Tag Archives: the globe and mail

All the news that’s fit to crib

Photo by Mark J Hunter
Photo by Mark J Hunter

One of the most important functions of newspapers, we are told, is that they produce professional content that no one else can. Investigating and breaking news stories is the most commonly referenced example. “If newspapers didn’t exist,” the argument goes, “bloggers wouldn’t have anything to write about.”

There is some truth to that statement: the vast majority of chatter in the blogosphere is reaction and commentary rather than original reporting. Even opinions and analysis are usually rehashed from professionals. Last month at the 2009 Interactive Exchange (IN09) Richard Stursberg, Executive Vice-President of English Services for CBC, repeatedly insisted that blogs and web 2.0 websites do not create content, they only distribute content. “If old media dies,” Stursberg told conference attendees, weeks before announcing massive layoffs at his corporation, “I don’t know who’s going to make content.” (Paraphrased from memory.)

On the one hand, I agree that a professional news media is and has been a critical component of democracy. The fact that this model is breaking, and will probably break completely before a replacement is found, is of concern. But what also concerns me is the fact that old media appears to be going out of its way to hide and deny the positive contribution that new media is making. One specific event this past week helped to convince me of that. (More on that below.)

Listening to newspaper veterans speak you’d believe they have a monopoly on overturning rocks and introducing new information. That’s nothing more than a wishful delusion. The fact is that by its own criteria, the news media has been doing a bad job, and others have started to pick up the slack. One Canadian political example that comes to mind is the blog Buckets of Grewal, which played an important role in uncovering some key facts regarding the Grewal tapes scandal. (I’ve had a few much more humble achievements myself. For example, I’ve not seen anyone else report on the connections between a supposedly independent study about the Hummer and the Hummer’s manufacturer, nor do I know of any columnist who noticed some disturbing parallels in two news events separated by a few years.)

Instead of being honest about examples of bloggers contributing to the news industry, old media, and newspapers in particular, would rather bury those examples in favour of promoting the popular image of bloggers as parasites to media companies.

When I was on staff at Torontoist, a popular Toronto news, events, and culture blog, we accepted with a sense of inevitability that whenever we were lucky enough (or, dare I say, good enough) to get an exclusive story of any significance it would usually appear in Toronto’s newspapers the next day without credit. Proving that we were the source of many of these stories was almost impossible of course, but there was a definite pattern, and I’m told journalists at the Toronto Star sometimes confided privately that we were indeed being cribbed. And then there were some situations, including this January 2008 incident involving the Toronto Sun, where full sections of our writing happened to appear word-for-word in print without attribution. (In that case, the Sun ended up apologizing, kinda.)

This past week, my old Torontoist colleague Jonathan Goldsbie authored an excellent example of the kind light that bloggers can shine through the cracks that news stories pass through as they fall. Responding to a reader letter, Goldsbie decided to get to the bottom of a Virgin Radio bus ad that some found offensive. (And by “some,” I mean anyone who thinks it’s not particularly funny for advertisements shown in the transit system to make jokes about subway suicide.) Goldsbie did a lot of original research, connected dots that others had missed, and ultimately was the catalyst for having the ads pulled.

It’s a big story, and it was covered prominently in Toronto’s newspapers the next day. But while the Globe and Mail at least gave some small credit to Torontoist for bringing the ad to the TTC’s attention, the Toronto Star’s article was aloof and vague on the question of who actually broke and developed this story. And neither paper, in my opinion, gave Goldsbie and Torontoist the credit they deserved.

There’s a reason newspapers are behaving this way. Their industry is in free fall and they don’t know what to do about it or where the bottom is. No one does. So they’re afraid, and fear triggers “behaviors of escape and avoidance.” (Wikipedia)

That’s a reason, but not an excuse. The smart thing to do would be to embrace what may be early glimmers of the future of journalism. Unfortunately, there are indications that at least some papers are more comfortable clinging to the declining models of the past.

ps. Right before I hit publish on this post, John Dickerson of Slate magazine tweeted about another great example.

Mark J. Hunter photo from Flickr.

Will we ever be on the same page?

In an extremely thoughtful piece in Saturday’s Globe, Charles Montgomery uses some of my comments from a previous blog post on Bali as a spring-board for analyzing the ethical dimensions of the climate crisis.

On one side of “the perfect ethical storm” sit John Baird and Stephen Harper, moralizing about their position:

“It is simply unconscionable to think that only the [developed] countries can do the job themselves,” John Baird told Parliament. “We are not prepared to allow the big emitters, the big polluters like the United States, China and India, to get off the hook. We need all the big emitters on board, everyone with an oar in the water rowing together.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper also hinted at virtue and the ethics of his stance at last month’s Commonwealth summit in Uganda. “It’s the only right position,” he said of his efforts to block a deal that called on rich countries to accept binding targets on greenhouse-gas emissions.

The other side (where I am dutifully located) also uses “morally charged rhetoric:”

Activist Sunita Narain, for example, has warned that Canada would have “the blood of the poor” on its hands if it waits for developing nations before acting on climate change. Toronto Green Party candidate Chris Tindal has written that anything less than Canada’s full participation in Bali would be “an immoral failure on a grand scale.”

And this week KAIROS, a coalition of Canadian Christian groups, issued an open letter to Canada and the conference in Bali urging them to stand by the “obligations and moral leadership” of the Kyoto framework and to advocate for a “just” climate-change agreement.

This presents a problem, argues Dale Jamieson, a professor of philosophy and director of the Environmental Studies Program at New York University, since climate science realities (and therefore, the related ethical dilemmas) are very complex.

“If Jack steals Jill’s bike, it’s easy to see why that’s wrong and to have an intuitive sense that there must be compensation, that Jack should be punished. That’s pretty uncontroversial.”

But what, he asks, if Jack and a large number of unacquainted people set in motion a chain of events that prevents people in the future, or in some faraway part of the world, from ever having bikes? “That’s the challenge of climate change.”

And check out this disturbing observation by Donald Brown, a professor of environmental ethics, science and law at Penn State University, about what happens when we only discuss the “costs” of climate change in economic terms:

For starters, the IPCC measures benefits and harms in terms of global market value – incomes and gross domestic products – but it takes everything else off the table.

“This results in the bizarre effect that the lives of people in poor countries are virtually worthless compared to the lives of people in rich countries, since the measure of their value is their earning power.”

And here are some of the most important ideas in the story, and also one of the best explanations I’ve seen as to why the Harper-Baird approach is wrongheaded, despite sounding logical on the surface.

In October, Sunita Narain, director of the New Delhi-based think tank the Centre for Science and the Environment, flew to Guyana to brief Commonwealth finance ministers on an increasingly popular concept of climate justice among poorer countries.

It suggests that in a truly fair world, the right to use the atmosphere would be spread equally among the world’s people – an approach that takes into account not only per-capita emissions today, but how much each nation has already polluted the atmosphere.

However, by the time she was done, Ms. Narain says, the Canadian delegation had stopped listening. Perhaps, she suggests, because under either a per-capita or historic measure Canada has failed its ethics test miserably.

“Industrial countries like Canada have used the atmosphere so they could grow,” she says. “If you look at the total of those emissions from mid-1800s until recently, you find that the entire atmospheric space has already been colonized by the rich countries. Now, they tell the rest of us there’s no more atmosphere for us to use.”

From 1950 to 2000, Canadians used 707 tons of greenhouse gas per person – or about 44 times as much as the average Indian. And today we are emitting about 19 tons per person while countries such as China hover around the four-ton mark.

But the IPCC has concluded that to avoid catastrophic climate change, a safe level of per-capita emissions would amount to about two tons for every individual on Earth.

Actually, “wrongheaded” might be too generous a descriptor for the Conservative non-plan. Montgomery gives the last word to Prof. Jamieson, who’s a little more, shall we say, critical.

[The Conservative government’s suggestion that all nations must “grab an oar and row at the same pace”] is a powerful metaphor, but ethicists such as Prof. Jamieson say it is slightly “perverse,” considering our skyrocketing jump in emissions. And it is a jarring departure from the position the country has taken since 1992, when it agreed with other rich nations that it would have to start rowing first.

It could also lead to a more obvious ethical problem: total inaction.

“Now, Canada’s position could be interpreted as saying we’re not going to do anything unless other countries go first,” Prof. Brown observes. “These kind of arguments can’t be excused. They just don’t meet ethical scrutiny now that climate change is already killing people around the world.”

That’s a damning (and, in my view, accurate) indictment of this government. So, will we (meaning the human race) ever build a large enough foundation of common ground to solve the greatest challenge we’ve ever faced as a species? The answer must be yes, as failure cannot be an option. (Or, as Petra Kelly put it, “if we don’t do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.”)

On the other hand, will this government ever “be on the same page” with reality? All evidence suggests otherwise. They oppose reality itself with a dogmatic vigilance resembling the Catholic church’s initial reaction to evolution. The continue to pontificate their talking points even when they know they’re not true. No, the government will not change, therefore we must change the government.