I've been reading a few of the highlights from the recent diplomatic cable dump by Wikileaks this week. One of my favorites is a report written by an American diplomat stationed in Canada, in which he gravely describes a worrisome trend: growing anti-American sentiment in Canadian sitcoms.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has long gone to great pains to highlight the distinction between Americans and Canadians in its programming, generally at our expense. However, the level of anti-American melodrama has been given a huge boost in the current television season as a number of programs offer Canadian viewers their fill of nefarious American officials carrying out equally nefarious deeds in Canada while Canadian officials either oppose them or fall trying. CIA rendition flights, schemes to steal Canada's water, "the Guantanamo-Syria express," F-16's flying in for bombing runs in Quebec to eliminate escaped terrorists: in response to the onslaught, one media commentator concluded, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that "apparently, our immigration department's real enemies aren't terrorists or smugglers -- they're Americans." While this situation hardly constitutes a public diplomacy crisis per se, the degree of comfort with which Canadian broadcast entities, including those financed by Canadian tax dollars, twist current events to feed long-standing negative images of the U.S. -- and the extent to which the Canadian public seems willing to indulge in the feast - is noteworthy as an indication of the kind of insidious negative popular stereotyping we are increasingly up against in Canada.
I really hope this guy has one of those direct-to-Obama emergency phones.
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We often talk of what group currently displaces the Nazis as radio, TV, and movies perfect villains. At first I was mildly surprised, but for the passed year or more it has been the U.S. and, specifically, the CIA in Great Britain and Canada.
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