Seven Oaks Magazine.

Given that we’re only now arrived into the autumn months of the year, it may seem premature to make my pick for the Most Galling and Soul-Deadening Moment in Vancouver Television for 2004; I think, though, that my nomination will stand the test of the next two months. The honours, I’m sure, will go to CTV News, rewarding the instance when they announced in the same breath that, coming up on the news-hour, they had stories about the hundreds of schoolchildren taken hostage in Beslan and “High heels – they look great, but they can be painful. We’ll show you how to look and feel great this season.”

Granted, I’m not normally someone who subjects himself to CTV News. On the rare occasions when I am inclined to indulge in the oxymoron that is “television journalism,” I tend towards CBC – and even then, only because of a decade-long crush on Gloria Macarenko and, more politically, Neil MacDonald’s principled refusal to describe Palestinian political violence as “terrorism.” I’ve never subjected myself to Pamela Wallin or the ubiquitous Bill Good who seems – on a raw aesthetic level, at least – to epitomize Desmond Morris’ Naked Ape.

But recently, things have changed; we’ve all been deluged with recurrent invitations to witness the investigative genius on Channel 9, as CTV News has been saturating the airwaves and bus shelters with advertisements incessantly pumping up their new journalistic edge – epitomized in Vancouver’s “First and only news helicopter,” Chopper 9. “While others are still leaving the parking lot,” CTV boasts, Chopper 9 is screaming across the Vancouver skyline in pursuit of cutting edge, up-to-the-second news.

At first, I was sceptical as to how much the addition of a news helicopter might improve the quality of coverage we received in this city. Frankly, the logic eluded me – how could a station that prides itself on asking tough investigative questions like “How much teeth-whitening gum do you have to chew to see a difference?” benefit from breaking skyward? You can’t see teeth or high heels from up above the city, can you?

And then I realized that Chopper 9 was the logical culmination of the journalistic heights that current affairs-challenged Vancouverites have come to cherish at the conservative, infotainment oasis that is CTV. The newshounds on channel nine have taken their craft to the next level, in a way that’s perfectly in line with established protocol: For years, CTV has set new standards for removing news items from the social and political contexts that produce them. The only place to go now is up; to literally leave the world behind, and cover the stories from the most pristine angle available – straight down.

Imagine covering the hullabaloo surrounding the Dickensian and anti-homeless (rather than anti-homelessness) Safe Streets Act, far away from the grit and grime of the Downtown core itself, using aerial images taken from the pulsating news machine that is the awesome Chopper 9. “Highlighted in glowing crimson, Pamela, are the homeless orbs themselves. Notice their intimidating migration patterns around the employed civilians, whom we’ve highlighted for our viewers in pleasing aqua-marine.” From Chopper 9, the Olympics land-grab is a far prettier enterprise; we see the ski slopes go up and the resorts spreading out – but we all know you can’t hear Indians picket from the sky! And in the air, the Woodward’s building is just a square spot of roof like any other, no matter how piddly the number of units inside set aside for social housing. In short, the view of Vancouver and the rest of B.C. from Chopper 9 fits the mould set by years of CTV’s journalistic integrity to a tee. Bill Good? Naw, Bill Great.

There’s rarely a time when Canadians entertain their continental superiority complex more openly than during American elections. One of our most cherished myths up here is that while our nacho cheese-saturated cousins to the South furrow their brows and yelp at screens dominated by Fox News and CNN, we enjoy a more urbane, more nuanced, more cosmopolitan and investigative strand of telejournalism North of the 49 th. But you know the other neat thing about Chopper 9? When you’re up that high, there’s no imaginary line separating us from them. You can’t tell where urbane Canada starts and obscurant America begins. While the rest of us fumble to leave the parking lot, the guys up in Chopper 9 can already see that the fences that separate us from the cultural abyss to the South aren’t really there.