The Star and The Mark: open for shilling
By Shannon Rupp The Toronto Star just announced that you can’t trust a thing you read on their website — although that’s not quite the way they phrased it. Canada’s largest daily has joined forces with TheMarkNews.com, one of those free blogger sites, to acquire a small army of unpaid “community correspondents” to cover Ontario’s [...]
Is CSIS replaying the Arar card?
By Alison@Creekside A leaked 2004 CSIS report from LaPresse on Thursday purports to be a summary of a conversation between Abousfian Abdelrazik and Adil Charkaoui in 2000 in which they plotted to blow up an airplane enroute between Montreal and France. It has already been enthusiastically repeated across our national press: CBC: CSIS file reveals plot to bomb [...]
Russell Williams: reality is reality
By Frank Moher 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 [...]
Postmedia: Layoffs? What layoffs?
By Brian Brennan Television reporter Tom Clark parts company with CTV News, and the network issues a public statement to that effect. Kevin Newman steps down as Global anchor, and his network does the same. But what happens when dozens, perhaps hundreds of print reporters in this country leave their jobs, either voluntarily or otherwise? [...]
Anatomy of a G20 mishmash
By Frank Moher The massive article, “Anatomy of the G20,” published by the Toronto Star last Friday, is a curious document indeed, especially coming from a newspaper that has taken a hard editorial line against the police’s actions that weekend. It feels like one of those articles that has gone all wonky as higher-ups got [...]
Remembering Yazamy — badly
By Frank Moher When it comes to Canadian deaths in Afghanistan, our media’s sentimentality knows no bounds. Each time a soldier dies, we are assured that the young person — for they are almost always young persons — loved animals, or to make people laugh, or, in the case of 22-year old Marc Diab, killed [...]
Part II: “We do not talk about things that we do not have enough experts to tell us about”
By Frank Moher In my post of a few days ago, I asked some questions of CBC and Maclean’s pundit Andrew Coyne, about his answers to a 9/11 Truther after a television taping. I said I’d e-mail him a link to the article (did) and advertise it on a few sites, including his own (did). [...]
“We do not talk about things that we do not have enough experts to tell us about”
By Frank Moher While researching my next-to-last post (and did you realize that “blogging” and “research” are not necessarily mutually exclusive?), I came across the following video: In it, a very earnest and nervous woman confronts Alan Gregg, Chantal Hébert, and Andrew Coyne after a taping of the CBC political panel “At Issue,” with a [...]
The issue with “At Issue”
By Frank Moher Calgary Herald columnist Don Martin offered an unfortunate comment during last night’s broadcast of “At Issue,” The National‘s equally unfortunate political affairs panel. Discussing the Conservatives’ plunging poll numbers, Martin derided the “line of pale male faces, with one exception” on their parliamentary front bench. He was sharing the screen at the [...]
Yesterday’s news
By guest blogger Brian Brennan They’re all doing it now but still I have to wonder: Why are Canada’s daily newspapers encouraging their opinion columnists to simultaneously blog on the papers’ websites? I used to think — like media observers elsewhere — that newspaper blogs were meant to be dumping grounds for material the papers [...]
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