Well I suppose it was inevitable eh? Ever since the Quebec students began marching, the Con media has been attacking them like a pack of rabid hyenas.

The Con liberal Andrew Coyne called them a violent mob. The windy little teabagger Rex Murphy called their protest a self-indulgent parody.

The petty-bourgeois hack Margaret Wente did her ghastly Marie Antoinette impression.

But now Michael Den Tandt has gone one deranged step further, and called for the Quebec students to be caned.

There’s a better way: Dispersal with massive use of tear gas; then arrest, public humiliation, and some pain. In 1994, an 18-year-old American named Michael Fay, living in Singapore, was arrested and pleaded guilty to charges of vandalism and mischief, after he keyed several expensive cars. He was sentenced to four months in jail, a $3,500 (Singaporean dollars) fine and six strokes of the cane, applied to his bare buttocks.

Barbaric? Not really. Arguably, caning is more merciful than incarceration for an energetic young vandal on the cusp of becoming a full-fledged career criminal. Many would probably rather be caned than locked up, given their druthers.

Caned like they are Singapore . . .

And I really don’t know what to say? Except is he serious?  Is it booze? Is it dementia? What kind of kinky stuff is this?

And of course what kind of savage country are we becoming?

You know the other day a friend of mine said the problem is the boomers invented the youth culture. But now they are old, so they hate the young with a passion. And  this is the beginning of a brutal generational war.

But I prefer to think it’s just another sign that Canada, corrupted by the filth of Stephen Harper and his Con thugs, has lost its way.  And doesn’t even recognize that the young are its future. And that they are fighting for a better world.

“When we defend the right to free public education to serve the people and their needs, we confront the bigger fishes that are obstacles along our path. And it is at this point that we must be more ingenious, more intelligent, more committed, more relevant, to avoid falling into the game and strategy of those who wish to divide us, frighten us, those who see us as hardliners, as delinquents.

A better world for ALL of us here now, and all future generations.

And I did point out to my friend that not all older Canadians are on the wrong side of history . . .

Didn’t you just love that fighting senior telling the cops what he thought of them?

Yup. Michael Den Tandt should shove that cane where the sun don’t shine.

The Con media should restrain themselves.

And the Quebec students should keep on marching . . .

An anonymous missive has appeared on

“Ok, RossK, I’ll bite. As a news worker at Postmedia, I think this is an interesting and important question you’ve raised about this odd shift in the commercial media.

It was McGregor and Maher at the Citizen and the National Post who picked up the rifle first, as you note, with the robocall scandal. And now there’s O’Neill. And there are more to come. The Postmedia chain has turned against the PM. Period.

There is no way to understate the importance of that shift. It hasn’t worked its way through the whole empire; you don’t immediately change the attitude or approach of the hundreds of idiots you’ve appointed to management jobs over the years. Or all the columnists, or reporters.

But it’s started.

And it’s huge. It should NOT be underestimated.

The question for us in their newsrooms is: What in the hell can the PM have done to piss off Postmedia (run nominally by the Tory-loving former managers of Canwest, but in reality owned and funded by GoldenTree, a New York hedge fund)?

Well, here’s one theory:

1. GoldenTree invested in the chain in 2010 because newspapers are high cash generators. (Usually, anyway.) Because Canada has foreign-ownership media laws, the new company and its share holdings had to be very carefully structured.

2. But maybe that wasn’t such a big deal, because Harper was making a lot of big, loud promises about opening up ownership to foreign interests. That would mean GoldenTree could unload the chain, or parts of it, in future with relative ease. Hedge funds like to get in and out quickly, and there aren’t a lot of Canadian buyers for a property that big. Quebecor was really the only competitor that GoldenTree faced in 2010 as Canwest lay dying, and Quebecor lost out because it couldn’t put together a big enough offer.

3. Foreign ownership isn’t anywhere on the apparent radar for Harper anymore. At all. Period. Unless he’s in completely secret talks that no one has heard a word about.

4. Postmedia isn’t making money, certainly not at the rate GoldenTree needs it to. As a hedge fund, it would have wanted to move in, tap the cash flow and sell it on. There are lots of more promising cash machines for GoldenTree to move on to.

5. Postmedia executives, including CEO Paul Godfrey, toured newsrooms in BC just weeks ago to announce that while the two papers in Vancouver were still clinging by their fingernails to the black side of the ledger, red ink looms with absolute certainty in the very near future. An online-only Monday-Friday edition of the Province is widely rumoured to be in the works, with staff busy working on a new design for the weekend edition. (Yes, some of this is company trash talk aimed at turning newsroom workers against pressroom workers in talks for a contract that expired about 18 months ago. But that’s not the whole story. True, newsroom workers have taken huge hits; press workers haven’t, yet. And true, pressroom costs are high, and they were high in Victoria, where the chain used them as an excuse for selling the paper there to Glacier. But it is also true that the papers aren’t making the money they should, costs aside. That’s because the company doesn’t understand its product or its readership and can’t think of any other way to fix the problem than to continually cut costs, which in fact only makes the product worse.)

6. Quebecor, which owns the Tory-worshipping SunTV, is now the PM’s best friend and only defender.

7. So should GoldenTree force a sale of Postmedia, with foreign ownership rules still in place, well, the best and maybe only positioned buyer might be  . . . ta da! . . . Quebecor.

8. Which would result in a takeover of the majority of Canada’s news outlets by a completely right-wing company.

9. Say it all together now: Hmmmmmmmm. Can this have been the plan all along?

As I say, just a theory among some of us.

But it would be fair to say that the shift in Postmedia’s Tory coverage is significant enough to have most of our newsroom radar on full alert.

And I would add one other thing, since none of us know where this ride will take us. For everyone feeling so rightly cynical about the media, you will note that there is the odd MSM reporter left who can, when turned loose, still produce. You will note that there were others at the Globe and CBC etc who joined in after the Post kicked off the robocall-fest. I would argue that the heavy lifting was still done by the blogosphere, including you and many of those in your own circle. But I think there is still a rescue-able body of journalists left should the MSM, or any portion of it, come under new ownership that actually understands it own product, readership and social contract — something that Postmedia fails entirely to do.”

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.

We’ve been getting a lot of stories from our media lately (here, here, and here), assuring us that an equivalent to the Rupert Murdoch scandal couldn’t possibly happen in Canada.

Really? No cozy incestuous relationships? No dirty tricks?

On March 30, 2009, Stephen Harper, PMO staffer Kory Teneycke, Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, and Roger Ailes, president of Murdoch-owned Fox News and former communications adviser to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Sr., all sat down to lunch.

We know this because it showed up in the mandatory disclosures made by media consultant and former White House flack Ari Fleischer to the U.S. Justice Department. Ari, you will recall, had a personal contract with Steve to grease US media wheels for him. Teneycke had a dream of a Canadian Fox news channel.

Four months later, Teneycke had left the PMO — barely a year into his job as Harper’s chief spokesman — only to pick up a contract with Quebecor to explore a project that Ottawa insiders almost immediately described as a fledgling “Fox News North.”

Three more PMO staffers followed Teneycke to SunMedia: an issues management adviser, an advertising manager, and an issues management researcher, described as “a guy who could dig up any dirt on the opposition in a jiffy.”

Teneycke himself had to take a brief three-and-a-half month leave from heading his new project, when conflict-of-interest embarrassments ramped up following his Sun op-ed and public admission to prior knowledge of the hacking of an Avaaz petition, hostile to his setting up Fox News North.

Teneycke was back in the Sun saddle during Steve’s re-election campaign in April this year when a fifth PMO ex, Harper’s former deputy chief of staff Patrick Muttart, sent him a photo of an Ignatieff look-alike posing in full combat gear in Kuwait in 2002.

“Ignatieff linked to Iraq war planning” ran the SunMedia headline and story, sans photo, before Teneycke apparently tumbled to the ruse.

Patrick Muttart was working for the Con election war room at the time, while simultaneously heading the “Canada/US practice” at the US PR firm Mercury Public Affairs, where he works under Terry Nelson. Nelson, former political director of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, and McCain-Palin campaign manager, now a Senior Advisor to teabagger and 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, is famous for the race-baiting campaign ads and phonejamming dirty tricks done under his GOP watch, and for employing the media advisor on the original Swiftboat Veterans For Truth ads, which used lies and doctored photos to smear John Kerry’s war record during his run for US president.

Amusingly, the CTV piece, Harper immune from Murdoch-style scandal, makes extensive use of analysis from Muttart to assure us a similar scandal could not happen here. We just don’t have the same “intense, quasi-incestuous” clique of political and media elites, Muttart says, without irony.

Besides, as another former Harper Chief of Staff, Ian Brodie, explains about Canadian papers: ”So few people actually read most of them.”

Yet somehow the rightwing National Post muddles on for 13 years losing $9-million a year, no one seems to know who owns CanWest/PostMedia now (besides it being some US hedge fund  — and so much for the rule limiting foreign ownership to a third), and 99% of the papers who endorsed a candidate in the last election all endorsed Steve.

We could have a Murdoch-style scandal here and it would be out of the news cycle again the same week, no damage done.

Update: More from David Climenhaga at Rabble.

Reviewed by Frank Moher

On the evening of Saturday, June 26, 2010, Jonathan Kay headed out on his bike into the streets of Toronto to see what was up with the G20. What he saw, he wrote early the next morning in the National Post, convinced him of “”the extraordinary professionalism of the police patrolling Toronto this week.” The city was intact: tourists thronged Yonge Street, a band played on the corner. He toodled west along Queen, where he found a line of police staring down protestors. But: “There wasn’t any violence — at least none that I saw.”

Er, not so much.

We know now, of course, that the police were engaged in widespread brutality and violations of civil liberties all over Toronto that day. But Jonathan Kay didn’t see any of it and, so, of course, the police acted with “extraordinary professionalism.” Or perhaps he would argue that a little head-bashing and snatch-and-grabbery is not really violence, as in, you know, violence, and the police and state agree with him, and so that is that.

We don’t really know what Kay was thinking in the wake of the G20, as he didn’t blog much about it after that, except to call Toronto a “city of wimps.”

And so we come to Mr. Kay’s latest item of “reporting,” a book titled Among the Truthers: A Journey into the Growing Conspiracist Underground of 9/11 Truthers, Birthers, Armageddonites, Vaccine Hysterics, Hollywood Know-Nothings and Internet Addicts. All the tropes evidenced in his G20 coverage are present here, too: perception peddled as reality, ad hominens, and a firm conviction that anyone who sees things differently than he does must be a nut. Kay, Managing Editor of Comment at the Post, bills himself on his twitter feed as an “Engineer-turned-lawyer-turned-journalist-turned-book-writing-guy.” But while he is indubitably a journalist and a book-writing-guy, he is not a reporter; he is an editorialist, and remains so here.

I should mention that I am referred to in passing in the book, which identifies me, bizarrely, as a “poet.” (I have worked in theatre and journalism for some 35 years, but the last poem I wrote, other than this piece of doggerel, was in high school.) It also lumps me in with the rest of its specimens as a “Truther,” which is more arguable, though I don’t identify myself as such, not only because the term is subject to the sort of mish-mashing Kay gives it here, but because it strikes me as pompous (kind of like calling oneself a “pro-lifer”). In any event, if I am a Truther, I’m a pretty bad one: I don’t think George Bush or Dick Cheney or anyone in the White House hatched the plot, I do think an airplane flew into the Pentagon, I’m agnostic about what brought down World Trade Centers 1 and 2 (though not so much 7), I regard Alex Jones as a highly unreliable (if entertaining) source of information, and I think Ron Paul would be a disaster as president. If the Truther movement issued membership cards, I’d probably be required to turn mine in.

I also wrote for the National Post for 11 years (including a piece with Jonathan Kay as editor). It was their itchy-trigger-finger syndrome when, in a book review, I alluded to the suspicious stock trading that preceded 9/11, that caused me to stop doing so.

What I certainly am is a sceptic — about the official version of 9/11 as well as much else I am told, whether by government or others who have a stake in a story. That, to me, is what is involved in being a journalist. But Jonathan Kay tells us that too much of that sort of thing can get out of hand. “Voltaire understood that man cannot survive on skepticism alone,” he writes, in the sermonly conclusion to his book — “that society requires some creed or overarching national project that transcends mere intellect.”

One thing that can be said for Among the Truthers — it certainly transcends “mere intellect.”

Kay’s tactic here is the same one used by Michael Shermer of the seriously missnamed Skeptics Society, which is, as the subtitle indicates, to mix up the 9/11 truth movement with The Protocols of Zion, holocaust denial, birtherism, moon hoaxism, etc., into one big wacky ball of racism and lunacy. And his method is as dishonest as Shermer’s as well. Thus, in his interviews, he emphasizes figures he can most easily characterize as charming but quaint, such as Ken Jenkins, a “Bay area flower child” who “embodies the sixties soul of the 9/11 truth movement’s older members.” Or, where he does speak with Truthers who are more immediately credible, he makes short work of their bona fides before reverting to the book’s default mode — a sort of bland superciliousness. Thus Barrie Zwicker, a journalist of longer standing and quite a bit more distinction than Kay, becomes “an amiable crank,” of interest mostly because he insisted on conducting his own counter-interview when they met, complete with “a chess clock to regulate our usage of time.” (Update in video below: Zwicker says it wasn’t a chess clock.) And David Ray Griffin, who has spent not two but eight years studying his subject and published 11 books about it, is also, simply, a “crank.”

Kay never addresses the arguments of his interlocutors, because, he tells us late in the book, a New York City editor warned him that “Debunking books don’t sell.” Instead, he refers the reader to various of those books, and sites. This is defensible on editorial grounds; were he to get into his own reasons for rejecting 9/11 Truth theories, the book would be even weightier than it is. But it is also a convenience; it means Kay never has to address what he calls the “anomalies” in the official story of that day. We never learn why his interviewees are so head-shakingly wrong — they just are.

He does, though, fall back on some of the easier explanations for why so-called conspiracism has thrived since the Kennedy assassination: the world is too complex, conspiracy believers can’t deal with its chaos, and so they develop over-arching narratives to make its unpredictability more palatable. All of which is nonsense; the notion that one could take comfort from the idea that Kennedy was killed by a cabal, still unidentified to this day, or that somebody blew up the World Trade Centre towers (and got away with it), is sillier even than the most exotic conspiracy theories. But there’s more where that came from. Kay is a proponent of the “If I Write It, Maybe It’ll Become True” school of prose. As I got deeper into his book, with its explanation that conspiracism is the result of “midlife ennui” (or that, as an alleged “poet,” my day job requires me to “weave a self-invented reality”; I wish), I began to find Among the Truthers as ludicrously entertaining as any Alex Jones broadcast.

Kay does offer an interesting history of conspiracy movements (though this leaves him in the uncomfortable position of having to acknowledge that some are legitimate; again, we never find out what makes one plot real and another not). And he is right that, for some adherents, 9/11 Truth evolves into a kind of religion. The comfort believers find in it, however, comes not from a simplifying explanation of the world, but from a group of shared verities, repeated over and over in incantatory fashion. Mind you, this could also describe the editorial pages of the National Post.

Less harmless than Kay’s pop-psychologizing is his zeal to eradicate ideas other than his own. Having concluded that “any effort to engage committed theorists in reasoned debate is a waste of time” — because, of course, they refuse to come around to his way of seeing things — he offers, in his final chapter, a proposal to shame them out of their wrong-thinking, by “applying the same self-critical, self-aware mindset that has served to stigmatize racism, overt anti-Semitism, and related forms of bigotry in recent decades.” What he has in mind are first-year university courses using an “anticonspiracist curriculum” to teach students “to recognize the patterns of conspiracist thought.” In other words, if you can’t beat ‘em, kill their young.

Well, okay. Sounds like an interesting course. Of course, the problem is that if it were taught in any way other than Jonathan Kay, dreamer-upper, envisions — if, say, discussion as to the merits as well as the vagaries of the 9/11 Truth movement were allowed — then Jonathan Kay, National Post writer, would no doubt take off after it. Kay got his start on this beat when, as he reminds us, he discovered that a Liberal candidate in the 2008 federal election had six years earlier reported on some of the findings of various independent researchers into 9/11. He immediately employed the Post in a successful campaign to have her turfed as a candidate. More recently he’s been trying to work the same voodoo on a student at the University of Lethbridge. For all that Kay affects to be really, really interested in 9/11 Truth as a sociological movement, and to really, really want to understand its actors, Among the Truthers is of a piece with his daily journalism. He isn’t out to understand them; he’s out for their scalps.

 
Six months after the G20, Jonathan Kay had a bit of a rethink. “A few weeks ago,” he wrote in his Post blog, “I thought the police response to the G20 protests was yesterday’s news — and I never really reconsidered the opinion I formed at the time of the event, based on what I saw with my own eyes.” But then the Toronto Star got on the case of Adam Nobody, the G20 peaceful protestor tackled and beaten by cops, and lo-and-behold: “. . . it’s now clear that there was some thuggish police behavior that that went on.”

“Thuggish.” So it’s a start.

We can hope that someday some mainstream publication gets on the case of 9/11, thus allowing Jonathan Kay to reconsider that also. We can hope, as he approaches midlife ennui, that he decides it’s okay after all to have heretical thoughts — or, at least, to let others have them. We can hope that he learns to use YouTube. Meantime, we can be reasonably sure Among the Truthers will have little impact, except to buttress the beliefs of the orthodox in the same way he claims (quite rightly) that the outpourings of the Truth movement reinforce its gnosticism. It’s a Battle of the Bibles, whether Kay accepts their equivalency or not, and, Brother, it’s not going to be settled in my lifetime.

But while debunking books may not succeed, neither do books that aren’t better at peddling their hortatory wares than this one. I would have liked to read an insightful study of conspiracy movements. Among the Truthers, on the other hand, is a failed salvo, that might just as well have been titled The Protocols of All Those People Who Make Me Think Twice.

***

Jonathan Kay in debate with Richard Gage, Barrie Zwicker, and Paul Zarembka on TVO’s “The Agenda”:

While you were enjoying the festive season, a minor contretemps blew up and just as quickly away at The Globe and Mail. Both parties to the matter have been studiously decorous about it, but it deserves further scrutiny before disappearing entirely down the memory hole.

On Dec. 24th, the Globe pulled from its website a blog post by Norman Spector, former Mulroney Chief of Staff and ambassador to Israel, now living in Victoria and making his way as a pundit. Spector had remarked on the unusual fact that, for the first time, Laureen Harper would join husband Stephen when he sat down for his annual Christmas chat with CTV. In fact, it would be “her first television interview with the Prime Minister since he took office in 2006.”

Why her sudden visibilty? Spector speculated that it might have something to do with rumours circulating in Ottawa that the couple’s marriage is in trouble, and, more particularly, that those rumours had recently emerged in the Ottawa Citizen, albeit in veiled form. Wrote Andrew Cohen in the December 3rd Citizen: “In Ottawa, tongues have been wagging for two years about trouble in one political marriage. One of the partners is now said to have left the nest. It hasn’t made the newspapers, at least not yet.”

Specifically, the rumours have Mrs. Harper living in the Chateau Laurier while the Prime Minister remains at 24 Sussex. Showing more journalistic initiative than the rest of our press, Spector did some digging. “I checked out the rumour with two journalists in Ottawa. From both, I got the sense that it was likely true. And that it was not being reported because it was deemed to be a personal matter.”

Oh really?

In his forbidden post, which Spector immediately republished to his own website, he makes a reasonable case for why the matter, if true, would be more than personal. “If the PM’s marriage was in trouble, that was something that could affect his performance and lead to bizarre decisions. (Have you heard about the census being abolished?) And given the power of the office, the troubled marriage could impact all Canadians.” I’ll add another: if Harper and his wife were living apart, but he continued to issue Christmas cards like the recent one above, we would have to conclude that the Prime Minister is a big fat dissimulator.

Spector also politely allows as how zapping his post “is the paper’s right.” (I’ve had my own experience of being disappeared, in my case by the National Post; I wasn’t quite so polite.) But while the Globe may be within its rights — that is, they haven’t broken any laws — their boilerplate claim that they did it for reasons of “fairness, balance, and accuracy” is ludicrous. Does the Globe think publishing the rumour is unfair, imbalanced, and possibly inaccurate? Then let it do its job, particularly in matters of public interest: phone up the principals and ask them about it. Then do what Spector did, and phone up some informed sources and ask them about it. Then publish what you’re told. It’s called reporting.

What did the Globe do instead? Zap.

This sort of misplaced politesse is the reason that mainstream papers are increasingly obsolescent in an age of internet journalism and wikileaking, no matter how many iPad applications they produce. Readers are increasingly aware of how much the old-school media choose not to tell us, whether for political or financial reasons, or from some misguided notion that it’s for our own good. And increasingly we reply: We’ll be the judge of that. Tell us what you know, or even just what you’ve heard (where’s Frank magazine when you need it?), and we’ll decide whether it’s File 13 material or not. And if you won’t tell us, there are plenty of sources out there that will.

We don’t need mommies and daddies in our newsrooms. What we need are actual journalists — even if they must be drawn from the ranks of retired civil servants.

Time to update our 9/11 Honour and Dishonour Roll. Some fine qualifees have presented themselves in recent months.

The original idea of the list was to record for posterity those news organizations that have or haven’t done their job in covering 9/11. You’ll find that roster here. For this iteration, I’m expanding it to include individual media types — columnists, hosts — as  they’ve been the busiest truthers or obscurantists of late.

As noted before, entrants may appear on both lists. And, as always, suggestions for additions are invited.

The 9/11 Media Honour Roll

Geraldo Rivera (Fox News). After walking in lockstep with his fellow Fox News hosts for years (see Dishonour Roll below), Geraldo recently allowed as how “the most obnoxious protestors in recent years may be right.” Welcome to the right side of history, buddy. Hope you stick around.

Eric Margolis. In an entry on his website, the former Sun Newspapers columnist calmly laid out some facts and asked some questions about 9/11, for which he received a sweaty attack from the National Post‘s Jonathan Kay (see Dishonour Roll below). Perhaps notably, Margolis did not speak out about 9/11 until after he was fired by the Sun chain, but better late than etc., etc.

The 9/11 Media Dishonour Roll

Geraldo Rivera (Fox News). Having given Rivera his props, we may as well show you his “Oh get a life” moment with those “obnoxious” protestors back in 2007.

Jonathan Kay (The National Post): Kay puts on a good show of objectively contemplating the 9/11 Truth movement for purposes of a forthcoming book, but Margolis’s column (see above) caused him to drop the pretense. Kay has also averred that he “just can’t get [his] head around the possibility of any kind of 9/11 truth conspiracy being true,” which is about as pathetic a starting point for a journalist as can be imagined.

Evan Solomon (CBC): Back when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the UN a simple truth — that there are numerous theories out there about what happened on 9/11 — Solomon followed-up by asking a guest on his “Power & Politics” chatfest whether there was any point in trying to reason with a guy like that. (I paraphrase from memory; sorry, the podcast is long gone.) Apparently, Evan is still stuck back in Geraldo-pre-2010 mode: don’t bother with facts; just go straight for the conventional wisdom.

We liked him better doing arts news.

Live-blogging from the Ottawa Conference on Combating Antisemitism, the intrepid Kady does her level best to find out what The Plot — a secret exhibit from the US Anti-Defamation League that is off-limits to media — is all about.

I don’t know either but I’ll lay you odds that it doesn’t include this B’nai Brith Canada poster – with its pictures of Nazis and allusions to “World Domination” – which graced the entire back page of the Natty Post exactly one year ago today.

Steve weighed in on the ever-expanding definition of the “new anti-Semitism” in his remarks to the opening of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism conference in Ottawa today :

“Harnessing disparate anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-Western ideologies, it targets the Jewish people by targetting the Jewish homeland, Israel, as the source of injustice and conflict in the world and uses, perversely, the language of human rights to do so,” the Prime Minister said. “We must be relentless in exposing this new anti-Semitism for what it is.”

Steve then went on to complain about the “bruises” he’s taken for his courageous defence of what is actually only the most right wing of Israeli politics and their rapture-ready fans here in North America.

Boris takes a good look at those ‘bruises.’

Meanwhile, from the US Anti-Defamation League, the “world’s leading organization fighting anti-Semitism”:

The Canadian news media have been engaged in a lot of hand-wringing and debate over the Russell Williams trial and their coverage of it. Should they have published photos of him dressed in his victims’ lingerie? Should newspapers have kept the photos off the front page? Should the details of his crimes have been reported, in their every lurid, sexually violent aspect?

It makes you wish for the days when the media were less punctilious. It also reveals the extent to which they’ve decided their job is to control the flow of information, especially if that information might be disturbing.

The Toronto Star got it right, by publishing a photo of Williams posing in women’s underwear alongside another of him saluting in full-dress military uniform. As publisher John Cruickshank told the CBC, “I think it’s that pair of photos — not the single photo — that tell an extraordinary, disturbing story.” Quite so. But Cruickshank really hit the mark when he added: “This is a day you hate as a publisher. I would much rather have a victorious Leafs cover celebrating their victory.” Why? Because the hockey pic would sell papers and leave everyone feeling good, as opposed to the Williams diptych, which you can bet resulted in a lot of cancelled subscriptions and ill-will towards the Star.

The decision to publish or not-to-publish, especially on the front page, was really a business decision, no matter how piously Cruickshank’s competitors explained otherwise. The Star made the hard choice; others did not.

Note, too, that the media’s squeamishness focussed mostly on those photos, as opposed to Williams’ murders. But cross-dressing isn’t a crime; if the still mostly-macho culture of our newsrooms can’t handle it, that isn’t a reason to suppress images of it. It’s a reason to get editors with more capacity for the complete range of human behaviour.

The job of the news media is to tell and show us what happened, period. It’s not to decide what we can or cannot handle, what is or isn’t tasteful, what should or shouldn’t be seen or known. And as a public, we have no more right to demand that newspapers keep shocking images off the front page than we do to insist cities remove homeless people from the streets. Reality is reality. Don’t like it? Can’t help you there.

Unfortunately, more and more news organizations do assist those readers (or viewers) who prefer not to be upset — not just in matters of human psychopathy, but more broadly as well. Prefer not to know that the CIA used drug profits to finance its war against the Nicaraguan contras? Hey, no problem. Or that the Bush Administration lied America into war? We’re on it. Or that evidence indicates foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks extended well beyond whoever hijacked the planes? Leave that to us.

Of course, these really big stories are suppressed for other reasons too, including fear of, or manipulation by, political overlords. But when the media set themselves up, not as conduits, but as filters, we’re all the poorer for it. No matter how much we might prefer to be kept in the dark.

Photo: j-source.ca

… careful consideration of the reasons for Canada’s failure to gain a seat on the UN Security Council continues among the Cons and their supporters in the media.
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“Canada barely escaped with its integrity intact at the United Nations”, writes Kelly McParland at NaPo, “According to reports on the voting, Canada lost because it refused to sell off bits of its principles.”

McParland does not mention the Mountie made available for photo ops with UN delegates or the bottles of maple syrup delivered to them before the vote. Just small advance tokens of our appreciation for not compromising our integrity.

Honestly, you’d think the Cons would be more grateful to Iggy and his awesome UN mind control ray.
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h/t Canadian Cynic