test blog 8

Ah, the things we miss when we don't follow mainstream media. I didn't even know the sports world was celebrating a rapist. This week, drinking wine in a hotel room in New Jersey, Allan and I were pleased to discover that the Red Sox were on the ESPN Wednesday night game. A nice treat, or it would have been, if the announcing team (which included one of my most disliked announcers ever) had been able to stop talking about basketball long enough to call the game. The game was often broadcast in a little box, while we were treated to the important news that hundreds of fans had gathered outside the Staples Centre in Los Angeles. (So many things wrong with that sentence!) Gee, if only ESPN had some other stations so it could broadcast a baseball game in its entirety while still reporting on the earth-shattering news from L.A. The news that interrupted our baseball game? Kobe Bryant's final game. So I'm thinking, Kobe Bryant, Kobe Bryant, don't I know something else ab...

The conversation around the movie " Obvious Child " has prompted me to re-visit a long-standing interest of mine, one I share with many other reproductive rights activists: the portrayal of abortion in the mainstream media. I haven't seen "Obvious Child" (I wait for DVD or Netflix, as always), but I've heard that it includes a rarity: an honest and positive portrayal of the choice to terminate a pregnancy. Considering how many women do have abortions - and considering that the choice is usually met with relief and happiness - this shouldn't be exceptional. Yet it is. On fictional TV shows and movies, when women are faced with unwanted pregnancies, certain outcomes are almost predictable. Sometimes abortion is never mentioned as an option, as if it simply does not exist. More often, abortion is mentioned briefly, contemplated with horror, and cast aside. In soaps, a spontaneous abortion (usually known by the antiquated term miscarriage ) often settles the...

One type of TV show that I enjoy are detective murder mysteries. I don't watch them all - that would be nearly impossible, Netflix carries so many - but I'm always looking for detective shows that I find absorbing. " Inspector Lewis " is probably my favourite. I loved " Prime Suspect ", Helen Mirren's tour de force. I'm in the middle of " Wallander ", recommended by a few wmtc readers, although I'm watching the BBC version with Kenneth Branagh, not the original Swedish show . " Case Histories ", featuring Jason Isaacs as private investigator Jackson Brodie, is another one I enjoy. And I've sampled many more - Inspector Morse, Midsomer Murders, Cadfael, and so on. On my to-watch list are The Killing and The Fall. As much as I enjoy this genre, I often end up annoyed when we learn "whodunit". Because, too often, you know who done it? A woman. In TV detective shows, there are an enormous number of women murderers. W...

A journalist, a pioneer, a feminist. An asker of questions. New York Times obituary here.

While I'm not writing, I hope you will read this excellent article by Matt Taibbi on mainstream media coverage of the Bradley Manning court martial. I cannot understand why good writers like Taibbi continue to refer to the "Bradley Manning trial". A trial is, in theory, an impartial hearing, where an unbiased judge and 12 ordinary citizens hear a full range of evidence from both prosecution and defense. Bradley Manning, by contrast, is being tried by his accusers. The accusers are judge and jury, and they write the rule book. What's more, the court martial procedures used by the United States military do not comply with accepted international standards of justice. This was proven in the cases of Chris Vassey and Jules Tindungan , US Iraq War resisters living in Canada. Calling Bradley Manning's court martial a trial connotes justice, fairness, and due process, where none exist.

Linda McQuaig recently wrote an excellent column about the blatantly false portrayal of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in the Western mainstream media. Chavez should be a hero to anyone who cares about social justice, but if your primary news sources are anywhere from CNN to the CBC to the New York Times , you might wonder why millions of Latin Americans mourned Chavez's passing rather than celebrating. You might imagine they were in the thrall of a charismatic tyrant. I found the mainstream media's description of Chavez as a "dictator" particularly rich, given the US endured at least two fraudulent elections in recent times. Toronto activist Judy Rebick had this excellent letter in the Globe and Mail : Your front-page article on the death of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez (Death Of A Revolutionary – March 6), calls him “a polarizing dictator.” He was certainly polarizing, as is our own Prime Minister, but Mr. Chavez was never a dictator. Mr. Chavez wa...

The wingnut media continues to redefine irony. Yesterday Fox News ran a piece called "To be happy, we must admit women and men aren't 'equal'". (Sorry, no link. Linking to bigots is a violation of wmtc policy.) To illustrate their homophobic, anti-woman twaddle, they used a picture of a wedding atop the Empire State Building, apparently not realizing it was... the wedding of two women! What a riot. Read the story: you'll come for the laughs, and stay for the wisdom. From Feministing. Yesterday the feminist internet collectively lol’d at Fox News when Jessica Valenti realized that the “wedding kiss” picture they’re using to accompany a piece about traditional gender roles is actually of a same sex couple. Turns out, the two women whose love was mistakenly highlighted by the tirelessly homophobic news outlet are no strangers to the spotlight. Lela Mc Arthur and Stephanie Figarelle of Anchorage, Alaska won a contest last year to have their dream wedding in New ...

Robert Fisk has a good piece in The Independent about the incivility (to put it mildly!) that is endemic in the comment sections of online news stories: "Anonymous trolls are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate the gutless journalism of the New York Times, BBC, and CNN" . Fisk wonders why newspapers that will not publish an anonymous letter to the editor will allow anonymous lies and hateful screed in comments. Surely he knows the simple answer: money. Advertisers are paying for clicks, and the idiots in the comments section are increasing the clickage. Why should we help them by reading those comments? Consider this. We know that governments pay people to troll the comments section with disinformation and misinformation, just like they hire fake journalists and bribe working columnists to influence public opinion. We know that the number of comments in any one direction cannot be taken as a gauge of public opinion. When Common Dreams respond...

Dr. Dawg has written a terrific piece about the mainstream media's disturbing, if predictable, response to the courageous actions of Chief Theresa Spence. Extraordinary things, we are being instructed, may only be done by extraordinary people. Spence is frumpy, not particularly witty or intellectual, somewhat inconsistent as things change around her by the day, perhaps untutored in Constitutional matters, maybe above her level of competence as a manager. And after days of hateful mockery, she doesn’t want to talk to the jeering media any more—how self-indulgent of her. How dare she commit an act of self-abnegation? That’s for her more presentable betters. It's a must-read: Ordinary people .

In case you haven't done so already, you'll want to read Dr. Dawg on the Vic Toews phony scandal, internet surveillance, and the mind-boggling hypocrisy of the both the Conservatives and the mainstream media: On hypocrisy, politicians and the media . I'm not even going to quote from it, because you've got to read the whole thing. So go, read .

My inbox is flooded with action alerts from all different groups, which I feel obligated to pass on, even though many (most?) people who read this blog probably get these petitions through multiple sources. So in the spirit of just in case... • David Suzuki asks: If a panel of doctors told you to take better care of your health, would you listen? Ten leading marine scientists with the Royal Society of Canada just told Canada to take care of its oceans before it’s too late. Let’s make sure our government listens to its doctors. With the budget speech just weeks away, now is the time to tell Finance Minster Jim Flaherty that our oceans desperately need proper investment. Rising ocean temperatures and increased salinity in certain areas are just two of the serious threats they face. In last year’s budget speech, the government promised to create six new marine parks by 2012. That hasn’t happened yet, and they only have 10 months left to meet their commitment. Join the thousands of Canadi...

If only the Harper Government TM weren't determined to waste our tax dollars on prison-building and useless mandatory sentencing, while telling us we can't afford to maintain decent spending levels for universal health insurance. If only they cared about facts. New poll results show the public is abandoning a stubborn belief that crime is on the rise, bringing public opinion into alignment with a 20-year trend of declining crime rates. The long-standing disconnect between public fears and reality has confounded criminologists and fuelled federal get-tough policies. However, the Environics Focus Canada poll - obtained by The Globe and Mail and scheduled for release Thursday - shakes conventional wisdom even more by finding growing support for the use of crime prevention rather than punishment. "This doesn't mean that people want to lay off criminals," said Keith Neuman, executive director of the Environics Institute. "But what people would like to see is more...

Last summer, Allan and I had plans to meet a friend for dinner, and I Googled the restaurant to get the address and details. The place came up in Google right away, but I couldn't get to the website. After trying a few times, I realized the restaurant no longer had a website: it only had a Facebook page. I was at work, and can't access Facebook from my workplace. This was the first time I had seen a company abandon a website in favour of a Facebook page. Since then, I've run into it a handful of times, especially with individual people's public pages. Where various people - writers, designers, techies, small business owners - would have once had a website where people could browse samples of their work and get general contact information, many have now moved to Facebook-only. This is heading in exactly the wrong direction. I understand why companies want to be on Facebook; that's a no-brainer. So many people use Facebook that tapping into it as a marketing tool is n...

We all know that agent provocateurs are a reality, but whenever we are offered hard evidence, we should spread it far and wide. A right-wing "journalist" has admitted to infiltrating a protest group and claims to have personally instigated events that led to a Washington DC museum's closure this past Saturday. What Patrick Howley lacks in journalistic integrity he makes up for in ego: unethical enough to pull this stunt, he then couldn't resist bragging about it, and his publication was stupid enough to run it. Apparently American Spectator has changed the wording of the story, but not before the Washington Post 's Suzy Khimm caught it and posted it on Google Docs . ( American Spectator could also use a proofreader: Howley writes of his "unshaven left-wing altar ego".) Khimm writes: A conservative journalist has admitted to infiltrating the group of protesters who clashed with security at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on Saturday — ...

Unlike many of my peers, I truly do respect and in many ways admire Oprah Winfrey. She's used her massive popularity and celebrity to raise awareness of difficult issues, not just feel-good reunions or uncontroversial medical research, but issues of equality and justice, especially for women and girls. Sure, her show is thickly padded with celebrity fluff and nonsense tearjerkers, but if it wasn't, she wouldn't reach half as many eyes and ears. Speaking to mainstream audiences about subjects they'd rather not face, while giving people hope and optimism about their ability to create change, is a worthwhile enterprise. Throw in a nationally televised reading group, and there's a lot for me to like. That's why when I read that Oprah was running ads on her network for the astroturf tar sands shills EthicalOil.org - and that the ads conflated tar sands oil with global women's rights - I felt so disappointed. I tried to write a post that conveyed just how wronghe...

James posted this in comments yesterday , but it deserves its own thread: Top Five Ford Lies . If you haven't seen it yet, please go read. Of course, politicians with a privatization agenda never let the facts get in the way of their profit-driven ideology. If they cared about facts, government services would never be privatized, since it's been proven time and again, the world over, that privatization is more expensive, less efficient and less accountable. Taxes don't decrease, but profits for a few increase. More on this another time, when I'm not on deadline. Meanwhile, in case you need a primer on this whole government-as-business thing, see Pogge: "Is he running a government, or making widgets?" And while you're there, on the related subject of government-spending-lies the media flogs whenever it's convenient: "Zombie lies" . Harper "spent his way out of recession". Yeah, right.

This is probably the strongest truth-telling about Canada's experience in Afghanistan - and the revolting response to it at home - that I have seen in the mainstream media. Thank you, Thomas Walkom! On Tuesday, Canada officially ended its combat mission in Afghanistan. It should never have started. The war has been a dismal failure. . . . For Canada, the lessons of Afghanistan should be sobering. This ill-contrived adventure has cost the lives of 161 Canadians, including 157 soldiers. As well, at least 615 Canadian soldiers have been wounded in battle, many seriously. Politicians and media lavishly praise our troops for their bravery and professionalism. Yet, ironically, this has made it easier for the country to gloss over the fact that these sacrifices were largely pointless. Had our military been made up of draftees rather than volunteers, there would be more public anger. For taxpayers, the cost of the Afghan war so far is $11.3 billion and climbing. That figure excludes ongoi...

"If that's really happening, why don't I see it in the news?" I bet many of you may have encountered a question like this one. You're speaking to a co-worker or a classmate, or discussing an issue on a blog, or you've wandered into the comments section of an online news story. You offer a wider perspective, and you meet with a question like this one. If millions of women are being beaten by their husbands, why don't I ever hear about it? If First Nations people are getting cancer in unprecedented numbers, why haven't I read about it in the newspaper? If the United States really has military bases all over the world, how come I don't know about it? This person is not criticizing the mainstream media for not covering this issue; that's not what the question means. He's questioning the validity of a statement of fact, implying that you are grossly exaggerating an issue or even fabricating it. If working conditions in these factories are so bad...

I've avoided any mention of the sickening spectacle of the GNOTFOTE thumping its collective chest because it (supposedly) took 10 years to assassinate one middle aged man with failing kidneys. Talk about security theatre! Surely this must be The Office of Security Theatre's Greatest Show on Earth. I do want to share a few items, though, related to this nonsense. One, Joy of Sox: The National Anthem and the Idea Of Respect . And two, Chomsky: We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic . Each coming from a different angle, and both well worth reading. Plus a bonus, in case you missed it, or didn't see proof: Fox "News" . The only positive is that bin Laden's death gives us all an opening to talk about getting the hell out of Afghanistan. Which Canada was supposed to do this year, a pledge the Conservatives had no intentions of honouring . In the...

From Mediaite : In the wake of Japan's recent massive earthquake and accompanying tsunami, the daily Ishinomaki Hibi Shimbun , based in Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture, found itself without power. So it produced new issues during a crucial time using what was available to editors – paper, and pen. For six days, six of the paper’s staffers researched stories before passing them on to three others, who then meticulously hand-wrote the news on poster-size paper, using flashlights when natural light was not available. These “newspapers” were then published, so to speak, by pasting them at the entrances of various relief centers, so that survivors could keep up to date with the day’s headlines, free of charge. What a beautiful throwback to a time when newspapers were the only source of information about the outside world. I found this not only extraordinary for its low-tech resourcefulness, but also moving - that journalists and editors, as providers of information, would take their roles so...