Angry Talking Heads

 

When I was a teacher, it used to bother me to no end that it only took one or two ignorant, badly-behaved kids to spoil the atmosphere and discourse in a class. For those who think it should have been a simple matter to silence those voices, well, let's just say they don't understand the reality and the dynamics of teaching.

I feel the same frustration today when I see angry men-children like Elon Musk and his Canadian counterpart, Pierre Poilievre, spreading their mischief to gain either attention or political advantage. Take, for example, Musk's impish decision to label publicly-funded media as government-funded, the implication being that they are merely organs of government propaganda. In the United States, this has led both NPR and PBS to close their Twitter accounts.

Not to be outdone, our own domestic mischief-maker, Pierre Poilievre, wants the same designation for the CBC. This is perhaps not surprising, coming from the man who is trying to exact as much political mileage as possible out of his promise to defund the CBC.

Like the problem students I dealt with, they clearly have too much power to influence the agenda. Unlike the classroom, however, all of us have a role to play in mitigating such madness, as pointed out in the following letter from a Star readers:

Trying too hard to make CBC the enemy, April 13

Bruce Arthur is right to pay attention to Elon Musk and Pierre Poilievre championing the word freedoms in order to destroy it when it comes to the public funding of national media like the CBC. Clearly these two are not reformers but transformers and destroyers of our democracy. As antistatist freedom fighters they appeal to everyone’s sense of liberty while bringing about its end in the media.

Like the typical 1980s neo-con U.S. President Ronald Reagan who identified government as the enemy of the people, Musk and Poilievre regard publicly funded media to express the national will of its people as illegitimate. They demand that the marketplace is the only way to provide free and balanced reporting.

The fact that such free enterprise thinking resulted in Fox News, becoming the lying propaganda media for Republicans only is ignored.

The fact that Musk bought Twitter promising to free it up so that everyone would be heard but turned it into the embodiment of censorship is overlooked. (Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s opposition is censored in Indian and Substack notes’ links are censored in the U.S.)

The fact that magical thinking that freedom bestows legitimacy on anything done in its name has proven to do major harm to democracy is ignored.

History has shown that public funding for national media like the CBC is the only democratic economic system that allows individuals to vote for how their money is to be used in the media. They can vote out the government and replace it with a different policy about its funding.

Musk can’t be voted out. Poilievre with such anti-democratic views should not be voted in.

Tony D’Andrea, Toronto

Perhaps a tall order from Mr. D'Andrea, but one that none of us who believe in a healthy democracy can afford to shirk.