Make up your own mind

TESSA VANDERHART STAFF

I’m one small part of a giant, amorphous, disgustingly ubiquitous blob. It’s everywhere, it’s dirty, and I love it. The media. Sure, “convergence” has made it prettier and perkier, but regardless of how you make your daily connection with the spectre of the media, be it through MuchMusic or MTV, it’s obvious: democracy, the fundamental assumption of so much anti-corporate-media mumbo-jumbo, is way over your head.

Media Democracy Day, an invention of Canadians concerned about the concentration of media ownership in our fair country, is celebrated every Oct. 18 by the lucky employees of Canada’s six media conglomerates, among others, and necessitated by what can only be described as a stupid attempt to reclaim media ownership. It’s at best a droll exercise in pretending that your personal perceptions of the world are somehow meaningful.

The fact is, if you don’t know a thing about the civic election next week, it’s your own damn fault. And — I hate to break it to you — when Sam Katz gets re-elected, that, too, will be your fault.

Whether you’re a silly, democracy-loving idealist or just another shmuck to be pandered to, Media Democracy Day is just another example of why your vote counts even less than your demographic’s market share value.

You see I, unlike you, am part of the media. This means I have power: lots of it. And I want to take this opportunity to remind you that you — yes, you — are stupid. You, reader, like every other reader of this newspaper, or that newspaper, or watcher of the CBC, or, I don’t know, Entertainment Tonight, all of you, I do my very best to believe, are morons. My future career as a world-renowned journalist depends on this assumption.

After all, that’s why newspapers are written to a grade-four reading level.

It’s why journalists interview the families of dead soldiers hours after they themselves receive the news, instead of venturing outside of the Green Zone in Iraq. Because we are better than you.

It’s why newscasters are made-up like contestants in a nightly Miss America pageant. (And you didn’t think that they covet the Ottawa press galleries, precociously close to the parliamentarian-soaked bars at the bottom of the Hill, because it means they get to save the world with coverage of the Liberal leadership race, did you?)

Sure, all of the media are saying the same thing — but what do you think you’re going to do about it? Remember: you, and only you, choose the news you follow. So go ahead: take this little tidbit and file it away in your skeptical little university student’s mind as another example of the media being evil, biased, and pumped full of the same five stories every week.

Hell, you’d be lazy and biased and evil, too — if you had the chance.