From Influence Communication’s annual survey of the media, which is otherwise kind of uninteresting.
Say what you want about Richard Martineau, he’s still getting people to talk about him. He was also voted the Clique’s No. 1 worst journalist in Quebec.
As Journal de Montréal columnist Richard Martineau whines about the hate mail he’s getting after his appearance on Tout le monde en parle Sunday night (he’s still getting plenty of blog hate too, but I’d love for someone to setup a blog solely for the purpose of making fun of me), someone dug up a column he wrote for Voir back in 2003 bashing Quebecor’s convergence and has apparently been emailing it to Richard Therrien, Steve Proulx, Rue Frontenac and others. Considering he now blogs for Canoe, writes for the Journal and has a show on LCN, it does kind of make him look like a hypocrite.
Quebecor's myth-fighting www.lheurejuste.ca
Quebecor, tired of the “misinformation” being put out by the union representing locked-out Journal de Montréal workers, has responded with a website of its own at www.lheurejuste.ca. It features management responses to union talking points, though nothing we haven’t heard in the media and in articles in the Journal over the past week.
It also has PDF copies of those two-page spreads from the employer repeatedly re-explaining its position (one of the links is broken – the rest are giant images rather than properly-created PDFs). And you can download copies of ads saying how great Quebecor Media is at creating jobs, complete with stock photos of happy employees.
It’s kind of hard for Quebecor to play the victim here since they started the lockout without even making a contract offer. Their reverse-talking points are also less than convincing (they won’t say how much the Journal makes, though they admit that it’s still profitable).
Last night was the big night with Richard Martineau and union boss Raynald Leblanc on Tout le monde en parle. There are plenty of summaries, analyses and just plain ranting of what happened:
Sadly, Radio-Canada still doesn’t put TLMEP online, so if you were busy watching the Super Bowl, you’re out of luck.
UPDATE: Therrien points out that TVA’s Le Banquier (which had Quebecor boss Pierre-Karl Péladeau on board in what I can only assume is a funny coincidence) had better ratings than TLMEP.
Richard Martineau goes on one of his usual rants, this time about what he considers racism.
The first part of his rant is against a lame This Hour Has 22 Minutes sketch that makes fun of Quebecers. Since Martin Patriquin already has a response to that one, I won’t bother here.
The second part attacks my newspaper for the most curious of reasons:
On faisait un appel à tous pour savoir si une famille du West Island pouvait accueillir une petite fille de 13 ans un week-end par mois, histoire de laisser sa mère souffler un peu.
«La jeune fille est très active, elle garde sa chambre propre et respecte les règlements de la maison, pouvait-on lire. Idéalement, la famille d’accueil serait noire…»
Imaginez comment The Gazette réagirait si le Journal se mettait à la recherche d’une famille d’accueil BLANCHE pour une jeune fille. On crierait au racisme !
The Gazette has regular columns in its arts and life section which profile kids looking for foster homes and organizations in need of volunteers. It’s about a step and a half below actually rescuing orphans from a burning building.
But Martineau takes issue with the fact that it’s suggested a black kid would ideally (but necessarily) best be placed with a black family.
To answer his straw-man hypothetical, if the Journal was trying more to place troubled children with foster parents, I would certainly welcome it. And if an ad requested white parents, I’d probably be more confused than offended. Statistically there are always more black kids in these situations and fewer black parents in a position to adopt.
But even if I grant that this is racism at its core, is this really the biggest injustice he could find?
The Gazette can be criticized for a lot of things (ask me, I’ll write you up a list), but in 1,000 years this would not have stricken me as one of them.
There’s a minor crisis happening in the Quebec blogosphere over Richard Martineau’s blog. He and Canoe are being sued for $200,000 over allegedly libelous comments made by visitors to his blog about lawyer Susan Corriveau.
The concern is over what impact that might have on comment policies at mainstream media sites. Traditional media (especially local empires in Quebec) are still trying to figure out what to do with this whole Internet thing, and are entirely clueless about the implications of user-generated content. They think forcing users to click a button that says “I agree not to post libel” is enough to protect them from liability.
Coincidentally, an earlier post this week by La Presse star blogger Patrick Lagacé mentions that he’s asking for tougher moderation of user comments to get rid of the junk and even cap the length of some discussions.
Ironically, both Martineau’s blog and Lagacé’s blog require user registration before people can make comments. This stands in contrast to websites like The Gazette’s which removed the login requirement to encourage more comments. (Then again, even The Gazette is starting to move back — their only popular blog, Habs Inside/Out, has changed its policy to require moderation of anonymous comments.)
As any forum gets more popular, it starts to see problems it couldn’t predict. Spam is the first to show up, in the form of junk sent by computer to advertise some money-making venture. That can be solved by installing a spam filter, requiring registration or manually moderating comments (or a combination of these).
But then comes the problem of real people posting unwanted things. Libel, flame wars, factual mistakes, personal attacks, trolling, copyrighted works, personal information, pornographic images, off-topic comments, the list goes on. The worst ones will get deleted outright. Border cases might get a polite warning from the blogger or moderator.
For some reason, there’s the implication that the goal is to have unedited, unrestricted, free communication in the comments section of blog posts. This innocent-until-proven-guilty mentality means that a lot of useless, mean or uninteresting comments get attached to blogs, comments that are of no use to anyone and are a waste of time and space.
Little by little, big bloggers are starting to restrict that freedom and filter out the noise.
Good.
I moderate comments on this blog. I don’t require user registration (because I know how annoying it is), and I tend to let most non-spam through. But nobody but me has the right to say what is published here. I have deleted plenty of personal attacks, unhelpful garbage, trolling comments and other junk that doesn’t belong here, and I will continue to do so. At the end of the day, I’m responsible for all the content published here, and it’s my ass in the courtroom if anything crosses the line.
I welcome criticism (in fact, some of my best comments are those who reject my entire hypothesis and ridicule my interpretation of the facts), but you have to show your work. Comments like “you suck” and “you’re gay” have no place here or on any other blog.
Patrick Lagacé wants to make it very clear that he and fellow Franc Tireur Richard Martineau don’t live together and aren’t attached at the hip.
Which is surprising to me because that show always seemed to have homo-erotic undertones, what with their matching wardrobe and the way they goof around together.
Anyone up for writing some Lagacé/Martineau slash fiction?