BC Legislative Press Gallery searches for news The account of a one small Alaskan newspaper holding a BC Minister to account for his misstatements of fact: The Bleatings Of Bill Bennett…Not Just […]
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Setting priorities
I’ve written about politics influenced by a captured and compliant press. This is from a Canadian Press article that Liberals found helpful, published by Macleans Magazine weeks before the last BC election: […]
Agenda journalism
Black Press political reporter Tom Fletcher, whose wife is a Public Affairs Officer for the BC Liberal Government, occasionally recalls the nineties. He wrote: The dark decade, the dismal decade, the decade […]
Hey Tom Fletcher, whose energy policy is nonsense?
The work of Tom Fletcher is a subject today and the article about agenda-driven journalism is drawing large readership. The Black Press writer offered a defence to one reader today. In it, […]
Oh, what a tangled web we weave…
I will comment about BC Budget 2014 after more study but I’ve read a few reports from media stenographers. Studying detail takes more time than rewording notes issued by the gaggle of […]
Distracting, dissembling, deflecting – lest you forget
Are you unhappy with rapidly increasing electricity rates and the general state of BC Hydro finances? Are you looking for the party responsible? Well, the Vancouver Sun has the answer. It’s a […]
Report news while making news?
It is appropriate to ask if political writers can report objectively after they become paid participants in the public forum, earning appearance fees and other remuneration from businesses with interests in their coverage…
A question to consider
A quick reminder about on-screen diversity at Fox News #foxnewsfacts pic.twitter.com/XE7tSHw2p9 — The Poke (@ThePoke) January 11, 2015 //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js @ThePoke @Norm_Farrell Can’t help but think if that’s what the collage of missing […]
Nobody’s servant…
North Van’s Grumps is the proprietor of Blog Borg Collective. While I search for material in the main aisles of information warehouses, NVG prowls the dark recesses. Happily, he shares many discovered […]
A crime family depends on its enablers – rerun
The bulk of this item was written in 2010 and it was moved to the top a year later. I’ve done a little editing to recognize the political environment of 2014 but […]
From Andrew Mitrovica
//storify.com/Norm_Farrell/media-accountability-or-lack-thereof/embed?border=false//storify.com/Norm_Farrell/media-accountability-or-lack-thereof.js?border=false[View the story “Media accountability, or lack thereof” on Storify]
Hedonists of power
Chris Hedges wrote many words for the New York Times; some of them wrong. He participated in false reporting that helped orchestrate invasion of Iraq by the coalition of the dragged kicking […]
Comforted by false reality
A New York Times article, The Surprisingly Large Cost of Telling Small Lies, quotes a successful English business person about the need to confront truths, even uncomfortable ones, “…telling lies is the […]
Beat reporters left the building
In 2010, the small city of Bell, CA was front page news nationwide. Over 17 years, the city manager and other municipal officials bilked tax payers out of millions of dollars. The […]
The Explainer explains
Surveying corporate media coverage of the education dispute, I noted a column by Vaughn Palmer that displays his particular usefulness when BC Liberals want information distributed. Here is an excerpt from Palmer’s A […]
Redefinition of news – Updated
It is no secret that Postmedia, owner of daily newspapers from Montreal to Vancouver, accumulates losses at rates it cannot sustain. Raising prices and reducing expenses is not a solution. Despite higher […]
R.I.P. Paul St. Pierre, 1923-2014
In the summer of 1968, I was a naive minion of the Liberal Party, helping manage the coastal part of Paul St. Pierre’s campaign to become MP for Coast Chilcotin. It was […]
A system guaranteed to fail
I grumble about the quality of political journalism hereabouts and these complaints seem justified, even urgent, when an Ontario pundit demonstrates an example of powerful advocacy for the public interest. Andrew Coyne […]
Losing the news
Pulitzer Prize winner Alex Jones wrote the 2009 book Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy. In it, he examines “authentic journalistic objectivity” and finds “a crisis of […]
Good questions
Not-a-nincompoop blogger RossK at The Gazetteer mentioned difficulties faced by Bob Mackin, the province’s preeminent investigative journalist, when Bob digs, and pays, for information the government does not want us to know. […]
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