Power and Betrayal in the Canadian Media by David Taras (review)

more difficult to obtain, often forcing Hom to rely on newspaper accounts of troubling episodes (e.g., at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto) and on his cogent speculations on the dangers the unseemly rush among university preSidents for corporate support may pose for academic freedom. Occasionally, however, and because the very words 'academic freedom' arouse their secular pieties, one wishes Hom were more willing to rattle the professors' cage. In his story of the slow but steady accrual of freedom to teach, publish, and engage in political life, there is a tendency to triumphalism , especially in the account of the breaching of barriers once posed to academic freedom by faded (or fading) religious institutions. Must this conflict be, one wonders, a zero-sum game? From Horn's account, it is difficult to infer anything other than the view that in religious institutions the claims of religion should, in principle, always yield to those of triumphant academic freedom, regardless of the effect on the institution's religious commitments. Hom recalls that the Canadian struggle for academic freedom has often paralleled the sometimes more robust American experience, including the struggle against the Believers. In this connection, his account of the tension between academic freedom and religiOUS institutions recalls Stephen Carter's more evenly balanced treatment - The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (1994) - of the American conflict between First Amendment guarantees of religious freedom and the hostility towards religion of the post-Enlightenment intellectual classes. (T.H. ADAMOWSKI) David Taras. Powe,. and Betrayal in tile Canadian Media Broadview. viii, 248. $21.95 Media-bashing these days is increasingly similar to what religion used to be in its worst aspects. It has spawned not only legions of virtuous denunciators , but also a class of more or less speCialized inquisitors armed with the tortuous instruments of prose for casting out media-devilry and the scourging of the monstrous owners of the media, from its global conglomerates to its crass moguls. These practices have also called forth no end of prophets and seers who peer into the media's entrails seeking signs and portents of either imminent doom and gloom or glimmers of a democratic paradise - if only the media can be cleansed of its many, many sins. As an exercise in the genre, David Taras's Power and Betrayal in the Canadian Media falls within the mid-range of media-bashing; it is surely not the worst of its kind, nor is it, alas, the best. It is clearly written, well intentioned and heartfelt in its concern, and reasonably thoughtful; it is not, however, an especially sophisticated analysis, nor is it particularly insightful in terms of its preoccupations. 296 LEITERS IN CANADA 1999 The 'main argument in this book is that the Canadian media system is in the midst of a profound crisis.' Hardly an original proposition, but things are only going to get worst as the vast technological revolution affecting the media - 'perhaps the most sweeping since Gutenberg's invention of the printing press' - is changing the very nature of mass communications, and national cultures, Canada's included, face a slow, lmgering death. That's the 'power' part of the title, spelled out in the first four chapters in the problems the media pose for citizens and democracies, the convergence and collision of media technologies, the convergence of news and entertainment , and the convergence of cultures, all of these menaces leading to (respectively) citizens without democracy, democracy without citizens, an arrogant adversarial style of journalism, the erosion of public space, and in Canada the extinction of the CBC and its original grand plan for what Davidson Dunton once called inculcating Canadians with 'the arithmetic of patriotism: a discussion that takes up the next four chapters. The 'betrayal' part of tl1e book is 'that the Canadian public is being betrayed by those who care more about lining their pockets than about the survival of a distinct Canadian culture or serving the needs of citizens.' Villains here include government leaders, industry regulators, private broadcasters, the likes of Conrad Black, and a 'vast right-wing conspirary: to use Hillary Clinton's expression, whose tentacular spread is...