Media mistakenly compare our prime ministerial traditions to U.S. ex-presidential traditions
Everyone wants to be Queen for a day. Some recent moaning in the media over treatment given Canada’s ex-prime ministers reminds me of my last visit to Rideau Hall, disguised as a tourist. While escorted through the Governor General’s residence with a tour bus group, a man next to me murmured, “Some palace.” The tour […]
What’s up with media fascination and Justin Trudeau, ‘the country’s fave son,’ ‘the man who would be king’?
The Trudeau Show, the longest-running daytime drama in Canadian politics, is in its final season. It was a TV creation–a “fetish,” the National Post once called it–from the day 23 years ago that Pierre Trudeau left town a step ahead of an enraged public. Voters had enough of Trudeaus, but TV could never get its […]
No one in media asked why Harper and Conservatives changed their minds on Anti-Terrorism Act’s sunset clauses, either
Scatter bread crumbs and some reporter is bound to follow your trail. On Feb. 16, the Prime Minister said, “We have a leader of the opposition who is soft on terrorism.” On Feb. 21, CTV NewsNet’s Mike Duffy said, “Isn’t there a danger after what we saw in the House this afternoon that the conventional […]
Filling female quotas in politics doesn’t promote diversity
Ottawa turns every day, yet the path of its orbit is often narrow. In a turn for diversity, most national parties in the next election will enforce quotas on the demographic profile of candidates. It’s about time. No one should run for Parliament who has not lived in at least two time zones, owned a […]
No, journalists are not obliged to set an etiquette standard
Must journalists set a standard of good behaviour? The question follows the resignation of a British Columbia Cabinet minister for rudeness. In seeking answers I contacted Warren Kinsella, National Post media critic, and a monthly columnist for The Hill Times, the only journalist I know of to recently lecture media on the need for moral […]
Media’s hard sell on global warming, heavy on patronizing
I own an $8,600 magic suitcase. Somebody in Ottawa wants you to invest in a magic suitcase, too, but that is in the fine print of the media’s hard sell on global warming. “Journalism is about asking the questions and debating the answers,” Globe and Mail editor Edward Greenspon wrote. Yet newsrooms, including the Globe’s, […]
Neither O’Neill nor Citizen has uttered a correction or an apology
Long before codes of ethics and media seminars, most newsrooms had one rule. It was so straightforward, and consequences of breaking it were so fearful, the greenest cub reporter committed it to memory. The rule was: nothing else matters if the story is wrong. Not pride or justification for misspent time and expense, not the […]
This just in… handful of journalists confirm my focus-group findings
Acting on a pollster’s tip, I conducted a focus group of preschoolers to determine the outcome of the next election. You might try this at home, too. Respondents aged five and three were shown flash-card photographs of the Prime Minister and leader of the opposition, and asked their impressions. I threw in a photo of […]
Vancouver to play host to 2010 Olympics
There is a little social worker in all of us: Very little, as we’re about to discover–and all because of TV. In what is a soon-to-be national embarrassment, hosts of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics have concluded the city is unfit to be seen by world media. “The problem, in a nutshell,” wrote the Vancouver Sun, […]
Media typecasting is more subtle than a partisan harangue, eh?
A lot of journalists really seem to like the leader of the Green Party. She is a mother and an environmentalist. Her name is Elizabeth May, but many think of her as Earth Mother. She is skillful at winning friends and influencing people. Born in the U.S., May has the American habit of self-deprecating chattiness […]
