Ad Nauseum: The Globe and Mail

I like to think that I have a somewhat unique perspective on the Globe after my time spent in King's. Not on the paper itself, mind you, but rather it's status symbol...uh, status.

First let me say that The Globe and Mail is a fine publication. Very intellectual, covers interesting global and national stories, and has some excellent writers (they use the inverted pyramid and everything!). I have nothing against the Globe itself. However, the daily comes off as a very pretentious paper, if not because of it's writing, then for it's readership.

At King's, essentially 50% of the students were from Atlantic Canada and the other 50% from Ontario, with a few statistical oddities from the Bahamas or Boston. My Journalism class was no different. And since we had to subscribe to a daily newspaper for this class, it was easy to tell the two apart; the people from Ontario wouldn't shut up about how fan-fucking-tastic the Globe was. They treated it as if they had a daily subscription to the Bible.

I'm not entirely sure where this attitude started; if it was the readership who put it on such a pedestal, or if the Globe and Mail marketing department has brainwashed its subscribers to put it there. All I do know is that the Globe is certainly capitalizing on this attitude, as is evidenced by their recent ad campaign:



I've been to Toronto, once, 11 years ago, and I can tell you this; this ad screams urban upper-middle class Ontario. Every restaurant I remember going to in that city, including the produce market/deli in the basement of the Eaton Centre, had images very similar to that image of the wine being poured. There were watermarked letters on parchment-style yellow everywhere.

This whole ad is filled with hoighty-toighty imagery like that; The marquee, the "Globe Health" heart, the two Internet faces debating (because the Globe is such a community where your voice can be heard!), the two faces made of newspaper cuddling up to each other with the sound of Shenkar in the background to make it obvious that the Globe is multicultural, the whole spiel. It's as if the ad is trying to say, "Read our paper, it will make you a worthwhile person."

My favorite image in this ad, however, has nothing to do with how haughty the paper is, but is in fact a fascinating social commentary, and perhaps even a psychological one at that. When the bay doors open and you see "FREEDOM" written in big red letters on the screen, only to see each letter dropped successively onto the supposed chemical plant below like bombs, that's just so delicious. Almost Orwellian in nature. It very much reminds me of the slogan in 1984, "WAR IS PEACE." But it's such a compelling, and rather apt, analogy to this war in Iraq that America is waging. They're using the excuse of freedom (both for the Iraqi people and the Americans back home) as a sort of weapon of tyranny. "We'll be welcomed as liberators. Because, you know, Iraqis love it when people drop bombs on them." I'll be honest, if it weren't for my experience with the new generation of stuck-up Ontarian Globe yuppies and this one image, this commercial probably would not have grabbed my attention the way it has.

Last night, Alex and I were discussing the phenomenon of the annexation of one's personality from consumer products, in the process debating which was more sad; an individual looking to gain social status from buying the soundtrack to the upcoming Transformers movie, or Scott Zimmerman, a 30-year-old fundamentalist Christian from Pennsylvania who is trying to convert us and yet, ironically, doesn't know anything about the Bible. To be honest, we're still not sure which is worse (perhaps we shall have to hold an organized debate on the issue). But this Globe and Mail issue really flies under the same radar. Most of the people I know who read it from Journalism class acted like they were better, morally superior even, for reading the Globe. It was as if they thought only smart, politically-savvy people read the Globe, and those who didn't weren't. It was in fact not dissimilar to the story of the Emperor's New Clothes; "Only smart people can read the Globe, and we're certainly not stupid!" The worst for this kind of stuff was the Sexy Socialist, a denizen of the King's campus whom I shall address at a later date. But this guy, he was by far the most snobby and stuck up about the paper, as if he kept his copy wedged far up his own ass. But the funny thing is, he was about the only NON-Ontarian who I know who read it. It was almost as if he were hoping that maybe by reading it hard enough, he could be a stuck-up Ontarian by default.

The Globe and Mail is a good paper. Probably the best for a Canadian perspective on the events of the world. But it's not the fucking word of God. Stop acting like it is.

- Silent G