Thursday, December 21, 2006

Have a very smuggy Christmas

Apparently smug is my new favourite word. I think I first used it on Will's blog to say that I bet Intelligence will do well in syndication and then we'll act like we loved it all along despite the fact that few are watching. Then I used it in my little rant about the CRTC for Blogcritics, which is the article that prompted the Canadian Press reporter to call me for that other article, which quotes me using the word smug again.

I'm reminded of that because the same reporter just published another article that quotes my Blogcritics post ... and again picks the part that has me calling us smug (but, er, I mean it with affection. Yeah, that's it). We'd talked about the CRTC stuff in the interview, but not surprisingly, I was probably far more coherent in print so that's what she quoted. I'd completely forgotten I used it in that post.
The blurb I'm talking about:

Diane [Real Last Name That's a Funny Adjective That Caused Me Ridicule and Torment as a Child and Now I Kinda Like But Don't Want Linked to This Blog], who runs the TV, Eh? blog on Canadian television (www.tv-eh.com), is irked by what she calls the failure of the CRTC to view Canadian content as a priority.

"I don't understand what the CRTC is for if not to protect the public interest in the use of our airwaves," [Diane] wrote in a recent post on the Blog Critics site (www.blogcritics.org). "And I don't understand how allowing Canadian broadcasters to make money duplicating the content we get on American channels and burying Canadian series is in our best interests."

[Diane] adds she's confronted regularly by people who think, without even seeing it, that Canadian television is substandard and so balk at the idea of rules forcing private broadcasters to produce more of it.

"Why, when we're talking about the most prominent expression of culture available to us, (is it) OK with us that we're becoming the 51st state?" she says. "We're so smug about what makes us different, even better, than Americans, yet we let ourselves be assimilated to the point where we loudly reject even the need to develop our own cultural product."

That CRTC post I wrote released the festering that was happening at the time in my wee little brain, which is why there's that running theme through my comments, which were all made in the same time period. I think I've moved past smug. It's Christmas. Maybe I'll start calling us sanctimonious.

I kid. I kid because I love.