John McLachlan Gray
John MacLachlan Gray is a Canadian writer-composer-performer for stage, TV, film, radio and print. He is best-known for his stage musicals and for his two seasons as a satirist on CBC TV's The Journal, as well as an author, speaker and social critic on cultural-political issues.
Distracting the guard: Getting Past the Part of the Brain that Thinks it Thinks
Those Americans who see Canada as one notch to the right of Soviet Russia have a point when it comes to the Canadian media. More and more, we do not read the newspaper, or follow the TV news, we decode it in the way that Soviets decoded Pravda and Isvestia.
Were you curious as to which party CTV, the National Post and the Globe and Mail would support in the last election? Of course not. We read their editorials not as a means of finding out what they think, but of discovering, in the subtext, the corporate agenda they mean to promote.
As for the CBC TV, it has become a pretend commercial broadcaster, whose mandate is not to deliver programs to an audience, but to deliver audiences to an advertizer. Meanwhile CBC Radio functions as a lever to maintain subsidy levels: i.e. if you cut back our funding, we'll shoot the puppy.
As a fatalist, none of this bothers me, frankly. Writing plot-based fiction has changed my world-view on all "whither Canada?" questions. But there might not be time for this.
Appearing at these conference event(s):
Parkland Conferences participated in:
Parkland Fall Conference 2008
More info:
For more information, visit his website at:
www.johnmaclachlangray.com
