It’s been pretty difficult to find any humour in G20, hasn’t it?

Inside — a billion dollar bunfest in which leaders talk about implementng austerity.

Outside — 20,000 police decline to confront a hundred or so rioters in favour of spending the following day assaulting and arresting a thousand nonviolent citizens and locking them up in cages for a day.

Undaunted by the emergence of uglier and uglier police stories, culminating in the one where police yank off an amputee’s prosthetic leg and order him to hop to his own arrest, Maclean’s appears to have asked The Onion’s chronically gormless Area Man to write its unsigned front page cover story this week.

Some highlights from Lock them up :

Anxiety over the behaviour of police is wildly overdone . . . arrests and claims of police brutality need to be kept in perspective.

Only the professionalism and preparedness of police prevented circumstances from being much worse.

Many of the complaints seem to involve the quality of the sandwiches in detention.

At the end of the day, debate over street violence, protest and police ought to be secondary to the summit’s practical achievements . . . . The role of formal summits is largely to provide world leaders with an opportunity to mingle and pose for a group photo.

Yup, that’s Area Man alright.

The Times shut down its old website on Tuesday and started directing all traffic to two new ones: thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk. These are the ones that they propose, at sometime in the indeterminate future, to start charging for.

I was interested to see how Rupert Murdoch, wily media titan that he is, intended to get people to pay for something they’re used to getting for free, and will still be able to get for free from most of his competitors. I imagined lots of rich media, streaming video, real-time interaction with visitors, maybe the kind of collaborative citizen/professional journalism, using Google Wave, that recently won the Seattle Times a Pulitzer. Imagine my surprise, then, when I signed up for the sneak preview a few weeks ago and found this:

A newspaper. Okay, so I wasn’t that surprised. As I’ve already written, the whole notion of charging for newspapers online represents a massive failure of imagination. This just confirmed that the NewsCorp cartel had run out of ideas.

And possibly reporters, too. I happened to be logged-in the night that the Israeli navy was chasing the Rachel Corrie on its voyage towards Gaza. The whole world was watching, to see if there’d be a repeat of the bloody incident of a few days before. Down in the corner, The Times was reporting this:

But as it turned out, it would actually be a good half hour before soldiers boarded the boat. Significantly, Twitter was busy at the same time with the same “news,” but already new reports were beginning to emerge there: the Israelis hadn’t “seized” the boat, but were merely tailing it. So I waited, and sure enough, about 10 minutes later:

The implication seemed unavoidable: The Times was getting its news from Twitter, right along with the rest of us. And for this it wants to charge us?

Sorry, Rupert. I already have Twitter. But good luck with that paywall idea anyway.

As those of you with way too little to worry about may know, May 31st is Quit Facebook Day. This is a Canadian initiative, once again proving that, while we of the North may not have the entrepreneurial mojo to create much, we sure know how to get all indignant once somebody else has.

The latest Hate on Facebook campaign (following on the “Dang, They Changed the Way it Looks” and the “Dang, They Changed the Way it Looks Again” campaigns) was prompted by news that the company has partnered with three other sites in a customization experiment. On yelp.com, pandora.com, and docs.com, you will henceforth be informed that the site is using public information from your facebook page to personalize your experience. If you don’t like that, you can click a link to opt out. That’s it. That’s what has caused a hue and cry in the geek community, though it has yet to spread very far in the common-sense community.

Now, the fact is that, as a Canadian, you would have to work very, very hard at this point to breach your own privacy on these sites. Pandora is not even accessible from Canada, and yelp — evidently spooked by the controversy — has turned off the personalization feature, making only vague noises about its return “in the future.” That leaves docs.com (Microsoft’s version of Google Docs), which apparently intends to let you embed Word files, spreadsheets, etc., in your facebook feed. Actually, that sounds kind of useful.

But even if docs.com were attempting to suck huge chunks of information out of my facebook account for the personal gratification of Steve Ballmer, it wouldn’t get very far. First of all, note that it can only access information which has been made public; if I’ve chosen to hide my interest in toe-sucking from all but my friends, docs.com will be none the wiser. And I don’t put a lot of personal information on facebook anyway. Why? Because I am not an idiot; if I want to keep something private, I don’t do it by putting it on the internet.

Some argue that unsophisticated users have no idea what they are and aren’t sharing publicly, nor how to control that. Which is true, and which means that what we have here is a teaching moment. Teach your daughter or your Uncle Ted how to use the privacy settings — they’re not nearly as complicated as facebook hysterics make out, and Mark Zuckerberg has announced that they will be made yet simpler. And while you’re at it, try to convince Uncle Ted that the world doesn’t really give a crap about what movies he likes anyhow.

The greatest irony in the great facebook backlash is that a lot of the geeks who are leading it are proponents of Gmail — Google’s in-the-cloud e-mail service. That makes a lot of sense — fuss about whether or not yelp.com knows you like sushi while entrusting your private and business correspondence to a service which — believe it — can be accessed by government snoops without so much as a warrant. It makes you wonder who the real unsophisticated users are.

In a 2007 article entitled “The Conference of Defence Associations gets $100,000 a year from the Department of Defence,” CDA executive director Alain Pellerin told Maclean’s John Geddes: “We also have to write a number of op-eds to the press.” Asked if there is any aspect of Tory defence policy the CDA opposes, he couldn’t think of one.

 
Also worth noting is that the comment editor at the Globe and Mail who runs these pieces joined the Advisory Council of CDFAI in 2006.

At 13 university centres across Canada, the Department of National Defence funds defence “studies” through its Security and Defence Forum. This is from Embassy Mag in 2007:

“According to the Department of National Defence, over 600 people, including 183 faculty members, are employed in these centres across Canada. In 2005-2006, scholars from these centres churned out 600 publications, including articles, books, and chapters. In this same period, the centres received funding worth $1,255,000. As of October 2006, DND approved a 25 per cent increase in funding. In the next five years, the funding will shoot up to $1,650,000, a 32 per cent increase.”

Steve Staples, Rideau Institute, Feb 2007:

“It’s not about scholarly journals, peer reviewed articles that they have written — it’s really about appearing in the mainstream media. What you tend to get as a general trend, is a steady stream of hawkish opinion from academics that are all linked together through Department of National Defence funding.”

Not all this hawkish think tank funding is DND of course. CDFAI donors for instance also include Enbridge, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin.

Something to think about given that the media Rolodex seems to fall open so easily to the same DND and corporate funded analysts over and over again.

Gosh, what a surprise. The Walrus leads this year’s National Magazine Awards with 33 nominations, followed by Maclean’s with 27 and Toronto Life with 26. This compares to 28 for The Walrus, 27 for Toronto Life, and 20 for Maclean’s last year, and 37 for The Walrus, 29 for Toronto Life, and 18 for Maclean’s in 2008. L’actualité is occasionally allowed to rupture the Toronto Top Three, but only if it promises not to let it happen too often.

The Walrus is a radically improved magazine since I last wrote about it — for one thing, under John Macfarlane, it actually looks and reads like a magazine. So is that the reason it now dominates the awards? No. It does so because it fills the historical role of Toronto alpha-magazine, a role that used to be filled by Saturday Night. When I was jobbed-in briefly as an editor at SN in the late ’90s, I handled seven stories that were eventually nominated for National Magazine Awards. I’d like to think this means that I was the most freaking brilliant editor since Tina Brown, but all it really means is that I was working at Saturday Night.

There must always be a Toronto alpha-magazine, so when Saturday Night folded it was briefly succeeded by Toronto Life, but that raised the uncomfortable question: if this is a national magazine award, why is a city magazine all over it? Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when The Walrus finally got good enough to assume the stance — though it’s worth noting that that happened before The Walrus actually became good.

So now we are returned to the status quo: The Walrus will win mucho d’awards, just because. Meantime, the “coveted” Magazine of the Year prize will continue to be handed out on a semi-regular basis to magazines not from Toronto, as per last year’s award to Alberta Views. Which begs the question: if these publications aren’t good enough to receive double-digit nominations — which they apparently never are — how are they good enough to be the Magazine of the Year?

One explanation would be that the award-givers understand that an allegedly national prize must occasionally be given to a magazine not from Toronto, lest it appear to be less than national. But that would be cynical.

What’s the solution? There isn’t one. It would be nice if the English-language judges weren’t overwhelmingly from Toronto (which, despite the claims of the organizers, they are). In the case of the French-language and bilingual juries, however, it’s inevitable that they’ll be drawn almost entirely from central Canada. No, the only possible solution is to stop calling them the National Magazine Awards. Pick some deserving Toronto magazine icon — Pierre Berton, Doris Anderson — and name them after him/her. That would be fitting. But they have never been national magazine awards, and never will be. So why keep pretending they are?

As it becomes increasingly clear that the official explanation of 9/11 is insupportable and won’t stand the test of time, I thought it might be apropos to establish a media “Honour” and “Dishonour” roll, recording those news organizations who have or haven’t done their job in reporting the story. The idea here is that, 10 or 15 years from now, when the great majority of people have cottoned-on to the fact that the government lied — just as the great majority now realize that about the Kennedy assassination — we’ll be able to look back and see which of them maintained the best traditions of journalism, and which were compliant or complicit.

This list is pretty much off the top of my head, and certainly subject to change, persuasion, and the wisdom of crowds. In other words, if you have suggestions for additions and subtractions, or moving an organization from one list to the other, let me know via the comments form. Please explain your reasons, and provide links to back them up when you can. Note that organizations can appear on both lists, and that individual columnists are excluded, as an organization may well maintain a columnist it disagrees with. We’re looking for institutional responsibility here. The exception is columnists like Alexander Cockburn, who also have senior editorial responsibility, and thus are the institution, or part of it. Maybe I’ll start a category for just-columnists down the road.

As well, the fact that a newspaper or magazine or network is big and mainstream, and possibly even corporate-owned, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be recognized when it does something right.

“Doing the job” is defined here as not swallowing the government line wholesale, remaining sceptical, reporting new evidence as it emerges, and investigating the facts where warranted. Or at least some of the above. “Dishonour” means credulity in the face of government explanations, ignoring or actively suppressing contrary evidence, deriding debate, failing to correct information that has been proven false, and various other forms of pernicious and/or bush-league behaviour.

So here’s the list for starters:

The 9/11 Media Honour Roll:

A Channel (Victoria, BC)
Report on Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth press conference

The British Broadcasting Corporation
The Power of Nightmares

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
The Fifth Estate, “The Unofficial Story”
Sunday Special Edition, “9/11: Facing the Fallout”

Channel One Russia
Showing of documentary Zero, followed by debate

The Copenhagen Post
Article on scientific study of nanothermite found in WTC residue

“Democracy Now!”
9/11 debate (Many Truthers regard Amy Goodman as a “left gatekeeper” — but she did run this debate.)

The Japan Times
Article on 9/11 Diet member Yukihisa Fujita

KBDI, Colorado Public Television
Showing of 9/11 Press for Truth and 9/11 Blueprint for Truth

KMPH FOX 26 (Fresno, Calif.)
Interview with Richard Gage

La Télé Libre
Interview with Cynthia McKinney and Niels Harrit

Maclean’s
“Hijacking the Truth on 9/11″

RT
Various programs and reports

TV2 News (Denmark)
Interview with Danish Scientist Niels Harrit

Vanity Fair
Article on Loose Change

The Washington Times
“Explosive News”

Zoomer Radio (Toronto)
Interview with author of A Guide to 9/11 Whistleblowers

The 9/11 Media Dishonour Roll:

ABC News
Nightline, “Inside a 9/11 ‘Truther’ Convention”

British Broadcasting Corporation
“9/11: The Conspiracy Files”

Counterpunch
“The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts”

Daily Kos
“The Conspiracists”

The Huffington Post
Editor’s Note

The National Post
“A theory that just won’t die”
From back ofthebook.ca: “On being disappeared by the National Post”
From back ofthebook.ca: “Part II: On being disappeared by the National Post”

Popular Mechanics
“Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report” (Much of the info in this early piece has since been disproven, but PM has never run a correction.)

The Washington Post
“A leading Japanese politician espouses a 9/11 fantasy”

TBS? TBS? All over Canada, Conan O’Brien fans are asking: What the hell is TBS?

And how the hell are we going to watch Conan?

A quick check shows that the cable network to which O’Brien today declared allegiance — Turner Broadcasting System — is nowhere available in Canada; no, not on cable or satellite, or even by interdimensional delivery using wormholes. Of course, the assumption had been that he would go to Fox, and that, along with much of North America, we would get our Conan fix by actually watching Fox after 11 pm (a heretofore unthinkable idea). But that plan was apparently scuppered by scheduling problems.

So instead it will be FBS — er, TBT — er — what the hell is it? Of course, this may be the start of the first truly successful cross-platform program, for which TV delivery is just one of many options. Conan’s audience is already just as likely to watch him on their notebooks or iPads, given the option, as on the tube. But for Canadians, even that may not be a possibility; geo-bounding already keeps us from watching much American (and, for that matter, British) broadcasting. Tried watching “The Family Guy” on hulu.com, or “Dr. Who” on the BBC iPlayer, lately?

It’s entirely possible — likely, even — that a Canadian broadcaster will buy the program and solve our predicament. And there’s always torrenting, or ATDHE.net. But as of this moment, the announcement completes our marginalization from the pop-culture cool-kids club.

Why, Coco? Why?

We now know, thanks to WikiLeaks, that the US military lied about the killing of 11 Iraqi civlians, including two Reuters reporters, in 2007. “There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” said its spokesman at the time. But the classified video released yesterday by the whistleblowing web organization plainly shows otherwise. No hostile actions by those on the ground; no threat to US forces; just some men walking through a courtyard, one appearing to hold a weapon pointed at the ground, the two journalists carrying cameras that the soldiers in the Apache helicopter overhead mistake for rocket-propelled grenades.

This isn’t shocking (though the video is); armies lie, truth being the first casualty of, well, you know. What’s interesting, though, is to go back and review the way The New York Times reported the story:

BAGHDAD, July 12 — Clashes in a southeastern neighborhood here between the American military and Shiite militias on Thursday left at least 16 people dead, including two Reuters journalists who had driven to the area to cover the turbulence, according to an official at the Interior Ministry.

The American military confirmed that the journalists, Namir Noor-Eldeen, top, and Saeed Chmagh, were killed as American forces battled insurgents in the area.

.
Every week we read ledes like this from Iraq and Afghanistan, presenting information that is patently unconfirmed, at least by the reporting organization, as “confirmed.” Yes, it’s our job as media literates to remind ourselves that second-hand information isn’t fact, it’s hearsay. But how often do we do so, and how often do we accept what we’ve read as “news” and move on? (The Times has now published a story that revisits the Army’s statements in light of the WikiLeaks video.)

What is appalling, though, is the way, one year later, the reporters’ own employer commemorated the killings. “The deaths of the two men brought an outpouring of tributes,” reported Reuters on the occasion of a memorial tribute held at its Baghdad bureau. “‘Namir was our favourite little brother with a big heart and a great talent who achieved great things in such a short time,’ said former Baghdad bureau chief Alastair Macdonald. Steve Crisp, Middle East Pictures Editor, added: ‘I can still see him walking out of the [Reuters] compound with his cameras slung over his shoulders laughing with Saeed on his way to his last assignment’.”

All well and good. Then this: “That was the morning of Thursday, 12th July 2007, in the fifth year of the U.S. and British led campaign to pacify Iraq and restore democracy after the overthrow and execution of the dictator Saddam Hussein.”

Oh really? That was the reason for the invasion? Not non-existent WMDs? Not phony links to Al-Qaeda? Not geo-political strategy? Not oil? But rather, peace and democracy?

It’s one thing for the Army to lie. It’s quite another for a major news organization to do so, and keep on doing so, five years along. The real way to honour Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh would have been, just once, to tell the truth about the war that killed them — the same truth they were in pursuit of when the US military opened fire.

Let’s play CanWest Idol! — in which we decide who should get to buy the bankrupt media company’s assets.

The finalists for the TV operation appear to be just two: Shaw Communications and Catalyst Capital. The former is the Alberta-based cable company; the latter is the front-organization for Leonard Asper and New York investment firm Goldman Sachs.

Simon Cowell says: Really? These are the choices? A hardware company run by a cowboy and the same people who drove CanWest into the ground in the first place? No wonder I’m quitting this show.

We say: That’s a little harsh, Simon. Besides, we know cowboys, and Jim Shaw is no cowboy. As for the Aspers, it’s true that letting them reassume control would be like putting Joseph Hazelwood back at the helm of the Exxon Valdez, but, y’know, their convergence strategy showed foresight and may just work yet, once the economy is out of the pooper.

On the other hand, they’re in large measure responsible for the pathetic state of Canadian specialty channels, so we say stick with the decision to give it to Shaw. Given all his mouthing off about the horribleness of Canadian programming, we’d like to see Jimbo try to do better. And who knows? Maybe he will.

In the print category, the known finalists are BC newspaper publisher David “No Relation to Conrad” Black, Vancouver-based Glacier Media, Inc., a consortium led by current National Post executive Paul Godfrey, and — guess who? — the Aspers.

Simon says: The Aspers again? Let me see: if the bank foreclosed on my home and put it on the market, and I tried to buy it back, promising that this time I’d really, really pay the mortgage, what do you think the bank might say to me? As for the rest: Who are these nobodies?

We say: Well, actually Simon, one of them has been running CanWest’s flagship newspaper for awhile now. But there’s the problem. The CanWest newspapers need a total reboot, and, plainly, neither Godfrey nor the Aspers are the people to do it. After Conrad Black sold the Post to Izzy Asper and Asper (eventually) fired Ken Whyte, the Post became a shadow of its former, robust self and remains so today. It needs reinventing. As for the others in the chain, particularly the big city papers like The Calgary Herald and The Ottawa Citizen, they are still beset by the poisonous atmosphere created by Black’s union-busting and the Aspers’ predilection for censorship — most famously reflected in their firing of Russell Mills, publisher of the Citizen, after the paper called for the resignation of Jean Chretien, and continuing today with their suppression of news and commentary contrary to Israel’s interests. Again, a housecleaning is in order.

That leaves the other Black (David) and Glacier Media. We confess to having known nothing of the latter until we visited their website, but we can confidently say that any company that can’t produce a better website has no business running a national news organization. David Black, on the other hand, has quietly built up a very solid chain of newspapers, some big, mostly small, in both western Canada and the States, most of which also have sophisticated online editions. Black Press has run into its own charges of meddling, but Black himself is known as a hands-off publisher with no particular political agenda. Wouldn’t that be refreshing?

Not that the Bank of Nova Scotia and other creditors are going to spend a lot of time considering who’ll create the best product, and help renew Canadian media. They just wantz their money. If they did, though, Shaw and Black would walk away the winners. Cue the balloons.

Hmm. What is this doing on the website of our public broadcaster?

Vancouver protestors fall silent.

The article I have linked to on the CBC site is a product of its agreement with The National Post to jointly cover the Olympics. It appeared in the Post first, and from there was syndicated to the website they have collaboratively created for the games, Vancouver Now.

As a piece of reporting, it is precisely what we expect from The National Post: a commingling of news and political purpose — in this case to deride the Olympic protest movement. It does so using the usual tactics: a snide tone, imputation of motives, loaded language. (The anarchists who broke windows are “thugs” and “the rabble.”) And, of course, contained within the pages of the Post, it’s relatively harmless, as we know this is the sort of thing they do.

But does the CBC really mean, in its turn, to host an article mocking public dissent, not just of the florid kind, but in its genteel, middle-class, let’s-have-a-march-but-keep-it-polite iteration also? Bob Ages, a spokesperson for the Olympic Resistance Network and member of that well-know radical cell, The Council of Canadians, tells the Post’s reporter/pamphleteer Brian Hutchinson that the ORN has “an agreement not to criticize each other in public. That’s not to say there isn’t internal criticism, but we’re not going to dump on the young people.” This is used to suggest that the protest movement has “unravelled” and is beset by “internal dissent” (the hed on the Post article, which, mercifully, does not make it over to the CBC site).

Is this the CBC’s stance towards the exercise of democratic rights? If so, it places itself in a league with Fox News. If not, is it paying any attention any more to what ends up on its website? Of course, the CBC is just as welcome as any other news organization to host strong comment, as it does. But Hutchinson`s piece wasn`t conceived as comment, and sticking it into the Blogs section of the Vancouver Now site doesn`t make it so.

So, fellow taxpayers, your money is now being used to tell you that the next time you think about getting uppity, you`d better think twice. This probably isn`t what the CBC intends. But it is, I`m afraid, what it is doing.