ThemVille
Mr. Kenney's finest of the fine guys have started their full-court, faux-journalistic press and it is starting to upset people.
Including, it would appear, some the bamboozled subjects how have been pounded into the tips of the war room's propaganda javelins.
James Keller of the CP has the story of one such dupee, this one from Lotusland, in the Canadian Press:
A Vancouver chef who was featured in an article produced by Alberta’s “energy war room” says he’s furious he wasn’t told that the Canadian Energy Centre was created and funded by the provincial government.
Donald Gyurkovits, president of the Canadian Culinary Federation, said his group strives to stay out of politics and he never would have participated if the writer who contacted him explained the background of the centre. Several other people interviewed by the war room have also said they were not told about its ties to the Alberta government and critics have questioned why the centre’s writers have been describing themselves as reporters...
Which is fair enough as far as the lede to a bit of 'straight journalism' push backfrom Mr. Keller and his editor(s) goes.
But...
Who made the legitimizing decision to call the original war room piece an 'article'?
Why not, instead, call the thing what it really was?
If you get my drift.
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Tip o' the toque to David Climenhaga of the always excellent 'AlbertaPolitics.ca'.
Way off-topic...It was great to meet reader D. and friend with his dogs down at the beach today...Hope next time to get a chance to chat with partner P. as well!
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2 comments:
The paleo-right’s lament was that lefties from academia had stolen a march from them and, as Preston Manning happily advised, alls we gotta do is get brainy like they is—as if the tenets of sciences, pure, social and academic, had availed an advertising hook that only needed matching for the right to regain the prestige it once had, way back before the electorate got literate. Call it trite. The new right wanted to look more factual than spiritual, more laboratory than pulpit, hence the Cato and Fraser Institutes —or “think tanks” and their purveyors of ‘truths’—that is, statistics. Once headed down that road of inquiry, however, the temptation to cherry-pick and abuse stats can overwhelm any pretence of sooth saying. Even back then the idea of right-wing think tanks accepted the political credo that whatever works is truly the art of the possible. It contributes nothing to the science of, say, the atmosphere or the ecosystem.
Fundamental to Jason KeKangaroo Kenny’s UCP propaganda arm or ‘war room’ are the notions that, hey, this stuff really works!—and of course, whatever ethical questions there might be, they’re all answered by the basic justness of it all: the bitumen industry is under attack so, never mind the atmosphere, Albetarians are fully within their rights to attack back. It’s just as just as defending God fearing Christians and Mormons from alleged persecution. If such persecutions can be imagined, then so can an enemy be imagined. The scales of justness must be balanced.
But it’s a slippery slope where, nearing the nadir, Genesistic fable may be taught as ‘equally true’ as the science that easily refutes it—in high school science classes, no less. Like Preston taught: alls ya gotta do is pitch a hook just like them acadeemics do—that’s only fair. Who’s denier, now?
The neo-right has developed absurdities such as this because, hey, it works and, along with the naturally attendant equivocation so closely identified with the neo-right (neoliberal-usurped traditional conservative parties), it may be judged as either its greatest success or greatest failure. It assigns itself perfect scores.
After all, the pseudo-author of the tRumpian playbook Jason KeKindergord Kenney so overweeningly obeys is the king of the neo-right’s most enduring accomplishment: fake news. Add to this the spike in distracting, hateful vitriol we’ve observed in all media ever since the greatest liar in history became president, and insertion of completely absurd nonsense passes for political discourse amongst neo-rightists as they bide, now, in their circled wagon laagers.
It remains true, however, that if any of this stuff were judged in a court of law instead of public opinion, the perjury would earn these spewers a stay in stir. Perhaps because it’s more like ‘when’, not ‘if’, the neo-right is getting in its parting shots, its closing arguments before the game’s over.
But, man! What a ride!
Thank you Scotty on Denman.
Hope every one has a Happy pre New Year's Eve weekend.
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