Media Bias [Merged]

[a_majoor]

Journalistic ethics at work. I wonder how the employer will deal with this (apparently) rouge journalist? </snark>

http://canadalandshow.com/article/amanda-lang-tried-sabotage-cbc-story-scandalized-rbc-who-paid-her

Amanda Lang tried to sabotage a CBC story that scandalized RBC, who paid her
"I cannot emphasize enough how wrong it was," says colleague.
Sean Craig • January 11, 2015

Last month CANADALAND reported that CBC Senior Business Correspondent Amanda Lang took lucrative speaking jobs from insurance companies and then gave them positive news coverage on CBC TV.

That was nothing.

Multiple sources within CBC News have revealed to CANADALAND, under condition of anonymity, a shocking campaign Amanda Lang undertook in 2013 to sabotage a major story reported by her colleague, investigative reporter Kathy Tomlinson.

Key details of these events have been confirmed to CANADALAND by Tomlinson’s spouse, Alan Fryer, a former W-FIVE reporter and Washington Bureau chief for CTV News.

Tomlinson herself declined to comment. CBC employees can be fired for responding to media requests without management’s permission.

Amanda Lang did not respond to CANADALAND’s request for comment.

Our investigation reveals that:

1. Amanda Lang lobbied aggressively within the CBC to undermine Kathy Tomlinson’s reporting on the temporary foreign worker scandal at RBC, the largest financial institution in the country and a bank that has sponsored Lang's speeches or events where Lang spoke at least six times (1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6), for fees up to $15,000 per event. 

2. When Lang's attack on Tomlinson’s story behind the scenes failed, she tried instead to deflate it by welcoming RBC CEO Gord Nixon on to The National for a softball interview, in which he criticized the CBC's reporting and dismissed the scandal as trivial. During the interview Lang does not challenge Nixon, who just months before wrote a promotional blurb for the back cover of her book, The Power of Why.

3. Amanda Lang then took her campaign to the Globe and Mail, where she penned a dismissive opinion piece defending outsourcing and making light of the abuses at the heart of the RBC scandal.  The CBC would not confirm if Lang asked for permission to do this, as she is required to.

"The sideshow about hiring temporary foreign workers is just that – a sideshow." - Amanda Lang, Globe and Mail, April 12, 2013

4. Amanda Lang then took more of RBC's money as a paid speaker, even after she was made to cancel a speaking contract with iGate, a company contracted to RBC and implicated in the RBC scandal.

As you'll read in detail below, it's just as bad as it sounds: Lang didn't just align her own journalism in the interests of a corporate sponsor. She also meddled with the work of her colleagues.

Here’s how it all happened:

On April 6, 2013, eleven days after Amanda Lang spoke at an RBC-sponsored event, Kathy Tomlinson and her Go Public team exposed RBC for using an outsourcing firm to bring in temporary workers for its Canadian employees to train... in order to sack those Canadian employees and ship their jobs overseas.

It was, in time, a triumph for CBC News and its investigative journalism.

Tomlinson’s story would make headlines around the country, set off a national debate about corporate abuse of labour laws, draw a direct response from the Prime Minister, prompt legislative reforms to the government’s Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP) and win a Gold reporting award from the Canadian Association of Journalists.

And at first, CBC News treated it as the major story it was, reporting it aggressively on all platforms.  Here’s CBC host Christine Birak grilling an RBC executive on Sunday April 7, 2013 – one day after the story broke on CBC.ca. Birak is relentless, at one point telling the RBC exec that she’s “not really buying” her “semantics”.

The momentum continued that evening, with Kathy Tomlinson’s initial report as the lead story on The National.

According to CANADALAND’s sources, CBC newsrooms were readying that Monday morning to push the story hard on all platforms across the country.

In Ottawa, reporters prepared to chase the federal government for a response. In Vancouver, where Tomlinson is based, her team continued to seek RBC employees impacted by the outsourcing. In Toronto, CBC reporters readied questions to lob at RBC’s Bay Street headquarters.

Then, as CBC journalists across the country pulled in information to advance the story, they were summoned to a conference call with Kathy Tomlinson and, to their surprise: Amanda Lang.

CANADALAND spoke to three CBC employees who were on the conference call with Tomlinson and Lang.

Lang, they recall, relentlessly pushed to undermine the RBC story. She argued that RBC was in the right, that their outsourcing practices were “business as usual,” and that the story didn’t merit significant coverage. She and a defiant Tomlinson faced off in a tense, extended argument. Two of the CBC employees we spoke to recall a wave of frustrated hang-ups by participants.

“I cannot emphasize enough how wrong it was,” said one CBC employee we spoke to. “That another journalist, not involved in a story, would intervene in the reporting of others and question the integrity of her colleagues like that. I haven’t seen anything like it before or since.”

As another journalist recalls, “people hung up the phone and looked at each other with jaws agape. Everyone was asking ‘What just happened?’ We were directionless, we didn’t know whether to pursue the story any further. We didn’t know what was going on...”

Lang’s efforts to scuttle the story were successful, at first.

A third employee present says that shortly after the call, Tomlinson was dropped from a scheduled World at Six item on the RBC scandal without explanation.

At no point on the call did Lang disclose to her colleagues her financial relationship with RBC, our sources say.

Despite Lang’s efforts, the RBC story survived, due to the perseverance of Kathy Tomlinson and, CANADALAND is told, of Raj Ahluwalia, a senior producer at The National.

Raj Ahluwalia did not respond to requests for comment from CANADALAND.

Two of our sources attest to Ahluwalia’s courage in facing down Lang and championing Tomlinson’s reporting for the rest of the week. He marshaled follow-up reports on the scandal and worked diligently to assist CBC employees working on the story. His efforts, we are told, kept the story on The National.

Ahluwalia and Tomlinson would later win the Canadian Association of Journalists Award for Labour Reporting for their work on the story.

“Raj is a fantastic person,” praises one CBC source, “an incredible colleague and a journalist of the highest principle.”

But Raj Ahluwalia wasn’t the only person who could get segments on The National.

Later that day, Amanda Lang booked an interview with RBC CEO Gord Nixon. A long cut of the interview aired on her afternoon show, The Lang & O’Leary Exchange.

At the 4:34 mark of the interview, Nixon attacks Tomlinson’s journalism. “I know you're part of CBC,” he offers, “but I think the way the story was portrayed was very unfair and misleading, in that it left Canadians with the impression that we were hiring foreign workers to come in and take the jobs of Canadians.” Lang says nothing. She offers no defense for the journalism of her colleagues.

Lang’s interview with Nixon ran that night on The National, with Lang describing Nixon's talking points to Peter Mansbridge in terms so awkwardly glowing that TV critic John Doyle would later write in his Globe and Mail column that the “baffling” and “inane” segment could have been mocked wildly by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Despite Lang’s best efforts to downplay the scandal, the story had legs. Tomlinson’s follow-up work ran across the CBC.

So, Lang took her message away from the CBC. On April 12, she published an op-ed in the Globe and Mail, bashing the temporary foreign workers story as “a sideshow”.

An outraged colleague e-mailed Lang, urging her to apologize to Tomlinson and writing “I sincerely hope you never host [The National] when I file a story”. Lang’s colleague who sent the e-mail provided it to CANADALAND under the condition of anonymity and offering no further comment.

RBC soon reversed itself, buying full-page national newspaper ads to run an open letter from CEO Gord Nixon. Three days earlier he had denied to a credulous Amanda Lang that any Canadians had lost their jobs. Now he was publicly apologizing to 45 sacked local workers, promising to re-hire them and to be more “sensitive”. For Kathy Tomlinson, it was a complete vindication.

And what were the implications for Amanda Lang?

She lost a speaking gig.

It was revealed on the blog Creekside that Lang was scheduled to be the paid keynote speaker at an April 23 conference on outsourcing, which was sponsored by iGate, the very company at the heart of the scandal, the one that had the foreign worker contract with RBC.

Lang cancelled the keynote. According to CBC News Editor-in-Chief Jennifer McGuire, “there was the potential for at least a perceived conflict of interest.”

But if iGate sponsorship was a no-no, RBC sponsorship was not. Lang delivered a paid keynote two months later to an RBC-sponsored conference in Halifax, with management’s blessing.

Which begs the question, where is CBC management in all this?

Backing up their star.

While Lang would not respond to CANADALAND’s request for comment, CBC answered for her. Head of public affairs Chuck Thompson had the following to say in Lang’s defence.

Chuck: the conference call was “a robust journalistic debate” the kind which “occur on a regular basis inside CBC News and which we encourage”. 

Lang’s CBC colleague:

"How does Chuck Thompson know? He wasn't on the call. And as far as I know it wasn't recorded. Nobody from PR was on the call. No one has asked me about the nature of it. No one from management was on the call. I know two other people who were on the call and they haven't been asked about it. So how does Chuck know? Who did he ask? I don't know anyone who has been asked about it.

That's CBC management's MO. Look at what happened with the whole Q thing.

It was not a regular occurence. There were two things about (Lang's  involvement with the conference call) that were weird to me, that I've never seen before as a journalist. First, the person who was asking all the questions and raising the doubts had not been involved in the story. Amanda had never been involved in the story. Usually when you have a debate like that, it's between people involved in the story.

Second, nothing seemed to affect (Lang's) position. Every question she had, Kathy would bring up a fact or evidence and none of it meant anything to her. Her position never changed. I remember Kathy providing evidence to counter Lang’s one note opinion. I remember Kathy talking about all the public reaction we were getting on the story, and I remember Amanda saying that the public was wrong: that outsourcing was a good thing."

Chuck Thompson added, “we stand behind Amanda Lang as one of Canada's most respected business journalists.”

Postscript

The reporting of this story has been incredibly difficult for sources involved, who have risked their careers by providing information. One key source bravely provided on-the-record comments to CANADALAND. In a matter of minutes, these comments were rescinded.

CANADALAND will continue to report on the fallout from this story as necessary.

Please send relevant information to sean@canadalandshow.com

 

[The Bread Guy]

Calling a spade a spade? (highlights mine)

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says "a lot" of Radio-Canada employees "hate" conservative values.

Harper says those values that are loathed by many employees of CBC's French-language network are the same ones that he says are supported by a large number of Quebecers.

Harper made the comments during a French-language interview with Quebec City radio station FM93 Québec, conducted last Friday and aired today.

The comments about Radio-Canada came in response to a question about how Harper plans to convince Quebecers to vote for his party in the upcoming federal election.

He says he doesn't believe that voters in Quebec are predominantly left-leaning.

Rather, he says, Quebecers approve of the measures taken by his government: lowering taxes, staying tough on crime and cracking down on the threat of terrorism.

"I remain convinced that Quebecers are not leftists, contrary to the image conveyed by some media or the opposition parties," Harper says in the interview.

"I understand that there are many at Radio-Canada who hate these values, but I think that these values are the true values of a large percentage of Quebecers." ....

 

[Edward Campbell]

This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from Policy Optioins, is going to confirm the existing biases of several members here, but I find it interesting on two grounds:

    1. It's use of data; and

    2. It's method ~ which is, for me, novel.

Caveat lector: Ken Boessenkool was both a Reform Party insioder/operative and a policy advisor to prime Minister Harper; he's hardly unbiased, himself, as he points out near the end of the article..

http://policyoptions.irpp.org/2015/04/30/what-can-a-little-birdie-tell-us-about-the-parliamentary-press-gallery/

What can a little birdie tell us about the Parliamentary Press Gallery?
Ken Boessenkool

Blog post, April 30, 2015

Building on analyses that inferred ideological inclinations of think tanks and economists by examining Twitter followers, this analysis considers what social media suggests about an old question: Is the Parliamentary Press Gallery biased?

For as long as we’ve had media and political parties, the former has been accused of partisan bias by the latter. In both Canada and the US, those on the right often complain that the media has a “liberal bias” while those on the left complain of “corporate media” or “conservative bias.” Is there actually bias or is this just a story partisans tell themselves?

Social media sites and the big data they produce offer new, experimental ways to measure nebulous concepts like bias. I’ve tried to uncover signs of partisan bias in Canada’s Parliamentary Press Gallery using Twitter followers.

My analysis used an approach developed by Stephen Tapp that compares numbers of Twitter followers to infer the ideology of think tanks (Policy Options, January-February 2015). Tapp used the same approach to infer the ideology of economists (reported by Jason Kirby of Maclean’s magazine).

As followers are mostly X, with few Ys among them, there is a good chance A’s thinking, at least as expressed in tweets, is decidedly X. So an economist with more followers that match a “right-wing” think tank than followers that match a “left-wing” think tank might be inferred to be more right wing than left. Of course, there are caveats to which I will return below.

Tapp’s analysis suggests this methodology could be used to test for other biases — such as those of political journalists.

I turned to the official listing of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. I focused on journalists who I believe have reach outside the confines of Parliament Hill, so I ignored the Hill Times, iPolitics and CPAC. I also excluded foreign and Aboriginal correspondents and freelancers. I admit these are subjective decisions. Finally, I included only reporters and columnists with more than 5,000 Twitter followers, to keep the list manageable. I didn’t search every person on the list as it includes non-journalists like camera operators, so it is possible I overlooked someone who should be included. I am quite certain they will let me know.

Tapp’s approach requires two “anchor” Twitter accounts on opposing ends of the spectrum. I initially hoped to use the Twitter accounts of Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau as my anchors, but immediately ran into trouble because they have too many followers for Followerwonk to handle.

So I needed to find benchmarks with smaller but similar numbers of Twitter followers. Politwitter.ca publishes a useful ranking of Canadian MPs by twitter followers that was helpful in my analysis. Other than the selection of MPs with similar numbers of followers, the choices are also subjective. I have no doubt others would, and will, make different choices. The required data crunching is not difficult.

Tapp’s article describes the details, but essentially how it works is that you look for Twitter followers of the Conservatives who do not also follow the Liberals (they are deemed “Conservative” followers), and followers of the Liberals who do not also follow the Conservatives (“Liberal” followers). Then you look at each reporter’s Twitter account and compare his or her relative percentages of Conservative versus Liberal followers. The difference between the two is a measure of the reporters’ inferred partisanship.

Figures 1 and 2 illustrate the approach using Michelle Rempel and Ralph Goodale as our Conservative and Liberal anchors and comparing their followers with those of journalists Joan Bryden and Jason Fekete.

In the comparison with Joan Bryden (figure 1), Rempel has 9,418 unique followers and Goodale has 9,534 unique followers. The two of them share 1,137 followers. Joan Bryden shares 699 followers with Michelle Rempel and 1,274 followers with Ralph Goodale. When we adjust for the fact that Goodale has more overall followers than Rempel, we see that Bryden has an 11.5 percent overlap with Rempel and a 19.8 percent overlap with Goodale. The difference is 8.3, which is Bryden’s “Liberal” partisanship score. Using the same calculations (figure 2) produces a 12.0 percent- “Conservative” partisanship score for Jason Fekete (a size-adjusted 21.3 percent of his followers’ overlap with Rempel minus the 9.3 percent overlap with Goodale).

Figure 3 shows the full press gallery analysis using Michelle Rempel as the Conservative anchor and Ralph Goodale as the Liberal anchor. Both Rempel and Goodale are active partisans for their respective parties. Goodale has a higher rank within the Liberal caucus than Rempel does within the Conservative caucus, but they have similar numbers of followers and both have built their Twitter networks largely through politics.

The Rempel versus Goodale graph skews heavily Liberal and both tails of the distribution have a number of scores above 5. Jason Fekete’s unusually high Conservative score is undoubtedly due to his having recently worked in Calgary (at the Calgary Herald) — the city from which Rempel hails.

To ensure that these results are not due to things that are unique to Rempel and Goodale, I repeated this exercise two more times with different (subjective) choices for Conservative and Liberal anchors.

In my second analysis, I used James Moore as my benchmark Conservative and Marc Garneau as my benchmark Liberal (figure 4). Moore and Garneau might be expected to have a fairly large crossover of followers (both partisan and otherwise) beacause of the former being a prominent economic minister (Industry) and the latter having a loyal following due to his former prominence as a Canadian astronaut.

Unlike the Rempel versus Goodale comparison, the Moore versus Garneau graph evenly splits reporters into left and right: 20 fall to the left and 19 to the right. And, other than outlier Hannah Thibedeau on the left, few reporters have scores above 5 (a score of 5 would indicate that 5 percent more of the reporter’s followers matched those of Moore or Garneau — but not the other).

In my third comparison I used Lisa Raitt as my Conservative anchor and Scott Brison as my Liberal anchor (figure 5). Again, the graph skews heavily Liberal, though the average scores, particularly on the Conservative side, are below 5.

If you compare the rank order of various reporters, you find that Chris Hall, Tim Harper, Hannah Thibedeau, Terry Milewski, Glen McGregor and Aaron Wherry rank in the Liberal top third across all three comparisons, while Paul Vieira, David Akin, Vassy Kapelos and Jason Fekete rank in the Conservative top third across all three comparisons. Laura Payton, Robert Fife, Tonda MacCharles and John Ibbitson are all in the middle third for all three comparisons.

Finally, I wanted to combine these three comparisons into a single measure. The correlations between the rankings of two of the three pairings were reasonably high: 0.790 between Moore/Garneau and Raitt/Brison; 0.716 between Raitt/Brison and Rempel/Goodale; but only 0.353 between Moore/Garneau and Rempel/Goodale.

I tried a number of different ways of combining the three scores and found the results were very closely correlated, and so I settled on adding up the numbers of overlapping followers for each of the comparisons and rescoring each member. For each journalist I added up the unique shared followers with Moore, Rempel and Raitt to get their Conservative score. Clearly this will result in some double counting — for example, if someone followed Moore, Raitt and Rempel but not Garneau, Goodale or Brison, this would add 3 on the Conservative side and 0 on the Liberal side when a pure score would be only 1. Still, it would be the same problem on both sides of the spectrum, so while the raw score might not be pure, the order of magnitude should be indicative.

I also compared average scores across the three comparisons. The graph was virtually identical to the result of using the previous methodology, with only one change in rank order — Terry Milewski and Michael Den Tandt switch rank order. And the correlation between the two was 0.99.

The resulting graph (figure 6) shows a strong Liberal skew with the following press gallery members scoring above 5 on the Liberal side:

Hannah Thibedeau, CBC (17.6)

Tim Harper, Toronto Star (16.0)

Chris Hall, CBC (13.7)

Joan Bryden, Canadian Press (13.6)

Terry Milewski, CBC (11.4)

Michael Den Tandt, National Post (11.1)

Allison Crawford, CBC (11.3)

Julie Van Dusen, CBC (10.6)

Aaron Wherry, Maclean’s (9.9)

Stephen Maher, National Post (9.5)

Glen McGregor, Ottawa Citizen (9.0)

Althia Raj, Huffington Post (7.6)

Rosemary Barton, CBC (5.9)

Kathleen Harris, CBC (5.8 )

Heather Scoffield, Canadian Press (5.7)

Laura Payton, CBC (5.4)

And the following scoring about 5 on the Conservative side:

Jason Fekete, Ottawa Citizen (16.9)

Vassy Kapelos, Global TV (11.1)

David Akin, Sun TV (9.1)

Paul Vieira, Wall Street Journal (6.1)

Among Liberals we have reporters and columnists from a number of media properties, with a preponderance from the CBC. Among Conservatives, two made their living reporting on politics in the Conservative heartland of Alberta before moving to Ottawa, one works for the Conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal and the other was recently a journalist at the now defunct, Conservative-leaning TV station Sun News Network.

Before you draw your own conclusions, it is worth asking how well this methodology measures partisanship. I consider myself a devoted Harper Conservative and my scores on the various indexes (I admittedly have only 1,646 Twitter followers) came out as follows:

Moore/Garneau: 24.5 Conservative

Rempel/Goodale: 31.9 Conservative

Raitt/Brison: 12.1 Conservative

Total score: 67.5 Conservative

So before any reporter thinks they have been outed as a hard-core partisan, I would note that no score comes close to that of someone who actually is.

And while this is an interesting tool based on a valid insight, it’s not hard to imagine how factors other than partisan affinity might result in a heavy skew in a reporter’s followership. Remember when Terry Milewski was driving the Chrétien Liberals nuts? I’m pretty sure that if Twitter had existed then, his follower numbers would have leaned Conservative, or at least much more Conservative than they do now. Why? Not ideological or partisan affinity, but simple confirmation bias (such as “I always knew Chrétien is an XXX and Milewski’s proving it!”).

This is not entirely speculative. Remember that the theoretical underpinnings of the “birds of a feather flock together” argument are psychological: the fact that we enjoy having our ideological or partisan identities supported and dislike having them challenged, and therefore tend to seek out those sources that deliver, is merely one variety of the broader phenomenon of confirmation bias.

And there is also location bias: Jason Fekete and Vassy Kapelos were based in Alberta prior to moving to the Parliamentary  Press Gallery — and this undoubtedly resulted in their having more followers similar to Conservatives in general and Michelle Rempel in particular. And it would make sense that Marc Garneau would have larger overlaps with Quebec-based, or French-language, reporters.

I have no doubt that others will do their best to come up with other biases. Still, I think these rankings, while clearly imperfect, are quite interesting.

I have no opinion comments, but there are several hyperlinks in the original which are worth a look and may persuade some of you one way or the other.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Yes more chicanery in the CBC, this time it's Evan Solomon who has been let go due to breaching the "code of ethics" (loose though it must be).

There are some wonderful people and programmes on CBC: Mary Hynes and Tapestry, Eleanor Wachtel  and Writers and Company and Paul Kennedy and Ideas to name just three, but most of CBC, ALL of CBC TV, is a waste of bandwidth.

 

[jollyjacktar]

I won't miss him.  I was getting tired of his biased reporting and it's good to see him smacked down.  Especially if he was playing all Mike Duffy with feathering his nest.

 

[The Bread Guy]

A bit of commentary on the latest CBC staff "changes" ....
"Canadian public broadcaster's crisis: 'When you create celebrities, you create monsters' "

 

[Kirkhill]

A bit of commentary on the latest CBC staff "changes" ....
"Canadian public broadcaster's crisis: 'When you create celebrities, you create monsters' "

Gutted by a conservative government and forced to emphasize ‘host culture’ over content,

:rofl: :crybaby: :stars: ???

I feel Harper's pain.  Round our house everything is my fault. 

 

[jollyjacktar]

Yours too, eh?  I think its universal.

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

A bit of commentary on the latest CBC staff "changes" ....
"Canadian public broadcaster's crisis: 'When you create celebrities, you create monsters' "

This is one of the most hypocritial articles I've read in a long while. The CBC has been producing "celebrities" (if we can call them that....) since long before the CPC took over. Don Cherry, Ron McLean, Rick Mercer, Mary Walsh, knowlton Nash, the Air Farce people, Brian Williams, Lloyd Robertson, etc etc etc.

I can see no way that Jian ghomeshi enjoying rough sex/sexual assault (alleged) and Evan Solomon using his position in Ottawa to sell art work can be blamed on cuts to the CBC. The fact is that TV as a whole is personality and celebrity driven, regardless of public vs private network. The popularity of a show/person is what drives celebrity, which in turn drives ratings, which in turns drives salary.

CBC just needs to admit that 2 of its employees made mistakes and move on... begging for more money is shallow and sad.

 

[jollyjacktar]

This is one of the most hypocritial articles I've read in a long while. The CBC has been producing "celebrities" (if we can call them that....) since long before the CPC took over. Don Cherry, Ron McLean, Rick Mercer, Mary Walsh, knowlton Nash, the Air Farce people, Brian Williams, Lloyd Robertson, etc etc etc.

I can see no way that Jian ghomeshi enjoying rough sex/sexual assault (alleged) and Evan Solomon using his position in Ottawa to sell art work can be blamed on cuts to the CBC. The fact is that TV as a whole is personality and celebrity driven, regardless of public vs private network. The popularity of a show/person is what drives celebrity, which in turn drives ratings, which in turns drives salary.

CBC just needs to admit that 3 of its employees made mistakes and move on... begging for more money is shallow and sad.

FTFY.  Otherwise, pretty much bang on.

 

[The Bread Guy]

I can see no way that Jian ghomeshi enjoying rough sex/sexual assault (alleged) and Evan Solomon using his position in Ottawa to sell art work can be blamed on cuts to the CBC.

Or the other way around, for that matter ....

 

[Pusser]

I can see no way ... [that] Evan Solomon using his position in Ottawa to sell art work can be blamed on cuts to the CBC.

Unless of course the cuts led to a reduction in salary that meant he needed to sell artwork in order to put food on the table.  Did he take in laundry and boarders as well?

 

[Edward Campbell]

The American journalist AJ Liebling said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

It's actually an important principle. The media, the journalists, are nothing special; they have no special role to hold politicians to account and so forth. In fact, another wit, one who did own the presses, quipped that the only role of journalists is to fill up the empty white spaces between the advertisements.

But, and there's always a 'but,' isn't there? the media does have an important role in a free society: it gives us 'access' into our political, legal, social and economic processes, and, ideally, informs us about them and the issues of the day.

I think, however, that it's important to separate what Ezra Levant does, infotainment and what e.g. David Akin and Mercedes Stephenson do, reporting. (I will use those two as examples, again, because they know some of us, here on Army.ca, and some of us know them either person ally or professionally.) I think Prof Macfarlane's definition of "freedom of the press," the press, the Akins and Stephensons of the world, being 'free' from government control (but not from government influence, which is why government's a have e.g. press secretaries and communications directors and so on) is adequate. Freedom of the press does not apply to e.g. Ezra Levant; he's not in the 'press' business; he's a 21st century version of the 16th and 17th century pamphleteers.

The media, in truth, has no right of access to politicians. But, Prof Macfarlane challenges politicians to use or exploit the media in order to influence us by answering the tough questions. So, I don't think he's actually contradicting himself.

But: I will repeat that I think M. Trudeau is uncomfortable with hard questions; my guess is that he is a very, very nice, personable young man with an adequate brain, but he lacks depth or "bottom" as the Brits would say, in policy. Lightweight was the word I used and I stick with it. If that's true then his campaign team's strategy of ignoring hard questions and, now, ignoring one whole media agency, is a good one. The press is still as 'free' as it ever was, but M. Trudeau is not answering.

It's no secret, I hope, that I am not a big fan of the media ~ with a few notable exceptions ~ and that the rise of infotainment and shouting heads (vs the "talking heads" of an earlier generation) actually frightens me because I suspect that 95% of Canadians get 95% of their political/socio-economic information, such as it is, from far, far less than credible sources.

It should also be not secret that I believe that we, Canadians, are heavily influenced by American social trends and our media tends to follow the US model slavishly ~ when, for example, CNN started have news anchors stand up the mindless, witless CBC followed suit, blindly. Why? No one knows ... but if the big boys are doing it then it must be right, right? I don't blame Stephen Harper for making Canada more conservative. In my considered opinion America became more conservative, for a whole variety of (not very good) reasons and Canada, being Canada, saw and followed ... for equally not very good reasons. All Stephen Harper did was recognized the direction in which the mob was headed and, as Ralph Klein advised, he jumped out in front and led it.

This article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail is about Donald Trump and the US media, but we can already see some of the same things in Canada, including Stephen Harper's disdain for the parliamentary press gallery and his equal disdain  for hard facts when analogies better suit his purpose:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/donald-trumps-candidacy-is-a-case-study-in-the-anxious-state-of-contemporary-media/article25964895/

Donald Trump’s candidacy is a case study in the anxious state of contemporary media

SIMON HOUPT
The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Aug. 14, 2015

Donald Trump isn’t even the President of the United States yet, and already he’s achieved what both Barack Obama and George W. Bush pledged but failed to do: Be a uniter, not a divider. Last week, before he bellowed and stomped his way through the first Republican candidates’ debate on Fox News, a New York Times story described Trump as “the first post-policy candidate” (and not in a nice way). That view has been mirrored by The Weekly Standard – the standard-bearer of American conservatism and, in many respects, the polar opposite of the Times – which has inveighed against Trump in a series of columns, each one more incredulous than the last at his success.

And yet the developer-slash-fired-Apprentice-host seems impervious to challenges, emboldened even, by the attacks. (Trump’s rise will prompt a knowing nod from any Canadian parent familiar with the books of Robert Munsch, whose classic tale The Boy in the Drawer is about a young girl who discovers a pint-sized boy making a mess in her room; every time she insults the troublemaker, he gets bigger.)

There are plenty of reasons Trump seems to be so popular, some of which have to do with poor polling and the power of reality TV. Still, his seeming resilience is unnerving many in the media, and not just because they’re in uncharted territory.

Last weekend, after Trump telephoned in to CNN to carp about a question he got during the debate from the Fox News star Megyn Kelly (he told CNN’s Don Lemon, “She had blood coming out of her… wherever,” a seemingly anti-female comment that the Weekly Standard noted “might end any other presidential campaign”), Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, was forced to call Trump to de-escalate the growing feud. Even though the channel has been one of the most powerful forces in American politics over the past 20 years, it was Ailes who had to take a knee lest the rabble get too roused.

In the two months since Trump announced his candidacy, pundits have twisted themselves in knots trying to understand and explain his appeal; he is a Rorschach blot in a bad hairpiece.

But what the media are really talking about when they talk about Donald Trump is themselves. Because his candidacy is a case study in the anxious state of contemporary media.

His appeal raises hard questions: about clickbait versus quality journalism, and whether the two are mutually exclusive; about bias and fairness; about polls; about outrage journalism; about the little-examined role that class plays in media; about journalistic integrity; about whether the media – even the media outlets that position themselves as the true voices of real people – are actually in touch with real people.

Ultimately, Trump’s so-far-bulletproof appeal presents an existential challenge to America’s news media – both individually, as in the case of Fox News’s craven caving to his complaints about Kelly – and collectively. Because if he does manage to succeed, in spite of the right-to-left array of outlets that are applying increasing scrutiny to him and his, er, checkered record and lack of interest in facts – what does that mean about the efficacy of journalism?

Trump’s animus toward journalism is well documented, and on regular display. He praises reporters who praise him, belittle those who do not bow down, sues those who really get under his skin.

Some outlets have tried to inoculate themselves by making their biases part of the coverage. Last month, the Huffington Post declared it would no longer legitimize him by covering him in its Politics section. “Trump’s campaign is a sideshow. We won’t take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you’ll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.”

If it was an odd move by an online outlet – which is usually accessed through social media, where such taxonomic tags are irrelevant – it pointed up the ways in which outlets fall over Trump’s tripwires even when they try to avoid them. Most (but not all) of HuffPo’s Trump coverage is, indeed, published under its Entertainment section banner, but it’s reported by the outlet’s Politics staff.

Meanwhile, other outlets seem to be adopting the candidate’s own shrugging indifference to facts: Though Trump already sat for a two-part 60-minute chat this week with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, in a press release NBC trumpeted its Trump interview on this Sunday’s Meet the Press as an “exclusive.”

Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser who was asked about his erstwhile boss’s habit of fudging the facts, told Bloomberg Politics this week: “The country needs a cheerleader,” as if pompoms were the enemies of facts. He added: “The conventional rules of politics – so far at least – do not apply to Donald Trump, and it’s an exciting thing.”

Trump isn’t the first politician to use the media as a whipping boy to raise himself up. (Indeed, a few are on the Canadian campaign trail as we speak.) But he is far more than that: He is pure id, with no interest in journalism or its basic role of holding powerful people to account. He is the electoral equivalent of the yahoos who harass female reporters by yelling the vulgar phrase known as “FHRITP.” Like them, Trump sees the media as one big goof. So far, at least, many in the media are content to prove him right.

Now I don't care about Donald Trump, I wouldn't even care much if he became POTUS ~ he couldn't be that much worse than either Hillary Clinton or Rick Perry, could he? But I do care about what Simon Houpt appears to fear: a media that is unable to define itself thanks to being unable to answer "hard questions: about clickbait versus quality journalism, and whether the two are mutually exclusive; about bias and fairness; about polls; about outrage journalism; about the little-examined role that class plays in media; about journalistic integrity; about whether the media – even the media outlets that position themselves as the true voices of real people – are actually in touch with real people."

Some journalists, and I don't mind naming e.g. reporters like David Akin and Mercedes Stephenson and commentators/analysis like John Ibbitson have real "points of view" on issues but they try to present honest appraisals of the situation, even then they must report or comment on things with they (seem to) disagree. But too many journalists and too many media outlets, as Simon Houpt says, "have tried to inoculate themselves by making their biases part of the coverage."

The media, including individual journalists, have an important political role: they gather and sort information that we need to have and then they present it to us in, we hope, a useful and accurate form so that can make our own judgments about who we want to represent us in parliament and in the world. Buffoons like Donald Trump make the media less able to be responsible; politicians like Trump encourage journalists to include their biases in their reporting ~ and some (too many) don't need much encouraging. I am persuaded that this phenomenon will continue to spread in Canada, too. But: don't blame Stephen Harper and don't even blame the media ~ look in the mirror, it is we who copy the Americans, no one forces American culture on to us.

 

[Brad Sallows]

>The media, including individual journalists, have an important political role: they gather and sort information that we need to have and then they present it to us in, we hope, a useful and accurate form so that can make our own judgments

The "media" can have that role*, but many today choose not to because big prizes - presidencies and prime ministerships for a journalists's preferred faction - are at stake.  I stopped accepting "editorial policy" as an excuse for spiking unhelpful evidence while promulgating misleading misinformation years ago, which is why I despise most media today.  There is more honesty and insight in the informal media today, if you have the wit and will to find it.

*"Explanatory" journalism pamphleteering not included.

 

[Jed]

>The media, including individual journalists, have an important political role: they gather and sort information that we need to have and then they present it to us in, we hope, a useful and accurate form so that can make our own judgments

The "media" can have that role*, but many today choose not to because big prizes - presidencies and prime ministerships for a journalists's preferred faction - are at stake.  I stopped accepting "editorial policy" as an excuse for spiking unhelpful evidence while promulgating misleading misinformation years ago, which is why I despise most media today.  There is more honesty and insight in the informal media today, if you have the wit and will to find it.

*"Explanatory" journalism pamphleteering not included.

Exactly

 

[ModlrMike]

>The media, including individual journalists, have an important political role: they gather and sort information that we need to have and then they present it to us in, we hope, a useful and accurate form so that can make our own judgments

The "media" can have that role*, but many today choose not to because big prizes - presidencies and prime ministerships for a journalists's preferred faction - are at stake.  I stopped accepting "editorial policy" as an excuse for spiking unhelpful evidence while promulgating misleading misinformation years ago, which is why I despise most media today.  There is more honesty and insight in the informal media today, if you have the wit and will to find it.

*"Explanatory" journalism pamphleteering not included.

As I've said before, the public is by and large stupid, lazy, and greedy. The legacy media counts on the first two, politicians on all three.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

I know it's The Rebel and Ezra Levant, but knowing unions and their tactics, he may be onto something.

http://www.therebel.media/_shocking_journalists_union_is_registered

Related Article: http://metanoodle.blogspot.ca/2015/08/the-journalists-reporting-on-our.html

August 14, 2015

"SHOCKING": Journalists' union is registered to campaign in the federal election

Ezra Levant
Rebel Commander


I talk a lot about Canada's "Media Party," but even I couldn't believe what I saw when I was researching "third party campaigns" on the Elections Canada website.

Those are the groups who aren't political parties, but who want to spend money campaigning and running ads in Canadian elections.

Mostly these are the usual big left wing labour unions, but this time one name stuck out:

The Canadian Media Guild.

That's the union representing 6000 journalists, many of whom work for the CBC, TVO and other outlets.

So while Guild members are "objectively" reporting on the federal election, their union is campaigning in it -- and for typical left wing causes, of course.

(snipped)

 

[Acorn]

Look to the British press if you want to see where it ends up. Every news outlet has a definable political stance. There is no neutral.

 

[ModlrMike]

Look to the British press if you want to see where it ends up. Every news outlet has a definable political stance. There is no neutral.

I think we could live with that. It's the pretense of impartiality that gets me.

 

[Edward Campbell]

I think we could live with that. It's the pretense of impartiality that gets me.

:ditto:  I expect the media to be somewhat biased. Journalists are (ought to be) smart people; smart people are (ought to be) opinionated; smart, honest people can report the facts and still let their opinions shine through in an appropriate manner.

I do not agree that the role of the media is to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," as some journalists seem to believe, any more than I agree that all journalists do is "fill up the white spaces between the ads," as some media moguls think. I think journalists ought to have opinions but they ought to know how and when and where to express them without distorting the information they are presenting to an interested public.