Wrong about Vancouver
My city, Vancouver, will be hosting the Olympics in a couple weeks. The cool thing about big splashy events of this sort is that they generate all sorts of international media attention, and thus briefly turn the host city into the Most Fascinating Place on Earth for a couple of weeks. I’m now constantly confronted with articles about my hometown in all sorts of respectable media outlets that would never previously give a fairly unaccomplished, mid-sized Canadian city like Vancouver much of a second thought.
It’s also interesting to see how much complete nonsense is written about my city by ignorant blowhards who are trying so desperately to find some “edge” to the Olympics story.
From a journalist’s perspective, the Olympics are very boring to cover because the story is always the same. “Countries win medals amid glamorous spectacle.” Many journalists feel they are too good for this sort of stuff, so they have to turn the Olympics into some sort of “bigger picture” thing, usually by highlighting how the host city houses some particularly good or bad manefestation of some currently fashioble cultural/political/social trend.
Here’s an idiotic editorial in the UK Guardian about Vancouver. The basic thesis is that the Olympics have transformed the city into a crazed fascistic hellhole of oppression and exploitation, proving that the games are little more than
a corrupt relic of the 20th century that does little more than gut city coffers and line the pockets of developers and investors. If things go pear-shaped and Vancouverites resort to their riotious ways, at least the city will get its money’s worth out of that bloated security force and the ensuing spectacle will boost NBC’s slumping ratings.
I cannot overemphasize how uttery, uttery terrible this piece is. Almost every single sentence in it is wrong. One of my friends posted it on Facebook and everyone — right or left, pro or anti-the games — tore it to pieces.
It’s interesting, though, because the story will doubtlessly influence the minds of lots of foreigners who have never been to Vancouver, don’t read Canadian media, and like believing sensationalistic things.
We all understand that “you shouldn’t believe everything you read” and you should be skeptical of the media, and so on, but when something as intimate as your own hometown is being discussed by the mainstream media in such brazenly untrue terms it really brings that reality home in a powerful way. It makes you realize how much reporting and editorializing is just little more than ignorant speculation, hasty generalizations, pre-determined conclusions, and other useless blather about topics no one actually knows anything about.
As a pundit myself, it makes me second-guess the legitimacy of much of my own work.
