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”

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.

The more Maclean’s changes, the more it stays the same. At a recent public discussion in Calgary, co-presented by Maclean’s and CPAC and titled “The West is in. Now What?”, the panel included Fort McMurray Mayor Melissa Blake, Alberta Minister of Culture Lindsay Blackett, Saskatchewan Environment Minister Nancy Heppner, University of Winnipeg president Lloyd Axworthy, and Rob Anderson of Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance. Sounds pretty Westy to me.

But who, besides CPAC moderator Peter Van Dusen, were the journalists on the dais? None other than Maclean’s columnists Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells, fresh from Toronto or Ottawa or wherever, parachutes still billowing behind them. This despite the fact that Maclean’s actually maintains bureau chiefs in Calgary and Vancouver. But they, of course, don’t speak English. Or something.

We have been here before.

Perhaps the most embarrassing moment of the evening, besides Heppner’s mispronouncing “surreal,” was Wells’ assertion that Blackett must be Alberta’s first culture minister “ever,” or at least “in your lifetime,” and that this was a sign that Alberta was now wearing its big boy pants. That will be news to Horst Schmid, the debonair culture minister with whom many of us worked in Alberta’s fully-fledged arts scene in the 1970s (and I expect he had his own predecessors). Fearlessly, Wells continued to ventilate: “This wonderful theatre that we’re in [Calgary's Theatre Junction Grand], that I saw an extraordinary Russian theatre troupe perform in on Saturday night . . . is a reflection of the reality that this whole region, led by its capital cities, has to admit that it’s becoming sophisticated, even if it doesn’t always feel comfortable.”

It’s true, Paul; it isn’t comfortable, having to dress up in them cummerbunds and all. But it seems to me I also remember international theatre troupes visiting Alberta in the 1970s, though that may just be some ridiculous phantasm of the memory. Why, we sometimes even put on plays of our own — though, of course, they were only ever about cows and gopher hunts.

The West is in. Just not at Maclean’s.

In our last episode, I said I’d tell you what I found out about why my review of What the Furies Bring disappeared from The National Post website a day after being put up. My little investigation provides a tonic insight into what happens when journalists find themselves on the receiving end of an interview.

First, I phoned up Mark Medley, co-editor of the Post’s online books section. Medley had earlier e-mailed me that he was looking into the matter. Now that I was calling as a reporter, though, he didn’t want to say what he’d found out. Hm.

So then I phoned up Duncan Clark, “Executive Editor, Digital.” If anyone would know why an article went poof on the Post’s website, it’d be the Executive Editor, Digital, right? But Mr. Clark said he knew nothing of the matter and that he’d pass my number on to those who might. Something told me, however, that I wouldn’t be getting a call back from those who might.

So then I called up a third individual who, it turned out, did know what had happened but would only tell me off the record. So, of course, I can’t tell you what this individual said. I will say, though, that my prognostication skills, as demonstrated in that previous post, are pretty damn good.

You have to wonder what it is about 9/11 that puts the Post into such a dither. I have previously written about the inertia that keeps newsrooms firmly locked in groupthink. And yet all over the world, millions of people are now speculating about what really led to that day, and what really happened. And not just on internet fringe sites, but increasingly in the mainstream press and TV (see here and here and here and here), and in academic articles such as the one I cited. Truthiness isn’t just for Truthers anymore.

For the Post, however, the matter must remain fixed and dry, because . . . because why? Because otherwise it might have to look into the matter? Because corporations dislike uncertainty? Because they’ve been told to toe the line? Because other newspaper people might laugh at them?

Of course, the Post might say that they simply have high standards for certitude. According to that scholarly article, there’s only a 1% chance that the sort of extraordinary stock trading that went on prior to 9/11 could have occurred randomly. But hey, 1% is 1%. “Beyond reasonable doubt” may be good enough for the court system, but not for the Post! Mind you, this is a paper that regularly publishes articles sceptical of global warming, also in the face of official explanations, and based on quite a bit less evidence than I can offer about those stock trades. But ya choose yer conspiracy theories. And besides, most of those were opinion pieces.

Oh, wait, so was mine.

And that’s what really makes what the Post did scuzzy, not to mention a bit dumb. The books section of a newspaper has traditionally been the place for a trade in ideas — ideas that originate between covers, and ideas that are offered in response. It is not just a place to remark on prose styles; it is, much of the time, a place for debate. Or should be. The appropriate response to my piece, from both a journalistic and business point-of-view, would have been to leave it on the site and let the festivities begin. Let some readers damn me, let others comment in support — think of all those page views! Let its columnists go after me, run an op-ed dissociating itself; whatever. The Books section would never have been livelier.

Instead, it chose the Delete key. If this is the way the Post intends to toddle into the prismatic future created by the internet, in which there is no one “truth,” and control of information is an anachronism, it truly is doomed, and deserves to be.

I knew when I submitted my last book review to The National Post that it might not be published. What I didn’t expect was that the Post would publish it, and then unpublish it.

The review was of a book of essays, What the Furies Bring, by Canadian poet Kenneth Sherman. Doesn’t sound like hot-button material, you say? Well, Sherman has pegged his book to 9/11, and that, of course, remains combustible — especially if you are of the opinion that the official explanation for the events of that day remains, er, incomplete.

The Post put my review on its website at 7:30 pm on December 18th. Of course, it might have been something less sensitive that caused them to remove it sometime the next day. Sherman’s book is mostly about literature, and hence my review was too. Maybe some Mallermé-lover on staff didn’t like the fact that the book is cool towards the poet and thought, “I’m not putting up with this aesthete-bashing any longer!” But somehow I don’t think so.

No, I expect what caused someone to press the delete button were these two paragraphs:

His reading of 9/11 itself, however, is thoroughly conventional. In “Amis’s Atta” he deals with the British writer’s collection of short stories and essays The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom. Amis portrays Muhammad Atta, who, we are told, flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, as a death-bent fanatic, and Sherman is happy to echo him. “After all,” Sherman writes, “those sons of militant Islam who crashed the twin towers were operating from a skewed sense of manhood, and their morality was topsy-turvy: Death is good; Life (World/Manhattan) is evil.”

The problem with received wisdom, though, is that it is sometimes wrong, or premature, or incomplete. Psychoanalyzing the hijackers without also assaying those who had sufficient foreknowledge of the attacks to profit from them on the stock market is to miss half the meaning of the event. But they don’t appear in Sherman’s reading, and so they don’t appear in his essays. He writes that John Updike’s novel Terrorist “addresses the essential questions that thinking Americans posed after 9/11. Is there truth in the fundamentalist’s assertion that materialist America has poisoned itself with trivia? Has America justly incurred the wrath of the globe’s unfortunate by becoming an exploitive, soulless nation?” But this is a sentimental explanation for 9/11, handed down by the Bush administration at the time – “They hate our freedoms” – and it doesn’t sit on Sherman’s book any better than it did on Updike’s.

The Post might have been able to tolerate that note of doubt about Atta — after all, we are told he piloted Flight 11, right? Nothing wrong with saying so, right? They might even have gritted their teeth and put up with my bit of Bush-bashing. After all, he’s gone now, right? No need to keep defending him, right?

But that bit about the stock trades? Not so much.

Now, I was quite careful about what I wrote. There’s an immense amount of speculation around 9/11, and most of it remains just that — speculation. But the fact that there was extraordinary trading on the stocks of American and United Airlines in the weeks prior to the attacks — up to 100 times the usual volume — is acknowledged even in the 9/11 Commission Report. The trading was in the form of “put options,” which are taken in anticipation of a stock’s price dropping. The more it drops, the more money is made. The Commission adopted a “We checked into it, nothing to see here, move along now” approach to the matter, but a scholarly, peer-reviewed article published in 2006 noted that the chances of such trading happening randomly are 1%. That’s good enough for me. Of course, it might not be good enough for the Post, but the place to deal with that would have been during the editorial process, before publication. Instead, I got a nice note of praise from my editor, and that was that.

It’s a little hard for me to cry censorship because the review did appear that same day in the print edition of the paper. But the Post’s behaviour suggests that they would have removed it from there, too, were newsprint as ephemeral as the Web. The fate of one little book review may not amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but the excision does beg the question: what else is the Post leaving out of its pages? And why?

I’ve told them I won’t be writing for them anymore, which ends a relationship of 11 years, going back to the earliest days of the paper. I’ve enjoyed it, but I don’t do loyalty tests. But I do have some questions for them. (Mark Medley, co-editor of the Post’s online Books section, told me before Christmas that he was looking into what happened, but the rest has been silence.) They are: Who removed the review? Were they told to do so? If so, by who? And, regardless, why was it removed?

I’ll let you know if they have anything to say. Or, of course, they can always use the Comments section below to reply. I promise not to delete it.

Meantime, I have posted the review in backofthebook’s Arts & Books section. And if you’d like to see the web page that The National Post would rather you didn’t, I’ve posted it here. Because if there’s one thing the Internet has taught us, it’s that if you want to suppress information, you’d better do it before you publish it.

We’ve now seen, for the second time in recent memory, a journalist being harassed by Canadian border guards while trying to enter the country. Three years ago, American talk-radio host and filmmaker Alex Jones was detained for four hours, in the middle of the night, by Citizenship and Immigration Canada agents in Ottawa who confiscated his passport, camera, and belongings. They ordered him back the next morning for further grilling.

Now U.S. public-radio star Amy Goodman, co-host of Democracy Now!, has received a similar hazing while trying to get to a speaking engagement in Vancouver. Goodman got off a bit easier — apparently the guard who interrogated her was mostly concerned that she might say something nasty about the Winter Olympics — but what they have in common is that they were stopped because they might be bringing across the border, not fruits or vegetables, but ideas.

Those ideas could hardly be more opposite — Jones is an extreme libertarian while Goodman comes from the far left — which suggests that it is not a particular ideology but thinking itself, not to mention any opposition to state authority, that causes our border police to become unhinged. We are unlikely to get an explanation or defence out of Citizenship and Immigration over this embarrassment; when Jones was detained, all they had to say was that they could say nothing because “we are forbidden from discussing individual cases.” But it’s time various knuckleheads-in-a-uniform started getting disciplined or fired for their behaviour. Telling them that trade in ideas is not criminal behaviour is not likely to work. Telling them their paycheques are on the line might.

And yes, border guards, if you’re reading this at some point in the future, because I’ve been flagged in your system for speaking ill of your fine work, I did write this. And I’d be glad to discuss it with you — though preferably not while in detention in the middle of the night.

A number of years ago I proposed a story to Saturday Night magazine on the journalist Barry Broadfoot, veteran western Canadian newspaperman and pioneer in Canada of oral histories (Ten Lost Years, Six War Years), who had a new book coming out. Over the phone, I extolled his virtues to my editor in Toronto, who replied, “And he’s a very funny guy, too.”

Really? Funny? There were all sort of things I admired about Broadfoot, but I wasn’t aware of his stand-up routines. Some time later I realized the editor thought I was talking about Dave Broadfoot, the longtime “Royal Canadian Air Farce” mainstay. No wonder they didn’t go for the story.

It was about that time I decided I was tired of trying to get Toronto media types to get a clue about the rest of the country. This may inform my reaction to the recent announcement of the winners of the Canadian Online Publishing Awards, as presented by the trade publication Masthead Online. To wit: that the last thing we need is more awards coming from the centre of the universe, which is, as we all know, Mississauga.

Masthead kindly was in touch with us back when the awards were announced. I e-mailed back to say that we’d probably send in some entries (despite the $50 per entry price tag), if they could tell me that the judges would be drawn from across Canada, and not just Toronto. Awards fests have a funny way of favouring hometown entries, and the only way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to make sure there’s no hometown. I don’t really care about Torontoists giving one another awards and pretending they’re “national” — one gets used to it — but I don’t want to send in multiples of $50 to support it.

I didn’t get an answer, and so we didn’t enter anything. As it turns out, though, my question was apropos. Of the 30 judges over numerous categories, 20 are from Toronto. Another two come from the States. Precisely eight come from what those of us who live there like to mordantly call the “Rest of Canada.”

Now, Masthead may point to the fact that the Vancouver online mag thetyee.ca ended up winning three awards, including Best News and Best Community Feature. Indeed, they did so in the announcement of the winners. So all is well on the national unity front. The fact that the top awards (for best overall magazine website and best overall online-only website), in both the Red (consumer) and Blue (business) categories, went to Toronto publishers simply means that, er, wait, not that these awards are the same as the National Magazine Awards, where Toronto Life and The Walrus always clean up, or that, on the whole, the judges would prefer to give awards to people they’ve actually heard of and perhaps had a beer with on pub night, but because, um, excuse me, I have to go catch my subway now.

Besides the fact that it’s good to be the self-appointed King of All One Surveys, these sorts of awards are a cash cow for those who administer them. The Canadian Online Publishing Awards received over 250 entries; at $50 a pop, that’s over $12,500. That’s not chump change to a magazine that recently had to abandon its print version. And this was Year One; wait until more players, including more of the big ones, get involved. I e-mailed Masthead to ask if those fees are used to pay the judges or, if not, what they go towards. They haven’t got back to me yet, but I’ll let you know if they do (or, of course, they can reply below). But this time I don’t think I’ll hold my breath for an answer.

Meantime, congrats to The Tyee for its win(s). Much deserved. As for the others: dailyxy.com? Seriously? A magazine that features an advice column by the egregious dandy (but rather good novelist) Russell Smith? Where do you get your judges from? Toronto?

Of course, in saying that, I’m exposing my west coast bias. But that’s rather the point, isn’t it?