A longtime resident of Uxbridge, Ted Barris has written professionally for 40 years - for radio, television, magazines and newspapers. The "Barris Beat" column began in the 1950s when his father Alex wrote for the Globe and Mail. Ted continues the tradition of offering a positive view of his community. He has written 16 non-fiction books of Canadian history and teaches journalism at Centennial College in Toronto.
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I'm all ears
This week a teaching colleague of mine told me an embarrassing story. He'd been working in the college's Internet radio studio late one night, attempting to improve the quality of telephone interviews on air. At one point in the evening, to test the phone signal in the studio, he called his wife at home and asked her to read something over the phone. She began reading a document they'd received from the college's human resources department into the telephone.
“Why am I hearing myself in the speaker?” she asked.
My friend suddenly realized he'd forgotten to shut down the broadcast signal of the radio station. His conversation with his wife and the contents of his HR document were being broadcast on the college radio signal. Of course, it was an Internet signal, not a regular radio station frequency broadcast. So, perhaps a few students were listening and it was relatively harmless information.
I bet Tiger Woods wishes he were that lucky. If so, his cell-phone message to his alleged mistress - asking her to remove her name from her phone so that his wife wouldn't discover it - wouldn't have been heard by half the planet. Nor would images of his SUV wrapped around a tree in Florida, have been downloaded and seen by millions of YouTube fanatics. It's true: Most celebrities thrive on leaking gossip to the Internet, being caught on video by TMZ paparazzi on the street or being ambushed by amateur videographers inside ritzy restaurants.
But if celebrities (or anyone else for that matter) want to, it's getting harder and harder to hide. The social media - YouTube, Facebook and Twitter - are everywhere.
Long before the explosion of ubiquitous media, however, those of us working in print, radio and TV learned some very basic tenets about being in the public eye. The moment we stepped into the vicinity of a professional situation, we were told to beware; sound could be picked up, images caught. I can even recall the words of my Ryerson professor now.
“If you're in a TV studio, consider its camera to be taping,” Peter Lacombe used to say. “And if you're in a radio booth, consider its mikes to be live.” In other words, if you didn't want to be caught doing or saying something stupid, you assumed you were “on” all the time.
Case in point. Remember the name Avery Haines? She's the former TV anchor who sat in a CTV NewsNet studio waiting to record her next segment one day back in January 2000. It was early on a Saturday morning. She didn't think the cameras were rolling and she took the downtime to kibitz with her crew about visible minorities.
“I could be a lesbian, folk-dancing, black woman stutterer … in a wheelchair, with a gimping rubber leg. I'd have a successful career, let me tell you,” the National Post reported. Of course, the cameras were rolling. The whole rant went live to air. Complaints flooded in. And Ms. Haines was quickly dismissed.
But these days, it's not only studios with unexpectedly live mikes that people have to avoid. My wife has described to me countless occasions aboard the GO Trains where businesspeople get on their cell-phones and blab at the top of their lungs - as if no one can hear them - about business dealings, marketing strategies and all matter of top secret enterprise such that if their bosses knew, they'd likely be fired.
Which reminds me of that famous Canadian incident back in 1998. In October of that year, the then Solicitor General Andy Scott boarded a plane for New Brunswick. Seated within earshot on the plane was NDP opposition MP Dick Proctor. Proctor happened to overhear Scott talking about the inquiry into RCMP crowd-control actions at the APEC summit in Vancouver. Proctor said that Scott was speculating about the outcome of the inquiry - one whose commission reported directly to the Solicitor General. Scott appeared to be in conflict of interest and Proctor had him dead to rights.
But that was in an era when the most sophisticated spying technology would have been a notepad and a Dictaphone. No texting devices, no cell-phone camera lens, just a trained ear listening and a squinted eye watching. If the Scott incident had happened in the same week as Tiger Woods' “transgression,” the former Solicitor General's reputation would have been in tatters even before he claimed his luggage.
Twitter, YouTube or TMZ would have destroyed him instantly.
