As he did when the news media, the pollsters and Citizen editorials got it all wrong about the 2013 provincial election, local resident Paul Serup was quick to write in Wednesday, in the wake of Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. presidential election, to point out the failings of us lefty journalists.
Three years ago, we were meteorologists.
Now we're "intellectio-idiot elites" (see his letter below).
Harsh, perhaps unfair, but his central message is valid.
As Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post writes on the opposite page, the vast majority of journalists in the United States and elsewhere just couldn't wrap their collective heads around Trump's candidacy, never mind a victory. This bias, however, wasn't limited to just the spoken and written word.
Even photographers got in on the act.
The accompanying photo from the Republican convention in Cleveland in July says as much about the woman in the photo, Florida delegate Dana Daugherty, as it does about the woman behind the camera, Washington Post photographer Toni Sandys.
Like great photographs, this one tells a story. Daugherty is carrying a collector's edition Trump doll, still in its original package, as she speaks to a television reporter. Yet the viewer is immediately aware of Daugherty's Barbie doll-like appearance - the hair, the makeup, the hot pink dress and matching lipstick, the significant bosom, the flawless skin.
Sandys took an interesting, well-composed photograph but she must have been quite aware of what the image projected. For those who despise Trump, this photograph confirms what a female Trump supporter must be like: someone obsessed with their physical appearance and always ready for their close up. Feminism be damned, this is the stereotypical dumb blonde in action.
As the photographer, Sandys is making her views about Trump, his supporters and Republicans crystal clear in visual form.
Yet there is a more flattering way to see Daugherty, as a professional woman, politically engaged, proud of both her physical appearance and her political affiliations.
Regardless, we know nothing about her - her wealth, her background, her beliefs, her broader political views and her education. She could be a tenured professor at one of Florida's top universities, a police officer, a hairdresser, a librarian or a computer programmer.
We also don't know how she came to acquire the Trump doll or how she feels about it. She may be a longtime adoring Trump fan or she may have bought the doll for fun a few moments ago, surprised to find such a thing exists. The doll may be her most prized possession or it might not even belong to her - a souvenir from the convention for a friend or family member.
News photographers, like the rest of us, make instant presumptions about people based on their appearance and the context in which they appear.
Canon did an experiment to prove it and posted the results in a short video on YouTube.
The camera company separately brought in six photographers and asked them to take a portrait. The photographers were randomly given a life saver, a millionaire, a recovered alcoholic, an ex-inmate, a fisherman and a psychic. The twist was each person was actually the same male model.
The six photographs are radically different from each other because the photographer didn't shoot the man, they shot what they believed he was.
"A photograph is shaped more by the person behind the camera than by what is front of it," the video states at the end.
The same can be said for a news story or an editorial.
As journalists and as people, we try to get it right, we try to call it as we see it but sometimes we get it wrong, blinded by the various lenses through which we view the world.
As journalists and as people (and as president-elects), it's important to always remember that what seems so right and obvious to us might actually be wrong and that our worldview isn't actually the real world but the world as we'd like it to be.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
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