Tagged: Cape Breton Post
Retribution north of Smokey — conflicting views
The Cape Breton Post has a thoughtful followup to my post about Victoria Standard publisher Jim Morrow’s refusal to name the members of a police advisory council in Victoria County for fear they might face retribution in the district north of Cape Smokey. Morrow portrayed the area as rife with retributive justice and public fear, and asserted that new houses cannot be insured there because of widespread arson.
The Post noted that accounts of the social fabric in Northern Cape Breton often conflict:
Delilah Delores Dixon and Peter Sheldon MacKinnon, who were recently ordered out of their Bay St. Lawrence Road home under the province’s Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Act, were alleged to have been using and selling illegal drugs, and playing host to a group dubbed “Society’s Rejects.”
Now, try to square that image with one painted by Dina Waik and Debb Bertazzon of Toronto in a letter to the editor published on Sept. 4, 2010. The two were trapped in Meat Cove after a torrential rain storm on Aug. 22, 2010 washed out that community’s roads and bridges.
“Allow us to thank the wonderful residents of Meat Cove who helped us in every way and opened their homes to us when we were in need,” ran part of the letter, which depicted how the two tourists were fed, lodged and entertained free of charge.
“We were absolutely inspired by their thoughtfulness, consideration and insistence that our needs be put before their own, despite what they had already lost.”
It’s difficult to square the two images, because one is of a community at its worst due to a few dealing with chronic adversity and the other is of a community at its best in the face of acute adversity.
In further mixed messages,. the Post said Johnny Buchanan, municipal councillor for the area, refused to speak with the paper on the record about the arson problem. Given the long history of arson, I wondered whether more sophisticated policing was in order. Already in place, says the Post:
The Post learned Wednesday that the Ingonish Beach RCMP detachment’s allotment of five officers has been augmented by four Mounties brought in specifically to investigate arsons. Seemingly, once those files are cleared up, the four will leave. But the root problem will remain. Police can’t be everywhere a ne’er-do-well flicks a lighter, but a permanently bolstered force would help.
For its part, Information Morning Cape Breton, first to take note of the concern, had a reporter in the area Wednesday, and plans to follow up on the story tomorrow.
More on that Sydney Harbor silt plume
The Cape Breton Post’s Chris Shannon has a thorough and detailed account of Environment Canada’s failure to monitor or control rampant siltation from the Sydney Harbor dredging boondoggle project (first reported here).
In among the buck-passing and not-my-department quotes lies this gem:
The federal environmental screening assessment report is supposed to be posted online. But a check of each of the departments’ websites didn’t turn up the report.
A spokesperson for the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency said the screening report couldn’t be found on its agency’s website either since it doesn’t conduct that type of environmental assessment.
“It’s really the responsible authorities that are responsible for the mitigation measures, the follow-up programs, and that would all be detailed in the screening report,” Lucille Jamault said.
Did Ms. Jamault really say the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency has no responsibility to provide access to environmental assessments? Did she say it with a straight face?
The real problem here is the politicization of Environment Canada. Projects should not be subject to varying standards of environmental assessment, monitoring, and control simply because they are popular or politically useful to the government in power.
Herald vs. coyotes
Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim is the title of a 1980 compendium of unintended double-entendre headlines collected by the Columbia Journalism Review. It illustrates the power of tiny punctuation flubs — in this case, a missing hyphen — to radically alter meaning. Readers also have to chuckle in wonderment over how small a town must be for the local newspaper to deem dog bites newsworthy.
When the dog is a coyote, however, and the person bitten is a 16-year-old girl in a National Park where a 19-year-old woman was killed by coyotes 10 months ago, there’s no doubt about newsworthiness. Still, consider how differently two daily newspapers reported the story:
“Coyote bites sleeping teen in head,” was the Cape Breton Post‘s accurate but subdued headline.
INGONISH — A teenage girl was bitten by a coyote early Monday morning in the same national park in Cape Breton where a woman was killed by the animals last year.
“Coyote attacks girl in Highlands,” screamed the Halifax Chronicle-Herald in a headline that spanned the top of page one.
A second vicious coyote attack on a visitor at Cape Breton Highlands National Park prompted park wardens to start setting traps early Monday morning.
Source: Halifax Chronicle-Herald
A photo of a sinister, prowling coyote illustrated the Herald story, together with a graphic showing a second coyote posing triumphantly astride a map of the Cape Breton Highlands. Lines connected the posing coyote to the sites of the two incidents, which took place 40 kilometres apart, separated by the least hospitable terrain in the Maritimes.
The two stories, both written by competent, journeymen reporters, agreed on the relatively benign facts of the case — a couple of bites to the back of the head, requiring a few stitches at outpatients. The Post’s overall treatment of the event was consistent with these facts. The Herald, by contrast, contrived to hype the story and frighten readers with lurid adjectives, illustrations, and headlines. I’m curious to know whether the unwarranted “vicious” was composed by the reporter, or added later by the desk.
The Herald has long had an outsized appetite for bad news from Cape Breton. Whether staff reductions have contributed to its recent drift into sensationalism (see examples here, here, here, and here) is a topic for another day. For now, it’s enough to point out the striking differences in the two papers’ treatment of a coyote bite.
Hat tip: SP.
CBC weather panic — feedback
After hectoring us for five days about Bill, a hurricane that was actually a tropical storm, the media took an only slightly more restrained approach to Danny, a weak tropical storm that actually appears to be a half-day rain shower. CBC still wrung its hands for much of the week, but didn’t cancel regular programs. Many contrarian readers responded to the hype, starting after the jump with CW.
