George Bain explains lamestream media bias

Still browsing in the Media section of the library (see "It's Not News, It's Fark") and was finally able to lay my hands on Gotcha! by one of the top three Canadian columnists of the 20th century, George Bain.

Mr. Bain wrote for the old Toronto Telegram, the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. In 1979, he became director of the School of Journalism at the University of King's College. He was a member of the News Hall of Fame, and in 2000 was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for having "contributed greatly to the development of journalism in Canada". He died in 2006.

A dozen years before his death, George got sick and tired of the liberal bias of the mainstream media. (Sarah Palin had not yet coined the word "lamestream".) Fortified with a large class of vitriol, he wrote Gotcha! (Key-Porter Books, 1994), rightly described as "a thorough and damning analysis" of said media.

The book is well worth reading, a compendium of detailed and insightful analysis of examples of the media serving the public badly by yielding to leftward bias, political correctness, ingrained negativity and intellectual laziness.

Here is a sample which Walt thinks is particularly relevant to topics recently discussed in this space.

It is easy to imagine, posted on bulletin boards of [the major] news bureaus, lists headed Good and Bad. Political parties are Good anywhere left of centre, and need not be so in any discernible way, so long as they make the proper sounds.... Left is Good.... Unions in themselves are inherently Good; business is Bad.

Canadian peacekeepers are Good but the military (who are the same people but with guns) are Bad. People who shoot other people are Bad, but if they are caught and imprisoned they are Good, because prisons are Bad.

Immigrants are not Bad unless they take jobs from others who came earlier. However, if they entered the country as illegal refugees, they are automatically Good, because they wouldn't be refugees if they had not been persecuted, which is Bad, therefore they are Good.

How I wish I could write like that.

Also recommended: In addition to being a cynic, George Bain was a oenophile. He was also a humorist, and won the Stephen Leacock prize for Nursery Rhymes to Be Read Aloud by Young Parents with Old Children. My favourite, though, is Letters from Lilac, which describes lovingly the sort of small town in which I grew up.