One is impressed by just how credulous the reading public — that would be you — can be. You see what I just did there? I just insulted you. Conventional wisdom would suggest that insulting one’s readers is not the best way to start an article. But conventional wisdom is pretty stupid, too.

It’s called “contrarianism,” and it’s what Christie Blatchford and Christopher Hitchens practise and practised, respectively, to a tee. And, as they know and knew, it’s good journalistic business, not least because readers will fall for it every time.

These thoughts — or rather, insults — are inspired by the response to Blatchford’s recent National Post Globe and Mail National Post column on man-hugging (I have trouble keeping track of who she’s writing for this week), and the recent outpouring of tweets and status updates beginning “I still can’t believe Christopher Hitchens supported the war in Iraq, but . . .”. Hitchens, of course, came out in favour of the invasion early on, and remained stridently unrepentant to the end. Blatchford’s column was on a less keen matter — the alleged sissification of the modern male, especially in Toronto — but the widespread astonishment that anyone could hold such an opinion, much less write it down, was about the same.

Dear Stupid Readers: these people don’t write broadsides and columns to be liked — they do it, at least much of the time, to rile you up. Why? Do I really have to write this? Because then you will continue to buy their books and newspapers. Thus endeth Street Journalism 101.

Readers don’t return to a writer or publication because the writer or publication is correct — they do it because, as a seasoned editor once taught me, to my own youthful astonishment, they have developed an emotional connection to the writer or publication. And outrage will do the job as well as any other emotion. The easiest way to forge this sort of codependent relationship with the reader is to look for a widely-held assumption and then argue its opposite. Babies cute? Babies suck. War in Iraq bad? War in Iraq good. Rinse and repeat.

It also gives the writer something new to say. After a decade-or-two of spouting left-wing pieties, even the most earnest of fellow-travellers is liable to hanker for a change of subject. This explains P.J. O’Rourke. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to work the other way as often — right to left — though we are currently seeing a variant in David Frum’s reinvention of himself as a critic of the Republican Party. In Frum’s case, though, it is likely a matter of survival — having been frog-marched out of the clubhouse, he doesn’t have much choice.

This is not to say that these people don’t believe what they write — I have no doubt Hitchens was sincere in his support of the Iraq invasion. It just means that, when they sit down to put their unpopular thoughts out into the public sphere, they don’t get all quivery and “Gee, maybe I shouldn’t say this.” Instead, they go, “Oh goody.” Because they know how you are going to respond.

And so, dear Stupid Readers (as well as the rest of you), you might save yourself a lot of turmoil if, when Blatchford produces her next unspeakable column about how, really, smoking is good for you or Stephen Harper is actually kind of cute, you smile and respond, “Oh, Christie” (and perhaps also observe how freaking funny and well-written her stuff is).

And by the way: Babies really do suck.

Bye Bieber Bunting rocks the cover of Rolling Stone next month, looking as bad-ass as his infant-face is capable of.  The Stone is teasing out its Biebernterview by releasing all the salacious bits, and the PITCHFORKS ARE A-GATHERIN.  Particularly around the Bieb’s stance on abortion which, though RStone calls it a “solid opinion,” he feels the need to end in a question mark.  “It’s like killing a baby?”

Heedless comments like that are interview-bait gold, and RStone knows how to capitalize on an interviewee who has not yet learned to curb his tongue by asking him about abortion in cases of rape.  Clearly disconcerted, the teenlette stammers, “Um.  Well, I think that’s really sad, but everything happens for a reason.”  REMARKABLY INSENSITIVE THING TO SAY, yes, even when followed by the admission that, never having been in that position, he “wouldn’t be able to judge.”  But what 16-year old pampered boy-child has a well-balanced, reasoned view of rape and abortion?  This is how we develop informed decisions, y’all, by saying really ignorant things and then having someone correct us.

Unfortunately for the Biebling, his learning is done on the pages of Rolling Stone and all the idiotic teenaged remarks that usually go reprimanded by parents are being SLATHERED on the intertubes.  His wranglers need to wrangle him better, because following his abortion comments he goes on to comment on the political situation in Korea.  Come ON, RStone!  That’s like letting a puppy talk about universal health care!  I’m hesitant to call shenanigans on an interview not yet released in full, but perhaps we should be hollering for the Bieber’s education before his blood.

By Rachel Krueger

A white supremacist group called The Council of Conservative Citizens is outraged that Marvel has cast Idris Elba as Heimdall in Thor, because he is foxy.  I mean, black.  They probably don’t appreciate that foxy black men exist in the world, but it is definitely the blackness that they are pissed about. “It seems that Marvel Studios believes that white people should have nothing that is unique to themselves,” they complain.  Which, ok.  That is a boringly awful thing to say.  We are all appalled by this, AND righteously indignant, AND genuinely furious.  But surprised?  They are white supremacists.  Being dirty racists that nobody likes is sort of their job, and it is our job to not like them and to try to make them stop being a thing.  Their being dirty racists isn’t exactly Extry! Extry! news.

The TV Guide, on the other hand?  Come on, TV Guide.  You were my hockey-schedule-checker in the days before the internets, my lazy morning reading once I was done with the cereal box.  Why you gotta be such sneaky secret bigots?

Padma Lakshmi, Indian-born and freakishly attractive, appeared on the cover of TV Guide this month looking suspiciously Caucasian.  I have no problem with Caucasians.  They can be a very pretty people, and to be honest Padma makes a lovely white woman.  But Padma: Original Sauce is FAR, FAR LOVELIER, and lacks that distinctive ping of whitewash, with its undertones of colonial imperialism.

Clearly the white supremacists are bad guys, but they’re so overtly jackasserish that all the sane ones shake our heads.  Making The Padma into a vampire of her former self, however, is insidious.  It simultaneously deprives us of a (rare) Non-White-Person-On-A-Magazine-That-Does-Not-Have-To-Do-With-Sports and reinforces the long-held believe that we only like to look at white people . You need to sit in the corner, TV Guide, and think about what you’ve done.

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.

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”

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.

The Beaver is no more. Begun in 1920 in celebration of the Hudson Bay Company and the fur trade, Canada’s foremost historical magazine will now be titled Canada’s History. Who would’ve thought such a venerable institution would buckle under to a bit of competition from internet porn sites?

According to its publisher, Deborah Morrison, the name has become a problem for online readers who find their magazine sometimes blocked by spam filters. Eighty years ago, “beaver” meant a semi-aquatic rodent, and to many it still does, but it’s also, of course, a slang term for a woman’s genitalia. But so what?

The Boy Scouts don’t appear to be afraid of internet mislabeling. Their youngest cohort, ages 5-7, continues to be called “Beavers” in many parts of the world, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. No mention on their website that they’re concerned about being mistaken for women’s privates.

The football, basketball, baseball, wrestling, soccer, and volleyball teams at Oregon State University are still the Beavers. Benny Beaver continues to be the university’s mascot, initially chosen because of Oregon’s historic fur trade. Given the beaver’s dam-building prowess, he is also a proud representative of their engineering program.

Even Surrey, British Columbia, a city willing to kill beavers — as shown by the rise in beaver murders, from 15 in 2006 to 40 in 2008 — continues to display the furry creature on its flag. Local teams such as the Surrey Beavers Rugby team continue to be so-named in spite of the innuendo. Even their lodge, housed in Cloverdale, is the “Beaverlodge.”

The Beaver magazine, though, seems to take pride in turning tail. They point out the “international attention” their change of title has earned them in the UK’s The Register, Australia’s Daily Telegraph, and the National Post. According to Morrison, the move to the innocuous Canada’s History was made largely for the sake of women and people under the age of 45. “Unfortunately, sometimes words take on an identity that wasn’t intended in 1920, when it was all about the fur trade,” she told the Post.

Well, speaking as a woman under the age of 45, I’m disappointed in the change from double entendre to dull and boring. And as one who shares a similar name, I’m doubly disappointed. I’m proud to be called “Beverley,” or “of the beaver lake or stream.” Should I follow the decision of a magazine that I have, until recently, held in high regard, and change my name to simply “Lake” or “Stream”? Or, concerned about the sexual innuendo in the expression “eager beaver,” should we now change it to “eager rat”?

Watch out, Canadian magazines. Owl, the magazine for ages 9-13, could be mistaken for a magazine about prostitutes. After all, both come out at night. Gripped, Canada’s Climbing Magazine, might be thought of as a publication better suited for a very private setting. Cottage Life, a magazine of cottage traditions and lifestyles, may soon be considered an alternate lifestyle publication. Such titles could be the next offerings sacrificed on the altar of the new P.C.: that is, pornographic censorship.

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?

Your feckless Media blogger has been off cheating with his other mistress — theatre, of all things — which is why this section has been quiet as a dying newsroom lately. While I was away, Canada lost one of its few genuine sources of shit-disturbance, Frank magazine. Its folding was duly reported but went curiously unremarked upon, as if the pundits it had routinely skewered knew that, if they got started, there’d be no end to their grave-dancing.

To my knowledge, I only made Frank once, when something I’d written in The National Post appeared in its “Drivel” section. I was elated. It was not commonplace for a writer outside the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal axis to merit its scorn. (Despite some game efforts, Frank was generally as Upper Canadian as the publications and broadcasters it covered.) I felt I had passed some career milestone. And the fact that I couldn’t see anything wrong with what I’d written suggested to me they might be on to something.

Others, of course, were less delighted, when their extramarital canoodlings or unceremonious dumpings from various media or political aeries were revealed. But Frank was exactly what this snobby contry, with its left-over notions of aristocracy and deluded notions of meritocracy, needed. I understand it was based on the British magazine Punch, but having never seen its progenitor, it all seemed quite new and brilliant to me.

Frank relied on a network of “contributors” (read: tattlers) who provided fodder, often from inside various newsrooms and editorial offices. If one was oneself on the inside of an organization, it wasn’t particularly hard to figure out who the moles were; you simply came up with a mental list of likely suspects, and then waited to see what happened when they left or were fired. If items on that publication dried up, you knew you had your double agent. It was fun.

In recent months, I had come to appreciate it for additional reasons. Whenever anyone searched on the net for “Frank” and “magazine,” it tended to bring traffic to backofthebook, since my name is Frank and this is a magazine. Thanks, fellas. I also appreciated its entrepreneurial spirit. I was a subscriber to eFrank.ca, the electronic wing of the magazine, but earlier this year had decided I would let my subscription lapse — it was pricey, and I rarely had time to visit (though always found it rewarding when I did). I accomplished this, I thought, by simply not sending in my new credit card information. When renewal time came up, they sent me a “Hey, your credit card info is no longer up-to-date” message. When I ignored that, they apparently went through various possible new expiry dates until they found the right one. Despite my best efforts, I found myself still a subscriber after all. Some might consider that, oh, I don’t know, let’s use the word “shady.” I thought it was pretty clever.

And possibly also desperate. Seven months later, Frank publisher Michael Bate announced its closing. (An unrelated Atlantic-only edition continues.) It was a great run, Mr. Bate; thanks for the laughs.

Now who is going to keep the “braünnosers” and “fartcatchers” and “moist but garrulous” windbags in check?