PMO speechwriters can’t resist casting Prime Minister Paul Martin in role of a copycat Kennedy visionary
It’s the secret of persuasion as revealed by the world’s greatest salesman, William Durant, a door-to-door peddler who created General Motors. Durant was so smooth he once sold 1,524 Buicks in a week. The secret? “Do not talk too much,” Durant said. “Give the customer time to think.” Sermonizing only makes people question the product, […]
No one has a constitutional right to a radio licence
When Québec City radio CHOI-FM was ordered shut down by regulators for broadcasting obscenities about boobs and minorities recently, media whipped themselves into a tempest of indignation. “Censorship,” they roared; “freedom of expression.” CHOI-FM invoking freedom of expression is like a drunk driver invoking freedom of mobility. It’s a half-clever legal ploy that obscures embarrassing […]
‘Western alienation’ biggest media hoax since cold fusion
It is the biggest media hoax since cold fusion and Y2K, yet journalists would sooner sustain it than expose it. The hoax is “Western alienation,” the cliché that paints an entire region as home to 9.6 million cranks boiling mad over the Senate, or gun control, or Esperanto, or, you name it. “Western alienation” hints […]
Journalists should read more books
They buried Alvin Hamilton last week. He was a war hero and one of the great Cabinet ministers of all time. If you read the Ottawa Citizen you might have missed the story; news of Hamilton’s death appeared as filler on page F7, next to the discount furniture ads. The obituary ran six pages back […]
Campaign 2004’s liveliest moments of media coverage
Campaign 2004 soon will be reduced to harrowing flashbacks of campaign buses and stale doughnuts. While the wounds are still fresh, let’s preserve the liveliest moments of media coverage this political season: Most Ominous Campaign Development: New Brunswick Conservative Bob McVicar was waving at rush-hour drivers in Saint John when a five-vehicle pileup snarled traffic. […]
Smiling Jack
Campaign 2004 made Jack Layton the first media subject in Canadian political history who smiled too much for his own good. It was the unnerving grin that finally prompted media suspicions there is less to Layton than meets the eye. It’s the mirthless, Stepford smile Layton wears for hours at a time, the love-me smile […]
Media are no more adept at picking a winner
Raw and spontaneous, an election debate gives Canadians a rare and useful glimpse of how party leaders perform under pressure. Just as revealing, it offers a useful glimpse of how journalists work under pressure. Very often — and this may come as a shock — media miss the story. “The next-day analysis of these things […]
PM Martin’s gloomy coverage
Facing uncertain re-election and his first taste of hostile media, Louis St. Laurent slumped in the back seat of his Cadillac in the final days of his disastrous 1957 campaign and groaned to an aide: “I’m finished. They don’t want anything more to do with me.” It is an unforgettable experience in a politician’s career […]
D-Day coloured by annoying journalism
It was called “the cane routine” by the man who invented it  James Curley, a politician so colourful his career was fictionalized in the novel The Last Hurrah. Facing a tight re-election race as a Boston alderman in 1910, Curley hired a white-haired actor to appear at his rallies posing as a Civil War […]
On the road again, eh?
Pulitzer Prize-winner Walter Duranty, a reporter in Soviet Russia, annoyed fellow correspondents by filing stories that conspicuously quoted “conversations overheard in the streetcars of Moscow.” Duranty neither spoke Russian nor took the streetcar; he travelled by chauffeured limousine. Duranty died in 1957, but the streetcars-of-Moscow type of journalism rolls on. I once worked with a […]
