Reading the Goose Guts

The Supreme Court just sent the Harper government a message: don't waste your time tightening juvenile crime laws unless you're willing to make prosecutors work harder to prove that the li'l buggers deserve no breaks.

They're still cursed.

Billy Penn is just messin' with the Flyers.

Hillary: The Last Ten Days

This has been posted at a number of my favorite blogs, including Enjoy Every Sandwich. IKf I wasn't such a technopeasant I'd know how to embed the YouTube image in the blog page. But I don't, so click the link.
It's probably the funniest satire to come out of the 2008 campaign so far, but does have lots of dirty words so govern yourself accordingly.

Keith Martin on Human Rights Commission Censorship

From a scrum today in the House of Commons foyer


Question:
What did you think of the Justice Department's intervention on the Canadian Human Rights Act, Section 13?

Keith Martin:
Well, I was very disappointed with the Justice Department intervention. I think they made a significant error. They were confusing hate crimes with the stated intent of the Human Rights Commission which is -- particularly Section 13-1 which refers to dealing with statements that are made that could offend a group of people. In the Justice Committee's -- in the Justice Department's missive, they spoke a lot about hate crimes but they also spoke about the issue of writing things that could offend people so they were very confusing in their submission and I think it'll be wonderful if the Justice Committee here in Parliament actually does a public examination of the Canadian -- Canada Human Rights Commission. That's what I've written to the Justice Committee to do and I hope that the Justice Committee members have a public hearing on the Canada Human Rights Commission so that those who are for it and those who are against the status quo will have their day to express their views on the Commission which I think that the Canada Human Rights Commission has gone far beyond and away from what its original mandate was intended to be.

Question:
Were you shocked to find out that the Justice Department's own filings said truth and fair comment are no defence?

Keith Martin:
Well, there were a lot of things in the Justice Department's missive which I find absolutely shocking. Not only that but about blithely talking about restrictions on freedom of expression. That has absolutely nothing to do with hate crimes, nothing to do with hate crimes and nothing to do with hate speech whatsoever. So the Justice Department's missive really was a trampling of basic human rights, human rights that are enshrined in our Charter and I was very disturbed by their intervention. So I'm hoping that our Justice Committee actually reviews the Commission and hopefully they'll be able to -- that we'll be able to bring in members from the Justice Department to be able to account for their statements.

Question:
The first thing that happened when you raised the issue of repealing Section 13-1 of the Human Rights Act was you were linked with white supremacists and you were out there for people to support the KKK. Do you think the Conservative government is afraid to even touch this issue because they're afraid of being associated with the same thing?

Keith Martin:
I think Mr. Harper has told Mr. Nicholson, our Justice Minister, to put a muzzle on their MPs. But the Conservative MPs, as many members in my caucus, have expressed deep concerns about where the Canada Human Rights Commission has gone. They have expressed a great deal of support for my motion to remove Section 13-1 from the Act. And I think that's a fair thing to do would be to have this out and open. Have a public hearing through the Justice Committee and televise it so that Canadians coast to coast can hear those who believe that the status quo is acceptable and those of us who believe that the Human Rights Act has to be amended to ensure that we have freedom of speech because in my view freedom of speech is being trampled in Canada right now.

Question:
What are the chances that the Justice Committee will take a look at this because they've been a pretty dysfunctional committee up until now?

Keith Martin:
I think -- I've spoken to members on the Justice Committee and there's a great deal of support across party lines to deal with this because members on the Justice Committee recognize that the removal of Section 13-1 and an investigation of the Canada Human Rights Commission is in support of that fundamental human right, the right to freedom of speech. And they recognize that it is our responsibility to defend this right, a right that Canadians bled for and fought for over two world wars and that it is our responsibility in this House of Commons to defend that right.

Question:
Now at the very end of the Justice Department brief it talks about how the law is settled as if to even inquire about this or to take it up to go to the Supreme Court again would be an abuse of process. What do you think of that?

Keith Martin:
Well, laws can be changed and the Human Rights Commission, Canada Human Rights Commission came about at a time with very laudable goals. The goals were to ensure that people had recourse if they were being discriminated against, against employment -- in employment or in housing. Those are laudable goals that we embrace and fully support but over time their actions and mandate have changed and some of the actions that they've been taking of late have been very disturbing I think to a lot of us and to a lot of Canadians. So that's why I put forth the motion to remove Section 13-1 but I think taking it to the Justice Committee, having a public and televised assessment of the proceedings, having an examination of the Canada Human Rights Act and the Commission will serve the Canadian public and serve the fundamental rights that are the pillars of our democracy.

Question:
Whatare you going to be also -- hope that the Justice Committee will invest some of their abuse of process as well, for instance the way they handle evidence, their allegations of (inaudible) going on line to entrap people and make (inaudible) comments themselves that are hateful, the whole idea that you're guilty until proven innocent. It's almost like a reverse of the judgment. Are you going to take a look at that if you're successful in getting this (inaudible) committee?

Keith Martin:
All these things are very disturbing and that's why I'm bringing this up so that we can take a look at the Canada Human Rights Act and also the Canada Human Rights Commission and the committee is a master of its own destiny. It will do what it feels it should do and it's up to the members. But I'm almost certain that they will take a look at all of those and do a very profound dissection of the Canada Human Rights Commission, of what they're doing, of what they're not doing in the defence of the true rights of our country.

Comment moderation

Now that the krazee who was posting crap on the blog and sending me psycho e-mails has either fled or been moved to a ward without Internet privileges, I can take comment moderation off.
I'll give it a try, anyway.

Bugs

Neil Young may have a spider named after him, but I'd rather be John Coltrane:




This is Coltraneae oufenensis.

(NT: National Newswatch; Picture: Extinctions Fossils Ltd.)

The pot examines the kettle

The Toronto Star's David Olive looks at the New York Times and finds bad management, lack of imagination and intellectual stagnation.
Read the piece and replace "Times" with "Star".

Last week, the TorStar hit yet another 52-week low, fuelled by what one poster called a "capitulation trade", a huge (for this stock, as a 100,000 share day is the norm) offer of 500,000 shares at the bottom of the market. Yes, someone threw in the towel, believing the Star's situation was going to get worse, not better.

If you want an example of dumb thinking, nepotism, bad judgment and poor use of journalistic staff, you certainly don't have to go to New York. All four Toornto English dailies suffer from those malaise, and there's very little likelihood of improvement until the proprietors, present and future, are rattled enough to look inside the newsrooms and the executive suites and separate some sheep from some goats.
Unfortunately, the proprietors of the papers aren't any smarter than their employees or their expertise is somewhere other than newspapers.
The questions: why do the best and brightest young hires pay with their jobs in recessions while the deadweight, the wimps, the newsroom politicians, the dinosaurs and the huge bureaucracies of unproductive sub and assisting editors survive, age and entrench? In what other industries do such under-performing and non-productive executives hang on, year after year, while the equity of the company evaporates?

My prediction: the recession and the bankers will sort it all out. Toronto will end up with two or three very good newspapers owned by newspaper companies. And you won't get free local news on the Internet, if the owners have any clue at all about what they're selling.

David Warren Watch

For those of you who were amazed at Ottawa Citizen columnist David Warren's piece on the state of newspapers, here's today's offering on Mother's Day/Pentacost, Or something. See if you can make heads or tails of it.*

Read it with your best fake English accent.

Canwest stock hit another 52-week low this week, but there's always room for David Warren on the payroll. And Janice Kennedy. And a whole whack of other people who can barely function in society, let alone enlighten any other person.






*I must confess, I could not actually read it all the way through. I did try. It is too early, I have not had enough coffee, and well, life is short. I will give an autographed copy of my last Great Lakes shipwreck book to anyone who can actually get through the mess and give me 100 words on what it's about.
E-mail submissions to mbourrie@yahoo.com or post them as comments.

Toronto the Good

Friends, especially those in the media, marvel at how, since I was 24, I've avoided living and working in the media capital of Canada. I save this kind of headline for those brief coversations. (When they ignore that reality, I toss in the cost of living and the sheer ugliness of the place).

AIDS Fundraiser honored

It's imporant to recognize talent and community service. Hopefully, she'll make the ROB Magazine' Top 40 Under 40 next year.

Sell, sell, sell...

Izzy's legacy hits another 52-week low. It's still above the all-time low of about $3.40 set in 2003, but not by much..

TorStar falls through the $13 level (off 2004 high of $30), hits modern low, does dead cat bounce back above $13.

Should we be scared?

Having been to Foleyet, I know there are no medical services of any note within seventy miles. And people do get sick and die on trains. So what is going on?
The authorities are acting like this is a SARS-type case.
Definitely a story that needs answers.

UPDATE:

Looks like a case of "better safe than sorry", which was the best way to handle it.

He haunts is still: the Mafia hitman who plays politics

Let me tell ya a story.

Long ago, back in 1984, two vermin from a Montreal crime family decided to go freelance and brought a big bag of cocaine to Toronto. Vic Cotroni, the don of Montreal, put out a contract on these two clowns. Real Simard, a full-time Cotroni hit man, went to Toronto to take care of it.
The victims, guys named Heroux and Hetu, were ambushed in the old Seaway Hotel, out on the lakeshore. Heroux died immediately. Hetu took three slugs in the head but survived.
Hetu recovered, cut a deal with the RCMP, and was given help under the witness protection program. The cops picked up Simard and tagged him with six hits, with many more -- perhaps well into the double-digits -- suspected.
Here's where things start getting weird.
Hetu was given a new name and sent to live in a Francophone enclave in Central Ontario. I'd sometimes see him walking around with that big scar on his face but I didn't know who he was until he started molesting children. He was arrested and, it turned out, continued to collect money from the feds in the years in which he was awaiting trial. I covered the case for the Globe and Mail and, later, the Toronto Star. His defence? Simard's bullets had scrambled his brain. Hetu has since done his time. It would be interesting to see if the Mounties are still looking after him.
Simard, the hit man, cut a deal, too. He ratted out Vic Controni in return for his charges being dropped to manslaughter. Simard was given a really nice cell, with a great view, exercise equipment, state of the art audio-visual system, the works.
By 1994, he was out. I heard he was living at Jay's Peak, in Vermont. How in the world he got into the States legally is beyond me. And he's been seen many times around Montreal, even running into Cotroni a couple of times before the old crook pegged out eight years ago. Yet he remains unslain. Go figure.
But the story's not over yet. Just after his release, stories, certainly untrue, circulated that he had a crush on Sheila Copps and was organizing the Eastern Townships for her prospective leadership run. After a few years in the community, Simard was picked up for welfare fraud and had to fight like hell to keep from having his parole revoked and being sent back to prison.
Today, I received an e-mail from Prime Minister's Office press guy Dimitri Soudas with a reprint of a November, 2000 piece by Michel Vastel, presumably in the Journal de Montreal that talks about Simard's work as a campaign worker for Bloc Quebecois candidate Nik LeBlanc in the suburban Montreal riding of Verdun.
Gotta love Quebec. Only a province like that could produce a Hetu, a Simard, a Central Casting-style Mafia boss like Cotroni, an outfit like the Bloc, and Dimitri.
Distinct society indeed.

Today's nugget

Can Maclean's and Ezra Levant use the Alberta Press Act Reference as a precendent to show provincial regulation of the press via Human Rights legislation is ultra vires?
I'm researching Oliver Mowat Biggar, who represented the SoCred side (and lost). The Aberhart government essentially wanted to establish a press censorship system. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that regulation of the accuracy of the press was a federal responsibility.
The Wikipedia entry is sparse. The real meat is in the Supreme Court decision that's linked.

Pile this on top of the Charter arguments and I suspect the provincial Human Rights complaints would be tossed.

Zap!

I read Maclean's magazine's very convincing piece on why the Leafs suck. I, too, blame it on the fans.
But while visiting Laurier House the other night, I hazarded to consult Mackenzie King's crystal ball (yes, tourists, it's in the third-floor study for public display. Laurier House is on Laurier Street about four blocks east of the University of Ottawa). The ball showed me interesting things: two previously unidentified sports curses.
The first, The Curse of Stafford Smythe, was placed on the Leafs by Smythe as he lay dying of a bleeding ulcer in 1971. Smythe was up on charges of income tax evasion and looting Maple Leaf Gardens. He was only 50 years old. The ball says Smythe, whose visceral hatred of the Leafs showed itself in 1968, when he fired Punch Imlach (Imlach laid a powerful pre-curse at that time) put a hex on the Leafs, the terms of which were that the Leafs would not win a Stanley Cup while Harold Ballard was alive. The curse would have been lifted at Ballard's death in 1990, but, instead, was supercharged by Yolanda Ballard, who hexed a Lanny MacDonald action figure and surreptitiously buried it near the creek at the back of Ballard's Thunder Bay Beach cottage. Yolanda, who had been Harold's sin-eater and punching bag, was cheated by Ballard's will. The curse will expire when a statue of Yolanda is erected in plain sight in Maple Leaf Gardens.
The Ottawa Senators, according to the crystal ball (and remember, this ball won six federal elections), were cursed by the ghost of One-Eyed Frank McGee. McGee, a member of the Ottawa Silver Seven, scored 14 goals in a Stanley Cup final, a record that is unlikely to be broken anytime soon. The game was held Feb. 7, 1905, at the old arena near the corner of Bank and Gladstone streets in what is now a seedy part of downtown Ottawa but was, back then, on the outskirts of town.
One-Eyed Frank somehow got into the army during World War I and was killed at the Battle of the Somme. Frank McGee apparently cursed any Ottawa hockey team that falsely claimed a link to, or ownership of, the Stanley Cup championships of the Ottawa Silver Seven and the original Ottawa Senators. That hex was automatically attached to the Palladium/Corel Centre/Scotiabank Place/Ugly Arena in the Car Lots.
The only way to lift the curse is to remove the offending pennants.
I'm just telling you what the ball told me.
Pass it on.

Today in Dreck

The other day, I wrote a piece about the decline of newspapers. I put the blame fairly squarely in two places: leveraged buyouts that have encumbered formerly profitable newspapers with hefty debts; and on managers who have strangled the papers themselves as a way to cover the payments on that debt. It is a self-perpetuating cycle: the papers can't cover debt costs and pay dividends at the same time, they cut staff, people say there's nothing in the papers and stop buying them or turn to free news sources, newspaper profits decline, staff is cut, more people stop reading, more profit slippage, more staff is cut...
I was too kind to mention editorial deadwood, except in passing.
For instance, there are the various head cases and pals of editors who hang like barnacles on the newspapers of the country. The Ottawa Citizen's David Warren is one such place-holder. His former publication, the Idler, was unread by the public but was a darling of the troglodyte right in Canada. When the Idler deservedly succumbed to the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace, Warren was very much between opportunities. His pal Neil Reynolds set him up with a very comfy gig at the Ottawa Citizen, where he's been a mainstay of Frank Magazine's "Drivel" section for some time.
In a piece in today's Petfinder, Warren babbles on about the decline of the newspaper trade. His two targets: newspaper unions and journalism schools.
I want you to read the piece.
Here are some comments I'd make if I marked it:
First, the intro sucks. It is pedantic, not particularly connected to the argument, not original, and it doesn't answer the age-old question: "who gives a shit"? Most readers would be gone by the third or fourth sentence.
Second, the column has holes as grotesque and obvious as a sucking chest wound. The first obvious one is Warren's disdain for the union. Why mention it? Is it to maintain right-wing cred or tag it as part of the problem? You can't leave stuff like this dangling.
Third, if J-schools are the problem, do tell us why. Is it because the students went to a university? Is it J-school curriculum? If so, why? Would you prefer history majors? English majors? Sociology majors? I look among my circle of friends in journalism and find them all. The column falls down because the writer does not seem to understand that a degree in journalism in not a mandatory qualification for journalism. Daily newspapers hire people from college papers, from journalism schools, sometimes from community colleges. Even half-bright people with intellectual pretensions who are too lazy to get a post-secondary education can make a decent living in journalism. If Warren seeks an example, he should look in a mirror.
Fourth, Warren talks about the situation of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Its troubles are the nut of the column, yet there is far less description of the Star-Tribune's travails than of the dinosaurs. David, the readers do know what killed off the dinosaurs. They don't know why the Star-Tribune is on the ropes. And you didn't tell them.
Did an inordinate percentage of Star-Tribune reporters and editors go to journalism school? Um, we don't know and neither does Warren. What Warren does know is the paper was sold twice recently. I'd say that might be the genesis of its business-side problems. At least it's a solid fact, unlike the rest of the smoke tossed around by Warren.
My last question: If a paper is filled with copy like Warren's, written by someone pulling down $100K a year, is it in trouble? Does it have any business offering buy-outs and cutting staff while running dreck like Warren's? Does it entice people to lay down a buck, rather than get their news and commentary online for nothing? Surely there's a libertarian writer who can do research, structure a column properly and make words sing. And I bet there are cheaper ones.
(And I'm not offering myself. I'd rather work at Little Ray's Reptile Zoo out in Greely than in the Baxter Road snakepit).
Again, when a company is asking people to spend a dollar on a product that is offered elsewhere for free, there has to be a certain amount of value-added. So my last question: would you pay a buck to read that column? And don't forget, the Citzen let you read it for free.
I would have failed the column with the words: "Looks too much like a rush job or first draft".

Meanwhile:
Canwest touches a 52-week low and probably an all-time low before doing a dead cat bounce and rising a few pennies. Torstar stays at a new 52-week low.

The Star is tumbling toward 40% of its value in 2004 and is down 10% in a week. I wonder how long before the Honderich, Thall, Campbell, Atkinson and Hindmarsh families start howling and Lenny's bankers call.

I vaguely remember a mantra of sorts: "Content is king... content is king..."

Denver: Will Hillary and Obama Join the Mile High Club?

Because I'm still willing to make a side bet on a second or third ballot and a Gore-Obama ticket. It wouldn't be a big bet. Still, the way things are shaping up, it's well within the rules. And right now, the old pols -- all of them Gore adorers -- who have control of the outcome must realize that Obama and Hillary are too damaged to beat John McCain.

If Parliament's an institution, why do the inmates get paid?

I took a handful of my former first-year students to the House of Commons and the Senate. It was an interesting choice of days. The Tories had got the hang of blowing smoke over the In and Out election financing scandal, deflecting questions with a lame half-assed Greek chorus led by John Baird and Pierre Poliviere.
Today, the auditor general's report came out. Maybe the Liberal research office missed that memo. The Liberals and the Bloc never mentioned it in QP. But the NDP was ready. Its caucus raised questions about air safety and the treatment of immigration detainees. That's how you win debates.
I don't understand the Liberals. They have some top-notch researchers (most of whom used to be Press Gallery reporters, but that's for another day). Yet the Liberals are one day behind the news cycle. When the prime minister and every minister have written answers to your questions, it's time to re-think how you're coming up with those questions. And that's where the Liberals were at.
The Tories scored a big point when one of the cabinet ministers listed the number of days, the number of questions and the number of House votes wasted by the Bloc, a party that now keeps about 50 Quebec seats in mort main.
But that point was forefeited by Peter MacKay, who said the Minister of Patronage would soon be looking at the reconstruction plans for the lovely old Quebec armoury that burned down some weeks back. Er, that was supposed to be Minister of Heritage.
There was enough truth in the statement that everyone who wasn't in CPAC's shot got a good laugh from it.
My students lasted longer than Michael Ignatieff, who was gone by the halfway mark. I guess he has other fish to fry.
Perhaps the best line of the day came from Clare, a brilliant student who is going to be running a newsroom some day. When I told her how Stephen Harper's goon squad zip him around to different entrances of the Parliament building on different days (supposedly to shake off any press that want to steal his soul with a camera), she quipped "Sort of a Chevy shell game."
Yup.
And the House always wins.

Nerd Wurld

This is the height of the fossil season. Warm, with enough rain to clean off dusty rocks in quarries. No mosquitoes or black flies.
On Sundays, my hunting partners and I have been playing hide and seek with gravel quarry owners as we try to rescue trilobites from rock crushers. We go very early
with concrete saws, climb over blast piles, find the fossils and cut them out. As theyears have gone by, more and more quarry operators have become fearful of lawsuits and clamped down on collectors. A few others have the good sense to accept a release that absolves them of any risk or they simply turn a blind eye.


The spiny bug above is a Gabriceraurus, a 450-million-year-old, fine-inch water bug that lived here when Ottawa was 150' under sea water, part of the continental shelf of "Laurentia" at about the same latitude as Peru. Back then, we were still, sort of, connected to Europe and North Africa. I say "sort of" because there are chunks of continents that have come and gone.

My friend Marcus Martin in upstate New York, an ex-Marine, is beavering away on sites where trilobites are found preserved with soft body parts:



Soft body part trilobites are very, very rare. Marcus pulled at shale for years until he found a new locality.

Meanwhile, back on this side of the St. Lawrence, the hunt for Paleozoic life continues. Here's a fossil crinoid, a "sea lily", an animal related to starfish and sea urchins. It's from Arkona, between London and Grand Bend:




But not all of us are out in the field. My friend George Kampouris is putting the finishing touch on a giant Devonian fish fossil. He's very carefully chipped, ground and sandblasted a huge nodule holding the front-end of the nastiest fish that ever lived. This guy, a Dunkleosteus, ate sharks. The fossil George is working on is about the size of a stove. It was found embedded in a ravine in Cleveland, Ohio. Here's what it would look like re-assembled:





The beast's skull was on the outside of its head. It had 10" fangs that were used to hack through the flesh and armour of similar Devonian fish. This animal was so tough that even its eyes were armoured. Full-grown, it was 30' long and could have bit through a Volvo.

But a fossil doesn't show you everything. Here's a great YouTube clip of a couple of guys fishing in the Devonian and meeting up with a Dunkleosteus. It is an incredible piece of animation.

Steyn being set up?

On Mark Steyn's web site, the Great Man says he's been invited to go mano a mano on TV Ontario's Agenda tonight with three of the sock puppets who are often incorrectly cited as the authors of the Human Rights Commission complaints against him. In fact, according to the TV Ontario web page, Steve Paiken is going to interview Steyn, then, after that's over, chat with the three sock puppets of Mr. Elmasry, the man holding the strings.

My advice, which I'm sure our chirping-voiced free speech hero will ignore: Tell TVO to screw off.

See one, play one

Kate at Small Dead Animals has a posting about Lawrence Solomon's recent Financial Post column of the doctrinaire Marxist shenanigans at Wikipedia.
Old news, sez I.
This is in the real news.

Connecting the dots dept.

Can you name one former editor of the Toronto Star?
You can read this story about a former Star editor and find no mention of the fact that he's one of the paper's former editors.
Not that it's connected to his recent fame, but surely it's worth a few words.
(He also wrote the definitive arse-kreep bio of Pierre Trudeau back in '78).

Charles Caccia

I just talked with him a week ago in the foyer of the University of Ottawa law school, still very dynamic, bright and urbane.
Now, Charles Caccia, one of the more able members of the Trudeau cabinet, is dead of a stroke. He was a long-time MP, holding the then-predominantly Italian-Canadian riding of Davenport. While Trudeau made use of his enthusiasm for the environment, Chretien did not. I don't know why. Possibly Chretien was overwhelmed by the high number of top-tier, high-profile Toronto MPs who just had to be in cabinet, including people like Allan Rock and Art Eggleton. Unfortunately, there are only so many seats at the cabinet table.
Caccia was a decent man who cared about Canada and its environment. He was a smart, civil debater and a man with deep commitment to his constituents, his party and his country. I'm very sad to hear of his passing.

Where will the axe fall next?

Torstar hit yet another 52-week low Friday, down 38% from its one-year high and more than 50% off its all-time high, reached in 2004.
So, what's wrong with Canada's largest newspaper company?
I bet they blame the Internet again.

I am still marvelling at the Ottawa Citizen, which killed off its lame-o Sunday feature section to run TV listings. Yes, TV listings are cheap. But TV Guide went out of business last year for a good reason: anyone with cable or satellite has easy access to TV listings on their TV. Anyone so impecunious that they don't have cable or satellite is unlikely to pay a buck for a paper. If the Citizen wanted to fill the pages with useful copy, maybe they should have published hundreds of sudoku puzzles. More people would have bought the paper.

Yes, the Citizen's Sunday features were boring. Multi-page series on the great pilgrimage routes of Spain, self-congratulatory crap written by boomers who never left the office, eyesplitter columns. Even the body language in Citizen column pictures -- bland-looking, badly-dressed boomers with their hands aggressively placed on their hips or slovenly slipped into their pockets -- is off-putting.

Like I said earlier this week, the Internet is the best thing to happen to stupid media managers. It gives them an easy out. But here's my question: why are magazines doing so well? And book publishers are still doing relatively well, considering they, at least in this country, nearly priced their products out of the hands of the middle-class.

You ask anyone from a 13-year-old to a 90-year-old what's wrong with newspapers and you get the same answer: there's nothing in them.
What that means is there's nothing that they care about.
But are newspapers addressing that issue?
What happened to local journalism? Where are the journalists who are willing to take on power and influence? Where are the publishers who give a damn about informing the public?
They're few and far between.
And the numbers reflect that.

Here's my tip to the Aspers and TorStar: fire any editor who wants to run celebrity news, wine columns, stories about menopause, anything about Kingsley Amis, columns about wonderfully wonky kids doing the darndest thing, TV highlights, the Cannes film festival, and cottage decorating. Cut most national political coverage, especially poll-based stories and "who's hot, who's not" dreck. Stick to telling people about new laws. If there are no new laws, policies or taxes of note, maybe there's just nothing going on on the Hill.


Hire people who are eager to leave the office and talk to real people to get real news. Run unfashionable stuff like obits to get older readers back. Get more reporters into the courts and city hall. Cover the surrounding rural area a bit. Tell people ways they can save and make money. Be hyper-local. If you see stuff on the 'net, you don't want it in the paper. Run the stuff that you can't get on the Internet. No one can read about local people, local politics, local issues, and local crime on the Internet. Don't post that kind of material. Make people pay for it.
If people think your web page sucks, great. Make them buy the paper.

Comments

I haven't allowed unmoderated comments for a while because I have received a large number of threats and harrassing comments from an anonymous poster. I have his IP number and I'll be handing it to the police soon.
I hardly need the aggravation. My dad is sick and my wife has been extremely busy with law school exams. The head case began sending me crap after I posted the remark about Maclean's using content provided by an employee of the Dept. of National Defence.
There are some real winners in the world. And some real losers.

I'm gathering examples of bad reporting, the sort of stuff that crops up when you do news on the cheap. Below is an excellent case of prejudicial pre-trial publicity in which a newspaper, the Midland Free Press, takes a press release from the cops and prints it without editing or vetting it for potential legal and ethical problems.
Note that the paper states categorically that the charged man, whose name I removed, is guilty of armed robbery of a Subway restaurant, a charge that could easily result in a penetentiary term.
Quebecor is the company that owns this newspaper. A good lawyer woudl ask for a jury trial and argue the newspaper has limited the suspect's right to a fair trial by an untainted jury. Quebecor risks a fine for contempt of court. Sometimes "cheap" can be awfully expensive.
This is a great example of a case of "cheap" and "lazy" impacting on the civil rights of some ordinary person who may or may not be a robber. That determination belongs to the courts, not the newspapers.


Arrest Made in Subway Robbery

The Southern Georgian Bay OPP Crime Unit has been following up a number of leads, which have lead to the arrest of the person responsible for an armed robbery at the Subway Sub store located at 188 Main Street in Penetanguishene on the evening of Thursday, Dec. 13 2007.


Charged with one count of armed robbery is 31-year-old XXXXX XXXXXXX XXXX* of Orillia. He appeared in court and was remanded in custody to a later date.


(Name removed to prevent legal hassles)

Remember the Curse of 1940

For all my friends who play ProLine, keep this in mind: The New York Rangers have been cursed since 1940, when they burned the mortgage to Madison Square Garden in the Stanley Cup. Foolishly, they renewed the curse in 1994 when, after winning their first Stanley Cup in 54 years, members of the team took the Cup to Belmont Park to let the winner of the Kientucky Derby eat oats from it.
So beware. BEWARE!!!

Good move

Fourteen years ago this summer, my wife and I moved from Midland to Ottawa. Money Sense magazine says it was a great decision. Midland, it turns out, is the worst city in Ontario to live, while Ottawa is the best city in all of Canada.
Now, Midland's not all that bad of a place, especially if you have money. There's about 30 miles of nice sand beaches in the area. Some of them are public. There's also some great boating in the area. It's also very close to the recreation areas of Muskoka and not far from Toronto (although too distant to conveniently commute, and it lacks decent public transit out of the region).
The Money Sense people did not take those things into account. If they had, Midland should have been able to beat Cornwall, one of the ugliest places I've seen in this country.
On the down side, summers there are short and can be wet. Winters are extremely snowy. It is the only region of the province without a university or community college. It has been dreadfully misgoverned and mismanaged, with collapsing infrastructure and relatively high taxes.
Most of the industry in the region is long-gone. The summer tourism season is brisk but far too short. There is no winter tourism.
The hospital facilities are dreadful and, for the most part, the medical community is inept. Major employers in the region are a psychiatric hospital and a super jail, which are not particularly delightful places to work and give you a fair idea of the cultural level of the local populace.
There are no decent newspapers, no writers of any note, and just a couple of artists. There is no decent concert venue, no good libraries, and just a couple of second-rate historiacl attractions. One is a silly representation of the old naval base at penetang (nothing happened there), the other is a reconstruction of Fort Ste. Marie, a 17th century Jesuit headquarters that dares not delve into 17th century Jesuit life or the rather gruesome fate of the place's more famous inhabitants. (You won't find, for instance, any mention of "ritualistic cannibalism".) Great place for kids!
Still, I'd love to spend my summers there again. But until some of the beach ownership issues and environmental problems are solved, I'll stick to the Gatineaus and the Eastern Townships.

The Public's Right to NO

The Accountability Party government has shut down an important database that tells people what material has been released under Access to Information requests.

Blame the Internet

I used to buy the idea the Internet was killing newspapers. I don't anymore. I believe the real killer has been a combination of bad management, out of touch newsrooms and the profit demands of publishers, who need the money to pay for their mergers and acquisitions. In April, I told the story of the Midland Free Press, once the best weekly paper in Canada, that has been asset stripped from a business with its own downtown office and press and a group of six very good reporters and editors to a one-person newsroom using rented a rented office and a printing contract. It wasn't the Internet that killed the Midland Free Press, it was four successive leveraged buy-outs headed by people who know nothing about newspaper publishing and saw journalism solely in terms of "cost".
As I've said, this recession will likely drive Canwest and Quebecor out of the newspaper business.
Here's a great piece. I see some managers have added the recession and the credit crunch to their list of things to blame for their failure to cover their communities and serve their readership. Readers of the Ottawa Citizen and New York times don't need or want wine columns, celebrity news or "me" joyrnalism by 55-year-old boomers. They want news that's really news to them.
Meanwhile, Torstar stock bounces along its 52-week low, worth half of what it was in 2004. Canwest, at just under $5, is worth 40% of what it was a year ago.

HT for the article to Small Dead Animals.

Gonna have to get me one of these

Recently, I chastised Maclean's for taking copy on Afghanistan written by an employee of the military. It was a gaffe that not only was a sin against journalism but undermined the magazine's case vis a vis the Muslims who want Human Rights Commission-enforced rebuttal space for 22 articles Maclean's ran. The rather unpleasant plaintiff in those HRC complaints is a jew-hater named Elmrasy found offensive. I still believe Human Rights Commissions are no place to deal with complaints against the media. If you have a libel issue, you sue. If you think a paper or magazine has published hate literature, you ask the attorney general to lay charges. Therefore, I will be willing to be caught dead in this, even though I'm sure the thin-skinned Mr. Steyn does not, in fact, own a beret with a maple leaf front and centre.

Love, Toronto style

He was in one gang, she and her family were in another. Now she's married with a couple of kids. Can they ever get together?

The Low Court of Injustice

My favorite law student has sent me this link to the searchable records of London's Old Bailey courthouse from the days when hanging, flogging, mutilation, branding and transportation to Australia were common outcomes of cases that today would be dealt with via community service.

The best headline of the year (so far)

Bright, witty, very appropriate to the story, this is a gorgeous example of headline writing.

HT Kinsella

Moi?

There's a new web site that tries to reconstruct a person's employment history. Right now, it's not particularly accurate.

Don Martin on the Tiresome Brenda Martin

Columnist Don Martin and I agree that Brenda Martin has become a big pain in the ass. The Canadian media has judged her not guilty and has let her play them like a violin. No one is asking why an American con man in Mexico would hire a Canadian to do his cooking and pay her American-style wages.
My take: she's guilty as hell. She's lied about consular visits, stamped her feet demanding special treatment (which she's received) and given the CBC all the anti-Harper quotes they could ask for. I've lost a lot of respect for Harper's strong-arm regime, but they've gone way above and beyond the call of duty for Brenda Martin.

Today in censorship

The NatPost's Jonathan Kay blogs a letter from the ever-popular Canadian Union of Postal Workers threatening to, at some unspecified time, block mail shipments to Israel.
Any postal worker who does so should be fired.
If CUPW wants to make political statements, the union must do it on its own time. It has no business censoring the mails, which belong to the government of Canada, not the union. As well, we have treaties with Israel and most other countries including some of the most truly repressive on earth, promising we'll deliver the mail.

Welcome Frank scumbags

Remember Frank Magazine? It used to be big in Ottawa in the 1980s and 1990s and is still managing to keep afloat.
In today's web edition the lowlifes at Frank claim ownership of the material on the Citizen's quest for an editor (see below). Since Frank has reported the Petfinder's morale is low because of the machinations of executive editor Graham Green, and because I mention it, I'm somehow plagiarizing Frank.
Hmmm...
Of course, they don't mention the fact that I scooped them on Dimmock's mass e-mail mocking Green. And they've never had the fact that staffers trashed Green in an employee survey. I suppose they'll just lift that for their next issue.
The current incarnation of Frank is published by the same Michael Bate who used to beg me for copy and several times offered to sell me the magazine real cheap. Bate's rep was made long ago when the "Frank Insurance" racket became public: you send your kids to his wife's montessori school, you'll never be Franked (Globe and Mail editor Ed Greenspon, c'mon down!). Bate values his Tuscan vacations much more than he values integrity or a good reputation.
Most of the magazine is written by the worthless and stupid Steve Collins. I wonder if Steve is still with his psychotic stick-insect girlfriend, a frustrated writer of no real ability who used to ruin on-line discussion forums with astounding displays of narcissism?
(I notice a plug for her masturbatory web site in the Frank piece about Lowell Green).
Frank's problem is that no one talks to them anymore. Collins has burned so many sources that Bate can barely function. A gossip magazine has to be discreet, and Collins just doesn't make the cut. It's all hate, all the time, with that boy.
So the magazine is a complete bore. There's nothing in it except rehashed news from the papers with the odd tired Frankism thrown in. The magazine hasn't broken a serious story in ages. And, just as bad, it's not particularly funny anymore. At five bucks a pop, I want a few snickers and maybe the odd yuk. These days Frank is a Mirth Free Zone.
On the gossip front, it's being imitated and stomped by everyone from Jane Taber to Mitch Raphael. Bloggers like Skippy Stalin write far better satire.
Bate recently begged Warren Kinsella for copy, somehow fantasizing Warren would be interested in being screwed over and betrayed again by Frank. Kinsella's a tough old bird who can handle himself. He's not stupid. He knows Bate and Collins would sell his ass out from under him for an absurdly low price.
In Frank's world, if I write "the sky is blue" I'm a plagiarist because Steve Collins and Michael Bate saw it first. Uh-huh.
No one reads Frank anymore. I've been paying for an online subscription just to be nice, knowing they need the money. I also give quarters to bums on the street. Same difference.

Comment moderation

After an influx of Steyn's Retard Brigade, I've decided to moderate comments for a while.
I get paid to teach things to smart people. I have no time to donate to educating the stupid.