Spinning off the rails

Spin: The Oxford dictionary defines it as turning “rapidly on its own axis.” We in the press use the term to describe facts that have been either distorted or stripped of essential elements in order to deliberately present the topic in a subjective way. Politicians, for example, are spin-masters. The media’s job is to spot spin and filter it out. However, sometimes, the press does a very poor job.

It still surprises me how even respected, supposedly objective media will accommodate spin. Last month the Toronto Star dedicated part of its editorial page to Railway Association of Canada president Bill Rowat, not to comment on the state of his own industry but instead to write about trucking.

The column, titled “Let Truckers Pay More on Highways,” contained many distortions and half-truths.
Rowat’s claims aren’t new. Trucks, he said, get a “free ride” on highways they use and tear up. (Well, truckers pay exorbitant amounts in fuel taxes, permits, licensing fees, etc.-virtually none of which gets put back into infrastructure). He wrote that rail is a “self-financing entity”-it pays for its own infrastructure. (Truckers, Rowat failed to mention, maintain their own equipment without any of the massive government subsidies and loans that rail receives.) And my personal favourite: trucking, Rowat said, is rich enough to pay more, so it should. (CN, meanwhile, hauled in $224 million in profit in its fourth quarter of 2003, putting it over the $1-billion mark for the year. Also, while truckers have had to swallow a variety of new costs lately, CN’s operating expenses fell to $1 billion from $1.5 billion).

In fairness, the Star published rebuttals by Ontario Trucking Association president David Bradley a week later. But the point is not who’s winning this ideological game of chicken. It’s why the largest newspaper in the country would volunteer to be the proverbial drag strip for that ongoing game, and why it published Rowat’s claims unchecked in the first place.

Surely, the chief of a large railway lobby association trying to convince taxpayers to rally against his biggest competitor should have at least raised flags about the column’s credibility. You think?

I’ve worked in mainstream journalism and I know what it does best is recycle clichés and reinforce stereotypes. Indeed, it’s easier to feed the public’s perception that trucks are slow-moving, smoke-spewing, road-ripping monster machines than it is to challenge false claims head on. After all, someone like Bradley or a trucker will always write in and set the record straight, regardless.

More troubling than this blindness to spin, however, is the tendency of some reporters to disproportionately pick pet causes. It was a media-fed rallying cry after several truck wheel-offs in Ontario during the mid-’90s that led to legislation that takes away a carrier’s defence of due diligence in any wheel-off incident. I can accept that there should be a zero-tolerance policy when you consider the potential catastrophe a wheel-off may cause. But let’s apply the rule across the board. In the last couple months, there have been several train derailments in the Toronto area, two of which resulted in fatalities. Will those same journalists now work overtime to pressure government to remove rail’s only reasonable defence in any such incident? We’ll see.

In the meantime, the RAC wants a more “level playing field.” Well, good for them, I say. Truckers have been calling it for years.