Interview by Joseph Roberts

Joseph Roberts: What do you feel about the state of media in Canada today?
Patrick Watson: The state of media in all Western industrialized countries is too much in the thrall of advertising. I’m talking particularly about news, but to a large extent about all forms of media. And, on the whole, I think we’re not in very good shape.
Our public broadcaster has let us down terribly by conceiving, 24 years ago, that its morality should be the same as independent broadcasters, and that it should compete with them for audience numbers and revenue. That’s not what a public broadcaster is supposed to do.
We have the obscenity of our public broadcaster, for which Canadian taxpayers are paying about a billion dollars a year, running American movies on Saturday night at eight o’clock. Movies you could go to the corner store and rent. That’s a major absurdity when there is so much stuff that is not being covered, both in the form of entertainment and information programming. There is a real gap for the public broadcaster to be working on.
Another good example is the public broadcaster’s failure to go and collaborate with the specialty broadcasters, and get some of their terrific series, like the History Channel is doing. Taking a second position, we can get them for very modest prices and run them without advertising. We need to make sure that citizens are getting to see those on an ongoing basis.
The third major delinquency, on the part of the public broadcaster, is not going back into its archives, where we have stored thousands of hours of really outstanding Canadian drama and documentary, which is molding away in the vaults. There is an audio-visual portrait of our country, going through the processes of growth, over the last half century that contemporary Canadians should be able to look at. There is one instrument by which they could look at it, and that’s the public broadcaster. And, it’s not doing it.
JR: There is this whole other issue, of media literacy. If people don’t understand what media is about then they don’t know if there is something wrong with the picture. We have small publications like, Common Ground, or the Tyee, the Republic of East Vancouver or Adbusters, and others, which are trying to wake people up. What have you found that works?
PW: I think on the whole we are better off in this country than many other parts of the industrialized world. But, what you are saying is absolutely true. I guess, for me, the greatest shortcoming is in the area of my professional and practical interest, television.
I am now collaborating with a man named Paul Jay who has been the executive producer of the CBC series called Counterspin. He is putting together an enormous worldwide organization, which originally was known as Independent World Television, and now is The Real News. Great international journalists, for example, like Jonathan Shell from the United States; people in India; people in Britain; Australia and New Zealand; all of them are signing on to this.
The idea, with a time frame that sees us getting our first broadcast provision of this news service in 2008, is an international satellite news service, carried 24 hours a day, operated by journalists, no advertising, paid for entirely by subscription from satellite viewers.
We have the names of several hundred people who are prepared to put together a lot of money, on an investment basis. The business plan looks so good, they are all confident that in 10 years they will get their money back, and make some profit on it. But, the primary concern here is to develop a television service that is directed and run by journalists; created only in the interest of people who want thorough, globally oriented, television journalism.
So, this is in the process of developing, and this is the best idea that has come along in my lifetime. I think it’s fabulous. It is a result of the advances in satellite technology that make it possible, at a relatively low cost, to go global. This is in development.
I’m very hopeful. I was skeptical at first, I thought Paul Jay was being romantic about it, now I’m convinced by the numbers, and by the extremely convincing, elaborate and well produced business plan. I hope I live long enough to make a contribution on the editorial end.
JR: We have all this new media today. I’m working with this magazine that’s been in print for 24 years, now it is on the web, and still evolving to be more relevant.
PW: The Internet is going to be full of surprises for us, and the conventional media are really going to be transformed. The Real News, that we are developing, will have its first expression on the Internet. And, the Internet will remain a major field for it to work in. A great many people I know have their main news services sitting there on the Internet and they just punch in, from time to time, to check what’s going on, and never turn on a conventional broadcast.
JR: You mentioned that democracy is not taking place very much on Parliament Hill.
PW: I did say that I am distressed with the way journalists generally, in this country, both in print and in the electronic media, tend to equate politics, and thus democracy, with what goes on in the House of Commons in Ottawa. One of the things I have found over the years, and began to be thoughtfully aware of, probably within the last decade, was the extent to which democracy is really at its most alive and well in small communities.
We have this little country place at a port north of Toronto in a township called Mono, and I bumped into the mayor at the movies, and asked him if there was something that I could be doing to help. We’re up here half the time and I wanted to make some kind of contribution. He asked me to join the Mono Economic Development Sustainability Action Committee. I’ve now been going to meetings with these guys for a little over two years. Most of them are volunteers, or elected council. We’re dealing with the issue of how to develop this rural township economically, without tarnishing its greenness.
Also, we’re close to being able to bring high speed Internet into this part of the country. We are dealing with dial up out here. And it would mean that a lot of people wouldn’t have to drive into the office a couple of days a week, the work could be done from home. One of our guys came up with the motto, “Compute to work, don’t commute to work.”
JR: Are there any films you’ve seen lately worth watching?
PW: We’ve seen a few movies in the last year that I thought were admirable. Good Night Good Luck is absolutely outstanding, and was very nostalgic for me because I was sort of drawn into television by Edward R. Murrell. I had, as a young graduate student, intellectual snob, in the late 1940s, early 1950s, looked on television as beneath contempt. A few things changed my mind, most noticeably, Edward R. Murrell. What he did on the Joseph McCarthy story was outstanding.
Another George Clooney movie we saw recently, Syriana, is also challenging and rewarding. A New Yorker critic said something shrewd: “Don’t see the movie at all, unless you are prepared to see it twice.” It is that densely packed. Although, I think Clooney as a director is a little more deliberately intricate and puzzling than he needs to be in this film. However, his performance is magnificent. Also, there is a portrayal of lower class Arab workers who do the bottom jobs in the oil fields, which is really superb. It helps one understand the quantum of anger there is in the Muslim world against the West. It’s a terrific movie.
I thought Capote was extraordinary. Within minutes I was completely taken in. And it won my assent – a key word in my vocabulary these days; it won my assent within the first few minutes. Hoffman’s performance was a jaw dropper.
Also, quite outside of the social dynamics we are talking about, I thought March of the Penguins was just about the best piece of cinematic work I’ve seen in years. In fact, it’s worth getting the DVD. I thought the story of making of it was even better than the actual film.
JR: What books and magazines do you read?
PW: I read the Atlantic and Harpers, but not all the time. I read the New Yorker faithfully. It’s been very good, except the cartoons have been a bit down the last few years. But, as journalism with a real range of interest and very good writing, and occasionally very good poetry, I find the New Yorker is rewarding. I also read Books in Canada, the Literary Review of Canada, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. They come in regularly and they get totally devoured. Also, I’m reading a lot of poetry. I’m memorizing a lot of poetry. I can probably recite poems to you for two and half, three hours.
On the book side, I’m reading a lot of biographies. I just stumbled over Volume 2 of Roy Foster’s immense biography of Yeats, and have read it through very slowly and deliciously – it is 700 pages. Volume 1 is not in the bookstores anymore, so I ordered it and will have it momentarily. I will read anything in and around Yeats.
JR: What’s closest to your heart these days?
PW: Leaving aside my wife, and my marriage, I would say that language continues to be an aspect of experience that takes my heart by storm. I mean primarily poetry, but not just. A well-spoken person, standing up in a crowd, who conveys heart and insight and engages that audience in some kind of common pursuit; that’s terrific.
Also, I find the stage very satisfying. I’ve had a very interesting time working with one of the world’s finest stage magicians, who happens to be a Canadian, named David Ben. We have been collaborating now, for going on 15 years. My co-writing with him for the stage… a lot of what we do is around language.
It’s come to the point now that when we finish a script and get it on stage, we often can’t remember who wrote which line. That is an absolutely exhilarating experience, to have that kind of collaboration.
JR: Relationships? Big question. How do we get better at them? What have you learned about love and life?
PW: It’s such an immense subject, I think one is constantly learning. I’m in the thirtieth year of my second marriage and it’s been magnificent. It has grown the way it has because somehow early on the relationship we realized the most important thing we could do for one another was to tell the truth, which is sometimes brutal and difficult, but it has been the basis of a love and a collaboration that has sustained us through all kinds of difficult times. We have an extremely intricate, ongoing conversation about life, which is absolutely central to everything I do.
JR: Is there anything that gives you a sense of calmness and peace in the world? What do you do to get yourself centred?
PW: Some people would call what I do meditation but it’s really more gazing. I am an atheist. I do not believe in life after death, and I do not believe that there is communication with people who have gone. I find the universe profoundly mysterious, and I am grateful for its existence, and I don’t think, the race, if it lives and investigates for a million years, will ever figure out how the universe began, or what it ultimately means. I find myself awed in the face of that mystery.
It does not, for me, spell out, in any sense, the idea of some paternal intelligence sitting out there, directing affairs. I’m always a little uneasy when the word “spirit” is raised because it is so commonly used in that kind of immaterial personification. And, it is just something about which I am profoundly skeptical and not, in the end, very much interested, except in the way of exploring how a lot of really great minds have been convinced in the reality of a spiritual existence, the presence of something like God.
A lot of people have indicated, like Auden did, when he converted to Christianity in his later years, that he really wanted to believe, and he wanted to be around people who believed, but he didn’t necessarily subscribe to the creeds of the church. He spoke them; he spoke them as an approach to making some kind of profound, universal statement about the nature of life.
I think a lot of people who are in churches are there because of the sense of community with people, with people who have the desire to believe, and this desire to express something very concrete about all that mystery. But if you got them in a corner, and gave them a couple of double whiskeys, and enjoined them to be absolutely truthful, would say: “I don’t believe the doctrine, but I want to be around it.”
JR: I am reminded of a chapter in the book, The Unconscious Civilization, by John Ralston Saul. The chapter title was: From Propaganda to Language. It’s as if humans have cultural or historical amnesia and they need to relearn the art of authentic conversation.
PW: I think that’s extremely important and I was just reading somewhere within the last few days someone analyzing very carefully this whole seemingly impenetrable conflict between Islam and the West and saying that the only way out of it is for the warring parties to learn the art of conversation.
JR: What would you like say to Common Ground reader in closing?
PW: Trust in the will of benevolent human beings to try and make it better. The universe is steady; change takes place because people do it. The universe is very reliable.