Cataracts and O'Leary's Guns

[Ken Gigliotti]

A Case Study/Opinion : Cataracts and O'Leary's Machine GUN
         by Ken Gigliotti Feb.2017

I had cataract surgery recently. The cataract developed in my shooting eye. It develops a clouding of vision slowly over time and leads to blindness.

This is a common problem that photographers may miss because they think degrading vision is from shooting too many sunrises and sunsets. When you get your eyes checked, ask specifically if a cataract is starting to develop. You may be getting eyeglasses instead of an important heads-up and going back for a check sooner.

It took 11 months from diagnosis to surgery. ( I got in early on a cancellation).

During that time, the clouding of my vision degraded to a thick mass on the lens of my eye. It made driving difficult and I lost confidence in believing what I was seeing. Not seeing signposts caused disorientation on well-worn paths at night. Sometimes, while looking to the passenger side mirror, I saw something that flashed across my field of vision. It seemed like a person on a bike.  It was just light. The streaking light crossed a sharp-to-fuzzy-to-sharp focus areas of my vision, very scary when driving. Critically thinking the problem, eventually and thankfully my wife took over the driving duties. Over past months, I could not trust my clouded vision and bad things nearly happened. A year is a long wait. This was my experience.


Information and the gathering of information is passing into a transformation state. Newspapers had to change when radio came along, then again for television.

"Photoshop" for words/facts/journalism.

The web has created a photoshop-like capability to alter facts themselves. Photoshop for words has gone political. Just as photographers have come to guard the integrity of pictures, journalism has to do the same. Readers/viewers  need to know the words are true, not altered, no angles, no slants, no torque, no political correctness.


What follows is my opinion.

I hate bias in media and think political correctness has seen its best days and should be replaced with more critical thinking of story formulas. PC has one single view and therefore feels like bias. For the good of democracy, newspapers and TV, this is my wish.

We are in a time when voters are being influenced in negative and illegal ways and media is naively in the same boat. The consequences are dire with the democratic process and print media becoming extinct. These elections have become high-stakes investments.     

Pipelines and power are the results. TV personalities seeking high public office because of their TV experience of ratings-induced communication. “Might is right” has been replaced. 

Journalism needs to see the  broader context, the web has changed perceptions of information. TV delivers the other large traditional demographics of TV watchers, like me.

Journalists have to step outside of themselves, outside the forest. The stakes are too high, just look south.

During the hand ringing after the 2017 US election, media people are beginning to recognize the bias they held in thinking Donald Trump never had a chance. He successfully challenged political correctness. A PBS Frontline doc, Trump's Road to the WhiteHouse, mentions PC many times as it outlines the rise of Donald Trump.

PC was already in the minds of mainstream news reporters as it was already in place before they were born. But not when I started in 1977. (Why does PBS news look and sound so different? I meet people who are going to cable PBS and BBC news North America for the same reason.)

Reporters missed SEEING the significance of  Donald Trump's crowd sizes in democratically held states. Was this a predisposition, clouded vision from accepting decades of PC? Reporters, one after the other, dismissed the crowds as a product of  seeing a TV celebrity.

HEARING may have been the next thing to go. Hearing impaired by PC's incorrect messaging by Trump was received favorably by the arena-sized crowds. Rowdy crowds yelled, “Lock her up,” and "Drain the swamp.” These are hard words for soft media.

Reporters looked for scapegoats. They deferred to white supremacists and somehow missed a much larger demographic. Funny how that works. PC protects racists who are pulled out whenever they're needed. In Canada, the Reform Party and Westerners, and now Quebec'ers, were smeared and stereotyped. These are small groups. Mainstream ears could not hear it objectively.

When poling was consistently wrong, it was later thought that people were afraid to admit to pollsters they were Trump supporters. PC stifles SPEECH. The context of PC influence caused a cascade of unintended consequences, influenced THOUGHT process and senses, creating a perfect storm at many levels. The printed word “Comments” on news websites were restricted or eliminated long ago. Seems like a lot of social engineering going on.  People are pushing back.

Culture just had to blow off steam in the only legal way it could after decades of neglect. Voting rogue once in a four-year cycle was their only option. The loud exhale of steam has happened before with the Beatles, Civil Rights of the 60s, Archie Bunker of the 1970's, and it could /will come to Canada. Canadians deserve unbiased and critically thinking reporting.

The idea of controversy over truth for commercial gain is shortsighted. Television holds sway for regular voters on the many levels of persuasion. The web has a new group of young tech-savvy voters and disruptors. A direct line to candidates and their messages can be converted to voting movements of the undecided.

'Politics should not be so important,' lament reporters who covered the US election. Politics should not offend journalists to the core, not 4 years before an election. Please treat politics like every other beat. Even sports doesn't have the wiggle room that political reporting is exercising. Even sports beat reporters are not homers at the beginning or middle of any season. Politics is theater.

There's the story generated from Kevin O'Leary's social media posting of him firing a machine gun on the day of the funeral of Muslims killed in a mass shooting in Quebec .

This is a pretty good case study in political correctness. Posting the video was considered incorrect. It's hard to find any real evidence that there are rules to ensure correctness is used correctly but it is safe to assume that correctness implies a subjective assumption that there are things that ought not to have happened.

Political correctness sits joylessly, dead center, balancing on a head of a pin on the political scale. And everyone knows how the story ends. It attracts hate, not excellence. It cannot allow for the slightest deviation so it is characteristically unprepared for messy rebellion when it happens. It did not see the crowds for the people.

Rebellions, big and small, are the characteristics of change and innovation. Masses of rejected people are rejecting, their rejection. Journalism is making itself irrelevant in this digital speed-date with information. 

The messy truth is that political parties and those who sympathize with political parties as well as the media, use these incidents to their own advantage. Political parties  jumped in to criticized a person who is likely to oppose the sacred powers that be. Media are always on the hunt for a story and web-page clicks.

O'Leary's gun was totally web driven. I'll bet there wasn't a phone call made. It was likely a setup for the televised leadership debate scheduled for the next day. A political reporter should have caught that. These are the manipulations people hold in their memories. The web has filled the world with false impressions that are hard to set right. The false stories are harder for media to process in terms of cause and effect. Electronic media seldom apologizes but asks for too many empty apologies.

On the day of Trump's travel ban, Iraq banned all Americans from entering Iraq and Trudeau invited all the misplaced.  Same day. Web forces were strong. The next day was a walk back. The next day, the courts stepped in.

Even though it is generally agreed that the O'Leary video ought not to have been posted on the day of the funeral, it is likely that posting the video a month before or after would have been better. That O'Leary did not post the video with the intention to do harm or to insult Muslims seemed to be the agreed-upon point.

No one is saying there is a  connection between the video and the funeral. Viewing the timing of the video through the lens of political correctness clouds the narrative. It is a false narrative.

The reality is the video and the funeral are not connected and the video was randomly posted. But the timing was wrong. Someone gain political mileage. Sad.

Speaking truth to power needs a narrative that does not have parts missing. Canadian media have parts missing in narratives that have been clouded by political correctness combined with self-interest. This is all dangerous, as we have seen in the US.

When media reporting is seen as just more spin, things can go sideways. Fast web-reporting has fundamentally changed the way news is processed by the public.

 People no longer trust mainstream media and that is scary. Mainstream media can be bypassed through web messaging. Other media with equally missing parts emerge. All media becomes tainted. News is not content and content is not news. Information may be both in a spiral of spin. Political operatives take advantage leaving journalism holding a very stinky bag.

Through the PC lens, connecting the O'Leary video has other more subtle connotations.  O'Leary is on notice by those who see things through the lens of PC and they are creating a negative narrative of which this is a building block to be used in the future. The second message was that O'Leary spends a lot of time outside the country and is not aware of issues inside the country as viewed by in-country and PC-oriented media. Sounds like spin.

  O'Leary has distanced himself from his TV life by saying that it was all TV talk. A reset. Another reset will happen after  the leadership race is over, another after the election. Yet there must be miles of video of O'Leary that never made it on air but it will, a week before the next election. Getting rid of all unions might be one of his most scary thoughts.

Is this a half-truth, an alternate truth, false news or just "content"? Can the public tell? Decades of political correctness has created an ever clouded view by journalists with little critical thinking. The PC lens is now dense-only shapes and colours are visible. Total blindness will follow. Easy signposts are being missed.

In the US, people in the Rustbelt states trusted progressive parties but heard the same promises repeated over the past 8 years with no progress. These large masses of marginalized voters had nothing to lose with Trump. See where this is going?

Canada has consistently had 7-8% unemployment rate for years. Students with college and university education sit in their parents' basements unemployed for decades. Refugees brought to this country are on welfare after a year. People want jobs not promises. There is an opening for populism. It will attract French, English, the young, women, blacks, immigrants and refugees.

Journalism needs to think deeper. Liberalism is in decline across the Western world. News media have spread fear so thick, everyone is beginning to believe it. It is bankrupting countries already weakened by decades of job loss.

Lack of tax dollars is the short answer. There is no welfare without wealth. The job loss has created a broad context to social breakdown effecting children, marriages, families, drug & alcohol dependency and bad wars. It is one very long page of every newspaper. Governments are overwhelmed by treating symptoms and not the cause. Creating jobs makes people responsible for their own destiny; people, not government bureaucracies, take responsibility.

Without the political correctness, a different narrative could have been written that points to O'Leary's military experience as a cadet and that he works outside the country. He has a worldview of not only the tech business but business in general. This is his advantage that most of his political opponents may or may not have leading up the next federal election. Sounds like spin too.

So the story is an open-ended rabbit hole depending on the point of view. Different points of view are valid. Revolutionary.

If the carbon tax fails like it did in Australia, look out. If Trump somehow succeeds, big change will be coming. In any case, there should be a bigger cut of the pie moved to the business page for more verifiable analysis during power panel talks on daytime/night time TV and web and print journalism.

The preference for easily slanted PC news to create controversy rather than straight news is troubling. And it attracts hate. Police tell a story about permission. When people see spray-painted hate messages, cemetery vandalism, even mass shootings, the public is appalled. But there are certain segments that feel they can copy those incidents. And so these incidents go up.

Some people are inclined to disrupt. These people are not creative so they copy. Visuals and news coverage give them permission in their own minds. They are called copycats. Media has to take some responsibility. Fast web reporting contributes to boxing the story in. Media sees an uptick in racism it may have created.

What I am saying is both are valid storylines about O'Leary may be true but in Canada, there is a lack of variety caused partly by a following mentality on the web between competing news organizations. This narrowing of narratives reduces point of view to lockstep, homogenized storylines. As for journalists, sadly it looks like we like some people and we dislike others.

Before PC, a reader of newspapers could rely on views from right and left of center. The lack of variation of narrative points to a grave weakness in the media which pushes political agendas to create new web organizations that oppose existing ones.

We have seen this in the US with Breitbart in the HOUSE. Like the many seemingly old-school newspaper cliches, hard-nosed, ruggedly fierce, booze-fuelled, loser of a million bar fights, self-hating collides with hard limestone hallowed steps not present in the airy virtual world. A bloody head injury, a bad shave.

The problem is that many people begin to see bias and respond to mainstream media with a wary eye. This is bad for journalism especially when it is mistaken for fleeting web content. Or is it freedom of speech on the steroid of rating clicks?

The consequences are dire. Media is supposed to be watching democracy's back as it has done for over 200 years. It is not the job of media to keep in power parties they like, parties that may influence budgets, or parties that might influence the existence of specific media.

Political correctness has had clouded vision for too long and the election of the mad president or crazy uncle is proof.

- Ken Gigliotti Feb.2017


My new lens has greatly improved my eyesight. The colour and subtleties of tone have returned. I love being able to see clearly again. A true gift from doctors who skillfully preform these 20-minute surgical miracles everyday for dozens of people, one at a time.