Celebrity, how fickle is thy fancy

By John T. Smith, Editor in Chief

As I write, an unusual drama over a kidnapped child is developing in Canada.

What's unusual about it is that the father has succeeded in accomplishing something that is virtually undoable for the rest of us, and that is to get the police to actually charge his daughter's mother for violating the shared custody order to which they are subject. He has been able to do that because the mother is a capital-C Celebrity (although the father is not, so this is not just another trashy, high-profile divorce), and thus the mere mention of her name is enough to get the press paying attention.

Were she just another mother who had stolen her daughter and run off into hiding, no reporter (or police inspector) would get his knickers in the slightest twist. The father's pleas for publicity to locate his child would go unheeded by editors searching for the scandal or controversy which sells papers; his demands to the police that the mother be charged and searched for would be answered with the time-worn reply, 'That's a civil matter, sir, so you'll have to call your attorney. As long as the child is safe with her mother, the police can't intervene in these cases....' (Which of course is a lie, but an expensive one to put the lie to....)

But mention that the mother is Canadian Olympic nordic ski champion Myriam Bédard and suddenly, everyone is listening and the police are consequently falling all over themselves to do their duty. As American television comedian Jackie Gleason used to say, 'How sweet it is....'

Madame Bédard's own story is unusual in itself as well. Once a Canadian National Sweetheart after winning Olympic bronze and gold in cross-country skiing at Albertville and Lillehammer, she then went on to become a high-profile political figure when she testified at hearings on the Sponsorship Scandal which brought to an end the Liberals' long reign of power two elections back. She also sued a chewing gum company for $700,000, and got into a very public spat with Via Rail, the Canadian national railway company for whom she worked briefly.

All this passed the public's craw without sticking--she was such an appealing, clean-cut, girl-next-door heroine, after all. But when she testified to Parliament that it was second-hubby Nima Mazhari's advice which convinced then-P.M. Jean Chrétien to keep Canadian troops out of Iraq, she started raising eyebrows in more than a few places. And now that she's been formally charged with stealing her own child in contravention of a court order, it seems her star has tarnished badly. Bédard supporters are finding themselves hard pressed to stay on-side, and the general run of public opinion is that she's gone round the bend. One columnist in Montréal described her as 'behaving like a deluded wingnut.'

But predictably, the media are giving voice to claims by her family that it's not her fault, but that of her new husband, Mazhari, who stands accused of stealing millions of dollars worth of artworks and is a strange enough character on any terms. He 'controls' her, they say in press reports (see some of the stories currently featured on our News Page). Damage control now consists of trying to shift the focus of the search, so that it appears to be a search for her as a victim, instead of a search for her as the perpetrator of her daughter's disappearance. The spin doctors are busily polishing up the classic 'poor-victimised-woman' role for her to wear. Well, it won't be the first time that one's been tried, nor, unfortunately, the last.

What rankles about all this is the imbalance in what one might call 'communicative power'. Stories such as this one scream the message that if one doesn't have the ear of the press, one is doomed to being ignored. Yet to get that ear is more a matter of who one is, rather than what one is saying. And this is a sad commentary on what the media think people consider important. In other words, if it's not juicy scandal--which is to say dirt about someone over whom we can sit licking our chops whilst the press to roast him to perfection--it's just not worth a 5-second sound bite on a slow news night; it's just not worth a one-column head and two inches on page 34 below the fold....

But who is to blame for that? Is it the media...or is it the media consumer who, after all, pays the bill? It's easy to say the media only give us what we ask for...but this is almost like asking, "Which came first: the chicken or the egg?" Over the last 50 years, have we not trained the media to train us to expect what they think we want and then demand that they supply it?

And meanwhile, the girl's father waits for Interpol to make a formal demand to the FBI for help, and wonders where his daughter is, and if he'll see her for Christmas...or ever again.

Whilst the rest of us ordinary fathers envy his media advantage, and pity him finding himself in our common plight...and pray for his child's safety.