Yesterday’s RCMP press conference revealing the arrest of two men involved with an al-Qaeda connected plot to bomb a VIA Rail train was almost noticeably boring. As Fox News correspondent Shepard Smith noted, apparently annoyed by the sluggishness and bilingual-ness of the proceedings, Canada is “not great at the [sic] television.”
The whole thing was polished and professional, with press kits prepped for the media in advance and everything. Yet it was also drained of sensation and affect, possessing all the razzle-dazzle of someone reading a press release (twice). This is precisely how it should be.
In June of 2006, when members of a militant Islamic terrorist cell in Ontario (the so-called “Toronto 18”) were arrested, the media coverage was stained by certain racist biases. RCMP officer Mike McDonnell rather famously remarked that the Islamist radicals represented a “broad strata” of Canadian society, relying on the dangerously naïve post-9/11 broad-stroking of incompetent schemers as representative of Canada’s Muslim community writ large. It’s the sort of irresponsible comment that felt connected to the resulting vandalism of mosques in the GTA, and a corresponding effort to run a recuperative PR campaign for Canada’s Muslim population (see: the CBC’s Little Mosque On The Praire).
Yesterday’s press conference avoided such rhetoric, by largely avoiding any rhetoric – save for some stuff about “vigilance” and security starting at home which, well, OK. It’s important to keep levelheaded and factual and not make any sweeping generalizations when dealing with stuff like national security and terrorism and maybe especially terrorism with alleged connections to Islamic extremists.
Too bad this welcome equanimity lasted like four seconds. It all evaporated, almost instantly, as the media scrambled to make up narrative out scraps of information: Iran + al-Qaeda + non-citizen + trains + “support” + “individuals” + “direction and guidance” = ???
On CBC News last night, Evan Solomon called in terrorism “experts” Ray Boisvert and Andrew Arena to conjecture wildly on the potential connections to Iran, al-Qaeda and Boston. Arena clarified that the U.S./Canada border is lengthy (indeed, the International Boundary is the longest in the world) while Boisvert talked about why trains are “iconic,” which is kind of like talking about how they go “choo-choo.” They spoke in clunky insider patois (“residual individuals,” “hidden hand,” etc.) that seems to be the only qualification for being an expert in terrorism. That and a rudimentary knowledge of speedboats.
As Soloman noted in his role stage-managing this sideshow of speculation, there are “more questions than answers.” Sure. But you don’t get journalism points for just saying whatever you want and then lilting up at the end like it’s a question or couching everything in “hard to say, but…” and “…let’s see.”
Nor do you get any points if you default right to fear-mongering, as columnist Rosie DiManno does in this morning’s Toronto Star. “The other is us. The other is in our midst…The other is enthralled by alien causes,” writes DiManno in what reads like – to quote a friend – “an undergrad slam poet’s first draft.” DiManno attempts to make the dual claims that Canadians are intimately familiar with the threat of domestic terrorism while simultaneously “whistling past the graveyard,” cooking up some naïve exceptionalist attitude that Canadians ascribe to. Her supposition might be supported by a CBC straw poll, that ran alongside Solomon’s “expert” panel, which should 67% of respondents are “not very” concerned about the risk of a terror attack on Canada. What DiManno doesn’t account for is that Canadians aren’t necessarily frazzled because we feel safe: because efforts to stop these sorts of terrorist plots in their tracks have proven by-and-large effective. Are we supposed to feel dumb for not being afraid?
DiManno’s reliance on the dual bogeymen of the Terrorist and the Other is certainly non-exceptional. Like the CBC’s confab with their experts – who make their livings justifying the existence of the security state – it feels like bandwagon jumping. It’s like Canada’s trying to keep pace, tugging at Uncle Sam’s pant leg as he strides bravely toward the imagined enemy, all “Hey wait up, us too!” We must be vigilant! We must be wary! We must watch the other, despite the odds of dying in a terrorist attack being about equivalent to those getting hit by a meteor. (To say nothing of al-Qaeda’s historically lousy track record as an organized, effective terrorist network, as evinced not only by yesterday’s announcement but the booking of the Toronto 18. All the follow-throughs DiManno indexes are the exceptions proving the rule of terrorism’s general inefficacy.)
This is shoddy, cut-rate sensationalism, fit for Fox News and CNN, the kind of stuff that incites the passion of irrationality. If there’s a takeaway from last week’s Boston investigation – not to suggest that there is any correlation, like, at all between the marathon bombings and the VIA Rail plot – it’s that actual, actionable intelligence takes time.
The networks and dailies (and weeklies, and websites) may feel the pinch to scribble inside the framework of the 24-hour news cycle, but we should all take a lesson from the RCMP: cold, dispassionate, taking pains not to seed misinformation to a vulnerable public. The rest of them – the speculators, the bogus experts, the mongering columnists – offer nothing but noise a gloomy chorus clucking through their well-rehearsed parts, ringing out hollow in the theatre of terror.
