I have friends who nobly militate against homophobia and misogyny, racism and ageism and, my current favourite, the almost universal misapprehension and underestimation of people with intellectual disabilities. I’m afraid my own efforts are a little less grand, though. As I get older and my grey matter becomes more and more liable to slosh into increasingly unattractive ruts, I really enjoy being forced every once in a while to change my mind on one or another of the assumptions that can make life in one’s twilight years so cozy and reassuring.
Like the fact that Christie Blatchford and Rosie DiManno are bad at their jobs. I’ve got to say, I have loved that one, coming as it did with so many other labour-saving accessories, like the comforting picture of the professional who succeeds not by merit but in spite of great and obvious inadequacies that happen to line up with the public’s own lack of intelligence and discernment.
I’d lived comfortably with it for ages, and it has allowed me to not read them for years at a stretch. Then I read Blatchford on Layton, and all the response to it. And then I read her again on safe injection sites. And now I’ve been forced to read, and re-read, DiManno on the multimediation of reporting. I disagree with much of what they’ve said, and much of how they’ve said it, sometimes violently, and find myself backed into the conclusion that they are, both of them, paragons of non-objective journalism of the sort that Brooke Gladstone argues to compellingly for in her recent book, The Influencing Machine.
These women are not only not ideologues, they are anti-ideological. Their reporting and their columns are unabashed reflections of their own idiosyncratic accretion of experience, observation, predilections and predispositions, and in this, they are excellent reflections of ourselves. Attacks on the two crop up pretty much as often as their bylines, which is as it should be.
The first one I ran across in my search on DiManno was this one from an Xtra writer named Serafin LaRiviere a couple of years ago. It was a response to DiManno’s description of someone in a royal-watching crowd that the writer felt crossed a boundary. He wrote a note to her editor, cc-ing DiManno:
“I’m curious as to what DiManno is implying when she refers to a male shop keeper as a “hermaphrodite-in-waiting” who “cooed” at Camilla.” The note could have ended there, just as DiManno could have been more restrained in her description of the shopkeeper in question. But what fun would that have been?
LaRiviere goes on:
“I certainly wouldn’t write an article describing her as ‘senior citizen-in-waiting’ who is exhibiting classic resentment that the fancy-boy in question might jump the estrogen line and rob her of the hormones her withering body so desperately needs.”
Like I say, there are probably hundreds of attacks on DiManno out there, and hundreds more on Blatchford. But this one works nicely as an illustration of what DiManno is about, and why it’s a good thing. DiManno’s response, in full, was, “Oh, take the 2-by-4 out of your arse. (Not a gay slur, might I add.) I don’t give a toss about his sexual preferences. The guy looked like a male impersonator.”
If you’ll indulge me one more time, I’ll give you LaRiviere’s response to her response(it goes back and forth 8 more times): “Honey,” the writer says, “I’ve seen you up close and trust me, so do you.”
So a writer, concerned about either homophobia or what the at one point in their exchange calls “effeminaphobia” commits verbal acts of ageism, sexism (he calls her menopausal at one point), and something like whatever the reverse of effeminaphobia would be (Ivan Coyote, give me a hand here). And why? Because this is how many of us think. LaRiviere didn’t look at DiManno with fresh eyes in the wake of his umbrage and concoct these attacks in response. This was his pre-existing estimation of her, and of women of a certain age, the bon mots, prefaced with a gay-clich “honey” to make it clear what team he’s on, ready to be whipped out whenever one of them crosses him.
This is what DiManno does all the time. It’s what she was doing in this column. The fact that she doesn’t wait for a specific attack on her doesn’t make much difference. She puts what she thinks, and how she thinks, onto the page. It’s what she’s paid to do, and it’s why people read her. We may not share all or even any of her own prejudices, but we do share the fact that we have them, that we think them, and that we sometimes express them, verbally or otherwise.
This may be the point in the conversation at which someone says that we should be working for a better world and not be satisfied with the faults and injustices of
the all too imperfect one we live in. We should be working against prejudice and insensitivity, not trumpeting it on the pages of our nation’s biggest daily (or the Post either).
But name-calling is only a part of prejudice. We prejudice everything and everybody all the time. Sometimes our pre-judgments are subverted, sometimes they’re not. We can’t come at everything cold. We’re all the result of a thousand previous experiences, observations, lessons from our families, and stand-up jokes. Some of these are pleasant and lovely, like the assumption that parents who adopt multiple orphans from around the world are loving and charitable rather than emotionally needy. Others are more venal. Some of us make a habit of trying to be open-minded as often as we’re able and have the energy. Most of us don’t.
We have laws governing to what extent prejudice can work its way into actions like hiring or hitting. But it would be wrong to assume that these laws are early steps in a campaign to eliminate prejudice. Like many laws, they exist to put limits on basic aspects of human nature.
The lens I see the world through is ground differently from DiManno’s and Blatchford’s. For my part, I think the majority of people who drive cars are a little less conscientious than those who choose to ride bikes or take transit. I think people who thank god for winning a Grammy don’t get it and are probably a little dumb.
Blatchford has said, out loud and in front of people (including me), that she sees soldiers, police officers and firefighters as heroes until proven otherwise and that she is, mostly without question, on their side. Both Blatchford and DiManno have an explicit predisposition towards the maudlin and the gruesome, hovering around child-death trials like much of the rest of the reading public hovers around celebrity and, not coincidentally, child-death trials. This makes the two of them both unobjective and transparent, which is one up on most journalists.
Sustained success and popularity are never accidental. I’ve known this ever since I started reading Stephen King and watching Steven Spielberg. It’s just taken a while for me to realize that it applies to these gals, too. We’ve got Hello!, Architectural Digest and Cond Nast Traveller if we want aspirational media. Our newspapers should be, and mostly are, reflections of who we actually are. Which is what makes them way better reads.
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Bert Archer is the Media Critic for the Toronto Standard.
