Be yours to hold it high

Unless you've been living under a rock - and good for you if you have - you know that the Olympic torch has been making its way across southern Ontario for the past week-and-a-half.

It was in Brantford on the 21st, where loudspeakers and scared dogs congregated at City Hall, before it departed from Harmony Square the next morning en route to Paris. It wound its way through the southwest over the holidays, finally hitting Kitchener no the 27th.

Then yesterday in Guelph, controversy struck as a young torchbearer was attacked and knocked to the ground by protesters. And in all the media coverage I've seen of this, I've been led to an alarming truth: the Olympics are everything that's good with the world, and if you're the least bit skeptical about that, well, that's quaint and all, but you can go off and do your silly little protest stunt after the Olympics have finished.

Yes, I'll admit that Julian Ichim probably isn't the best person to be the face of any protest movement at all. I'll also admit that the protest shouldn't have turned violent, and Ichim's group shouldn't have done any more then run alongside the torch.

But there's a bigger problem here, and it's the same one I saw with the torch protests in Caledonia and north of Toronto. In news coverage of these events, the reasons for the protests are either buried deep in the story or, worse, not mentioned at all.

I more or less expect this from CTV and anybody else who is paying enormous sums of money for the right to broadcast the Olympics - they're interested in protecting their property, and stories that reflect badly on the Olympic movement could ultimately be detrimental to their ratings (and thus profits).

But the Waterloo Region Record? They, like most newspapers, have absolutely nothing to gain from sucking up to the IOC. And yet they still swallow the Olympic propaganda hook, line and sinker - if the torch route is adjusted, the story is that there was a minor hiccup, not whatever was being protested about forcing the adjustment. If a torch-bearer is attacked, it's the torch-bearer who the focus is on, not the grievances of the attackers.

Why were there so many stories about how the Olympics will force China to start coming in line with Western rules regarding human rights, and why are there so few following up on what really happened (or didn't happen) there?

Funny thing about this is that I'm overall pro-Olympics. I just don't think that their activities and propaganda should be treated with kid gloves in a way that no other organization would ever be treated.

--Ryan