It’s typical for individuals to excuse whatever they do by taking cover behind (or identifying with) the corporate mission. “It’s for the good of the organization” or “I was just following orders” are standard lines we’ve all heard. Often.

But it seems that opposition is also hackneyed and lame. I can’t identify with any radical group that would post some kind of “call to action” on utility poles, or march with protest signs to CanWest or Black Press corporate offices (not that such a creature has materialized at any rate). What good would they do, when most citizens wouldn’t want to identify with whatever the opposition identifies as its mission?

So we have a vacuum, it seems to me. A real competitor on the media front could step into that vacuum, perhaps. But what are the chances of that happening? Who is going to come up with a compelling, honest, viable and robust alternative? Bloggers? Not likely. Homemade presses and newsletters? Ditto: too diffuse, not robust. The “Indymedia” forums? Last time I checked the Victoria one (some years ago — I think it’s defunct now) it was full of lunatics raving about conspiracies and Americans, with a vile comments board. Talk about crazies… Vancouver at least has The Tyee, which is very good (although the comments degenerate there pretty quickly into predictable and often flaming slamming). Maybe strengthening laws against media concentration is one part of the solution…?

In the meantime, the vacuum gets filled by more of the same-old, same-old, to the point where even the occasional good article gets obscured by all the drivel that surrounds it.

What seems to work are aggregators — human aggregators — who pick out the best or relevant articles, posting these to a “feed” to which users can subscribe. Sort of what Marianne Lepa does with ArtsNews Canada or Denis Dutton with Arts & Letters Daily.

I’m quite often amazed by the disconnect between what Canadians believe about themselves (”best place on earth,” “kinder, gentler [than the US],” “naifs,” and so on), and how they actually behave. At the corporate level, Canadians play hardball and they play dirty, very dirty. Yet they continue to believe that they are somehow the underdog to the big bad American wolf. (I have dual citizenship, and I love America for its good qualities, even when I look at it critically; I could say the same about Canada — I know both countries have many stellar qualities, along with huge flaws.)

No doubt there are media conglomerates in the US who’ll play as dirty a hardball game as Black Press — or any of the other tough corporate entities around here. But somehow, there’s a tougher, law-based push-back from citizens in the US when injustice occurs, which I don’t see here. That bothers me a lot.

Canadians sometimes shake their heads at American ways, and say that Canadians are “lucky” because they’re not “as litigious” as Americans who “like to sue” at the slightest provocation. But you know what? Americans use lawyers to assert their rights, and the lawyers ensure that rule of law continues to be the ideal to which civil society should adhere. (When that breaks down at the very top levels, with civil rights stripped for the sake of “homeland security,” then a country really can get into trouble. Let’s hope that trend will be reversed after the next election.)

Too often — IMO — Canadians instead take it up the backside where an American would call a lawyer and sue for millions. Money talks — as you note in regard to advertisers, for example. If Black Press had a bit of well-placed fear of a lawsuit that could drain its purse, maybe they wouldn’t behave like thugs. But there’s no tradition of that sort of reliance on the law here, it seems to me, so that if either Keith Norbury or Brennan Clarke hired a lawyer to represent his interests, it could still be a public relations failure for the plaintiff (since the public wouldn’t side with the “litigious”), while the defendant might walk away untouched.

Meanwhile, the other media outlets close ranks with Black Press — where has this been covered? CBC, A-Channel? Brief snippets only? Bah!

Lucky Americans. The lawyers would be all over this, as would other media, and neither Black Press nor the Imperium that runs the Times-Colonist as well as practically every other daily newspaper in Canada would be able to hush it up.