Journalism gets mad

(Published in J-Source, Oct. 12, 2010)

By Claude Adams

To the many legacies of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, you can add one more: The Journalism of Outrage. The natural disaster that nearly obliterated New Orleans five years ago made it okay, no, even fitting, for reporters to let loose that righteous indignation that lurks in all of us when we are witnesses to needless death and devastation, and we know the worst effects could have been prevented.

It’s not only setting aside objectivity. It’s raising the temperature, pointing a finger, holding someone accountable. It’s more than speaking truth to power; it’s assertively demanding an explanation, and maybe even throwing a figurative shoe when an honest answer isn’t forthcoming. “Cool is one thing,” said psychiatrist Frank Ochberg of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, reflecting on the emotions that were generated by the coverage of the Gulf Coast hurricanes. “Cold is something else.”

Katrina killed cold. Those of us who covered Rwanda and Haiti and the Asian tsunami, and prided ourselves on our reserve and professional detachment as we tip-toed around the bodies, got a shock when we watched the coverage of New Orleans. The rules of the game were changing. Here, finally, was gritty, hardcore journalism with a voice, an attitude. It was the end of deference.

“Excuse me, Senator,” remarked Anderson Cooper of CNN, as the US Senate leadership was congratulating itself for having passed an emergency funding bill. “I’m sorry for interrupting, I haven’t heard that because for the last four days, I’ve been seeing dead bodies in the streets . . . Because literally, there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the streets for 48 hours. And there’s not enough facilities (sic) to take her up. Do you get the anger that is out there?”

Call to arms

The tone was unmistakable: If you don’t “get it,” we are here to remind you of it over and over again throughout the news cycle. It was the newsman’s equivalent of the call to arms, to shake the foundations of a lethargic Big Government until it responds.

For NBC’s Brian Williams, the slow government reaction became a focus of the story. Williams recalled watching the U.S. Third Infantry Division in Iraq land a pallet of ready-to-eat meals, portable toilets and bottled water into an emergency zone 10 minutes after an order was issued. “What about these people in front of the (New Orleans) Convention Center—they didn’t deserve that?” he asked.

A TV critic in Seattle, Kay McFadden, remarked that the outrage showed America’s “passion for passion.” The storytellers, many of whom were themselves the victims of Katrina, had the right, even the moral duty, to get mad.

But the Journalism of Outrage is more than hectoring and finger-pointing. In New Orleans, it was the distilled proxy voice of a dispossessed population--wounded, homeless and feeling abandoned. Or as the BBC’s Gavin Hewitt put it: “Outrage is at its most effective when it is based on compassion; the sense that one is speaking out on behalf of ordinary people.”

The emergence of angry, compassion-based journalism is only a small part of Covering Disaster: Lessons from the Media Coverage of Katrina and Rita, a collection of essays edited by communication professors Ralph Izard and Jay Perkins, of Louisiana State University. But it’s easily the most evocative and important part because it makes such a strong case for aggressive advocacy in certain events.

“Citizens and reporters alike saw firsthand how inefficient and inept government really was,” they write. “It was a catastrophic failure from top to bottom, from the sheriff on the street to the bureaucrat in Washington . . . Many journalists clearly abandoned the concept of fair-and-balanced coverage and became advocacy reporters, telling the people in no uncertain terms what they were witnessing.”

And this kind of journalism struck a chord with the American public: Surveys showed that a solid majority of viewers didn’t mind having their emotions, and their critical faculties, stirred by a strong-jawed mad-as-hell media.

A kind of apology

It’s a bit surprising, then, to see what happened in the post-mortem analysis of the Katrina coverage. So entrenched is the profession in its ethos of equanimity and “coolness” that when the crisis was over, some of the journalists who had made the most noise were the first to issue qualified apologies. Looking back on his displays of on-air emotion, Anderson Cooper told the authors that he doesn’t “take sides” and that viewers don’t need an overpaid anchorman to tell them what to think. It was a repudiation of an honest and, I believe, justifiable impulse. (To be sure, in his coverage of post-earthquake Haiti earlier this year, Cooper was quite unrestrained in taking sides and telling his audience what they should conclude about the slow delivery of food and medicine to the people of Port-au-Prince.)

Other commentators warned that journalists needed to be careful lest they get “burned” by this new readiness to display outrage.

“Outrage,” said the BBC’s Hewitt, “should be used sparingly and should never slide into anger.”

To which I have to ask: Why not? As journalists dispense with their dispassionate objectivity in the face of tragedy and genocide, why shouldn’t they inject a little righteous anger into their reporting? Isn’t that display of passion essential in creating a true sense of connection between a viewer and an eyewitness to an extraordinary event? Indeed, isn’t that emotion part of the context of the story? Isn’t that also part of the legacy of 9/11?

Psychologist Daniel Goleman reminds us that in any given situation “our first moral response comes as a feeling, not a thought.” That’s not a bad thing, for a reporter with fully-developed Emotional Intelligence. For those with lower EI, however, strong emotion can cloud judgment. In New Orleans, in the fever of the moment, media outlets were too quick to report rumors of large-scale violence, rape, even snipers shooting at would-be rescuers. One commentator called the coverage of Katrina “an unmitigated media disaster”—an overstatement that unfairly tarred a profession struggling to deal with the worst natural disaster in American history.

Mistakes and hyperbole will always happen in the heat of the moment. (Remember Three Mile Island?) But what Katrina demonstrated is that passion and taking sides has its proper place in disaster journalism. “2005 was the year the stakes went up in journalism,” wrote one newspaper columnist.

Things will never be quite the same.

The Wedding on Fonyo Beach, Aug. 28, 2010

The disparities of disaster journalism

Published Aug. 24, 2010, in J-Source

By Claude Adams

In November, 1985, the CBC sent me with a TV crew to the town of Armero in Colombia, scene of an horrific mudslide that buried the town and 20,000 of its inhabitants. In the remorseless media hierarchy of human events, Armero was a middle-of-the-show disaster. An aerial shot, some failed rescues, a few anguished interviews with survivors, a government statement, and a reporter’s on-the-scene wrap.

But then we found Omayra Sanchez. Omayra was a pretty, 13-year-old girl trapped up to her shoulders in the mud and debris. For 60 hours, with reporters all around her, she waited to be rescued. She gave interviews, prayed, cried. Her image went round the world—an icon of heartbreak and tragedy. All rescue efforts failed. Then she died, of gangrene and hypothermia. Over the years, reporters who were there would forget Armero, but they would remember Omayra.

She taught me my first, and most indelible lesson about journalism and disaster: the anecdotal human experience will always command our attention. Josef Stalin predated modern electronic newsgathering, but in a twisted way he got one thing right: A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

For better or worse, we are all transfixed by the singularity, Omayra living and breathing and in close-up. Whether it’s a baby pulled out of the rubble of a Haitian earthquake, or a tourist who survived a tsunami, the “human interest” anecdote will inevitably trump the Big Picture story. It’s not good or bad, it’s just human psychology, and it’s also part of the complex algorithm of media disaster coverage.

This came to mind while evaluating the very uneven North American media coverage of the Pakistan flooding. Considering the scale of the catastrophe—as many as 17 million homeless, and perhaps many more facing a food crisis—why is the flooding getting so much less coverage than the Haitian earthquake?

After all, the scope of this act of God is heart-stopping. In a recent report, the Toronto Star’s Rick Westhead quoted an aid official’s description: “It’s like Ontario disappearing under water, and dragging half of Manitoba with it.” On the basis of geography alone, it should be getting a lot more attention.

But it clearly isn’t. As Al Jazeera English noted in a recent report, in the week after it happened, the Haiti quake filled 41% of the “news hole” in US newscasts. The Pakistan flood, meanwhile, attracted only 3%. I would guess that you would find roughly the same disparity in Canadian newscasts.

Many reasons are being advanced for this gross imbalance in coverage. Pakistan is far away and far less accessible. Fewer than 2000 people have died, while the death toll in Haiti approached 300,000. We’re in the dog days of summer, when nobody is watching television. Our viewers and readers don’t travel there, and it has a much smaller diaspora. Celebrities haven’t taken up the cause. We’ve become “tragedy fatigued” after Haiti, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the continuing calamity in Afghanistan.

We’re told that the narrative of Haiti that we carry in our minds—misery compounded by poverty, a lost ecology and bad weather—is perfectly consistent with the devastation wrought by the January earthquake. It’s an easy story to tell. Our narrative of Pakistan, however, is colored by a complex storyline of insurgency, regional conflict, corruption, the Taliban. Some commentators talk about an “image deficit”—a politically-tinged perception of Pakistan that influences both the flow of aid, and the allocation of resources by media organizations to cover the story.

Maybe we’ve become jaded by the optics of mayhem. In a 2005 assessment of how the media cover catastrophes, the International Red Cross noted that “sudden dramatic disasters like volcanoes or tsunamis are intensely newsworthy whereas long drawn-out crises (difficult to describe, let alone film) are not.” An earthquake’s damage is picturesque, in the strict sense of the word; a flood hides its havoc. It’s just a lot of water.

Or it may be something as simple as money. In mid-1990, while I was working for the CBC in London, northern Iran was struck by a massive earthquake that claimed nearly 40,000 lives. I argued that we should be sending a crew and edit suite to Tehran immediately. I was over-ruled. It had nothing to do with body counts or disaster algorithms.The National’s newsgathering budget simply couldn’t handle it.

How do we rationalize our inexcusable indifference to the ongoing war in the Congo, which in its body count alone—five million and counting, along with rape and the dispossession of millions more—far surpasses any other human outrage since the Holocaust? The answer: too hazardous to cover, too many layers, covering too vast an area, too complicated. (And not as eye-catchingly “newsworthy” as the plight of the mountain gorillas on the Congo-Rwanda border.)

But these, in the end, are all alibis. And failures of imagination. There’s a Haitian Creole saying: “Tou moun et moun.” All people are people. And every human story, told in close-up and in detail and with compassion, has the capacity to touch us and teach us, whether in Port-au-Prince, or a flooded Pakistani village, or a hill town in Colombia. Their stories help us understand how the world works, and doesn’t work. Plus it’s great television. In 1984, the CBC’s Brian Stewart traveled to a part of the globe few Canadians knew or cared about—the wilds of Ethiopia—and came back with famine stories that captured the world’s attention.

Newsroom culture has changed dramatically in 25 years. Journalists are no less compassionate, but they are tied to a tight bottom line. Often, decisions of what to cover, and not to cover, are linked to the Eyeball Imperative—how many viewers will this story attract? How can we deliver a more cost-effective newscast? If we accept that Eyewitness News and crime/celebrity/ground-zero mosque stories draw bigger numbers than serious international journalism, how does a flood in Pakistan fit into the new business model?

As the news assignment desk becomes more and more corporatized, the Omayra Sanchez stories in the distant corners of the world will go unattended, unwritten and unfilmed. That would be a loss for journalism, and for all of us.


Tag: claude adams

Pakistan in the disaster shadow
Aug 27, 2010 by David Milliken under Hot Topics, Insights
A few weeks ago we posted a Hot Topic button to our websites when it became evident that we were receiving news releases concerning the flood disaster in Pakistan. Initially, news releases from World Vision and the Canadian Red Cross moved over the wire. These were followed by various organizations announcing substantial donations to aid the stricken country.

However, the volume of content came nowhere near the deluge of news releases that crossed CNW in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. The floods have left an estimated 17 million people homeless in Pakistan, and one media report described the devastation “… like Ontario disappearing under water, and dragging half of Manitoba with it.” Canadians were quick to respond to Haiti – as evidenced by the sheer volume of releases on CNW – but the nightmare in Pakistan seems second rate.

Why? Claude Adams, a freelance journalists, documentary filmmaker and broadcast journalism instructor, offers a balanced and thoughtful insight into why Pakistan isn’t getting the news coverage. His essay, posted on J-Source, can be accessed here: http://www.journalismproject.ca/english_new/detail.php?id=5527.

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Tags: claude adams, crisis, flood, Hot Topics, j-source, journalism, News, pakistan

The Limits of Compassion

Vancouver Province, July 20, 2010

By Claude Adams

Twice in less than a year, Steve Fonyo has learned a harsh lesson about the limits of Canadian compassion.

The first time came back in December when he heard, while in jail, that he’d been summarily stripped of his Order of Canada—awarded 25 years ago for his epic run across Canada for cancer research.

The second time came last week, when a group in Victoria, BC, withdrew its support for Fonyo’s planned wedding next month, on Fonyo Beach, near Mile Zero, where he ended his run.

The reason: His fiancé, Lisa Greenwood, was in jail for shoplifting, and Fonyo didn’t tell them about it. That bit of dishonesty, along with rumors about other alleged misbehavior, was enough to provoke the Victoria group to yank the welcome mat, along with the flowers, limousine, wedding cake, free hotel accommodation, air tickets and other donations that were pledged.

“We are all God’s children,” said the organizer of the disillusioned Victoria group, John Vickers, but, alas, some “children” are more deserving than others. Call it kindness by contract: I will give you something, if you repay me with displays of virtue. It’s charity that often becomes paternalistic and judgmental--leading to a form of transactional redemption for both donor and recipient.

But it’s not the real thing. Compassion comes without conditions. “Compassion,” said the 19th century American clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, “will cure more sins than condemnation.”

Steve Fonyo’s life is full of sin, and condemnation. I first met Steve in jail last January. He was doing time in a Maple Ridge cell for the latest in a series of mostly petty offenses. His life was a train wreck: no job, no money, few friends and no prospects, and a growing rap sheet.

I picked Steve up on his release date in early February. His clothes were unwashed, and his artificial leg wasn’t functioning. The two-month jail term left him shaken. He said he’d been attacked and almost killed by a fellow inmate. He hobbled into the arms of Lisa, who was also there to greet him, and they hugged for minutes.

On the drive home, he talked about their impending wedding. Steve told me he’d never loved anybody the way he loves Lisa. But it's a rocky relationship. When they arrived at their rented home in Surrey, Steve discovered she’d sold some of his possessions to feed her cocaine habit. He was furious, and he asked me to leave so he could have it out with her. The next few weeks were an emotional whirlwind: they would fight, and make up, and fight again. She burned a manuscript that she had written about their life together. Before she destroyed it, she allowed me to read it. It was a touching document, a love story of two people joined in a communion of addiction and despair.

It was at about this time when John Vickers contacted Steve. Vickers, the director of the Victoria Truth Centre, said he’d like to help Fonyo with his wedding plans. An accomplished fundraiser, he quickly pulled together a network of contributors. “It’s up to us,” Vickers told me in an interview on Fonyo Beach, “to ensure that this (achievement) has a proper footnote in Canadian history.”

Fonyo mused that the wedding would excite national attention, “just like Prince Charles and Lady Diana.” Vickers said he might have to hire security guards. They were like two excited kids, building sandcastles on a beach.

Fonyo lied about Lisa being in jail, because he didn’t want any blemishes on the evolving fairy tale. But Vickers found out anyway. A person close to Fonyo told Vickers that Lisa was in jail, and speculated that she might not even be released before the wedding. And there were other things: rumors about drugs and stolen goods and shoplifting at the Fonyo home. In emails to me, Vickers worried that “many innocent people (were) being truly victimized” by Fonyo’s activities.

I asked him if he had any hard evidence. He didn’t. Could he name somebody who had been victimized? He couldn’t. He acknowledged that his assumptions were “unsubstantiated” and that it may have been a “sorrowful failing” on his part to jump to conclusions. Vickers issued a news release, saying the wedding was off due to “complications.” All the other Victoria donors melted away, all except 88-year-widow Norma Fitzsimmons who told me she would still donate flowers, and solicit other donations, because “I don’t believe in hitting someone who’s already down.”

Fonyo never got to answer the allegations. And, as with the Order of Canada revocation, he never found out who his accusers were.

Steve Fonyo raised an estimated $13 million in the fight against cancer. It was the selfless and reckless act of a teenager driven by a crazy idea that succeeded, against all odds. He never asked for anything in return.

Fonyo is a hard case: rough, often uncouth, prone to anger, insensitive to others, opportunistic, not always truthful. He’s an addict on the road to recovery (he says), and likely suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder. In short, he’s not an easy man to warm up to. “I am what I am,” he says defiantly.

But for all that, Steve Fonyo is what we made him. He’s a product of our culture, a culture that confers celebrity, and then takes it away, and then passes judgment. We created the hierarchy of values that he tried, and failed, to live up to.

In a way, Steve Fonyo holds up a mirror in which we see the reflection of all the things we dislike and disown in ourselves. And that reflection presents us with the challenge to learn what a true community of compassion might look like.

“There’s a whole swath of Canadians across the country who want to see (Steve) get on a better path,” said Vickers. Then he withdrew his offer of help, even though his Truth Centre offers healing for those “in situations less than perfect.”

A wedding won’t save Steve Fonyo. That’s just one of the fantasies he wove, with our complicity. But he doesn’t need or want our approval. What he needs is some trust and compassion--the same kind of raw unquestioning altruism he showed when he started his run, for us, in a Newfoundland snowstorm 26 years ago.

A SPORTSCASTER REACTS

August 6, 2010

I read your article about Steve Fonyo. I appreciate your thoughts, and the article was very well written, but I do not believe Steve Fonyo is worthy of your efforts.

Steve Fonyo ran across Canada to promote himself. To show others he was just as good as Terry Fox, and was able to do anything Terry could do… only better. Steve is not a person who does things without benefit to himself. He is a thief, an addict and an emotional cripple. He has no idea how to run his life, and is… simply put… not a very nice person.

When Steve decided he was going to run across Canada, he walked into the news room at CJIB Radio in Vernon BC, and promptly told News Director Glen Morrison “ I am Steve Fonyo, I am going to do what Terry Fox could not do… what are you going to do for me?”. I know this, because I was there when it happened. I was the Sports Director in the same news room. His attitude was awful, so we sent him packing without a sponsorship. CKAL Radio took the sponsorship and regretted doing so.

For the better part of the next year, we heard and witnessed all kinds of stories about the things Steve did during his Canada wide run. Walking out of restaurants without paying the bill… swearing at people who did not donate…. And being charged with theft in Salmon Arm, for walking out of a Shoppers Drug Mart store with a basket full of personal items.

Even the Canadian Cancer Society threatened to withdraw their approval of the run.

Steve Fonyo does not deserve our compassion.

Make some phone calls to the people who were involved with “the run”. Find out about all the Dirty Little Secrets…!!!

The life and times of Steve Fonyo, would be an interesting read if ALL the details were ever released. He is a Con, and you have been conned (sp). He is no better than a common thief, liar and addict. The only difference is that he is Almost Famous!

He is addicted to the spotlight, and will do anything to keep himself in it.

Sorry, but there are a lot of real people in this world that need our compassion. Steve Fonyo is not one of them.

Craig Jeffers
250-412-9705


August 7

Craig:

Thanks for your note. I wasn't aware of some of the anecdotal stuff you relate about Steve's past.

I view this at two levels. As a journalist, I too look at the accumulation of awful behavior, bad choices, and outright criminality, and am tempted to write him off as a reprobate.

But there's another way to view this. Steve is ill. He's almost certainly ADD (diagnosed in his 20s, and never treated) and he's an addict. He desperately needs therapy and psychological help. I've told him this, and others have too, but it's classic ADD behavior to disregard the best advice.

In a way, the more trouble he causes, the more compassion he is in need of. I'm not a bleeding-heart liberal, but I can see what's in front of me. His life is a cry for help. If we turn away now, he falls deeper down the rabbit hole.

Condemnation is the easiest thing in the world. "Fuck him"--the essence of a lot of the hate mail his story has generated-- slides off the tongue with no effort at all. Caring enough to push him in the direction of help is a little harder. Somebody asked me yesterday "How many times can he fall off his pedestal, and expect us to put him back?" My reply is that WE put him up on the pedestal, possibly against his will, and he never really felt at ease at that height. So let's not try to "put him back"--let's just try to help him find his angle of repose as if he were a brother of a child. That's hard work, and it may be disappointing and even heart-breaking.

But I think it's worth it. Even if he hadn't done something extraordinary for us as a teenager.

Claude Adams


Claude.

I appreciate your reply.

I do not disagree with most of the things you say. But I have had almost 25 years experience, both directly and indirectly with this man, and I feel you have lost sight of the fact that this is not a very nice person.

I respect you for your courage, but suspect you are being a little naïve. This is not a man that will change, but will allow you to help him until he has exhausted every ounce of your patience, energy and time. He’ll take from you whatever he can get, and leave you wondering why you ever thought you could help in the first place.

There have been a lot of well meaning people trying to help him over the years. The “wedding planner” in Victoria is the perfect example. The wedding of a lifetime for Steve and his fiancé… only to be spoiled by the fact that she was in jail and he steals gas!

Maybe before you get more involved, you should investigate a little more. Drive to his hometown of Vernon BC. Interview friends and relatives. Talk to Glenn Morrison, Doug Blackie and Lee Powell about covering the “run”. See why the people in his own home town are embarrassed, and not willing to help any more. He gives a whole new meaning to the term “heart-breaker”.

I wouldn’t call you a “Bleeding Heart”, only a good guy, trying to understand why this guy is so bad. I enjoyed your article. It was fair. But, I would hate to see another person get hurt and be taken advantage of.

**Sorry for the bad grammar…. I was a Sportscaster… not a news guy,.,…. Hahahaha

Craig

AUGUST 7

Craig:

"This is not a man that will change."

Think about that statement a little, and you will see just how wrong-headed it is. Was Fonyo born a lying, cheating, opportunistic heartbreaker? Of course not (unless you believe in the "bad seed" theory). He was "changed" into that lifestyle by circumstances, most of which started young, many of which we are not aware of, and some of which we, his audience, may even have contributed to.

Read some elementary psychology, about how people learn to survive in the world, about how they react to classic punishment and lack of mentoring.

You call me naive; I prefer to believe that I think a little more deeply and critically, and humanely . . . We live in a community of interdependencies: some of us in this community benefit more than others from the compassion that drives the community. Steve fell through the cracks: I'm sure your list of eyewitnesses have a lot of rich anecdotes about how he is "not a very nice person." I don't challenge that assessment: my question is, how did it happen, and what do we do about it?

Was his run across Canada a giant "con" by a wet-behind-the-ears teenager? I was watching in the 80s when he did it, I've also been around the world a few times in my life since then, and met a lot of saints and sinners, and I believe Steve is neither. He's just a thoroughly fucked up kid who swears a lot, cries easily, has terrible relationship problems, and employs some unfortunate survival mechanisms. He gets caught, but as an ADD-stricken guy, compounded by addiction, he doesn't take responsibility, or feel guilt. (Read about this condition. It's very interesting.)

Too many of us, confronted by the Fonyo's of the world, react, as sportscasters are trained to do, with their gut. That makes for good "gutsy" journalism, all black and white and headlining-grabbing and judgmental--a 30-second analysis. But it doesn't go to the heart and the head. And I think that's where you should do to understand Fonyo, and why our smug "gut" reactions don't serve anybody or anything (except maybe the little Stephen Harper that exists in all of us.)

regards

Claude


From Terry Delisle, August 7

Hi..
I just finished reading your rationalism,
on Fonyo`s behavior.
You have some good points.
I am a senior who was planning to attend his wedding
give a nice sum toward starting their new life.
Most all canadians are forgiving ... let the past stay
where it belongs.

But... we are dealing with the present now..that is
not looking any rosier than past misbehavior.
What kind of message then would we send
to the teens these days " rewarding " lawless living
regardless ?

As a parent of four decent law abiding, hard working adult children
I never believed in " unconditional love "
Due to dire circumstances I had to fill in both parent`s role
all by myself, in their formative years.
I was very firm, but fair and loving at the same time.
They got hugs and I love you`s every day.

With one of them I had to use " tough love " when
she did`nt toe the line, keep the rules ( bad outside influences ),
she had to leave our home
and live somewhere else, for 2 years..
Believe me it was a lesson to the 3 younger ones
they never gave me a speck of trouble seeing that.
The troublesome one in her teens got married early
have a better than average marriage
working at a responsible job in the bank for many years
Now at age 52
a happy grandmother and considers me her " best friend "
who helped keeping her on the straight and narrow.
at a time of her crisis.

I think we all feel compassion for Fonyo deep down
and in the long run our prayers will help more, than handouts.
We know Steve and Lisa are incapable of managing no matter
how much we would give.
First some serious, prolonged counselling ( since their parents did`nt do the job )
then help them get on their feet.

respectfully yours : Terry
terry-rose@shaw.ca

Terry:

Here's a thought: Maybe real compassion comes only after the point when you really don't want to give it any more. Think of the drowning man who fights off your efforts to save him. Do you stop trying?

The wedding is a smokescreen. Steve and Lisa embraced the idea for a lot of complicated reasons, but it's a dumb idea. An idea that we, as a society, get very excited about for reasons I'll never understand. A public wedding for them would be a mistake but they don't know it. In a strange way, WE are imposing it on them. We're all hung up on rituals

As you say in your last line, they need counseling. Now. The truly compassionate Canadians will dampen the wedding bells, and focus on getting them both some help

Claude