Media matters

The best time for a large organization to make unpopular announcements is during late August or the Christmas holidays--journalists and the public are on vacation or home with their families, and by the time they get back, the news cycle has moved on. True to form, it's been a very unsavoury season for those who are paying attention. The Governor-General suspended Parliament to keep Harper in power; Ottawa's mayor caused a month-long transit strike; Liberal leader Dion was deposed behind closed doors and replaced by the most pro-war and pro-corporate leader in their history; and the Conservatives approved a $9.5 billion bailout for those who own asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP). I was out of touch quite a bit too, and I'm sure I missed other buried stories.

Like everything important in the news, these are not obvious, and I may clarify the issues involved at some point. For now, I'll focus on the most local issue, the Ottawa bus strike, because it is an interesting illustration of how the media affects public perception.

First, a little background for those who aren't from Ottawa. Larry O'Brien, a mediocre businessman, was elected mayor in 2006 on a promise not to raise taxes--actually, that was his whole platform--despite having no experience in government. He allegedly bribed other conservative candidates to drop out of the race. When he took office, he found that he needed to raise taxes after all (whoops!). Since then, he's fought City Council unsuccessfully to cut city services and reduce taxes. Then a few weeks ago, the city's bus drivers went on strike. This was in mid-winter and during Christmas shopping season, so traffic slowed to a painful crawl. My brother needed to bike to work (!) because he doesn't own a car. Basically, everyone in the city suffered one way or the other. That's enough to make anyone surly.

Next, the local media. It consists of the following: superficial, conservative-slanted coverage like the Ottawa Sun, CFRA, and CTV; detailed but very conservative news in the Ottawa Citizen; and alternative but scanty coverage in the X-Press or campus newspapers. Presumably there are Ottawa-centred internet sites too. Many people don't follow the news at all and get their opinions by word-of-mouth or anecdotal evidence.

How is the media portraying the bus strike? The Ottawa Sun cluster sends a simple and relentless message: greedy bus drivers and quasi-demonic union leaders ruined Christmas, and they deserve to be fired en masse and replaced with non-union workers. The union is also "undemocratic" because it won't let its members vote each time the city presents a new proposal. The mayor, when he is mentioned at all, is presented as someone working to keep the Working Man's money in his own pocket. CFRA organized a picket line around the union president's house, and there have been several death threats against him.

The Ottawa Citizen message is more sophisticated but still very anti-labour. They have multi-page explanations of the major players and issues. For instance, bus drivers in Ottawa organize their own work schedules and choose their own routes, which they negotiated for last time in return for lower pay. Now the mayor wants to remove this privilege without raising salaries. Some truth can be found, but it is obscured by a great deal of misleading statements and selective presentation.

I haven't read any alternative media since I've been in Ottawa since it's hard to get around, so I couldn't say what their angle is. I suspect they have a much smaller audience than mainstream media outlets, so their impact will be correspondingly small. Taken together, the Ottawa media helped create a virulently anti-union public opinion. (In fact, this process is repeated at every major strike, so anti-union sentiment runs quite deep.) Based on the perspective above, that seems quite deserved. So what's missing from this picture?

Let's tackle the easy accusations first. Bus drivers are no better paid than any other civil servant considering the hours they work. The union leadership doesn't hate everyone; they're doing their jobs and negotiating a better contract for their members. And they don't need to hold a vote on every offer: the mayor quite proudly declared "I will not negotiate" and presented the same non-contract to the union for weeks. Bus drivers voted 98% (!) to strike based on that proposal, so there was no need to expend all the effort to assemble the members and vote again. In a bizarre twist, the mayor asked the federal Minister of Labour Rona Ambrose to force the union members to vote on the contract again. No word yet on whether she has agreed to that.

The fact is, the strike was entirely caused by the mayor. Mayor O'Brien told the bus drivers "I won't negotiate" since day one, which defeats the whole point of collective bargaining*. Those who aren't unionized wouldn't know that, and the media never pointed it out. Furthermore, it is the mayor's responsibility to provide efficient transportation in Ottawa, not the transit union's, so the pressure should be on him to end the strike quickly, not the union or the bus drivers. The mayor benefits in two big ways from this strike: first, he saves hundreds of millions of dollars because he doesn't pay the bus drivers or run the buses during the strike. I guarantee that will turn into a tax cut next year. Second, as a businessman (and the former owner of a temp agency) he is trying to break the union. If he really could fire everyone and have non-union bus drivers, he would be ecstatic--minimum-wage drivers with no benefits would save big money and let him give another tax cut. He doesn't take the bus, so he doesn't care about the quality of service.

A common conservative catchphrase is "we should run the government like a business". That doesn't mean efficient budgeting and clear accounting--the government already has that where complexity permits. It doesn't mean running profitable industries--that's socialism. They mean that senior civil servants should think like businessmen, and Larry O'Brien is the perfect poster boy for that. He doesn't care about Ottawa citizens who can't find a job or have drug problems or face abuse at home or at work; he wants to reward those who make a lot of money with tax cuts, and everyone else is irrelevant. I find that completely repulsive.


The overall point I'm trying to make is how easily media distorts a straightforward issue and hence alters public attitudes. In the past 50 years, media have become almost exclusively corporate-owned, and corporations (which don't need buses or teachers or health care) always advocate tax cuts over improved services. On the national stage, we have CBC as a voice of reason, but in local politics, corporate control of the media allows them to fool the public into supporting politicians and policies which hurt them. That's not a difficult problem to solve. First, media conglomerates like Quebecor or Canwest need to be broken up to encourage competition and diverse voices. Why should a city like Ottawa only have one real daily paper? Second, the public needs to understand how the media works and why it is useful to have reliable information. 100 years ago, worker-owned newspapers were crucial to help citizens demand political change and improve their lives. Newspapers are a relic of the past, and we need to create electronic news agencies which cost money, employ real journalists, and provide real news. "The machine" is not as complex as people think, and with daily analysis and exposition, the public could understand it and use it to serve them better.


*In a unionized workforce like the transit union, the workers' pay and benefits are set by the collective agreement, which is negotiated between the union and the management every few years. If the management (ie the mayor) says they won't negotiate, that means none of the workers get any raise or improved working conditions until management says so. It's a sign of contempt for the workers, and no union would accept that.