by Kim M. Krett
the Carillon

Through a bout of the sniffles, the occasional cough, and a good hair day Wendy Mesley, the darling of the CBC, gave the twentieth Minifie Lecture Tuesday night at the Education Auditorium.

Mesley, the host of CBC¹s UNDERcurrents, entitled her lecture "My Life as a Dinosaur". She spoke at length at how public relations personnel are the low lifes of the occupational world and how journalists have become desensitized to what PR people hand out as information.

"Public relation hacks are the bottom feeders of the occupational evolutionary scale; lower than engineers and business types," said Mesley.

Mesley delved into how journalism has lost its role of being the objective voice in the world. She called it the ³new narcissism² in which reporters or columnists give you their opinion first in regards to a story.

³Who cares what the journalist thinks,² said Mesley. ³Journalists are a conduit to the public. We are here to stir up the shit.²

Mesley went into great length of the trial and tribulations of working on UNDERcurrents. In doing a story on Adbusters and their Carasaurus advertisements she suddenly had an epiphany.

³He said that the goal of TV is to deliver an audience to the advertiser. That shocked me, and here I thought it was content that mattered to television,² said Mesley.

Stories of how Mesley has battled the large corporate spin machines dominated the lecture. The proverbial run-around, ³No Comment², and the prepared statements were what Mesley called, ³penalties in not playing the PR game.²

At the start of the evening Costa Maragos gave a lovely story of how Mesley at the start of her television career with the CBC clamped her hand over the mouth of an over talkative newspaper reporter at the National assembly in Quebec City.

While working in the press gallery at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Mesley said that with so many stories to cover you took whatever the politicians gave you and you ran with it.

³When you¹re part of the Parliamentary pack the only way to stay sane is to be a pitbull in the scrum, but we all ate the same thin slop the politicians gave us from the same trough,² said Mesley.

In her parting words Mesley gave some good advice to the budding journalists in the audience.

³Stirring up the shit about things that matter is the best way to get a job in journalism...PR people are getting away with lots and journalists are not taking them to task...if journalists don¹t get in the way of PR people, journalists will become extinct.²