Archive for: May 2010
Anonymous, ’til we decide to out you
Lindsay Brown doesn’t like anonymous posting:
The good news here is that Halifax media are inadvertently leading the charge against the silly practice of anonymous online commentary.
First, in April, The Coast demonstrated that the mere possibility of court action was enough for it to de-cloak its posters.
Now, The Chronicle-Herald has shown us that its promise of anonymity depends on who you are. Apparently, the promise is worthless if the Herald thinks it can get a story out of identifying you. They’ll even go to the trouble of hunting you down. So, anonymous poster, beware.
The Herald has also exposed in a dramatic way the contradiction tolerated by media who encourage online “anonymity”. We know that the Herald is an ethical news organization, so it follows that the paper regards anonymous commentary as ethical. But the story on the premier’s chief of staff is predicated on the idea that it was UNethical for him to post anonymously. So, either posting anonymously was unethical, or the newspaper acted unethically when it identified the poster. The Herald can’t have it both ways. Media outrage across the country at the anonymous postings from Helena Guergis’s staff in March shows our local paper has plenty of company — they are all wallowing together in a frothy hot-tub of contradiction.
They can defend themselves by arguing that anonymous commentary is the special domain the elusive “ordinary citizen”, and that the public has a right to know when someone with a vested interest or bias has trespassed. That leaves online media with two options: they can check every anonymous post to ensure that its author is in fact ordinary; or they can require posters to sign their work and allow readers to determine for themselves how much credibility the writer deserves. The latter continues to work well on letters-to-the-editor pages.
A commenter on the Herald website called LilacLover also sees the contradiction:
So let me get this straight. The Chronicle Herald facilitates a public web forum, where readers can post comments with relative anonymity. However, if those comments call into question the Chronicle Herald’s objectivity on a particular story, then that reader can expect to be tracked down, repeatedly contacted, and exposed on the front page? If so, then I think Dan O’Connor’s comparison to Frank magazine may in fact be legitimate. I just registered today, to make this comment, and nowhere did I see a location to even enter my real name or did I see a Terms of Use* clause, informing me of this seemingly witch-hunt practice.
*The Herald does have a Terms of Use clause.
More begrudgery
Contrarian has some highbrow friends, including Mike Targett, who weighs into the begrudgery debate quoting Wittgenstein: “The meaning of a word is its use in the language.”
That is the classic formulation of descriptivism, the reigning philosophy among lexicographers. The trouble with descriptivism is that it leads to definitions like this one, from Merriam-Webster: “biweekly: 1. occurring twice a week; 2. occurring every two weeks.” It’s true, people use biweekly to mean both things, but sometimes you need a prescriptive dictionary to tell you what a word really means. I’m with Lindsay Brown on that score.
That NDP news conference – ctd.
Martin MacKinnon writes:
I am appalled by these NDP apologists — I do hope they’re getting paid — on the $42,000* press release. Regardless if some of the $42K should not have been included, it did include funding for things like buses and “marketing consultants.” If this was a Rodney MacDonald Tory event, I am sure these people would have also pointed out that the $42K was overstated. These NDP’er’s are double hypocrites. One because they are governing like Tories (John Buchanan should be proud) and because they told their party members they would govern differently. Shame on them.
*The $42,000 is overstated, a concoction of the Chronicle-Herald that mixes $11,000 in announcement expenses with $31,000 in expenses related to producing an electricity plan, and pretends they are all news conference costs. The Herald repeats this misrepresentation for a third time in today’s edition, along with the false claim that Dan O’Connor twice denied posting a comment to the Herald’s website.
This double misrepresentation of the story, repeated three days running despite clear contrary evidence, is a blatant display of dishonesty. Apparently, the Herald prefers to misinform its readers and defame others rather than acknowledge its error.
The Herald’s double standard – updated
Greg Beaulieu writes:
I particularly enjoyed this piece, probably in part because I agree with your view on the topic at hand around MLAs’ expenses and the like, and have been appalled (sorry Alexa) by some of the public reaction that was seen in places like the Herald’s online comments section, where it is apparently OK to impugn the integrity of politicians and their staff, but not Herald reporters.
The message you received from Mr. Whateverhisnameis sounds a lot like the comments one sees at the Herald and elsewhere….
The pervasiveness of government means that if one is a consultant, or in the communication, education, or medical business, or like Mr. Terris, a gadfly in in the arts community, you are likely to be on the receiving end of some government funds one day. That does not mean you cannot do what you are doing with Contrarian. What it does mean is that if you do something like Contrarian, you need to do it very well and not make it sound like comments in the Herald online, just with better grammar and spelling.
And you do it very well indeed, Mr. Donham. Congratulations on your first anniversary.
Colin May writes:
The Herald certainly made a mess of the $42,000 story because the headline was misleading as were the opening paragraphs.
George Bain would call this ‘GOTCHA’ writing, sensational headline to attract the reader and make a first, and false, impression. I see the same trait in media covearge of the expenses of MPs with no attempt to explain what an MP is allowed to spend and no details of the rules, which if published may get in the way of great revelations of what wine Ignatieff drinks and clothes Harper wears courtesy of our taxes.
Turns out an MP has an allowance of $280,000 per year to run an office in Ottawa and an office in the constituency. No reporter on CBC or the Globe or National Post or the CH bothered to tell readers the facts until late this week, all the while leaving the impression that MPs had access to $500,000,000 of our money. This deliberate obfuscation by the media is shameful and they need to be called out.
Finally, if the comments in the CH were never posted how did the reporter know of them?
Begrudgers pile on
Bruce Wark writes:
[B]egrudgery… may not (yet) be in dictionaries, but it is a useful coinage. Besides, the OED does list the Irish-English noun, begrudger: a resentful and dissatisfied person; a habitual naysayer or complainer. Well, what does a begrudger indulge in, if not begrudgery?
I’d say it’s OK to use a non-dictionary word if there’s no other word that conveys the meaning. Shakespeare did so repeatedly coining around 1,500 words, many of which we use today. To the Bard we owe bedroom, cold-blooded, compromise, enmesh, leapfrog, lonely,love letter, unreal and worthless. And since Shakespeare did not coin begrudgery, someone else had to.
A distinguished Nova Scotian who may wish to remain anonymous adds:
I can’t say for sure that “begrudgery” is a word with a long pedigree, but I’m quite sure it is in current use in Ireland. Begrudger is a commonly used Irish noun (along with “whinger”, a somewhat related unflattering comment).
I used “begrudgery” when speaking to an Irish lawyer after reading your blog this morning and he didn’t bat an eye.
If it isn’t a standard word, it should be. It expresses an idea which I don’t think any other single word encompasses. Isn’t that how English came to have such a large and varied vocabulary?
Caught in a falsehood, Herald lies again. And again.
A story by Judy Myrden in Friday’s Chronicle-Herald falsely conflated the cost of producing the NDP Government’s new Electricity Plan with the cost of a Pictou County media briefing and announcement of the plan. The effect was to overstate the cost of the news conference by four times.
Called on the falsehood, the paper repeats it in today’s lead story, also written by Myrden. Myrden then compounds this dishonesty by falsely accusing Premier Darrell Dexter’s chief of staff, Dan O’Connor, of denying he had anonymously posted comments to the Herald’s website pointing out the paper’s misrepresentation.
O’Connor told Contrarian Saturday morning that Myrden called him Friday and asked what his email address was. O’Connor gave her his government address (the same one he used to register on the Herald website under the pseudonym “O’Dempsey”). O’Connor said he did not think the request unusual, because he also has an NDP caucus email address, and emails to him sometimes go astray.
Myrden then asked if O’Connor had sent the paper any emails Friday, O’Connor answered truthfully that he had not. He thought for a moment, and repeated, “No.” The call ended.
“Two minutes later,” O’Connor said Saturday, “Myrden called me back and asked if I had posted anything to the Herald website. I said yes.”
If you have seen today’s paper, you will know the editors turned most of the front page over to a Myrden story falsely accusing O’Connor of twice denying he had posted comments to the paper’s website.
We can all agree that O’Connor showed terrible judgment posting pseudonymously. At least he ‘fessed up. Consider the Herald’s ethics: Caught in a lie, the paper repeated the lie, then fabricated another.
An interesting footnote is that the paper’s website never published O’Connor’s comments. It’s against the paper’s policy to post comments that impugn its reporters’ integrity. How ironic.
Happy Birthday to us
Contrarian turned one year old this week, and our pal Lindsay Brown took the occasion to upbraid us, with ever so uncharacteristic gentleness, on our use of the word begrudgery:
Your blog is not only wonderful, but essential. Yet I have the temerity to opine that no journalist worth his own block of salt should make up words. Especially a word that resembles the name of a caged bird far more than what their careless author intended to convey.
Honey, there ain’t no such word as begrudgery. And you should get a hold on your temerity and your opining and make use of the colourful and expressive English language instead of allowing readers to believe your faux Anglais. And no, sorry, “but making up words is fun!” is not allowed as a defence.
OK, first of all, I did not make up the word, but obviously someone did. While Ms. Brown is correct that it does not appear in standard dictionaries, a Google search turns up 45,200 instances of its use.
I first saw the word attributed to the Irish real estate tycoon Sean Dunne, in a New York Times article from January of last year.
“Jealousy and begrudgery are still alive and well in Ireland, and whoever eradicates them should be prime minister for life,” he says as he tucks into a heaping plate of gravy-drenched turkey and mashed potatoes in the restaurant of one of the two hotels he owns — and is hoping to raze. “It’s part of the Irish psyche and it is the result of 800 years of being controlled by other people, of watching everything the master or landlord is doing.
Consistent with Mr. Dunne’s claim, most of the begrudgeries Google unearthed were Irish in origin. The earliest I could find were (1) an August 2003 book review of, Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age by Rosemary Mahoney (which put the word in quotes):
Ms. Mahoney, who received her master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and now lives in Baltimore, brings her peculiar Irish/American sensibility to bear on the discrepancies she sees between the picturesque little villages and the rampant unemployment, alcoholism, “begrudgery” and sense of betrayal that infect Ireland and the Irish.
and (2) a comment by Sen. Willie Farrell during an October 2003 debate in Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Irish Parliament:
We are good at begrudgery and blaming someone, whether they are responsible or not. Senator Reynolds mentioned the media and they are at their best when they engage in those areas of activity.
Had 45,200 people not invented begrudgery before me, I’d be proud to have done so. It’s a word we need, in Nova Scotia almost as much as Ireland.
And speaking of begrudgery – updated
In response to this, someone called Peter Watts or perhaps Paul Buher, writes from a cryptic email account:
You, sir, are a pig, and no different than Darrell Dexter.
You hide under the guise of a political blog during the day, only to be writing for the NDP at night. A $15,000 pay cheque isn’t too bad I suppose. Good for you.
I have news for you. Anything you write on that virulent blog from this day forward is tainted with the stink of NDP orange, corruption, and self-serving interest. As I said, you sir, are a pig.
I wonder how Mr. Whateverhisrealnameis would feel to learn that Rodney MacDonald’s Tories hired me to write that government’s energy strategy.
Andrew Terris chimes in:
15K for 26 pages of text with lots of white space?
SWEET!
On the other hand, an erstwhile Daily News colleague writes:
That was a breathtakingly shoddy piece in the Herald this morning. Seems like Dan et al have made up their minds about the Dexter government.
I’ll leave it to others to decide whether the Herald’s shoddiness was breathtaking in this case, but I do think Judy Myrden’s story falls into a category of invidious reporting sensible people can see through without knowing much about the topic. She calls it a $42,000 press conference, but cites only $11,000 in costs (including transportation, catering, audio-visual, and event-management) related to the event.
The other $31,000 was part of the process of producing the plan, an effort that included several government departments, and discussions with interested companies, organizations, and individuals. Myrden falsely conflated production costs with news conference costs to make the latter appear four times larger than they were.
The sad thing about this is that if Myrden, or any other Herald reporter, would bother to read the energy plan, they would find it choc-a-block full of issues vital to Nova Scotia’s future—questions that could use robust discussion, debate, criticism, and even, dare I say it, investigation. Alas, that would take time, effort, imagination, and intelligence. Unlike finger-wagging.
Perhaps all provincial announcements should take place in Halifax, the centre of the known universe. Perhaps government should aways communicate with one hand tied behind its back, issuing reports written in bureaucratese and printed in gray ink on newsprint, Enver Hoxha-style.
[Update:] Stan Jones writes:
Sorry, Parker, but when you are sucking $15,000 from the same tit as the MLAs I really don’t think your opinion is going to sway me.
Perhaps Mr. Jones, who bills himself as a consultant specializing in social, health and educational research, is too pure to take government money. I’m not. About a quarter of my consulting work is with government. I relish these assignments because they give me a chance to work on the most important and difficult public issues facing our society, and to interact with thoughtful, energetic, well-motivated people.
The cynical assumption at play here is that doing government work automatically makes one corrupt. If that’s true, then it stands to reason that the most important and difficult decisions of our time will be worked on only by corrupt people, while all the good people (like Jones, Terris, and Watt) stand on the sidelines. Enjoy your purity, folks. Some of us want to tackle these issues.
Less pure readers can check out the Energy Plan here. They tell me it’s a pretty good read.
Melting pot
A resident of England, who spends much of his time in Nova Scotia working on Seaside’s rural high-speed Internet project, writes from Tel Aviv, where he is attending a wedding:
An Irish fiddle band is providing the music for the wedding. The band members are all Israelis. I was chatting with one of them, and he asked what I did. I told him about Seaside and spending half my life in Canada.
“I’m going to Canada in the autumn,” he said. “I’m going somewhere called Cape Breton, for a festival called Celtic Colours.”
So a Londoner visiting Israel meets an Israeli playing in an Irish fiddle band, and what do they have in common? Cape Breton and the Celtic Colours International Festival, of course.
