’s neck.
Regime Change—Not
Anyone suspecting that US “regime change,” (Democrat election wins), would fix things needs to think again.
It’s generally understood that US media and the Democrats are “joined at the hip.” The truism that “the media are too much biased toward the Democrats” has got it backwards. Democrats’ emphasis on identity politics is probably more shaped by media than the other way around.
Democrat identity politics highlights “otherness,” fueling “if it wasn’t for them” resentment powering the far Right. Wait in vain for the word “integration,” the melding objective of America’s Civil Rights period, to be mentioned in the current news.
In the broad sweep of history, greed and the overweening will to power left something behind for succeeding generations: the pyramids, various attractive castles and much of the art in the Louvre, the Hermitage and other museums. Envy, on the other hand, yielded Pol Pot’s killing fields, Mao Zedeng’s Cultural Revolution, Kim’s North Korea, Castro’s Cuba and other forlorn leveling experiments.
Empowering the middle, not swapping ends, is how Canada can help.
“What’s In a Name?” Everything
Every time an American broadcast or print media article headlines a story with the name of a President rather than the name of his office or the name of the country, authoritarianism is announced into existence.
Pounding home name awareness, heavily thumbs the political scales, prodding borderline Congressional candidates to claim association whether they agree with the Administration’s direction and methods or not.
Name-dropping journalism nurtures prejudice, supplanting governance based on ideas and values. Visibility rewards link electability to folly and misbehavior. Honorable intent, good historic public outcomes and personal gravitas are punished by inflicting invisibility.
History’s Precedents: They Couldn’t Afford to Care
When the smoking/lung cancer connection became undeniable, tobacco farmers and cigarette makers couldn’t have been expected to forge the solution. They couldn’t afford to care.
When cotton planting and the slave trade suddenly surged ahead because of Whitney’s improved ginning equipment, machinists in the gin factories and the salesmen who sold the machines could not have been expected to become abolitionist leaders. They couldn’t afford to care.
Today, something like 40% of the incredible sums raised and spent during American presidential elections goes toward television ads. Like plantation cotton and tobacco, the broadcast industry can’t be expected to abstain from choosing the most lucrative and provocative content—as opposed to dull but relevant candidate experience content which could inform capability to govern a vast nation…or the lack of it. Media can’t afford to care.
Who’d Catch Canada’s Lifeline? Lots of Folks.
They are anathema to the monetizing of binary conflict: today, Americans who have said “no” to partisan hype (“a pox on both your houses”) are by far the fastest growing segment of US voters changing party affiliation. In Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina and Massachusetts, unaffiliated voters already outnumber at least one major party.
Yet candidates who cater to them aren’t visible on the evening news. They won’t stoop to the outrage thing so they’re “disappeared.”
Light-up the American Middle
One thing Canadians can do to save American and our own liberty and freedom is to shine as much light as possible on the existence of this vast and growing disenchanted middle sector. If Canada’s media could draw the attention of the growing American unaffiliated sector to its own existence, the wistful middle would be empowered by a self-awareness US media now suppresses.
Party registration numbers are handles fastened to the body politic and used by media to jerk them around during election cycles. Canadians might raise the possibility of American “switch Thursdays” so those in the main parties who are unhappy being prodded by media toward MAGA or Democratic Socialists of America extremes, could show up to change their affiliation very visibly. If Canadian media reported each Thursday’s spike in change-to-unaffiliated numbers, mainsteam Americans could mutually witness their rising power..
Build a “Garcia Engine”
That’s “engine” in the “search engine” sense, named to honor John David Garcia, who championed the righting power of feedback.
Imagine software that captures and mutually compares American evening newscasts by their relative emotional “spin,” displayed on a simple graph, scribed over time on a cell phone app screen. The Garcia feedback engine would detect and register ONLY subliminal emotion-targeted content which can’t be expressed in words—only in numbers. A coded algorithm would tabulate and integrate a rolling numeric quantification of smirks, scowls, and angry or indignant voice inflections…only that content which can’t be expressed in words.
The exact same algorithm would be directed at each major US public and commercial network TV news program, plus CBC to be fair and credible (and give us relative feedback, lest we forget!) The Engine’s output would be viewable in real time while news shows are aired and also online searchable for trend analysis…forever.
A University of Waterloo undergrad class could easily write the Garcia Engine’s code and the Canadian Federation of Library Associations could oversee and certify the authenticity of its production and deployment, attesting that the Engine does what it purports to do. Americans could then access the Garcia engine online.
This is the intent: for the first time ever, producers, reporters and presenters of television news would know they are being objectively compared (that’s why no words are detected; opinions are made of words, not machine-made numbers) with their previous and successive performance and, mutually, with each other…by the numbers.
A Garcia Engine (and dozens of variations and enhancements) would objectively compare some of the relative sensationalism of TV news sources for the first time since TV appeared.
A Garcia Engine’s operating code would be tiny, less by far than a cell phone’s. It might be called “AA … Augmented Attention” because it would capture, quantify and showcase subliminal baggage meant to shape audience behaviour without arousing audience awareness.
The last decade has made it clear that monetized political sensationalism and liberty can’t coexist indefinitely. The cotton gin, tobacco and televised elections all had catastrophic consequences because business models cannot afford to care.
Freedom-loving Canadians cannot afford not to care what’s trending south of the border.
Let’s toss our silenced mainstream cousins a sunlight lifeline.
