Introducing Globe and Mail columnist and CTV host Jane Taber on a CBC panel today, Sunday Edition host Michael Enright said the following: She is often accused by Tories of being a Liberal, and by Liberals of being a Tory, which means she is doing her job. This canard is so common among journalists as to qualify as hackneyed. If both sides in a dispute criticize you, you much be striking the right balance. But there is an obvious alternative explanation: You could be doing such a crappy job that all sides find something to attack in your work. Let me be clear...

27 September, 2009

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, whose interview on Spark was the subject of a somewhat testy post on Contrarian yesterday, has returned fire. I saw your blog entry on my interview with CBC and my book "Delete". From your entry it is obvious that you have not read the book. [True.] That's perfectly fine - except that you then move to render a flawed judgment on the book. To start with, the example that I used in the interview is not about photographic memory, but about a biological condition of a very small number of people who cannot forget - or at least remember a...

23 September, 2009

Let the blogosphere note that on Friday morning, contrarian bet a friend that Hurricane Bill would not rank among the 10 highest wind speeds recorded in Nova Scotia in 2009. As of this morning, the bet is looking pretty safe. Environment Canada and the CBC  need to realize that the shrill, cover-your-ass forecasts they adopted in the wake Hurricane Juan are just as dangerous as under-predicting. EC and CBC cry wolf so often, and so predictably, citizens simply tune them out. This is a topic contrarian will return to. Reader comments welcome....

22 August, 2009

This month, Apple approved a free CBC Radio app that offers yet another reason to own an iPhone. It will prove a boon to radio listeners not tied to their radios all day. The CBC Radio app will give iPhone or iPod users live audio streams from of Radio 1, 2, and 3 (the corp's net-based, indy-oriented network). It will let users listen in any time zone, so when Atlantic Canadians miss a national program, they have four chances to catch up. Want to listen to a local show in real time? Pick it off the station menu (below left), our use...

20 August, 2009
CopyCon Ministers - cropped
Why is Canada's news media doing such a shoddy job covering the copyright consultations now taking place in select cities across part of Canada? At the heart of the consultations on planned changes Canada's copyright law lies a fundamental question: Should the law protect authors of creative work, or corporate intermediaries who traditionally profited from the massive effort formerly required to reproduce and distribute them? Thanks to digital technology, the cost of copying and distributing works is rapidly approaching zero. Naturally, those who once profited from copying and distributing creative works are frantically trying to stem the flow of creative works, advocating ever-lengthening copyright protection,  and mandatory enforcement of consumer-hostile technologies that prevent all copying, legal or otherwise. In many cases, they have co-opted creator organizations to their cause. Not surprisingly, news organizations tend to view this question through the lens of corporate intermediaries. With exceptions, they frame the debate in terms University of Ottawa law professor Jeremy De Beer describes as, "the caricature of toiling creators vs. freeloading pirates."
02 August, 2009