Bon's Mots

It is the end of the first week of school and I have sur­vived. No wed­gies, no Uggs, no sea of lap­tops in class.

The fears I laid out in my first post were all for naught. The ben­e­fit of a post-grad win­ter pro­gram is the va­ri­ety of peo­ple en­rolled in it. There are a few stu­dents fresh out of their un­der­grad term at uni­ver­sity but the ma­jor­ity, like me, came from the work­force. We all bring dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives to the ta­ble and there has al­ready been a good ex­change of ideas and opin­ions. The size of our class (31) also al­lows for a feel­ing of close­ness and sol­i­dar­ity — we even started our own Facebook group!

The funny thing is, we take the same classes to­gether. Coupled with the fact that our cam­pus served as Degrassi High, at times it feels like I’m back in high school. (I think my locker is near Joey Jeremiah’s but I haven’t been able to con­firm it.) And like high school, the cafe­te­ria food leaves a lot to be de­sired. Thankfully, the Danforth is just a 10-minute walk away.

I have an ad­van­tage over most of my fel­low stu­dents when it comes to cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions and P.R. But I’ve dis­cov­ered there is a lot more I need to learn. Like how to write, for ex­am­ple. As I men­tioned in my first post, it has been a long time since I wrote any­thing be­yond a client pro­posal or an e-mail. Back then, I had a ten­dency to­ward the ver­bose and the the­saurus was my bible. Since there is no de­mand for 2,000-word news re­leases, I will strive to learn the seven C’s of good writ­ing: clear, con­cise, cor­rect, co­her­ent, com­plete, con­sis­tent and cre­ative. The CP Style Guide will be­come my new bible.

Another tid­bit I picked up was how to read news­pa­pers. I mean, REALLY read news­pa­pers. I sub­scribe to the Toronto Star and read it re­li­giously every morn­ing. But I tend to skim over most of the ar­ti­cles, read­ing only the first two and last para­graphs to get the gist of the ar­ti­cle. But af­ter my first Media Relations class I be­gan to an­a­lyze the pa­per and no­ticed some­thing: Every jour­nal­ist has a bias. It tends to be ob­vi­ous and ex­pected with colum­nists like Rosie DiManno of the Star and Margaret Wente of The Globe and Mail. But the bias of other re­porters tends to creep in “hard” news sto­ries. For ex­am­ple, take this ar­ti­cle in last Thursday’s National Post:

’09 Afghan pull­out too soon, ex­perts say

It is al­ready too late for Canada to with­draw from com­bat in south­ern Afghanistan when the mis­sion ex­pires in 2009, mil­i­tary an­a­lysts said yesterday.

The fed­eral Liberal party made a sub­mis­sion this week to the panel study­ing Canada’s fu­ture role in Afghanistan, headed by for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter John Manley.

In it, the party in­sisted Ottawa should for­mally no­tify NATO now of Canada’s in­ten­tion to end its com­bat mis­sion in Kandahar next year, con­tend­ing it would be a “trav­esty” if the mis­sion con­tin­ued be­yond February, 2009.

But ex­perts warned yes­ter­day that there is not enough time to safely re­place the 2,500 Canadian troops in the re­gion with sol­diers from other NATO countries.

This “news” item is about a sub­mis­sion the fed­eral Liberals made to a panel study­ing Canada’s role in Afghanistan. The Post re­porter chose to fo­cus on the opin­ion of “ex­perts” who be­lieve it is too soon to with­draw our troops. This jibes with the Conservative government’s view that Canada’s should keep its troops in Afghanistan un­til progress is made, no mat­ter how long it takes. And we all know how “right” the Post is.

Now take a look at how the Toronto Star re­ported on the same item:

‘Travesty’ to ex­tend com­bat role: Liberals

Canada should re­main com­mit­ted to Afghanistan but the cur­rent com­bat mis­sion in Kandahar must end in just over a year, fed­eral Liberals say.

Canada should in­stead look at other roles for the mil­i­tary, such as train­ing the Afghan National Army and po­lice, pro­tect­ing Afghan civil­ians or lead­ing re­con­struc­tion ef­forts, the party said in a pa­per re­leased yesterday.

“We be­lieve Canada and the rest of the world have an oblig­a­tion to the peo­ple of Afghanistan,” the Liberal party says in its sub­mis­sion to the fed­eral panel now study­ing the fu­ture of Canada’s Afghan mission.

And in a news re­lease ac­com­pa­ny­ing the doc­u­ment, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion said he’s open to “other pos­si­ble mil­i­tary roles in Afghanistan.”

But the party says it would be a “trav­esty” to con­tinue the cur­rent mil­i­tary role in Kandahar un­der the guise of a “train­ing mission.”

Instead, the Liberals say, the Conservatives must im­me­di­ately in­form NATO that Canada will end its Kandahar mis­sion in February 2009, adding that as long as al­lies be­lieve the mis­sion is “open-ended, they will never pre­pare for our departure.”

The Star fo­cused on the view­point of the Liberals, who want an early with­drawl of our troops. This isn’t sur­pris­ing, given the Star’s leftist/Liberal lean­ings. The point I am try­ing to make is this: there is no real ob­jec­tiv­ity in the me­dia. While this is hardly new in­for­ma­tion it has made me think of how ob­vi­ous it is and how it doesn’t mat­ter any­more. With the tech­nol­ogy avail­able to us, we have ac­cess to raw in­for­ma­tion and can ar­rive at our own con­clu­sions in­stead of hav­ing it spoon-fed to us. We can also draw from a huge pool of opin­ions re­gard­ing the lat­est is­sues and de­cide which ones ap­peal to us. (For the record, I like mine with a lit­tle satire and Jon Stewart’s snarky, sexy grin.)

In the early term of George W. Bush’s pres­i­dency, the tra­di­tional me­dia was shame­less in their un­wa­ver­ing, hy­per­pa­tri­otic sup­port of the war in Iraq (“Bush Lies, Media Swallows”, Eric Alterman, The Nation). The dearth of cov­er­age on any op­pos­ing view­points and the grow­ing savvy of the pub­lic (or more so the left-leaning in­tel­li­gentsia) has led to the rise of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism (or “new me­dia” as some call it).

It would neg­li­gent for me as a fu­ture com­mu­ni­ca­tor to ig­nore this. If the role of pub­lic re­la­tions is to “…es­tab­lish and main­tain mu­tu­ally ben­e­fi­cial re­la­tion­ships be­tween an or­ga­ni­za­tion and the var­i­ous publics on whom its suc­cess or fail­ure de­pend” (Center and Broom, Effective Public Relations), then giv­ing lit­tle cre­dence to the “new me­dia” would be invit­ing dis­as­ter. There are nu­mer­ous ex­am­ples of how the “lit­tle guy” brought down “the man” (or an­chor­man, in Dan Rather’s case) and it’s not go­ing to end, folks. All of which leads me to be­lieve that when Time named their 2006 Person of the Year as you, they con­firmed what we all know: opin­ions are like a – holes — everyone’s got one. And they will blog about it. And the world will notice.