With age comes wisdom, or at least a greater probability of wisdom. Might we not expect, then, the occasional pearl of intellectual insight from the ever-expanding ranks of our senior journalists?
Denied a healthy and regular influx of youthful enthusiasm fresh from journalism school (thanks to shrinking size of newsrooms), surely the logical corollary should be the odd carefully-considered rumination on the nature of the world that so confounds us all. Alas, it is not to be. Not in Ottawa.
If there is one essential element missing in the daily media of the nation’s capital it is intellectual depth. This is not to say that Ottawa reporters are stupid. Some are, but many are quite bright -- brilliant even. But they chose to write only about events, and sometimes the geopolitical, sociological or environmental contexts in which those events emerge. Rarely are they allowed the indulgence of exploring the ideas, the forces, the abstractions that manifest both the context and the events.
Granted, this is not New York or Boston, where Sunday cafe traffic is commonly burdened with multi-hundred-page copies of local dailies that include some of the best speculations on the nature of life, the universe and everything worth an upper-middle-class yuppie’s time. But it is a sad thought that even a pale imitation of that culture is too much to ask for in this town.
Print is the logical first choice to look for an example, the electronic media being fearful of allowing anyone the time to adequately explore an idea. Yet here the pickings are the slimmest. The Citizen’s Sunday Art, Books & Ideas section hardly ever tackles a idea at the intellectual level, and when it does, the author’s byline is invariably accompanied by the likes of The New Republic or The Guardian.
Indeed, the only local columnist worthy of the intellectual’s mantle left Ottawa a year ago. Peter Stockland may have views that are, as they say, just right of Atilla the Hun’s, but rarely are his musings less than provocative and challenging. Where lesser writers debate the merits of freedom of information legislation, Stockland addresses the nature of information or the nature of freedom.
Stockland once served in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, where his penchant for Thomas Aquinas and his ilk left less-well-read gallery colleagues puzzled at the best of times. But when his employers offered him the editor’s post at the Calgary Sun, he headed west. Fortunately, the other Sun papers, including Ottawa’s, still run his columns every now and then.
This past Sunday saw Stockland, who could be described as more Catholic than the pope, exploring the four-hundred-year-old debate over his church’s treatment of Galileo Galilei and the scientist’s then-controversial notion that the Sun, rather than the Earth, is the centre of solar system. From this Stockland delved into basic epistemology -- how we know what we know.
Heavy. But without such stuff, a weekend paper just doesn’t feel complete, no matter how massive the advertising sections make it.
Who else? There’s Carleton journalism professor Christopher Dornan, who, though not long of tooth, deals with some of the more weighty issues concerning the media in his radio essays on CBO Morning. His contributions are a welcome break from host John Lacharity’s predictably lame attempts at editorializing, but Dornan’s focus is too narrow and too easy a target to permit true intellectual probing.
None of the phone-in hosts on CFRA, the city’s only information-oriented station, offers even the slightest hope of a serious discussion and Ottawa television is, as it always has been, an intellectual wasteland.
It isn’t as if other Canadian cities do much better, of course. The Kingston Whig-Standard once published the arcane and abstruse by academics with nothing better to do than challenge Whig readers in a weekend magazine essay format. But the magazine is no longer, a victim of those nasty rate-of-return targets -- the same targets that prevent papers from spending money on extras like research, travel and young blood.
Even newspapers that don’t aspire to the intellectual, but merely the intelligent, are having a tough time of late. The owners of New York Newsday, a paper that made the mistake of trying to steal readers from the venerable New York Times, fired all 880 employees earlier this month when the owners decided mere profitability was not enough.
One columnist for the Village Voice (the grand-daddy of all alternative weeklies and the best source of analysis on the NYC media scene) described New York Newsday as “sophisticated.” Another wrote of the paper’s “ornate stylists” when trying to explain the death of the city’s third daily tabloid. Both agreed that this is not what New Yorkers want. And if New Yorkers don’t want even a little sophistication, then why should Ottawa publishers and news directors bother?
Why? Just because. That’s why.