We can’t really have a good argument on policy issues in this country. I mean the kind that really matters – the tools have been taken out of our hands. To be sure, there are lots of opinions. Thanks to the Internet, the number of those points of view has grown exponentially just in the last 4-5 years. For this reason, among others, we continue to look to the media to sort through the maze of it all, yet discover that even media scrutiny itself has assisted in leading to the blandness of our present political and civic life.

Liberalism is usually ready for debate, seeing the theatre of ideas and concepts as the best way of formulating policy in any given time. People of liberal temperaments can often be found debating one another, as if only as the filter of testing out ideas before your peers can enlightenment and progress occur.

The coming of the Information Age, welcomed by liberalism and now in full swing, was supposed to bring about a revolution in the enhancement of public intelligence. It’s no secret, however, that the average citizen knows less about public affairs than they used to know – all the surveys have made that reality clear. In many ways it’s not surprising. With information and opinion coming at us from every angle, it’s a lot for our brains to handle.

One of the casualties of all this has been the loss of the art of debate. While looking to media to parse through it all for us, we have made them the gatekeepers of authentic citizen information. And while they have struggled to carry that task responsibly, they have in reality been outflanked by the digital media that gives most who dabble in it the right to promote anything they want without the more traditional filters of editorial oversight or fact checking. This new media runs at the speed of light and has been so pervasive that traditional media has been tempted to cross into the murky water of trend telling as opposed to truth verification.

In other words, modern journalism runs the risk of having their views, even at the corporate level, overtaken by what the comfortable want. Politics faces the same dilemma.

In the front page of the New York Times Book Review, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner noted:

Journalists express dismay that bottom-line pressures are reducing the quality of news coverage. What this actually means is that when competition is intense, providers of a service are forced to give the consumer what he or she wants, not what they, as proud professionals think the consumer should want or need.”

Sometimes this is made apparent in what journalists don’t cover in depth. How else to explain the present government’s intense agenda on crime in light of compelling evidence that it has been in recession for almost two decades? A new Statistics Canada report concludes that, overall, there is 17% less crime now than in 1999. As Jim Travers of the Toronto Star noted: “Most offences are minor and heinous violent crime has fallen so far that it’s now less than one quarter of one per cent of the shrinking total.” Travers then does what any good journalist should, endeavouring to give meaning to it all: “Canadian Conservatives are operating from a borrowed Republican playbook. From it they learned that a single frightening event or a memorable case where justice is seen not to be done is more emotionally riveting, more politically useful than data streams and reasoned debate.”

Canadians are fearful of crime because while the government uses fear to push its agenda, the media has largely failed to call them on it – the few like Travers excluded. So, while the government belittles opposition parties for whipping their vote to maintain the gun registry, Conservative MPs have privately acknowledged the threat of discipline if they don’t vote as the PM wishes. Journalists know that, but little to nothing is said – leaving the public space defiled by innuendo and hypocrisy.

This post isn’t an attempt to belittle journalism, but merely to point out that it’s traveling the same road as politics: pandering to the comfortable’s fears and wants. It is a pressing reality that’s limiting citizen discourse. Since the public no longer participates in debates on national issues, it has no reason to inform itself about those issues. If debate continues becoming a lost art, all the information received makes little or no impression.

People love to categorize, but when it leads to over-simplification or straight out prejudice we have a problem, especially if it’s promoted by political parties. The public needs help to sort through the chaff, especially when so much of the new media is peddling the propaganda. I have spoken with a number of seasoned journalists who have had to acknowledge the threat the public space is under at present, as have sincere politicians. This isn’t about helping one party over another. It’s about saving citizenship from itself. Some in Canada understand that if the liberal tradition of debate can be undermined, then the people of Canada can be led anywhere, and they use that knowledge for their own designs. Good journalism and citizen reflection is all that’s left to stop it.