Juno News - May 26, 2020


Being ＂political＂ – what it means and why you should and shouldn't do it


Episode Stats

Length

11 minutes

Words per Minute

192.42288

Word Count

2,206

Sentence Count

98


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Well, we definitely live in perhaps the most interesting time in recent memory, and I think
00:00:12.420 a lot of people are being faced with questions that they haven't ever thought about. They have
00:00:17.380 not really thought about the role of government, the role of government in society, how we interact
00:00:22.880 with each other, what our rights should or should not be, and I think this is the time where it's
00:00:28.040 an opportunity for us to think about some of these questions because when we do come out of this
00:00:32.660 eventually, and we're already starting to come out of this, when we come out of this we're going to
00:00:36.340 try and figure things out and see how we can move forward and pick up all the pieces because everything
00:00:41.640 is really in a big mess right now. Now, for this video I want to talk about two words that I think
00:00:47.120 people often confuse or maybe don't understand so well partially because they have so many different
00:00:51.900 meanings. Those two words are the words political and the word partisan. Now, I want to start with
00:00:57.540 the word political because that's probably the one that's more complex and partisan is definitely
00:01:02.440 a part of that. So now, when people think of the word political they probably tend to think of
00:01:08.040 something like this. This is the sort of Machiavellian worldview of politics. This is the amoral, you know,
00:01:14.060 politics has no morals, it's not about good or bad. The problem with this view is that it tends to be
00:01:19.840 amoral, which no morals, which tends to, they think, lean to immoral. So, I have no morals,
00:01:26.120 therefore I can act immorally because I don't have any morals. And in a certain sense, that's true.
00:01:33.100 Being involved in politics is not necessarily about morals because not everything is about
00:01:38.620 morals, but it should be. You should definitely have morals when you go into politics and I think
00:01:42.840 we're calling into question a lot of people's morals, perhaps correctly, perhaps sometimes
00:01:47.180 incorrectly, when we're having discussions about what we should do, what we should do about face
00:01:51.140 coverings. You know, people are being hypocritical in politics, some of the politicians, leading
00:01:55.140 politicians who have been very critical of people not wearing masks, have been caught not wearing
00:01:59.200 masks. Some people have been caught visiting family members or going out when they shouldn't have.
00:02:03.800 And so, it raises a lot of questions. Where does the political, you know, how does that fit in?
00:02:09.220 And so, political in the most basic sense, being political is really, you are being political
00:02:17.600 when you are engaging with the government or the political system with the intention of making a
00:02:23.360 change in policy. Now, that could include making a change in government, which would then have the
00:02:27.680 effect of making a change in policy. But again, being political is you engaging with the political
00:02:33.100 system with the intention of making some sort of change. So, that's you as an individual. And this
00:02:38.320 is very different from what you probably are thinking about here is decisions taken for purely
00:02:43.680 political reasons. And we have this article here from NPR, politics around hydroxychloroquine
00:02:49.600 hamper science. So, you are probably familiar that President Trump has been talking about
00:02:54.100 hydroxychloroquine. And there's been just a whole circus around whether we should use it, it's safe,
00:02:58.460 studies, etc, etc, etc. And so, the politics around hydroxychloroquine are really hampering the
00:03:04.800 science. That is different from a person being political. So, one of the accusations that you might
00:03:09.680 have heard is Dr. Tam. Dr. Tam is being political. So, in order to figure out if she is, we have to
00:03:16.660 look at some of her tweets and figure out when she's doing that. Now, this video is not about Dr. Tam,
00:03:21.900 so I'm not just going to go through a whole list of her tweets, but she's one of the more popular
00:03:25.460 targets of being political. But I do want to talk about this because this is something that we are
00:03:31.400 actually doing as a group. Being political, we are now talking to each other and talking about each
00:03:37.920 other in a political sense because we are trying to get the government to influence what people do.
00:03:43.700 We are very opinionated, often, a lot of us, on what the rules should be. What are the social
00:03:48.880 distancing rules? When should we reopen? When should we not reopen? These are being political. Now,
00:03:56.000 being political is often broken down into a couple of these activities, and I'll go through a couple of
00:03:59.820 them. But I wanted to just bring that to people's attention because there's a very big difference
00:04:04.600 between talking about facts or talking about scientific data, reading a clinical study,
00:04:09.940 talking about the infection rate of COVID, which is much, much lower than what was originally
00:04:15.100 thought. And that is a good thing. That is much lower. But the difference between simply pointing
00:04:21.020 out facts and saying, you know, the death rate is lower than becoming political and saying, okay,
00:04:26.940 well, therefore, we should do X, we should do Y. And I'm going to encourage or push the government
00:04:30.700 to do something about that. And again, it's not just ranting into the ether, into Twitter or social
00:04:35.300 media. It's actually pushing the government. We're trying to get some change. Now, being political is
00:04:41.220 not inherently a bad thing because you may be trying to change the government for a safety reason, which,
00:04:47.120 you know, some people believe that's what they're doing when they're talking about mask rules or social
00:04:50.940 distancing rules. But some of the rules around the political activities that people, normal everyday
00:04:57.380 people undertake, they often fall into a couple of categories. And those would be the anti-defamation
00:05:01.660 categories. So, you know, you're probably more familiar with the Anti-Defamation League of the United States
00:05:06.880 or different groups that combat hate and racism. And so that would be one of the ways that you can be
00:05:12.240 political, like get the government to try and change some rules. You can be a watchdog group. The media is
00:05:17.280 supposed to be acting as a watchdog group. I do want to talk about it in a minute as well, the media being
00:05:21.780 political, but the media is supposed to be in a certain sense, a watchdog group that is watching what our
00:05:26.860 political leaders are doing. You can be a lobby group. And this is probably the most organized
00:05:31.540 version of what many people tend to think of as an interest group, a special interest group.
00:05:37.040 So that's when, you know, if there was a group interested in making masks mandatory, so they
00:05:41.740 would form a professional group and set up in a really professional manner meetings with
00:05:45.840 politicians, try and get some laws changed, look at the laws, figure out how they would actually go
00:05:49.900 about changing them. And then there's maybe a legal defense fund. So for example, you could, you could
00:05:55.140 think of a situation where they, they made masks mandatory. So now it's, you know, in this scenario,
00:05:59.360 it's, it's mandatory to wear a mask. It's illegal to not wear one. And, um, you start a legal defense
00:06:04.940 fund and you basically send someone out to get arrested and then they would get arrested for
00:06:09.280 not wearing a mask. And then you would put a legal challenge, maybe a charter challenge all the way
00:06:13.540 up to the Supreme court and see if you can get those laws changed. And that's really being political,
00:06:19.680 but when do we become partisan and are they the same thing? So they're, they're not the same thing
00:06:26.460 in the sense that being partisan is when you are pushing for a political party. Now, Wikipedia has
00:06:32.980 a definition, which I want to talk about because I don't think it encompasses the whole thing.
00:06:37.040 And it says a partisan is a committed member of a political party or army. Um, again, it's just a
00:06:41.940 political party, not the partisan, uh, the, the, you know, the rebel partisan, um, and multi-party
00:06:46.540 systems, the terms used for politicians who strongly support their party's policies and
00:06:50.540 are reluctant to compromise with their political opponents, opponents, a political partisan is not
00:06:54.520 to be confused with the military partisan, as I just mentioned. But one thing they're missing here
00:06:58.640 is that sometimes a partisan goes above and beyond. It's not just, I strongly support my party's
00:07:05.980 policies. It could be that I support my party over the policies. So for example, you might say that
00:07:13.100 Justin Trudeau is making decisions that are good for the liberal party, as opposed to making decisions
00:07:18.780 that are strictly in line with the party itself, because the party might have some policy on the
00:07:23.600 books that is not in line with what the majority of Canadians are thinking right now, but he's going
00:07:28.700 to abandon that, throw that to the wind and therefore make a decision that is good for the liberal party,
00:07:33.540 but not necessarily something that the party believes in, right? Because he is in many senses,
00:07:39.740 one of the heads of the party, and so he can make those decisions. Um, and again, this could be,
00:07:44.520 it doesn't have to be just on, on Justin Trudeau with, I mean, he's the prime minister, so it's
00:07:47.720 probably the easiest, um, to pick on him and to find the scenarios and the instances where he has
00:07:52.680 done such a thing. Um, but it could be with, with any person. Now, the difficulty, as I said, is in,
00:07:59.860 in media and when are media and reporters, when do they go from being political to being, um,
00:08:08.380 being partisan or just simply stating the facts? So the CBC has here, this is their, uh, journalistic
00:08:15.080 standards and practices. And again, I'm not picking on the CBC specifically. There are many,
00:08:19.540 many complaints and instances where you can find CBC reporters, um, you know, crossing that line,
00:08:25.440 going from simply being a news organization to being political and trying to push an agenda
00:08:30.460 and possibly even being partisan and, you know, covering for one political party or another,
00:08:34.880 the liberals. Um, but, um, in their journalistic standards of practice here. So under opinion,
00:08:42.360 it says that when appropriate news and current affairs staff offer reports, we refer to as
00:08:47.380 analysis here, reporters may make observations and draw conclusions based on facts, as well as their
00:08:53.060 own experience and expertise. Their intent is to give the audience insight into the true nature of
00:08:58.120 events, not to be a forum for personal opinions or preferences of the author. The only issue is that
00:09:04.020 this definitely is a slippery slope because when you are providing analysis, like right now I'm,
00:09:10.240 I'm providing you a certain level of analysis. I'm trying to maintain a more factual, uh, basis on
00:09:16.180 what is being political and what is, um, what is being partisan. But clearly I'm putting my own
00:09:21.800 thoughts, my own analysis into this story. The danger is when the analysis starts becoming
00:09:28.960 political, I am now advocating that this happened or this does not happen. So we often see this during
00:09:35.900 election times when the analysis brings back up a scandal that someone might have had a couple of
00:09:42.740 years ago, or it brings back up or just reminds Canadians of this horrible thing that this politician
00:09:48.780 did a number of years ago. And in the strictest sense, that's not being political because you are
00:09:55.380 simply reminding people, but the overall scenario where you're taking the timing and the intent of
00:10:02.360 the article, like when you combine all those things all together, you are veering very, very heavily
00:10:08.340 into the political territory, which again, it's, it's up to the reporter's call. The important thing for us
00:10:15.800 as Canadians, as viewers, and why organizations like True North is here is because we are trying to
00:10:22.220 give that extra information that mainstream media might not be giving. They often pitch themselves as
00:10:29.400 purely, purely unbiased sources of information. Even the opinion sections often try and sound very,
00:10:37.000 very, uh, reasonable. They're not, you know, they're, they're not, um, uh, partisan in any, in any way,
00:10:41.880 shape or form. That's why it's important to understand the difference between simply information
00:10:46.920 and factual information being political and being partisan. So it's important to keep these things
00:10:52.340 in mind. And I think next time we'll do a little bit of an exercise. We'll look through a couple of
00:10:57.000 things. Um, as I mentioned, Dr. Tam has often been criticized of being political and I want to pull
00:11:02.120 up a couple of her tweets and just analyze them and leave them up for you in the comments. But in the
00:11:06.740 meantime, is there a reporter or is there a organization or a person that you guys think often presents
00:11:13.580 themselves as very, very unbiased, which is actually political or veering onto partisan? I'd love to
00:11:18.680 hear your thoughts in the comments and, um, you'll see what kind of things we can all come up with.
00:11:22.800 So for True North, I am Sam Ashkenazi. Stay safe, wash your hands, be well, and thank you for watching.