The Politics of the Press: Ezra Levant, the Alberta Provincial Government, and “Who gets to decide who’s the media?”

Over the past week or so in Alberta there has been a hubbub about “freedom of the press” in the context of provincial government coverage. When I was tempted to give in to an (ultimately pointless) urge to engage in social media debate, I began to realize that the issue itself brings out some deeper questions around definition, classification, and authority. This analysis aims to elucidate some alternative dimensions of the issue, or at least different ways to think about it. Perhaps then it also serves as evidence for the type of thinking that a humanities degree can involve, with one ceaveat: it ends with more questions than the one it began with.

You can read several accounts of the events in Alberta here and here, but to give a rough sketch:

The Alberta provincial government held several press-only, media-specific conferences, which (at least) two reporters were either not welcome at, or blacklisted from. The two reporters in question both work for Ezra Levant and his right-wing news organization.

Lawyerly letters were exchanged, in which Levant’s lawyer detailed the experiences of the slighted reporters, and the Alberta Justice Department on behalf of Premier Rachel Notley’s government responded, “Our client’s position remains that your client and those who identify as being connected to your client are not journalists and are not entitled to access media lockups or other such events.” (See links provided above.)

Ezra Levant called the Premier a “bully,” began a petition, and began crowdfunding for a lawsuit. (Aside: Can anyone else hear whoops of joy and guns shooting into the air?)

Under the threat of legal action and citing public reaction, the Notley government backed down and reversed their ban, while arranging for a former bureau chief of the Canadian press to review the government’s media policies and offer recommendations.

The article that someone posted on Facebook that I was going to respond to was actually a blog post by a political commentator. This man doesn’t align himself with Levant but it appears that he also wasn’t classified as media or press and was banned from the same events as Levant’s employees. So now we have another piece of evidence – it wasn’t just Levant’s organization that was banned, but presumably this ban applied to others who participate in non-traditional forms of media – those run mostly through websites and blogs, although Levant also appears on TV.

One of the reasons for the ban that was given to a Levant reporter was that she wasn’t an “accredited” journalist. This has sparked a debate around the question, “who gets to decide who the media is?” If there is a general ideal of a “free press,” who defines who is “press”? One article sources the director of a journalism program at a university in Halifax. She says, “The underlying issue, of course, is who gets to decide who’s a journalist… Do you really want government deciding who’s a journalist? I don’t think so. I think that’s a very dangerous path.” This leaves aside the fact that the Sun Media corporation is also knows as an “echo chamber” for the Conservative government (see here and here for examples).

The “who gets to decide who’s a journalist” angle is being thoroughly operationalized in response to fears of a repressive government with a monopoly on defining the press, and therefore the products that they produce – the mediators that produce media through a particular medium. I’d like to consider some alternative dimensions that also relate to the definition of a “journalist,” who gets classified as one, and what authority authorizes this identification.

From this particular situation, we can adduce that there is a category of individuals that become subjectified (made into subjects or a grouping of subjects) as the “media;” this grouping is allowed certain privileges contingent upon that definition, and being classified as such. We might say that the creation and perpetual use of such a category hails, or calls into existence, those who wish to claim the use of the word (and what it signifies) for their own purposes. (Building on Louis Althusser’s work here).

In this particular case, Ezra Levant makes himself and his organization recognizable as such, so that he has access to those privileges. We might compare this the situation in which groups make themselves recognizable as “religions” in order to claim the benefits of such a designation under a “freedom of religion” framework. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd explores such claims in international relations in Beyond Religious Freedom (2015), enumerating evidence for the inconsistent application of the category of religion by law and policy-makers. Maria Birnbaum does something similar throughout her doctoral thesis Becoming Recognizable: Postcolonial Independence and the Reification of Religion (2015), also within the realm of international relations.

However, in order for such a category to be effective, and for rights to be allocated to those who wish to claim them, an agent or institution occupying a position of authority must recognize and affirm such a claim. In an insightful chapter about claims to religious status and authority within the collection Religion as a Category of Sovereignty and Governance, Jeffrey Israel shows how both the original call to existence and the claim of the answering subject or subjects must be met by, “the gaze of publicly ‘authoritative’ recognition” (2015: 217). This point shows how when it comes to defining a category, more is involved than simply self-identification.

In relation to acts of identification, in a different context and to a different authority, Levant chooses not to invoke his identification with the media, despite the fact that it may have worked in his favour. On record in court in 2014 (according to the media), he states to the judge, “I’m a commentator, I’m a pundit… I don’t think in my entire life I’ve ever called myself a reporter.” The author of this particular article (who would presumably be one of Levant’s peers in the context of the Alberta government’s meetings) Christie Blatchford, doesn’t appear to consider Levant a member of the media: the title of the piece reads, “Ezra Levant insists he’s not a ‘reporter.’ On this, everyone agrees.”

Whenever there are rules (policies, law, etc.) about who is and who isn’t x or y, questions of classification enter into the equation and so does the potential for discrimination. In failing to recognize Ezra Levant’s employees and perhaps other bloggers and non-traditional media as “reporters,” “media,” or “press,” the Alberta government classified them as not-those-things, something other. My question in respect to the question of classification in this particular context then, is what does it take to not be classified as a reporter?

The government employee who cited “accredited” shifts the classificatory criterion to the prior recognition of an individual as a subject, in this case as a journalist, but a third-party who is seen as possessing the authority to do so. In a sense, this statement passes the responsibility off to a different institution that presumably has some standard. The president of the press gallery later backpedaled, saying “Journalists are not required to have accreditation from (the legislature) press gallery in order to cover media conferences at the legislature… It has long been the practice that reporters simply present their credentials to security to access news conferences.”

If a year of Latin in my undergrad accomplished anything, it’s that I can state with relative certainty that the terms “accredited” and “credential” both come from credere, which means to believe or trust. Not needing to be accredited implies that no external agent, no-one else, has to approve or place trust in a person as a journalist. If credentials are all that the authority in question requires, no-one needs to actually believe that you’re a journalist – you simply need a piece of paper or plastic that says you are, and perhaps an organization or publication of some sort – this is where the gray area comes in. Some reporters even acknowledge this themselves.

However, due to the fact that in the context of covering the democratically elected government, the recognizing authority is meant to be transparent and accountable to the very people making themselves recognizable. Taking away the rights of some of those people is going to appear repressive no matter what.

In short, with respect to the question: “who gets to decide who’s the media?” The answer is “anyone.” Questions of trust, belief, and sincerity can be left aside upon the production of empirical “proof” that doesn’t actually do anything more than make one recognizable to an authority. How many other contexts might such a framework operate within?

Such a framework leads to the assumption that: Levant produces, therefore he is. Just as a thought experiment, perhaps instead of adducing arguments that are contingent upon subjective states and external appearances (not to mention interpretations), we should be looking at effects in the world. Then we might ask instead: who gets to decide what is media, and is there some standard according to which to evaluate failed media? What are the actual results of recognizing Levant, and his employees as belonging to the same category as those others who produce media?

If so, and that standard is reporting or journaling with the purpose of accurately mediating between an event and a party once removed, then the Levant debate involves doubtful “media” in more ways than one. In fact, Levant has been in court for libel six times that I found in a very basic search, and not once has he won. Levant even has a web domain separate from his media site to solicit support against such accusations – http://www.standwithezra.ca/.

The elephant in the room that I haven’t yet acknowledged in this post is the fact that Levant and Notley have competing ideologies, as Levant’s partisan politics clearly show him at odds with Notley’s agenda as the Premier and leader of Alberta’s New Democratic Party (NDP). I wonder if it’s possible for repression to be viewed in light of prevention – or should the provincial government wait until Levant commits libel (again)? Who pays for that lawsuit, if it’s even a real possibility?

Does shifting the focus to what’s produced instead of the producer shed any additional light upon the issue? Can “freedom of the press” be reconciled with the repressive measures of the state? What happens when a member of the press has a competing, but equally repressive, agenda? Freedom of the press in this context allows for “the media” to serve as an ideological battleground. But can it exist any other way? In other words, is there any such thing as true neutrality?

In the meantime, dear Albertan demos, or people: check your sources’ sources. Wait, am I the media?

 

 

 

In Retrospect: The Discourse on “Culture” and Canadian Politics in 2015

I began this post a few months ago, but decided to finish it off now anyways. I think it is still relevant in light of the lead up to the presidential race across the border in the U.S.A., as stereotypically mild-mannered Canadians compare Donald Trump’s bombastic divisive cultural politics to less vociferous ones at home.

Take a foray into Canadian politics, late 2015…Media portrayals often play a role in reflecting and reproducing hegemony according to the language utilized by state actors. The discourse on culture in Canadian politics, and the shift in that discourse over the time previous to and throughout the federal election in October 2015, is a case in point. Analyzing this shift and the reception of it can reveal the ongoing framing and negotiation of which values are at play in Canadian nationalism and the identification of the ideal “Canadian.” Borrowing from Timothy Fitzgerald, this post illustrates how “language is far from being a game because control of language brings power to the controllers. Politicians [among others] hope to define words in such a way that they confer power and authority” (2000: 88).

While Stephen Harper was in power, culture was something that got in the way of such things as citizenship, women’s rights, and public safety. For example, in reference to the well-publicized debate around one woman’s desire to wear the niqab for the public portion of her citizenship ceremony, Harper stated, “We do not allow people to cover their faces during citizenship ceremonies. Why would Canadians, contrary to our own values, embrace a practice at that time that is not transparent, that is not open and frankly is rooted in a culture that is anti-women.”

Several things are interesting in this declaration about culture. The former Prime Minister uses the word “values” – but when religious freedom is a constitutionally protected right (despite the ambiguity in what exactly it protects) and the nation has an official policy of multiculturalism, shouldn’t those concepts characterize Canadian values, as opposed to state-enforced ideas of openness and transparency? Might we read this debate as actually about submission to authority, expectations around conformity, and the limits of diversity? As Ranu Samantrai remarks of frustrated multiculturalism, “the concern is not that Muslims fail to become Christian, but that they fail to follow Christianity’s path to secularism by subsuming their religious affiliation to their national membership” (2008: 331). Harper’s discourse frames this woman’s face-covering as an affront to the nation as a whole. In this situation Muslim women’s bodies, covered or not, become the site on which to contest institutionalized force and the reproduction of ideal citizens.

It’s also important to note that Harper uses the word “culture” and not “religion” or “Islam.” I would venture to say that he espouses a Bernard Lewis/Samuel Huntington-esque approach to culture (one that Samantrai critiques in the article above): that religious affiliation is a (perhaps the) foundational element in determining individual and national “cultural” identities. The religion of the ‘other’ is public, not private; irrational, not enlightened; and cannot be reconciled with a national ethos based upon a model of secularism that supposedly separates from but actually grew out of largely Christian societies and still reproduces Christian-centric bias. William E. Connolly might agree; he calls “secular rationality… hypocritical because it secretly draws cultural sustenance from the “private faith” of constituencies who embody the European traditions from which Christian secularism emerged.” (1999: 91)

Samantrai’s article is valuable for its proposal for the state to eschew religious affiliation as a criterion for citizenship and privilege, which she foresees as beneficial for minorities within minorities (i.e. women within ethnicized constituencies). Her piece, however, begs two questions: can a nation rupture from its own historical contingency in such as way as to align societal norms with constitutionally guaranteed ideals? And, what then holds together the public culture of the nation – or, how might the nation be reconstituted or redefined (if it ought to be)? Connolly’s argument points out that the very idea of a nation, contingent upon vague notions of unity, allegiance, and communication, exists in tension with that of democracy (1999: 90, 87). Connolly suggests that no constituency be given, “the right to occupy the definitive center [or public sphere] of the nation,” which he sees as opening up possibilities for “multiple minorities” to explore multiplicity and intersectionality (1999: 92-3). Instead of subsuming one’s allegiances to that of the nation, his reconfiguration requires people to positively identify with other constituencies based on such categories as gender, language, class, ethnicity, and what may have you. Whether such a desanctified nationalism is possible, I’m not sure.

Returning to Harper, his political decline is also characterized by the proposed “Barbaric Cultural Practices” police hotline. This initiative purported to contribute to public safety when more likely inciting violence against publicly religious persons, particularly given the PM’s obvious opinion of the niqab. As media reports, “The heightened rhetoric over ‘Canadian values’ coincides with a rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes.” Harper in the past year doesn’t sound like the same PM under whom Canada’s Office of Religious Freedom became a thing – although, promoting Western-defined religious freedom abroad perhaps isn’t all that far off from intolerance at home; there is a similar imposition of foreign values in an effort to “civilize” the inappropriately religious subject. (NB: The Liberals might scrap the Office of Religion Freedom.)

Post-October 19^th, 2015, and the election of PM Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party

Shifting for a moment to the provincial level of government instead of the federal, “What does culture mean to you?” That’s what the provincial Government of Ontario was asking via Facebook ads throughout November and December, in the months following the election. The criteria that they provide to define culture is telling of the shift in discourse discussed in this post. Culture is no longer majorly religion nor threat, but is now something that one participates in or shares with others voluntarily. Perhaps a consumer model of culture with the government regulating the market? According to various sections of the Ontario Culture Strategy, run by the Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Sport:

Culture is all the ways we remember, tell and celebrate our stories, and present and interpret the stories of others.

We tell our stories through:

film and television
recorded music and live performances
books and magazines
visual arts, theatre, dance
crafts
value systems, traditions and beliefs

Not only is culture now redefined as a creative and performance industry, but values are placed within this category. This shuffling of the conceptual deck of cards removes culture from the top of the deck, as this redefinition depoliticizes and domesticates culture as art, performance, material, narrative, and/or heritage. Culture is separated from that dangerous realm characterized by “transcendental narcissism,” as William E. Connolly calls self-serving religio-centric political discourse (8). Culture becomes a positive value, one to be enjoyed, instead of a potential source of threat to one’s way of life.

Justin Trudeau’s popularity grew at least in part through his courting of the segments of Canadian society that benefit the most from the multicultural policy, and those constituents who see themselves as liberal, welcoming, and open (there’s that word again). Trudeau particularly reached out to ethnic minorities. Trudeau is pro-refugee, and opposed Harper’s stance on the niqab. In a pre-election citizenship debate, Trudeau claimed that Harper’s stance “devalues” the citizenship of all Canadians, and that “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.” The PM also gained publicity and generally positive reactions after videos of him dancing Bhangra to Punjabi music, and “palancing” (dancing) to a Soca song circulated via social media.

Trudeau’s victory speech reads as a repudiation of Harper’s ideological agenda. In an effort to be inclusive he begins: “In coffee shops and in town halls, in church basements and in gurdwaras you gathered. You… told us about the kind of country you want to build and leave to your children.” He redefines Harper’s indeterminate signifiers: “[You want] a PM who understands that openness and transparency means better, smarter decisions.” He references Islam and women’s rights: “Last week, I met a young mom in St. Catharines, Ontario. She practises the Muslim faith and was wearing a hijab… She said she’s voting for us because she wants to make sure that her little girl has the right to make her own choices in life and that our government will protect those rights.” He addresses both religious and cultural diversity: “We know in our bones that Canada was built by people from all corners of the world who worship every faith, who belong to every culture, who speak every language.” And he ends by redefining Canadian values and national culture: “Have faith in your fellow citizens, my friends. They are kind and generous. They are open-minded and optimistic. And they know in their heart of hearts that a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.” (But a Trudeau type of Canadian, not a Harper type).

The second Prime Minister Trudeau depoliticizes culture, partly by participating in performances of culture (as defined by the criteria provided by the government of Ontario), and especially by enfolding “culture” into the national narrative of “Canadian-ness” as something to be proud of instead of threatened by. In a softer way than Harper’s niqab fixation, Trudeau establishes the primacy of national identity over religious affiliation by attempting to open the boundaries of Canadian-ness wider. Trudeau makes openness to cultural diversity cool again – a strategic role for him to step into with his father, former Prime Minster Pierre Elliot Trudeau, recognized for enacting the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Ontario government asking, “what does culture mean to you?” via social media in the months following the election reflects the politics of a sort of “people’s culture” that the Liberal party frames Justin Trudeau as representing in contrast to Conservative Stephen Harper’s “war on culture.”

The examples provided above show why, as academics and also as citizens, we should be wary of political essentialism and the naturalization of concepts and signifiers that get thrown around as if they’re prediscursive, unambiguous, and apolitical. Terms such as “culture” carry the weight of the values that get packed into and attached onto them. The concept of culture has the ability to shapeshift according to political aspirations that are contingent upon the promotion and reproduction of such values. Therefore, it’s more important to ask – what does culture mean for you, instead of to you?

*Bibliography in hyperlinks*

Pre-published Piece, “Searching for Method in a Sea of Theory…”

The Religion Bulletin, a blog connected to the journal Bulletin for the Study of Religion, was kind enough to publish a piece that I wrote after attending the North American Association for the Study of Religion‘s panels at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, November 20-24, 2015.

The piece is a reflection on my experience there, on the concept of “Method and Theory” courses, and about the discipline of Religious Studies and my own training within it.

You can find it here: http://bulletin.equinoxpub.com/2015/12/searching-for-method-in-a-sea-of-theory-or-how-i-do-i-even-do-this/.

A big thank you to them for giving me a start in the academic blogging world!