Let me get this straight: Maclean’s is writing articles about … issues? Policy issues? Analysis?
I’m taken aback here. Where are the opinion poll percentages? The endless back and forth over slips of the tongue? The shallow promises that “we have to do more”? The counting of Facebook friends as a quantitative measure of party popularity?
This isn’t the journalism I spent five minutes teaching myself in order to weasel my way into a career doing.
Shame on you Maclean’s.
Remember those CNN/YouTube debates a few months back, in which they crowded the stage with all the guys (and Hillary) running for president and had them answer questions posed by snowmen and Clinton campaign volunteers?
Well it looks like they’re coming to Canada. A media consortium (but not the media consortium) has banded together to form the Forum des chefs (auto-video-play warning), which is soliciting questions posed by Internet users for the French-language leaders’ debate an online debate in French sometime after the official debate*. The media partners, each of which provides a columnist to discuss the answers, includes Cyberpresse (La Presse), Le Devoir, Radio-Canada and L’Actualité magazine.
You’ll notice the ominous absence of TVA (which is part of the consortium running the official debate), Canoe, the Journal de Montréal or any other Quebecor property.
There’s also an inherent danger in simply accepting questions from the public like this. One of the CNN/YouTube debate questions, it turns out, came from a very active member of the Hillary Clinton campaign. It would be very difficult for journalists to properly vet every question to see if the person behind it may have gotten help from a campaign or may have a hidden agenda. Now it’ll be in the best interests of the campaigns to either submit questions themselves or get other people to submit questions for them. Perhaps they can issue talking points to the public so they know how to phrase those questions.
You can see the slippery slope forming here. What are the chances of it being abused?
*I’m an idiot (again) and didn’t read properly. It’s not the official debate, which I guess means it doesn’t matter as much. But the potential for abuse is still there.
Every now and then, a journalist will feel guilty about having a proper salary, union-negotiated benefits, ergonomic chairs and all the other stuff that another class of people could only dream of. So, in a bid to absolve them of this guilt, sell a few newspapers and hopefully scrounge up an award or two, a reporter will be sent “under cover” to work in a minimum-wage job, live in the slums and otherwise experience life as a member of the lower classes.
La Presse’s Michèle Ouimet did that, and articles about her work in a minimum-wage job and living in a slum with prostitutes and drug addicts appeared this week. The names in her articles are changed “to preserve anonymity.”
That doesn’t always work, though. Back in 2006, Globe and Mail journalist Jan Wong did something similar, living in a slum and working as a maid at less than minimum wage. She described her daily life, and changed names so that nobody would be embarrassed (or decide to sue her).
Unfortunately, a couple described in the story had enough “private information” revealed that friends recognized them, and they say that caused them personal embarrassment. So rather than admit that they treat hired help like crap and there are parts of their lives that could use some improvement, they sued Wong and the Globe for invasion of privacy.
This week, an Ontario court ruled against a motion from the Globe to dismiss the case.
Ironically, the lawsuits (one from the couple, another from the maid service) names the parties in question, which now makes them Googlable where they were not before. I personally don’t see how this more public humiliation (they’re not challenging the accuracy of anything said about them) is worth a chance to take on a paper for $50,000.
On one hand, this kind of journalism wouldn’t be possible without some deception.
On the other hand, how would you feel if embarrassing information about you appeared in a newspaper, and everyone who knew you could recognize you from the details given?
Perhaps a simple answer to all this is that journalists should take better care at anonymizing information, especially when they’re setting a scene with lots of detail.
According to Affiliation Quebec’s Allen Nutik:
Now that National Unity has become an election topic, almost nothing threatens Canadian National Unity more than the blatant and unconscionable abandonment of more than one million Quebecers of non-French origin by federal political party leaders, Harper, Dion, and Layton.
I agree. In fact, I think if the federal government doesn’t step up right away, anglo Quebecers might lead a secession movement and try to make Quebec its own country. The only problem, of course, is that we’d need to convince the francophone majority to go along with us, and that’ll never happen.
Good thing we have Duceppe in our corner though.
A lack of interest by youth in politics is a problem in many developed countries. I’m not sure exactly why the youth is so disinterested. Perhaps they don’t understand how important democracy is. Perhaps they’re jaded by our first-past-the-post system which makes their vote pointless. Or perhaps with school, relationships, finding a job and smoking pot they’re just too busy to care.
But if you took a poll of young non-voters, I’m pretty sure that “inability to text-message party leaders” would not rank highly on the list of reasons they’re not participating.
So why do people pretend that this will make a difference?
I’m all for making things more accessible and increasing the avenues of communication. But when old people reduce youth to nothing more than text messaging and Facebook, I find that just a bit insulting.
So apparently the biggest political news of the day had to do with a bird pooping on someone’s shoulder on a website. Canadian soldiers are dying in Afghanistan, our climate is becoming unstable, and our housing market is in trouble, but all of that is unimportant compared to analysis of whether a bird should be pooping on someone online.
Stephen Harper, whose Conservative Party website showed the pooping puffin, apologized for it after his handlers calculated that the bad joke went too far and was too personal (actually, it wasn’t personal at all, it was just pointlessly insulting). Stéphane Dion, the poopee, countered that this showed more about the Conservatives than about him, again following the politically appropriate route as instructed by his handlers and political strategists.
And the media, desperate for a scandal/process/horse-race story because they’re too lazy to research platform points and analyze actual policy issues, sucks it all up.
The excuses that the Conservatives give for this gaffe are the usual barely-believable stuff (a cursor was hiding it when it was approved? Give me a break). But there’s a reason why this was done, a reason why the person who came up with the idea crossed the line, and it’s a problem at the very heart of partisan politics.
Remember all those bad jokes during the Democratic and Republican conventions? Remember how the delegates found them much funnier than we did? In the partisan bubble that these politicians and their staff inhabit, the opposition is dehumanized. Instead of respected colleagues who challenge us to develop our positions on important issues, they’re seen as evil enemies bent on world destruction who must be mercilessly defeated.
That mindset leads to cruel, immature jokes and inevitable comparisons to Hitler. Nobody is there to stop them, because everyone in the bubble is part of the same partisan clique. But once those jokes leave the bubble and reach the reasonable, non-partisan outside world, it finally dawns on them that they were inappropriate.
I watched MSNBC during prime-time tonight, mainly because there was nothing better on TV. (It was mostly in the background as I caught up on some online reading.) The lineup consisted of liberal hero Keith Olbermann, followed by Air America talk show host Rachel Maddow, followed by a repeat of the Keith Olbermann show at 10pm. Listening to the two hosts, they sound identical (though one is much prettier than the other). They both use the same sarcastic points to bring down their enemies (in this case, John McCain, George W. Bush and the Republicans).
Even though I agree with them on their positions, I can’t help but cringe sometimes when I watch these shows. There’s that same immaturity, the same mean jokes, the same anoying smiles when they point out some flaw in the other side. And in Olbermann’s case, an ego the size of Alaska as he goes on with his boring feuds with the Fox News Channel and its pundits.
Olbermann and Maddow are, sadly, part of the problem. They have like-minded staff who won’t tell them that they’re becoming too biased toward the left. Those who do criticize are seen as the enemy or ignored.
The worst part is, some of these activists may be fully aware that they’re crossing over the line, but they accept their actions because they believe the ends justify the means.
Partisan hacks and political pundits need to learn what the politicians are already keenly aware of: cruel insults and immature jokes may get a good response from hard-core supporters who are drinking your Kool-Aid, but they turn off the rest of us, making us ashamed of both you and the political process.
Considering how much ink has been spilled over this issue over the past decades (remember when the PCs made fun of Jean Chrétien’s face?), it’s astonishing there are people who still haven’t learned to attack the issues and not the person.
Dear Sarah Palin,
Look, I know speechwriting is hard. Gathering those dozens of advisers and having witty sayings filtered through focus groups can take time. And you really did put a huge amount of effort into that acceptance speech the other day.
But 37 million people watched that speech. One would assume that includes the few hundred hard-core supporters you’re speaking in front of today, as well as the thousands of loser couch potatoes like myself who have nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon than watch CNN.
So why are you repeating your speech verbatim? Why are you using the exact same lines that have been replayed over the news networks since? And why, oh why, are you repeating the same jokes you gave then, as if your crowd hadn’t heard them before? You know, the joke about your kids missing the chef you fired? Or the one about selling the governor’s private jet on eBay (even though you didn’t)?
People aren’t laughing at your jokes, because they’ve all heard them before. They’re applauding, because they liked it the first time and are so awed by your presence that they don’t mind not seeing anything new.
TV viewers are a bit more discriminating.
I admit, I get a perverse pleasure out of people who are the creators of their own misfortune. Tragedies in the classical sense. Not necessarily causing death, but at least causing inconvenience. Hurricane Gustav created two examples of this, and the victims are our favourite punching bags: politicians and the media.
The first comes out of the video above. A few weeks ago, Stuart Shepard of Focus on the Family posted a video online in which he half-jokingly suggests that Christian Conservatives pray for rain during Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at an open-air stadium. They say they never meant for it to be taken seriously, but it was, and the video was pulled (the one above is a copy).
Of course, there was no rain the night of Obama’s acceptance speech, and the Democratic convention went off without a hitch. But the day after, as John McCain was announcing his vice-presidential pick, we start hearing about this hurricane headed for the Gulf Coast. Toward New Orleans. Three years almost to the day that Katrina struck.
Oh the irony. It almost makes me believe in a god, as it did Michael Moore.
The second example comes from our good friends at CNN. When Barack Obama announced his VP pick, CNN filled the airwaves with news and analysis. Responding to a viewer comment via Facebook (oh how the media has changed, folks), anchor Rick Sanchez says this on air:
By the way, I have to share this with you. It is from Sam. He says, Rick — this is on Facebook — I’m counting on you to do the same kind of coverage when McCain announces his vice president as you’re doing tonight when Barack Obama has announced his vice president. Sam, we’ve already made that decision. I can guarantee you we will.
No caveats, no ifs or buts, just a bold guarantee. Of course, neither CNN nor the other news networks are coming close to meeting that guarantee for the convention. Half the news about Sarah Palin was surrounded (literally) by hurricane updates, and the convention coverage is being threatened by it. Even the convention itself is changing plans at the last minute to deal with people (like President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal) who can’t speak.
I actually feel a bit bad for the Republicans. It’s not their fault this hurricane hit with such horrible timing, nor is it their fault that Bristol Palin got pregnant. If they lose in November, it should be because of the issues, not because the campaign was derailed by … well, acts of God.
Hey, remember back in June when I told you about that AMT contract to run two new express bus routes with crazy perks like air conditioning? And then two months later everyone hears about it for the first time (thanks to a press release) and is immediately outraged, saying this is “two-tier transit” and it’s illegal demanding it be scrapped?
Well you’ll be pleased to know that the Quebec government has done exactly that, bending to municipal pressure (and unions) and putting the kibosh on the project, mere days before it was to go into service.
Actually, it’s not really suspending it. Instead, the minister has taken the contract from Limocar and given control of the Vaudreuil line to CIT La Presqu’ile, which serves local transit needs of the western shore.
Of course, that’s what should have been done in the first place. The regional transit authorities around Montreal all have express buses going onto the island, including the RTL, STL, CITSO and companies that run transit in towns you didn’t realize had transit systems. Even CITPI has routes that connect with the STM network at John Abbott College in Sainte Anne de Bellevue. Why spend gobs of money on a private contract when you can just let the local transit authority handle it?
And even if we concede that the AMT needed to hire a company to run this route, why the requirements for air conditioning, Wi-Fi access and the rest that instantly disqualified the transit companies from the process? The government has been clear in the past that air conditioning is a luxury and they won’t pay for buses to have them. So why did AMT get special treatment?
Mentioning the delay between my reporting in June and the decision this past week isn’t just to make me look good. There are consequences to going back on decisions like this. Limocar went through a fair bidding process in good faith, and now they’ve been screwed over. It’s unclear whether they’ve spent any serious money setting this route up, but even if we just count the manpower they spent on the bidding process, that’s a lot of resources for something that has turned out to be irrelevant.
In other words, expect a lawsuit to develop out of this, or expect Limocar to get some serious cash in severance costs.
And, of course, all that is money out of our pockets.
All because people complained about a contract after it was awarded instead of when the ridiculous requirements were announced.
After recent injuries to pedestrians due to rear-view mirrors on STM buses, some are asking why these predatory reflective objects are allowed to keep recklessly and deliberately attacking poor bystanders whose only crime was standing less than four inches from the driver’s side of a moving bus.
The STM has refused to retrofit their buses in order to remove these threats to our (taller) children, even after discovering that people can get hit with them.
This is about safety. The ability of a bus driver to look at himself or look back at roads he’s already driven through should not get in the way of keeping our streets safe for pedestrians.
We must not rest until our buses are mirror-free.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock recently, you’ve noticed Loblaw’s’s new ad campaign promoting locally-grown fruits as part of a green strategy. I applaud Loblaw for embracing greener policies, but there’s still a way to go.
Take, for example, this bike rack outside the Loblaws at Jean-Talon and Park. Notice anything odd about it? The fact that no bikes are attached to it? The fact that it’s at an odd angle? Well, that’s because there’s nothing anchoring this bike rack to the ground. Seriously. Go there right now and just walk off with it.
Instead, everyone hooks their bikes up to the solid railings nearby. Although that keeps the bikes relatively secure, it also interferes with anyone wanting to use the railings to help them up the stairs.
This has been going on for weeks now, which means Loblaws is either lazy or just doesn’t care.
Underground, meanwhile, is a large parking lot that can hold over 250 cars. It’s free for shoppers up to two hours.
I was surprised to find, at the far end, parking spaces for bicycles. No signage exists anywhere else to point cyclists here, which is probably why it’s empty in the middle of the day (while bikes are locked to railings outside).
For a store so close to Park Extension, Villeray, Rosemont, Mile End and the Plateau, areas where bicycles are perhaps the most popular in Montreal, this store could make even a small effort to make cyclists feel more welcome.
Which of the following green-coloured products are made using recycled paper or make any other claims toward environmental sustainability?
The answer, of course, is none. They’re just green-coloured.
That’s the problem with greenwashing. There is no standard body to say what environmentally-friendly claims can be made and which ones can’t. And even if there were such a body with strictly-enforced rules, nothing prevents a company from simply using green-coloured packaging to subtly fool consumers into thinking that there is an environmental benefit to choosing a green product over a non-green version.
What’s the difference between these two products? They’re both from the same company, both weigh the same and are made from the same material. The difference, if you look at the numbers at the bottom, is that the green-coloured package has sheets that are half the size as those the blue-coloured package, and offsets that by having twice as many sheets.
In other words, the only difference between the two is that the one on the left has twice as many perforations. And yet there’s a sense that, because it’s green, it’s better for the environment somehow.
The one product on the shelves that does make green claims is this jumbo package of paper towels from President’s Choice. The paper towels here are printed on made using recycled paper, and I believe once you throw them away will explode into butterflies or something.
Whose bright idea was it to associate such a complicated, easily-abused marketing concept with little more than a colour?
Apparently, the city council in Westmount isn’t keen on the idea of a high-speed rail link between downtown and the airport going through their little town on the lines currently used by the AMT commuter trains going to Windsor Station. Instead, they’d prefer if the route used tracks further south in St. Henri.
The reasoning is somewhat complicated, and has to do with some very technical aspects of the two tracks. In order to better explain it, I’ve created a diagram of the situation below:
As you can see, it’s better for everyone involved if the train uses the lower tracks.
(I realize this is classic NIMBYism and not specific to Westmount, but you’d think it would occur to them that such a suggestion without any reasons behind it would lead to this kind of impression.)
UPDATE: Aww Pat, I’m touched (again). Your kickback will be in the mail shortly. Pour vos lecteurs, vous pouvez lire mes billets sur les médias, Montréal et, surtout, sur Patrick Lagacé.
Monday’s paper contained a couple of first-person pieces from reporters who were a bit closer to the action than they normally are. In the first, Gazette reporter Jason Magder recounts walking by a relative’s place whose burglar alarm had just gone off. Nothing happened, but he got scared when he thought there might be nefarious burglars nearby. He later learns that police recommend always calling them first, even if it’s more than likely a false alarm and will result in a fine, because (and this is pretty good logic here) a fine is worth less than your life.
The other, a few pages down, comes from Canwest’s Scott Deveau, who is a reporter in Afghanistan and came face-to-face with a roadside bomb. Again, no serious repercussions, but a pretty huge scare.
So what should we learn from this encounter? Simple: Jason Magder and Scott Deveau are pussies.
But perhaps we can look into this a bit deeper. What purpose do these first-person articles serve? There have been other home break-ins and other roadside bombings that have been worse but gotten less coverage. Is a reporter’s first-person account better than a second-hand version given by a witness? Is this a this-happens-every-day story? Or is it just a way for reporters to placate their enormous egos, a preview into their future memoirs, and an indication that things are more significant when they happen to people we know?
Discuss. Please include unnecessarily personal references in your comments.
Bruno Guglielminetti, seen above giving a video update from what appears to be an airport bathroom stall, has become the latest journalist to discover that it’s easier to simply upload videos to YouTube than deal with his company’s complicated proprietary system.
The advantages of YouTube are pretty astounding:
Given that, why don’t more non-television media outlets mothball their video systems and just switch to YouTube?
The main reason is control: They want 100% of all that ad revenue they’re not getting. They think they can do everything because they did everything in print. They don’t trust some outside company to handle this for them. And they don’t want to throw away something they spent thousands of dollars getting the CEO’s nephew to develop over the weekend.
On the other hand, many of these same websites use Google Ads, Google Analytics and Feedburner.
When it comes to video, I think they’ve hit the wrong side of this equation.
The evidence can be seen on their own blogs. Look at how many of them embed YouTube videos, or even unofficially upload their own videos to YouTube because they can’t figure out their company’s proprietary system.
Bruno’s step makes sense. Let’s hope others follow. And not just with YouTube. They should have channels on Vimeo, Blip.tv, Metacafe and others. Their business shouldn’t be in distribution, it should be in content.