Look who's here

Note - for some reason the gifs of the 09 4CC turned out huge, too big for blogger, so I'm going to have to do them again later before they can be loaded onto the post. Also, while I was trying to load the huge gifs, "revert to draft" must have been hit on this entry, so it went off line until I noticed.
`

Bryce helps Jessica on BOTB

Not surprised. I thought they'd bring in Bryce at some point, because BOTB loves stuff like that. But he's there.

Also here:

Bryce spotting Jessica's lift

I wasn't sure it was him at first because a few other guys involved with BOTB are also semi-tall, dark-haired and can produce five o'clock shadow every six minutes, so they look similar when they're bundled up. But the first link comments confirm it's BD. (To me, the second link looks a lot like John Kerr until it goes close-up)

If the Jessica/Scott sham were still going on, I believe this would still be what we'd see in official media and social media linked to BOTB anyway. Bryce. Not Scott. That's how it's always been. Only in strictly "personal" social media (Skate Canada's twitter is so inept I count it as personal - it's not that professional) did they sham it up.

I wonder why it's not Sebastien Wolfe helping her with her lift. :P

I've read Dube/Savage had a successful opening night, so congrats to them, but in the video of Bryce pitching in on ice, Jessica's face looks as nauseated with terror as it did most of the time when she was getting up there via Wolfe.

I had wondered how Jessica was going to navigate the aspects of the BOTB experience that didn't look like a natural fit, but if Bryce is helping out, problem solved.




This could have come about via a number of routes - BOTB's suggestion, BOTB and SC's suggestion (further retcon of D&D's split), Jessica could have rung him up, Jessica and Bryce could have long since re-set their relationship back on solid ground. It's no surprise that Bryce Davison is a bygones sort of guy.

It also throws another possible explanation into the speculation about why Moirville is re-bff-ing Jessica on instagram, twitter, and her BOTB facebook. If Bryce is back in the mix, there you go. It would not surprise me if after this, Bryce and Jessica made the occasional tour and guest star appearance as D&D.

Other stuff:

This is more Toddler Moir rumination. When I read the below, I started wondering if Toddler Moir will one day be College Freshman Moir and still "hidden" in the public sphere.

Well, not true. I started wondering that some time back.

We all know if Moirville could have that cup taken from them (the reveal that all along they've been liars), they'd do it. Indefinite procrastination - next best thing.

I'd not previously heard of Howard Sounes' 2001 Dylan biography, Down the Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan but apparently it revealed that Bob Dylan been secretly married for about six years starting in 1986, tying the knot six months after the birth of a daughter.*

This daughter is now marrying her partner, and the partner's family is chatting to the press about how, although Bob Dylan's a great dad, he'll probably give the wedding a miss.

Missing a wedding doesn't mean you're not a good dad

Parallels with Virtue Moir might be:

"Secret" wedding. Although, unlike Virtue and Moir, his then-wife was actually known to be Dylan's then-girlfriend. It just wasn't publicized that they'd gotten hitched.

The child was kept "secret" from the public for fifteen years. That's a long time, but I feel as if Moirville can see that and raise Dylan and his ex another ten.

The reason for keeping her secret has been given as "privacy."

So there you go. There's a precedent for Scott and Tessa to go on indefinitely.

There are a few differences.

When Dylan's child was a teen-ager, she opted to take her father's last name. Previously, she'd had her mom's last name.

Dylan has other kids with his last name, who weren't hidden.

He'd had a prior marriage that wasn't hidden.

Per what I've been reading, he's a notorious lothario with a complicated love life (read, multiple paramours stashed all over the country, frequent overlap), possibly has even more kids.

Maybe Virtue and Moir's situation has changed, and they don't want to advertise themselves as a married unit with a child, and end up locked in, if, for instance, their favorite description for their relationship and their circumstances - "unique" - has taken on more dimensions or complications.

I don't really think that, but there's a difference between the challenges of a conventionally married, faithful couple with a child they'd planned, a couple who can fly under the radar almost anywhere, go unaccosted in the streets and in public, who compete at events where even some of those attending haven't heard of them - and an aging, eccentric, internationally iconic, world famous singer songwriter whose action-packed love life has been a multi-tiered, occasionally sordid, colorful mosiac spanning decades. So maybe subsequently Virtue Moir have acquired more things in common with Dylan than is presently understood.

Dylan is "obsessively private" in a weird, grandiose, narcissistic show biz sort of way, traveling with a team of security, incessantly touring while staying inaccessible to the public attending his shows, and, according to one report, habitually butchering his most recognizeable hits to the point that half the time the crowd doesn't know what he's singing.

And while he's said to be "reclusive" in the ostentatious, "look at me being reclusive" style popularized by other privacy-seeking show-offs like Woody Allen, in his favor, I don't recall him ever telling the public that he was most definitely NOT married to, for instance, his first wife (with whom he had most of his kids).

His history departs from Virtue and Moir's in other ways. Down the Highway, the biography, reveals his marriage and his chid. It doesn't lie about his marriage.

"Journalist" Steve Milton, Virtue and Moir's Boswell, repeated over and over that Virtue and Moir were platonic, that their relationship had never been romantic at any point, that it existed in a twilight region of passionate but effortlessly platonic emotional and psychological intimacy.

Milton repeated this in articles he wrote after that book came out, calling people who believed Virtue and Moir were together, "dreamers".

When Milton worked with Virtue and Moir on that book, they were married. And expecting a baby. That was still the case when they did book signings. He appeared at at least one of the signings with Virtue and Moir.

Subsequent to that book, he received recognition for his work as a sports journalist. You know - journalist. Not fiction writer. Not Public Relations Professional.**

Sports journalists don't generally proactively lie to the public on behalf of the athletes who are the subjects of their writing, but many writers and journalists seem to make an exception when they write about figure skating.

I think they don't believe figure skaters are real athletes. Look at Phil Hersch - him knowing nothing about skating despite having written about it (more accurately, despite having "covered" it in terms of its human interest value and non-technical performance attributes) didn't stop him from declaring Yuna Kim the only athlete in figure skating. They don't consider figure skating a real sport, and they don't consider the public that follows figure skating to be real members of the public.

With Scott and Tessa, we have to believe that their real world is those they actually know, or who work in and around their lives, and the world that doesn't count is the public realm. This is something we should keep in mind when their reality show airs. Whatever we see, we are justified in believing it's garbage.

When you start by faking that you're not married, and you don't acknowledge the existence of your child (yet sign up for a freaking reality show ANYWAY), there's not much reality going on, and that includes how Ilderton will be presented.

Since they have such disdain for what the public thinks, I've always wondered why Scott made such a point of this back in 2009:



I'm going to gif this later, and 2009 Canadians. For now, at program's end where, exactly as he did at Canadians, exactly when the camera is where it is, he thwacks Tessa's behind with his skate guards.

And then look at him waiting until the camera has cut from the replay back to the Kiss'n'Cry before he takes the water bottle from Tessa and slugs some down, his arm draped over the back of the bench like a guy trying the yawn and reach at a movie theatre circa 1947. You can SEE Scott anticipating seeing himself on the monitor before he takes the water.

Canadians 2009

4CC 2009

Kiss'n'Cry 4CC 09

4CC Bench 2009

Who was this for except us? Both times, he's swatting her ass when the camera is at the same angle, as close as it can get. He waits for it. And he waits until the red light is back on the Kiss'n'Cry before taking Tessa's water bottle and swigging from it. That's for US. Scott Moir is the least natural "just act natural" guy ever. If Woody Allen and Bob Dylan are examples of the ostentatiously reclusive "celebrity", Scott Moir is elaborately casual. When he's doing it to be seen doing it, you can't mistake it for the real thing.

I guess what I'm wondering is, for some reason it made him feel better to be seen (by the public) cuing us about how close he really was to Tessa. His entire private life knew it already, so why did he need to express himself that way on camera?

And why is it not important that his own child doesn't participate even by having her existence recognized the way everyone around Tessa and Scott, including Tessa and Scott, are eager to be recognized/acknowledged in public? She doesn't exist.

For Bob Dylan, the clusterfuck that is his family dynamic is a community experience. Everybody shares the impact.

For Scott and Tessa's child, she is singled out by being erased. It's not going to be the same when a sibling comes along who was born after the Olympic career is done. It's a deliberate exclusion of someone in a situation where nobody else wants to be excluded, not even those excluding HER.
_____________________________
*To tie both topics together, I think Jessica and Bryce really need a book, or at least a chapter in a skating book, of their own. Their story is so dramatic. After they were paired and experiencing success, they were widely assumed to be sweethearts, not because they said they were, but because they kissed on the lips after their biggest triumphs, in front of the cameras and everything. In 2007 her face is sliced by by Bryce's skate blade, which event, per both of them, serves to bring them closer and closer together in the ensuing weeks and months, even though articles were now saying they were ex boyfriend and girlfriend (when the media announced they were ex boyfriend/girlfriend, it was the first time the media had shared that they'd BEEN boyfriend/girlfriend).

The season after her face was slashed was their most successful. They made the podium at Worlds. This achievement was not only remarkable in light of the face slash, but because, unbeknownst to the public until the following year, while Jessica and Bryce were growing closer and closer in the months after the face slash, simultaneously (April 2007) she had taken up romantically with his best friend from childhood, Scott Moir, thereby destroying the relationship of the two men.

We found this out when, in an unprecedented media gambit, D&D together took to Tellement sports to gaily chat with us about the sordid details.

As the skating fandom repeatedly asserted, D&D's stressful relationship and Bryce's wet blanketry, and insistence on making Jessica feel guilty, were the factors eroding Jessica and Bryce's 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 performances. This was confirmed when they announced their Olympic program was going to be "The Way We Were". Obviously, taking up with your ex-boyfriend's best friend and ruining their relationship while undermining your partnership is precisely the sort of life and professional milestone Bryce and Jessica would want commemorated in choreography.

Never mind what Scott and Tessa say - Bryce and Jessica really are unique.**

**Except when unique is the template for so many Skate Canada skaters, is it still unique? There's so much unique platonic passion running amok in that Federation.
___________________
P.S. When I online research articles on ethics in journalism, most of the "thou shalt not lie" material focuses on the use of deception to GET a story. I.e. may a journalist misrepresent who they are in order to get access? Can they phony up an identity and a background in order to get close to a subject?

I liked this especially from The American Journalism Review:

The Society of Professional Journalists' ethics handbook says deception should be used only when all other means have been exhausted; the story illuminates an extremely serious social problem or prevents profound harm to individuals; when the journalists reveal their deception to the public; and when the harm prevented by the information outweighs the damage caused by the deception.

That's the theory. In reality, the rules have been widely interpreted, especially in television, usually due to competitive pressures. Says one attorney, "Libel law never asked journalists to explain how they got the truth as long as they got it."

I like the quote because the question is - are there any circumstances under which a journalist may lie in order to get to and report the truth?

The issue churns around the subject/journalist relationship, not the journalism/public relationship. It's - how far do you go to get the story? And if you lie it up too much or use tabloid tactics, it's considered junk journalism.

I have a feeling the book Steve Milton helped write with Scott and Tessa isn't featured as prominently in his bio (if at all) as his book Tell Me to My Face done with Angelo Mosca (Mosca's book is also a "journey").

I don't know the journalistic guidelines about getting access, knowing the truth, and then turning around and reporting the opposite, while manipulating the shit out of the public, while simultaneously gaslighting the public (as Milton - and others - have done time and time again) because it's only figure skating. Maybe the figure skating exemption is in the fine print. If so, I think the figure skating public should be informed, and sportswriters and others who cover figure skating should stop deceiving the figure skating public into believing they're reporting.

It's not reporting. It's not even entertainment reporting. It's not "performance.". It's not "marketing." It's lying. It's reporters thinking as long as it's figure skating it's okay to be groupies.

That being the case, the public should understand, as the audience for all kinds of entertainment media already knows if they care to check, that anything written about figure skaters is public relations, up to an including flat out lying - i.e., saying, knowingly, the exact opposite of what is true.

Actual sportswriting ranges from solid reporting to a lazy hodgepodge of sloppy research, press releases, quote banks and what's been reworded and repurposed from previously published stuff. That's not what goes on with Virtue and Moir.

It's lying. Newspapers, columnists, and sportswriters who cover news and other sports with any legitimacy should disclose to figure skating fans that it's different when the the subject is figure skaters. That it's permissible to actively lie to the public on behalf of the skaters, that the writer's role changes from journalist to "protector" of the subject, and it's customary to proactively facilitate their aggressive marketing of those lies.

A little implied eye rolling at the public to make them feel even stupider is encouraged. If the public is mostly "ladies" there's really no limit. Pour it on.

There's always a lot going on that journalists don't tell us. Always a story behind the story. However, I am not aware of other cases where the journalist, in his or her own voice, knowingly tells us the opposite of the truth, when it's the central focus of the entire piece. Except in figure skating.

I suspect figure skating "journalism" is lower than entertainment "journalism". For example, suppose Brangelina split up but maintained their coupledom for p.r. And suppose this was widely known in the world of entertainment media, and suppose Brad Pitt has married a stuntwoman on the sly. There are many ways to continue writing about Brangelina by writing around these things, and very few readers would be the wiser. But I don't think anybody would flat out tell us that Brad Pitt had most certainly not married somebody else.

Scott and Tessa's book was a puff piece, but it's written by a professional who is advertised to the Hamilton Spectator's readers as a journalist, not just a columnist. When these two skaters and this journalist collaborated, nobody ever pointed out, in the interests of disclosure, that he was a hack for hire, acting as a public relations stooge, personal manager, or venturing into fiction. We were told it was sportswriter/journalist Steve Milton working with Olympians Virtue and Moir. We were told his credentials as a journalist.

I must say I'm curious if  anyone else at the Hamilton Spectator knows Virtue Moir were married and expectant parents at the time Steve Milton helped them "write" a book describing their platonic status, a book that called out people who suspected or "dreamed" they were romantically involved, and if these folks at the Hamilton Spectator just thought what the hell, it's not real journalism, but we don't need to make it clear that it's not real. People such as Milton's editors or the paper's owners.

It's okay to look the other way and pretend not to know, I suppose, but to actively promote married parents as single and platonic, and to reiterate that fans who believe or say otherwise are fantasists, is probably not ethical, journalistically or otherwise.

The practical matter is, it appears many of these people are honest only when they're accountable. If the light isn't shining on them, if what they're covering exists in the margins of a sport nobody understands but gets to write about anyway, then it's okay to lie, because they can get away with lying. That's all there is to it. They can get away with it. That's the real ethical standard for columnists and contributors at the Toronto Star, the Hamilton Spectator, the London Free Press, cbc.ca, Skate Canada's marketing and public relations, and TSN. They're not called out by their peers, and that's what ethics is all about. Getting caught.