Freedom from the Press

A couple days after the news media published pictures of Prime Minister Trudeau in brown ("Aladdin") and Black ("Day O") faces, the news cycle carried a story that opened with this inversion: "In an effort to deflect attention from..." Prime Minister Trudeau's racist behaviour, the federal Liberals "are set to" introduce new gun control legislation.

Suddenly the story is no longer that of Trudeau's (racist) penchant for cosplay and Toronto's almost daily (gang-related) shootings, but a reporting news media (journalists) versus those similarly trained who work for campaigning politicians (publicists, image consultants, spin doctors). And because the interweb has made us students of its systems and its various games, we accept its games as news.

Last night, while reading further into Myra Friedman's Janis Joplin biography (Friedman was Joplin's publicist), I came upon her description of the 1969 Woodstock Festival -- but even more compelling is what she says about the festival's media coverage, which, in both "underground" and "established" news outlets, is largely positive ("...expressing reservations about Woodstock at the time would have been akin to complaining of gout at a nursery").

Here is the conclusion of Friedman's Woodstock section:

Naturally, all of that media glow (and then the Woodstock film) was responsible for the country's concept of the festival and quite possibly for a reshaping of the event as it was experienced by the people who were there. A lot of them may not have been so accepting of the mud, the cold, the sickening sanitation, and the shortage of food, as they later claimed. How many, I wondered, were like this:

"I don't care what anybody says," a girl in my building complained when I saw her in the lobby after I returned. "It was a drag. It was polluted. You couldn't hear the music. Everybody was stoned out of their skulls. I hated it."

Three days later, having consumed the papers, she was dancing all over the building, singing another tune. (173)