A reader writes: I understand you dislike CBC.  Well that is fine for you, but for those of us who don't want to listen to the local shows made up of canned music and dubious prattle, the CBC treats their listeners as intelligent human beings. Just don't listen if you dislike the station. Point taken. I feel odd defending myself against the proposition that I dislike the CBC, but given recent posts (here and here), I suppose it's an understandable assumption. As an immigrant who came to Canada after my schooling had ended, I learned most of what...

03 April, 2010

The Globe and Mail's Tabatha Southey uses the same Pullman quotation to cast a harsh spotlight on an embarrassing Canadian example of political correctness run amok, courtesy of that habitual offender, the British Columbia Human Rights Commission, a tribunal whose main activity seems to be punishing the exercise of a human right it doesn't much care for: speech. Hat tip: Kady O'Malley...

03 April, 2010

CBC led its hourly radio newscasts this morning with a headline touting the release of the Apple iPad. Well, so did Contrarian; No complaint there. But it turns out the headline was only a teaser. Listeners had to wait 'til the last item in the newscast before hearing about Steve Jobs's latest gift to early adopters. And before getting there, they had to sit through a one minute-40 second "news story" about a CBNC contest to pick Canada's most hockey-crazed town. The humiliating chore of filling, oh, 20 percent of the radio service's flagship morning newscasts with this witless advertorial fell...

03 April, 2010

April 3:  Is this the transient alcoholic flicker on a too sweet rum cake, or a nuclear flash that will mark April 3 as a milestone we'll observe 20 and 40 years from now? According to David Pogue and Leo LaPorte, techies are scornful and users are awestruck, in which case, the smart money will be on the users. But there’s a big problem. To some, Jobs and Apple are a modern version of Bauhaus: elegant utilitarian design with fascist undertones. Apple’s singular control over what media its machines can play, and what machines can play its media, represents a giant backward...

03 April, 2010

English novelist Philip Pullman’s latest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, has provoked threats of a Christian fatwa against him. At a public forum this week, Pullman responded to an audience member who complained that “to call the Son of God a scoundrel is an awful thing to say.” Yes, it was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say, but no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody...

02 April, 2010

Arch-conservative David Frum stiffed CBC Radio's flagship The Current this morning [see update below], failing at the last minute to show up for a heavily promoted interview on his reincarnation as a thoughtful moderate. The program was forced to recycle a dumpster diving documentary in place of what I fear would have been the latest in a series of fawning interviews. Let's hope this will, in Canada at least, slow the media juggernaut bent on canonizing Frum as discerning paragon of moderation. Frum, as the saying goes, was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. His father was a...

01 April, 2010