Just after Christmas, I noted an angry denunciation of Chief Theresa Spence and the Idle No More movement by a Harper-friendly journalist. I took it as an early sign that Spence holds "outsized potential to cause trouble for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government." Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hébert seems to agree, albeit somewhat convolutedly: On the societal role of government, the gap between the various non-Conservative constituencies in this country has always been smaller than the gap between those who support the current government and those who don’t. The ranks of those who sympathize with the activist goals of the Idle No More movement stretch...

03 January, 2013

One would like to think of human history as an unbroken march toward enlightenment in which superstition and magical beliefs are gradually discarded in favor of rational thought and evidence-based decisions. One would like to, but then one remembers the media's obsession with Mayan doomsday predictions never actually predicted by actual Mayans, and the scandalous failure of most Nova Scotia health care workers to get the 'flu vaccine (thus depriving themselves, their families, and their patients of the most effective life-saving advance in medical history), and today's numerological media trope-de-jour: the fact that today's (arbitrary) date can be rendered as 12-12-12. So...

12 December, 2012

David Carr was on CBC Radio's Sunday Edition this morning, talking to Michael Enright about his work as a journalism critic for the New York Times, and his past life as a crack addict. The contrast did not flatter the host. At one point, Carr explained why, despite all the turmoil and job losses, he thinks we are entering a Golden Age of Journalism: DC: The column I'm working on this week about packaging quotes, I Twittered out what I was working on, I set up a separate Gmail called quoteapproval, I sent emails to 40 of the best reporters I know, and...

16 September, 2012

J-school prof Ivor Shapiro's complaint that Canadian sports reporters uncritically promoted a we-was-robbed version of  the Canada-US Women's Olympic soccer final provoked Contrarian readers to provide contrary examples, and a testy chinwag amount tweeting Halifax journos (viz.:  @pdmcleod, @bbhorne). Ruth Davenport, who knows a little about news, thinks he jumped the gun: Shapiro’s beef stuck in my craw for the same reason any unfounded assertion of laziness or incompetence sticks in my craw: it’s unfounded. He was griping about a lack of reporting that was patently in evidence – he just didn’t bother to look.  Even if those particular pieces hadn’t been published...

09 August, 2012

Journalism prof Ivor Shapiro, writing on the website of the Canadian Journalism Project, thinks news reports of the Canada-US women's football semi-final, fell short of the standard required to condemn the much maligned ref. Was the ref biased? Of course the Canadian players and supporters thought so, but for a reporter, the best way — the professional way — to address a conflict is not to add to the yelling and bawling but instead, to show the evidence. Where was the tick-tock — the chronological list of tough calls the ref made (or didn’t make) through the match, for and against the Canadians? Where were...

07 August, 2012

It would be an exaggeration to say the right wing voices who dominate Canadian media commentary have risen in unison to condemn BC's pitch for a share of Northern Gateway pipeline spoils, but the clamor has certainly been one-sided. BC Premier Christy Clark's "attitude," wrote Kelly McParland, "is disastrous for Canada." John Ibbitson called Clark's demands "dangerous," and urged Prime Minister Harper to step in. Rex Murphy bemoaned the premiers' declining "intellectual and emotional connection to the national understanding." Andrew Coyne called it "extortion." Rob Russo told CBC Radio the fabric of the nation was at stake. A Globe and Mail...

31 July, 2012

When I was a teenager, my parents were friends with Malcolm Hobbs, publisher of what was then a weekly newspaper in Orleans, Massachusetts. The Cape Codder was a respectable example of what might be called the golden age of community weeklies. From time to time, it ran detailed articles — "profiles" — of local worthies, a habit that one day generated a warning letter from a lawyer for The New Yorker magazine. The term, "Profile," he asserted, was a trademark of the great journal, who legendary founding editor, Harold Ross, first applied it to detailed articles about individuals sometime in the...

26 July, 2012

Tim Bousquet, pugnacious news editor of the Halifax news and entertainment weekly, The Coast, responds to Contrarian's chiding of local media for failing to cover issues surrounding The Old Mill's closure. Hardly a week goes by that someone isn't asking me — usually angrily — "Why isn't The Coast covering issue X???" There are a variety of reasons. The Coast — which is basically me, plus whatever freelancers I can lure with a minuscule budget, and the occasional intern — isn't covering an issue. Sometimes the issues are too far afield, out of our distribution area, so aren't a priority. Sometimes other media...

18 July, 2012

Saturday's guest post about the closure and pending demolition of The Old Mill, a seedy Wyse Road bar housed in the only surviving part of Dartmouth's historic Rope Works, criticized peninsular Halifax heritage buffs for not trying to save the building. Our correspondent also said a new Sobeys supermarket on the site would lead to closure of the community Sobeys in Woodside, making life harder for impoverished mothers and seniors. Beverley Miller, a member of the Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia board of directors, responds: Preservationists can only do something if they know about a pending demolition...

18 July, 2012

It's easy to overlook the loss we've suffered as traditional news outlets contract in Nova Scotia and elsewhere. This message from a former Halifax journalist, unpublished for four years, shows he has lost neither the itch nor the knack: My wife, a friend and I went to the Old Mill tavern Thursday night to have a beer and laugh at a Dartmouth dive on the eve of its destruction. What we discovered, instead, was a fascinating story of history, community, and class. The huge wooden beams running across the pub’s ceiling – six of them, at least 16 inches on the side,...

14 July, 2012
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