Ruth Ellen Brosseau and the corporate-media cowards

You remember those nasty, sadistic little pricks who used to burn ants with magnifying glasses? And then in school they used to get their kicks ganging up on younger kids? Seems they grew up, in a manner of speaking, and got jobs with newspapers.

Clearly, they're delighted to have what they consider an easy mark in Ruth Ellen Brosseau. As pale puts it over at A Creative Revolution:

It is not a story when a Government is found in contempt, not a story when a minister tells bald faced lies, not a story when other ministers use taxpayer dollars under the guise of G8/G20 budgets to improve their own ridings....
But Ruth Ellen? That is where they will follow every lead....BY GOLLY!

You can just imagine the sneering contempt from Canada's own Villagers.* Sniff.  She's a single mother. Sniff. She's blonde. Sniff. She worked in a pub, for God's sake. Sniff. I bet she's never even had lunch with Jeffrey Simpson. Obviously not a Serious Person.

Oh, and let's not forget – she's "controversial."

I could upchuck from all the ingrained classism, sexism and ageism. So many stinking layers deep, I don't even want to think about what's buried underneath it all.

So what if her French needs work? So what if her nomination papers weren't perfect? That's it? This is the best you can do, when you're not torquing bullshit stories about Jack Layton's massages?

Well, what the fuck, eh? Easy sport. Bunch of hens at a pecking party, at the expense of an inexperienced rookie politician who probably didn't expect to win and is getting a crash course in the cruel realities of having the corporate media painting a bullseye on her forehead. In school, they used to call this "bullying." Probably a lot easier than doing real journalism, as Ryan Painter's argued:

Maybe then journos, the CBC...all of these "media" outlets can actually do something productive and report on policy instead of continuing on this childish course of personal and political assassination via ridiculous reports of personality failure. 

And while I'm citing fellow progbloggers, let's hear from Saskboy:

 It’s obscene to put more energy into burying a backbench MP who has never even voted on a bill, while the newspapers and TV reporters, and radio talking heads let important issues like Contempt leave the front burner. Do we have an accurate price estimate for the ENGINELESS F-35 jets that the US government is balking over buying due to obscene cost overruns? No, and we won’t get one either because our government was just re-elected after contemptuously violating the rules of Parliament in hiding the true costs from us and journalists alike. Well, I guess following the money doesn’t sell newspapers or ad space, so who gives a fig, right? It’s only tax dollars going to weapons companies.

And they wonder why fewer and fewer people read or watch them any more, and why they're held in such contempt.

*Not that this should be news to anyone by now, but the idea that Canada's got its own self-appointed cadre of insiders – well-connected journalists, politicians, lobbyists and power-brokers who take it on themselves to decide which ideas are acceptable topics of discussion and which are not, who is a person worth taking seriously and who isn't, which parties are serious contenders for power and which are not – is just another indicator of how closely we're following our friends to the south down the path of decrepitude. Public policy and and the national discourse are, in effect, being controlled by the members of a cosseted, privileged elite who've been inside the bubble for so long that they have no idea how real people live.

Update: Not to mention the snickering frat boy(s) behind this.

Upperdate: I'm on FB now. (You can Like me! You can really Like me!)

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• A note from Sheenagh McMahon