The Struggling Rich

Long ago, there was a joke around Toronto about how the city’s three main dailies—in those days, the Globe, the Star, and the Telegram--would have reported the sinking of the Titanic. I can’t even remember how the imagined Telegram headline read. The good, grey, business oriented Globe supposedly would write “Shipment reported late at harbour.” And the Star would write “Star reporter saves puppy from sinking ship.”

The Telegram is long gone. The Globe in no longer so grey, no longer so business oriented, and no longer so good. But the Star hasn’t changed a bit in all these years. This is typical of “liberalism” generally—it is in fact profoundly conservative. And the Star has long considered itself the Canadian liberal flagship.

It still prefers praising itself to covering the news straight. And it is still completely out of touch with reality.

In her recent column, Antonia Zerbisias continues the tradition, as she regularly does, by patting the Star’s ample backside over its coverage of the current terrorist uproar.

She writes:

“What nailed this story is a dogged reporter pounding a beat, a paper investing time and resources on good old-fashioned journalism — something on which the corporate media, and the bloggers who attack them, can't, or won't, spend.”

Zerbisias

And get that—according to the Toronto Star, the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest-circulation newspaper, is the little guy fighting an insurgent battle against “the corporate media.”

According to the Torstar website, besides the Star, the Torstar corporation (TS.B on the TSE stock ticker) also owns “CityMedia Group, publishers of daily and community newspapers in Southwestern Ontario; Metroland Printing, Publishing & Distributing, publishers of more than 90 community newspapers in Ontario; digital properties including workopolis.com, toronto.com and LiveDeal.ca; and Harlequin Enterprises, a leading global publisher of women’s fiction.”

Welcome to the modern left—whose idea of insurgency is voting for greener policies during a stockholder’s meeting.

And that is clearly the constituency of the modern left: the rich. Economists say that making more money becomes a low priority for most of us after only about $20,000 US annual income (The Economist, “Tory-entalism,” May 27, 2006, p. 35). This is below the average Canadian income. Accordingly, promises of tax cuts and economic development, the conservative program, are more attractive to the poor, but hold little allure for the rich. The usual liberal call for raising taxes and slowing growth to concentrate on “quality of life” issues appeals directly to the rich, but not to the priorities of the poor.

Congrats to Antonia on that puppy, though.