Sunday January 22, 2022

There was a time in this fair land when commercials did not run (with apologies to Gordon Lightfoot) on the vast majestic airwaves of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 

            Back in those days, in my first full-time job, I wrote commercials for a private radio station in Vancouver. I saw how advertisers knowingly distorted the truth to make a sale; they cared little about the well-being of their customers.

            I submitted an article to Maclean’s Magazine for their now-defunct “For the Sake of Argument” section, contending that advertising needed a rigidly enforced code of ethics. 

            Maclean’s – which of course relied on advertisers for its revenue -- didn’t print it. 

            My next job, ironically, was selling air-time to potential advertisers. For the CBC. Which by then had gone commercial. 

            These musings were prompted by a recent email from the David Suzuki Foundation, and by a research report on the carcinogenic qualities of alcohol. The report was published in Lancet Oncology a year ago, but it only got noted in Canadian media last week.

Liquor and tobacco

            If you examine any medical report for the last 40 years or so, you’ll find that heart disease and cancer regularly top the lists of deadly diseases. And that the two greatest contributors to both those diseases are alcohol and tobacco. 

            The Lancet study claimed – and I suspect every epidemiologist would concur – that every drink of alcohol has an effect. On esophageal, mouth, larynx, colon, rectum, liver and breast cancers.

            Technically, ethanol, the form of alcohol present in beer, wine and liquor, breaks down in the human body to form a known carcinogen called acetaldehyde, which damages DNA and interferes with cells' ability to repair the damage.

            Limited alcohol consumption may offer some benefits, via antioxidants and stress relief. But alcohol itself is recognized worldwide as a Group 1 carcinogen.

             Ditto with tobacco. Since the 1960s, when the U.S. Surgeon-General officially linked smoking and lung cancer, tobacco advertising has been vigorously restricted. First, on air. Then, in print. Then on packages themselves.

            You can’t buy cigarettes without a label warning of the health risks associated with smoking. 

            Why is there not a similar label on every bottle of alcohol?

            Whitehorse, in the Yukon, tried it. But industry pressure pulled the warning labels after just four weeks. 

            Does Big Booze have more clout than Big Tobacco?

            "It boils down to money,” says Dr. Fawad Iqbal, an advocate for warning labels. “Alcohol is a $1.5 trillion a year [global] industry. They'll lose money, and money wins at the end of the day."

            Why did we crack down on one carcinogen, while promoting another?

Warning labels

            David Suzuki makes the same argument about gasoline-burning cars. Despite the improvements that car companies have made in controlling emissions and raising efficiency, cars and trucks still produce about a quarter of Canada’s greenhouse gases, every year. 

            There’s no question, anymore, that greenhouse gases – mainly carbon-dioxide and methane – contribute to global warming. Nor that land, sea, and air are warming. Which in turn results in catastrophic extremes of heat, cold, rain, flooding, drought, hurricanes and tornadoes. Which hurt all of us.

            Incidentally, if you dispute those facts, take them up with the scientists, not with me. I accept the scientific evidence.

            And so Suzuki asks the obvious question: why don’t cars have a warning label too? 

            “This is a public health and safety issue, just like tobacco advertising was decades ago,” says a Suzuki mailing.

Throttling our thinking

            I use these examples to make a point (I hope) that Big Money effectively controls what we get to see, hear, and think about. If the information could imperil corporate profits, Big Money will squash it.

            Which is why I believe Canada needs a national broadcasting system that can be utterly impartial, that cannot even be suspected of coming under the thumb of advertisers. 

            As long as any media voice relies on advertising for its revenue, it is vulnerable to dollar diplomacy.

            So I argue that all the CBC networks should be commercial free. 

            Yes, that will require big bucks. Although perhaps not as much as we might fear, once the CBC divorces itself from all the current departments trying to bring in enough money to keep the CBC going. 

            It also requires cast-iron protection against political interference. Its revenue has to be dependable and untouchable. No demagog, of the left or the right, should have the power to meddle in CBC programming. Ever.

            The CBC should have one mandate, and only one – to reflect Canada accurately to Canadians. 

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Copyright © 2022 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.

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Your turn

Last week’s column, about my troubles with bill payments and computer algorithms and, well, life in general, produced an astounding dearth of mail. 

Cliff Bristow said he solved the problem “I put everything on PAP (preauthorized payment) about 10 years ago.”

Tom Isherwood shared his own experience: “ Happy I'm not the only one who can get frustrated by following a voice menu that tells you to use your computer when the computer is not working. The latest horror came when I  agreed to switch to Telus fiber optic in order to receive NetFlix. My computer shut down and asked for username, password, and code number  -- the latter two were always rejected. Three Telus technicians arrived at different times to rectify the problem. All three failed. 

            “Eventually a  TELUS agent called from Alberta and fixed the problem over the telephone by walking me through the unknown after nearly a month without service.”

Valentine Young agreed with my definition of  “systemic”:  “invisible and often unrecognized concepts that people take for granted”. 

            She continued, “You then go on to equate those concepts with the ‘principalities and powers’ written by St. Paul in Ephesians 6:12.

            “In the previous verse, the apostle exhorts us to ‘put on the whole armour of God, that we may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil’.  He explains, ‘for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.’ 

            “To me, St. Paul is referring to Satan and his role in our world. Certainly the abstract ideas and forces you describe -- anti-black racism and sexism -- belong to the dark side of life.”

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TECHNICAL STUFF

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PROMOTION STUFF…

To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)

               Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.

               I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/

               Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)

ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE

               The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns.