A brilliant mind with a critical eye. Intelligent, engaging, curious, humorous and innovative
On Monday, a true giant of Canadian broadcasting left us. Patrick Watson passed away at age 92. Steve Paikin, host of TVO’s The Agenda, circulated the sad news. “A broadcasting legend has died. … His Witness to Yesterday in which he interviewed figures from our history got me hooked both on journalism and history,” he…
In all parts of the country
Ted Byfield passed away at his home on Dec. 23 at age 93. Many Canadian conservatives mourn the loss of a great man. Byfield was a giant in Canadian conservatism. He consistently challenged existing orthodoxies and societal norms within modern liberalism and helped create an intellectual blueprint for a political movement that had often struggled…
Rhea Clyman was the first western journalist to expose the forced famine that killed millions in Ukraine
She’s considered the first western journalist to expose the Soviet famine-genocide that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s. But although Rhea Clyman sent numerous accounts of Soviet and Nazi atrocities to North American newspapers as a foreign correspondent, she was soon largely forgotten. That is, until four years ago, when Jars Balan, director…
Crossings is the first to bridge undergrad research across all arts programs
A new student-led academic journal – peer-reviewed by students – has launched in the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Arts to showcase some of the finest undergraduate work in the social sciences, humanities and fine arts. Called Crossings, the annual publication contains perspectives as varied as a Marxist critique of capitalist trends in the theatre, an…
'Reporting' today is simply a note-perfect parrot-squawk of State-approved storylines
An editor-in-chief infamous for, shall we say, whimsy once decreed no opening sentence of any news story could exceed 21 words. The impromptu commandment unleashed a newsroom tizzy equivalent to what might have erupted if an exotic dancer had walked in bearing a burlap bag full of ferrets and released them during her performance. The…
In the midst of institutional confusion and ineptness, individual journalists are still holding the powerful to account
Honesty demands acknowledgement. In recent weeks I’ve written sharp criticism of journalistic performance on a variety of issues. It’s true that at the institutional level, corporate providers of the ceaseless information that floods our waking hours too often resemble a pooch begging for table scraps while running in ever diminishing circles going yip-yip-yip. It would…
There is a growing comfort in institutional journalism to follow rather than question
Warning lights should always flash before our eyes whenever journalists mix raw numbers and percolating percentages in the same paragraph. Numbers clearly state actuality. Percentages are the ups and downs of context. Regardless of the axiom attributed to Stalin that one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic, if two people die,…
Carl Berstein once exposed the existence of a network of CIA-recruited journalists working around the world for the U.S.
A few years after he broke the Watergate story, Carl Bernstein quit the Washington Post and spent six months looking at the relationship between the CIA and the press. The result was a 25,000-word cover story in the Oct. 20, 1977, edition of Rolling Stone called The CIA and the Media. The article, still online…
For Tom Ndekezi, university was a chance to gain practical skills not only for a variety of jobs but a variety of careers
Tom Ndekezi remembers hearing a statistic during his second year at university that would drive every decision about his academic future from then on: members of his generation can expect to have six to eight careers in their lifetime. “Not even just jobs, but careers,” said the graduating University of Alberta Faculty of Science student.…
Examples of tweets destroying careers are numerous. Commit your thoughts to Twitter and you're forever setting your opinions in amber
Last week, I got a notice from Twitter that I was ‘celebrating’ 12 years on the social media platform. What an accomplishment. Here are my Twitter stats after 12 years: I have sent out 3,475 tweets. I’m following 50 accounts, one of whom claims to be a graduate of ‘Bovine University.’ Bafflingly, I have 431…