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,…
Vacuous electoral promises and virtue-signalling schemes won’t deliver the outcomes Indigenous Canadians need
Canada has consistently failed to make progress commensurate with the many lofty pronouncements and expectations on the Indigenous file. It’s a national shame that most Indigenous Canadians on reservations live far below acceptable socio-economic standards. Money isn’t the problem. By 2022, the federal budget allocations to Indigenous will have doubled since 2016 to nearly $25…
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…
The camera doesn’t doesn’t lie. The stuffed characters behind the head of government in COVID news conferences are always on
Who are those people standing behind the newsmaker at press conferences? I see them in the hallways of legislatures when the party leader is making an announcement. I see them in a studio behind the head of government during a COVID-19 news conference. “Oh,” you say, “they’re showing that governing is a team effort and…
Isn’t it time politicians learned to simulate a real-life encounter with people who have questions?
Head of government: “… and so stay safe.” (Long pause.) Robotic voice: “Our next caller is Scoop Notepad from the Daily Planet.” Scoop: “Hi.” Head of government: “Hi Scoop.” (Pause. Sometimes the greetings are reversed.) Scoop asks a question, head of government responds and then we hear the oddball, robotic voice again. Who is that?…
It’s time for the media to deny the deranged the notoriety and fame they so perversely seek
Justice Anne Molloy recently found the man who drove a van down Toronto’s sidewalks, trying to kill as many people as he could, guilty of murdering 10 and attempting to kill 16 others. The judge also took the extraordinary decision to refer to him as “John Doe,” denying him any notoriety he might have expected…
Reporting on the George Floyd and Colten Boushie deaths twisted the facts to meet the agendas of mainstream media
Derek Chauvin is the Minneapolis police officer who achieved international notoriety for his role in the death of George Floyd. A video showing Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, as Floyd pleads that he can’t breathe, has been viewed millions of times around the globe. Floyd’s death sparked months of protests, rioting, looting…
Crackdowns fail to recognize that alternative lenders are the last hope for Canadians shut out of the traditional lending market
The media often portray alternative lenders as slippery, unethical loan sharks who exploit the poor. When targeting the sector and not just a few bad apples, such stories are easy, cheap hit jobs. New Brunswick Sen. Pierrette Ringuette, for example, recently described alternative loans to CBC Marketplace as “an abusive financial process that needs to…
When we limit our media consumption to one side of the political spectrum, we get a distorted picture of reality
Everyone likes positive affirmation. It’s nice knowing that while the rest of the world has gone crazy, your friends have your back. It feels even better when you have thousands of friends agreeing with everything you say. Frankly, that’s the power of social media, where positive affirmation is only a few clicks away. Social media…
Journalists eager to echo doomsday alarms about pandemic case numbers while ignoring the social devastation of lockdown policies
It has long been accepted both within and without the world of journalism that negative news trumps developments of a positive nature pretty much every time. Much may have changed in how news is delivered to people but the old cliches – “if it bleeds it leads” and “newspapers don’t report when airplanes land safely”…