Stoney Creek News item #1

The front page article at the Stoney Creek News covering the Merlo Clear-cut is a great example of how much variance is possible in how an issue can be marketed. (Another example is the 'paid parking brouhaha', something I'll address in my next post.)

From the beginning of my discovery of 'all this out there', from the first contact I had with the News Editor back on April 26th, I had nigglings about how what was happening would be presented to the public, and how the public would in turn respond.

Huh?

The sub-headline doesn't say it all, 'MNR investigating whether endangered species was illegally cut', but this wasn't the crux of the issue as we were all aware of it as of 'going to press' time this week, though this is a convenient -and safe- tack.

As I have maintained all throughout this blog, this issue transcends whatever legal transgressions perpetrated. In fact, if that's the only way we can view it in order to digest it, then we're in worse shape as a society than I've been willing to admit.

What if, for example, there had been no Endangered Species Act infraction, that no law had been broken. What then? How would the News have presented the story? What would the thrust have been?

As a culture, many people have a hard time being able to quantify an issue unless they have context laid-out for them; we've become a society of statistics, of studies, of certifiable reference points.

So how do we quantify morality?

How do we discuss behaviour that might not be 'against the law', but should still be regarded as, at the very least, not admirable?

I'm not slagging-off the News; they're a community publication owned by a conglomerate, delivered to homes on the backs of reams of flyers. They're not a 'hard news' entity. (But then, I'll go to bat for it and maintain that it's not a disposable 'feel good' paper, mindless fluff, pap.) And perhaps the way their business model is designed, they don't have much latitude to work with. (I'm speaking of the hard-copy version. Don't get me started on what the online publication should be doing. Oh, all right: 'It's 2010, not 1998. Does anyone over there actually use the Internet...?')

I'd just like to believe that we can discuss issues on a more substantive level than tossing notions of law-breaking back and forth to decide if anything 'wrong' has been done. Surely here in Stoney Creek, we've got more gumption than that.

I'm hoping that the News will see this issue for what it really is: a value-system litmus test, and a far more important challenge to the general well-being of the community and not merely a bureaucratic scrum.