Saki began one of his wonderful Reginald stories with the line, “I’m not going to discuss the fiscal question; I wish to be original,” the fiscal question being at that time a consuming issue in English politics. In that vein, this essay is not about drag shows. But it is about the Globe and Mail’s coverage of emotive and class-related cultural issues.
I am not sure if my observations are original, but they can help to identify what the media, and by extension hegemonic power, thinks about contested issues. Though the bias is usually obvious, there is value in the demystifying tools of textual criticism, which make precise what had been indistinct. The mechanically minded also like to see how things work.
When the mainstream media really cares about something, it reports only one side of the question, and here, in the drearily predictable topic of drag shows, we have such an issue. Voice is allocated to the favoured: the good guys are interviewed, allowed to speak in their own voices, shown in humanizing detail, and allowed the last word; the disfavoured side is described from a distance and as a caricatured unity, allowed at most a quotation from a politician.
Today’s Globe and Mail carries a story by Adrian Morrow, the paper’s Washington correspondent, entitled, “Drag artists in U.S. face armed protesters and legal attacks as performances are targeted.”1 The headline captures the gist of the story, better than headlines sometimes do. All the stereotypes have been conscripted: right wing, reactionary, gun-nut, Republicans, Q-Anon, the transgendered, and minorities are all here. And this being a Canadian paper, Morrow does not neglect the customary glaze of self-satisfied anti-Americanism.
The allocation of voice is his article’s defining characteristic. It begins with one Brian Hernandez, named with the plural “they,” and the neologistic salutation “Mx.” Hernandez is quoted saying, “the agenda is to erase queer lives,” as though this was a straight fact, and not hyperbole. Two other drag performers are also quoted, one “over tacos in San Antonio’s Pearl District,” with further unnecessary detail about the buildings in which they had lunch (factories turned into upscale restaurants: there is more there than the reporter realizes). Also quoted are a pro-drag lawyer and a professor at Johns Hopkins, described as an expert in transgender history. (Who knew there was such a thing?)
The only opponent of public child-focused drag shows quoted is a Tennessee legislator called Chris Dodd who complains about, “recruiting children to this lifestyle.” There was once a Democrat Senator of that name; there is no member of the Tennessee House or Senate called Chris Dodd.2 No one on the anti-child-drag side is interviewed; certainly this putative Chris Dodd has not been. All live quotations come from the favoured side; the disfavoured are described in Morrow’s voice as “bigots,” and left with a misattributed sentence fragment.
A semiologist would pick this apart: the tacos and subsequent information use unnecessary detail to signify an authentic humanity (a real person who likes tacos!). Unintentionally they tell us who the reporter is comfortable having lunch with. The lawyer signals legal, even constitutional, validation. The professor of history is a sign of intellectual authority and long-term perspective. The lawyer and the professor also tell us, again unintentionally, which side wields bureaucratic power.
The article’s language is didactic: the use outside quotation marks of phrases such as “the right of transgendered people to live their gender identity,” combines with the obtrusive pronouns and salutations to tell the reader that these concepts are unproblematic and supported by all sophisticated and progressive people. This is how you should think, or at least speak. Failure to do so would make you a bigot.
The gender theorists tell us to read for the silences. Here, a silence covers Antifa, as is the Globe and Mail’s practice, as Morrows describes armed counter-protesters clad entirely in black. (Is there some sort of editorial bull on the topic?) And the supposedly anti-LGBTQ Club Q attack in Colorado is mentioned, while the writer maintains a dutiful narrative-protecting silence about the fact that the murderer was a transgendered person. The realm of silence extends beyond the voices of the disfavoured to include inconvenient facts too.
The same one-sided coverage has been evident in the Globe and Mail’s coverage of medical controversies. An article by medical correspondent Carly Weeks about public anger at medical authorities mentions Jordan Peterson and Amy Hamm, a nurse guilty of holding that there are two sexes, without feeling the need to speak to or quote either Peterson or Hamm. By contrast, Weeks begins and ends with substantial quotations from an official in the Nursing Association prosecuting Hamm, allowing her a peroration on such uplifting themes such as “trust,” “absolute care”, and “interpersonal connection.”3
Hamm and Peterson are described rather than quoted. We are told that Hamm is a “nurse who is involved in a disciplinary hearing after the college determined she made discriminatory remarks against transgender people.” Peterson was the object of a complaint about “controversial tweets.” In both cases the retreat from specificity into bureaucratic generalities avoids giving the reader the important information that Hamm said that there are two sexes, and that Peterson’s “controversial” tweets supported Poilievre and criticized Trudeau. The positions of both would command wide support, but here we have only discrimination, discipline and controversy. The denial of voice combines with distancing abstraction to serve a polemical purpose.
A final example, again relating to the Globe and Mail’s reporting of an emotionally charged issue, is given by an article about controversies surrounding critical race theory and associated practices at the Waterloo District School Board. A long Saturday puff-piece on an educational bureaucrat who is also a Black Lives Matter activist begins with his experience with online threats and ends quoting him saying "all kids can be successful," and on “caring.” As so often, the narrative structure of mainstream articles begins and ends with the favoured person, allow him a quotation that concludes the article on an uplifting note.4 The narrative is old but powerful: the protagonist faces problems, but rises above them.
In this case, somewhat unusually, an opponent of critical race theory is actually quoted, though only briefly and in order to be confuted by the reporter in the next sentence. By contrast, the bureaucrat, one Jeewan Chanicka, is described with obsequious respect:
Mr. chanicka is Muslim, and he spells his name with lower-case letters because he identifies with his Polynesian Indigenous spirituality and says that he doesn’t give more importance to himself than his surroundings, including animals, bodies of water and trees.
This strikes the required multicultural notes, the didactic tone telling us not to notice that an orthodox Muslim would regard Indigenous beliefs as pagan heresy. Once again, the English language is butchered, orthography becoming performance, the unusual lowercase spelling claiming to be a sign of modesty, as the claim is destroyed by its imposition on everyone else. Chanicka’s rationalization strikes a further false note, the more so coming from a teacher, as in English we do in fact capitalize the names of bodies of water, such as Lake Ontario, though admittedly not the puddle by the back door. The journalist has left her critical faculties behind; we are being instructed to follow.
I have surveyed three Globe and Mail articles, all reported pieces published for the Saturday brunch section. In each case, an effective voice is allowed to those representing the cultural left — the drag performers, the medical establishment, and the educational establishment — but denied to critics. The latter, if allowed to speak at all, get a brief sentence and are immediately countered by the reporter. The favoured interlocutors are granted authenticity by way of humanizing detail and personal experience, and are allowed to speak at some length. The narrative structure of each article begins with the personal obstacles faced by the protagonist, and ends by quoting the hero on an uplifting note: “It’s never been this open, this free, this accepted. You can live your full, complete, actual life,” says a drag dancer. Open, free, accepted, full, complete: the sixties are here again, and who but a bigot could be opposed?
Three factors will tell you who the mainstream media likes:
Voice: as measured by quantity of quotation, especially from actual reporting;
Detail: personal, often excessive, detail is used as the sign of authentic humanity;
Peroration: the protagonist is granted the last words, almost always ascending into abstraction untethered to concrete referents.
Voice, Detail and Peroration: all are attributed by the writer. None are inherent in the objective, externally existing situation of controversy surrounding emotive cultural topics. All three are attributes of the text, and all three will be granted by the media to the favoured party, which is to say to the cultural left. I often come away from a Globe and Mail or other mainstream story with a strong sense of parti-pris, a sense that the author had a side in the controversy, and frequently with a list of factual errors too. But even without explicit errors, the allocation of voice, detail and the privilege of peroration will identify on the basis of textual analysis, rather than gut feeling, which side is favoured, and how favour is allocated.
Nor is it a coincidence that in each of my three examples bureaucracy (law and the academy in the first, the medical and educational bureaucracies in the last two) is on the side of the cultural left. It could hardly be otherwise. We live under the hegemony of the bureaucratic left, and mainstream journalists are its janissaries.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/us-politics/article-drag-artists-in-us-face-armed-protesters-and-legal-attacks-as/
https://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/LegislatorInfo/directory.aspx?chamber=H; and https://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/LegislatorInfo/directory.aspx?chamber=S
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-medical-regulatory-bodies-say-they-are-increasingly-experiencing-abuse/
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-why-a-waterloo-ont-school-board-has-emerged-as-a-battleground-for/