The final version of my letter of complaint to the Vancouver Sun has been published (popup jpg) re: a Spector column titled “Appalling glee on the right at the prospect of US payback for a dithering PM”.
As I pointed out to his editors, the column was completely devoid of URL’s or direct quotes to support his accusation. That should have been their first sniff that something was rancid… but editors are lazy, I guess – trivial matters like going to the source for fact checking purposes is too much effort. So much for the professionalism of the “mainstream media”.
For background, read the original post and comments and compare it to Spector’s take. Note that the chain of events places the appearance of his column in the Vancouver Sun in very close proximity, time-line wise, with his suspension of authorship privilages from the same website he critiques. Norm asserts that his column was submitted prior to his suspension – I’ll take him at his word. (The details about his departure were not public until he chose to volunteer them in an announcement of his “resignation” at Blogs Canada*.)
I was invited by Patricia Graham, Editor in Chief, to submit a letter. The original version appears here in its original email form.

Thanks; I’ve passed it along to the letters editor so you may hear from us prior to publication.

On morning of March 8th, I recieved a cheery note from Cheryl Parker, Letters editor, along with a request for my phone and address for their files. I asked she include the url for my blogsite.

Thank you, Kate. I’ll add the url and let you know what day it will be in the paper.

Late in the afternoon I recieved a call from Fazil Milhar (editorial pages editor). He asked pointedly if the content of Shotgun post had been changed since it was written on March 2nd. I assured him that it hadn’t. He seemed reluctant to believe me, and the interrogation continued. It began to occur to me that the question was in fact, a veiled accusation.
I wonder where he got that idea?
I informed Mr.Milhar of the protocols concerning blog changes and updates, and that to the best of my knowledge, nothing had been altered or removed from the post or its comments by me or anyone else. (Oddly, he did not contact the editors of the WS for verification.)
He then declared that, under Canadian law, the Vancouver Sun was legally responsible for any libel that might be on an external link, and that because content might change after the fact, they would not provide a direct URL to the “Missile Defence” post at the Shotgun. I countered that on any given day you could find external links in the pages of newspapers – it didn’t seem to be a concern to the Montreal Gazette when they published a link to Monte Solberg’s blog.
There was complete silence for a moment.
In lieu of a URL to the thread, he offered to quote the post directly. That only addresed the remarks about the alleged comparison of Arafat to Paul Martin – not the “glee” he alleged in the comments. I suspect the Sun might have wanted to steer readers well clear of the thread, in view of their columnists contributions to it;

If you spent less time as an anonymouse writing long-winded, over- intellectualized and meaningless postings, you too could probably learn French. Lots of westerners have, including the deputy minister of finance. And it’s not as if French immersion hasn’t been around for a few years. Face it: you’re a bigot.”

During the discussion, I filled him in on the fact that Norm had been suspended and asked if he was aware of his conduct in previous weeks on the internet. He resignedly admitted he had, and from my end of the line, didn’t sound particularly happy about what he’d found.
As is their nature, editors have difficulty recognizing that readers are not employees. Later that evening, I recieved a sharply redacted rewrite of my letter, ending with this;

“I leave it to readers to decide whose interpretation is correct, Spector’s or
mine.”

I replied that my interpretation was not subject to majority vote, and unrewrote the rewrite. I received this reply:

“For legal reasons, we will not refer to Western Standard’s Shotgun blog.”

Legal reasons? This is the same Vancouver Sun that gave approval to Norm Spector to write;

” the website of the Western Standard — a diverse group united only in their antipathy to lefties and Liberals..”

From the Law Offices of Flip, Flop and Bipolar….
I finally agreed to the version that was published. It had become obvious to me that protecting Norm Spector from the embarrassment of his own misrepresentation trumps journalistic ethics and transparency at the Vancouver Sun. More to the point, the exercise had already served its original purpose.
Despite the title they preface the letter with – Treat Blog Writers With Respect Due Other Authors, there is no mention of SDA or the Western Standard Shotgun.
A raw text file containing the full exchange from which the exerpts have been taken is here.

Trodwell at Right Thinking People administers a Right Proper Fisking to Norm Spector.

Apparently Norm is feeling a little down on the Internet, conservatives, bloggers, Canadians and a lot of other things, so one wonders whether he hasn’t had a little too much cheese in his diet lately. In fact, his piece sounds like an impassioned defence of the Mainstream Media, and as such, puts me in mind of King Canute ordering the tide to retreat. You know Canute, right? Danish guy, fancy crown, damp cuffs?

…nibble nibble nibble nibble ….
According to the Vancouver Sun, there should be a letter to the editor from me in today’s paper, in rebuttal to Norm Spector’s misrepresentation of my post on Missile Fallout at the Shotgun. The process included a few emails and an interesting phone call from Fazil Milhar (editorial pages editor), in which I (or the Shotgun admins?) were virtually accused of altering the content after the fact. Gee. I wonder where he got that idea?
He explained that the Sun couldn’t include a URL to my original post, as there was the possibility the content might be changed (by me, evidently), and that according to Canadian law, the Sun was legally responsible for any libelous statements contained in an external link.
“Oh?” I asked, “It didn’t seem to stop the Montreal Gazette from providing a link to Monte Solberg’s blog”.
I thought I’d been disconnected for a moment. Utter silence.
The problem was resolved with an offer to quote the post in its entirety. I thanked them, and mentioned that my letter would also appear here in its original form. (here). In the meantime, if someone who has access to a Vancouver Sun would be so kind, I’d be curious to know if today’s paper includes any URL’s.
In the meanwhile, at Blogs Canada, Norman has found both a new home and his intellectual soulmate in the persona of one “MWW”, none other than Meaghan Champion-Walker-Williams. Elevated discourse fair threatens to burst open the seams.

Heh. (Thanks to commentor TimR)

Via OTB, (who I’m linking to as the source site requires registration).

The Internet surpassed radio as a source for political news in the United States last year as more people went online to keep up with the presidential election campaign, according to a new report released today. Twenty-nine per cent of US adults used the Internet to get political news last year, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. That’s up from 4 per cent in 1996 and 18 per cent in 2000.
Television remained the dominant medium for most voters, but 18 per cent said they got most of their political news from the Internet, compared with 17 per cent who said they turned to the radio for their news. For those with a broadband connection at home, the Internet rivalled newspapers in importance.
Most Internet users surveyed said they voted to re- elect Republican President George W Bush, but supporters of Democratic challenger Sen John Kerry were more likely to say the Internet helped them settle on a candidate.

The information is broken down further;

52% of internet users, or about 63 million people, said they went online to get news or information about the 2004 elections. We call them online political news consumers.

35% of internet users, or about 43 million people, said they used email to discuss politics, and one of the most popular email subjects was jokes about the candidates and the election.

11% of internet users, or more than 13 million people, went online to engage directly in campaign activities such as donating money, volunteering, or learning about political events to attend.

Pew Research PDF’s available here.
From Editor and Publisher;

A Pew Center study released today found that using the Internet to get news of politics during the 2004 presidential contest grew sixfold from 1996, while the influence of newspapers sank.
In 1996, only 3% of those surveyed called the Web one of their two leading sources of campaign news. In 2004, the figure was 18%. Reliance on TV rose slightly from 72% to 78% but prime use of newspapers plunged from 60% to 39%.
[…]
About one in ten said the Internet had information not available elsewhere. They were more likely to visit blogs or campaign sites for information. Blogs “are having a modest level of impact on the voter side and probably a more dramatic impact on the institutional side,” Lee Rainie, author of the study, told the Associated Press. “Blogs are still a realm where very, very active and pretty elite, both technologically oriented people and politically oriented people go.”

Reached for comment;

Today, the dinosaur continues his retreat, but not without braying his displeasure from behind the safe haven provided by the Globe and Mail.

The vast majority of blogs are akin to teenage diaries that attract a few dozen readers a day. Space for immediate reader feedback suggests what talk radio would be without the seven-second delay or the host’s ability to disconnect vexatious callers.
[…]
But the weakness of Canadian conservatism — a coalition united principally in opposition to lefties and Liberals — explains the failure of Canadian bloggers to strike any significant blows against mainstream media.
Amongst conservatives, you’ll find a fair degree of despair bordering on loathing for Canada; neither is a good recipe for convincing one’s compatriots about media bias or anything else. A few conservatives, deeply alienated from the mainstream, propose retrenching behind firewalls or even broach the possibility of separating from Canada and joining the U.S.

The swarm gathers.
None of this is new material to anyone who has followed the great scaly creature’s stumble through the blogosphere… his walnut sized brain stubbornly seized on the post-Rathergate notion that bloggers exist to “take down” the media or get favoured political parties elected, and that nothing short of this achievement constitutes blogging “success”.
But this latest, more public cry from the swamp (an echo of a similar column in the Vancouver Sun a couple of days ago) merits a more straightforward explanation. In this case, I shall allow Norm to do the honours himself with this BlogsCanada.ca announcement explaining his exit from the Shotgun;

“A couple of hours after�filing�the Vancouver Sun�column�posted below, I was notified that I was being suspended for 3 months …. “

Posted at 03/04/2005 09:12:57 EST.
The before vs after timeline he provides might be a little fudging on Norm’s part – there’s no way to know, outside of asking the Vancouver Sun when he submitted it. I was informed of his suspension at around 5pm Mountain time the day before.
But this is the blogosphere, and in true blogger fashion, Sean says it best.

Nibble, nibble.

Editor And Publisher;

Laurie Garrett, the prize-winning Newsday reporter, left the Melville, N.Y., paper Monday with a blistering memo to her colleagues that may provoke debate elsewhere in the newspaper industry.

Well, there went the gold watch.

“When I started out in journalism the newsrooms were still full of old guys with blue collar backgrounds who got genuinely indignant when the Governor lied or somebody turned off the heat on a poor person’s apartment in mid-January. They cussed and yelled their ways through the day, took an occasional sly snort from a bottle in the bottom drawer of their desk and bit into news stories like packs of wild dogs, never letting go until they’d found and told the truth. If they hadn’t been reporters most of those guys would have been cops or firefighters. It was just that way. …
“Honesty and tenacity (and for that matter, the working class) seem to have taken backseats to the sort of ‘snappy news’, sensationalism, scandal-for-the-sake of scandal crap that sells. This is not a uniquely Tribune or even newspaper industry problem: this is true from the Atlanta mixing rooms of CNN to Sulzberger’s offices in Times Square. Profits: that’s what it’s all about now. But you just can’t realize annual profit returns of more than 30 percent by methodically laying out the truth in a dignified, accessible manner. And it’s damned tough to find that truth every day with a mere skeleton crew of reporters and editors.
“This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47 states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche. I have found America a place of great and confused fearfulness.”

You know, it’s tempting to just agree and applaud.
It’s more tempting to ask why she waited until after she quit.

This Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) piece turns the common complaint about the “lack” of fact checking in media on its head;

After a journalist finishes writing their story, it’s generally sent to a fact checker. Fact checkers serve to avoid embarassing gaffes, such as getting a person’s name wrong, or saying that they work for the wrong employer, or some other such straightforward, objective fact.
[…]
The fact checker, unlike the journalist, has usually spent no time researching the subject whatsoever, and so as a lay person reading the story they slightly misinterpret it, then paraphrase their misinterpretation and ask me if it’s correct. Inevitably this bastardized explanation says something grossly misleading or not quite factual, and though I’ve long since learned that I really ought to say ‘yeah, whatever’ and have them leave the story as is, I can never resist the temptation to provide a correction, at which point they go back to the story and rewrite some sentences based on their incorrect understanding of my correction of their paraphrasing of their incorrect understanding of the original explanation. Unsurprisingly, this always makes the explanation worse.

Or, to put it another way – the product of multi-level incompetence.

Retired CBS news correspondant, Tom Fenton is going public with criticism of CBS and TV news in general, in his upcoming book, “Bad News.” ;

“Once you get halfway through the CBS Evening News, the rest of it you can turn off,” Fenton told the News. “There’s nothing there you need to know. It’s an attempt to entertain people and pump up ratings. If I want entertainment, I’ll watch ‘The Daily Show.'”
“We have literally dumbed down our public,” he continued. “We have trained them to accept the coverage they’re getting. We so rarely explain what’s going on, there’s no context. So, people of course, aren’t interested. They have no idea what’s going on.

The rest is here.

…is a failure to communicate.

Out of curiosity, I ran a Google News search.

Results 1 – 10 of about 1,960 for Terri Schiavo right-to-die.
Results 1 – 10 of about 357 for Terri Schiavo right-to-life

The latter look to be mostly op-eds, or include references to “right-to-life” groups or lawyers. The hard news stories are nearly uniform in the “right to die”.

Drudge is currently quoting the New York Observer, that executives who were offered up in lieu of Dan Rather are fighting back and refusing to resign as ordered:

THE NEW YORK OBSERVER will report tomorrow: ‘Former 60 Minutes Wednesday executive editor Josh Howard has told colleagues that before he resigns, the 23-year CBS News veteran will demand that the network retract remarks by CBS president Leslie Moonves, correct its official story line and ultimately clear his name’…
In the event of a lawsuit, Mr. Howard has told associates that he would like to see Moonves put under oath to talk about his own roles in the network’s stubborn, hapless defense of the flawed segment on President Bush’s National Guard service.
Howard has also indicated to colleagues that he would subpoena specific CBS documents, including the e-mails of top executives.

As they say … developing

In other news;

hat tip – Sean.

All morning, Rawlco Radio’s CKOM has been playing hourly newscasts by David Kirton. His reporting is often tainted by editorial comment; this morning he’s characterizing Conservative Jason Kenney’s remarks that gays have always had the right to marry in this way;

“Jason Kenney MOCKED same sex marriage….”

Emphasis his. Now, considering that Kenney said nothing less factual or more “mocking” than judges who have ruled against same sex marriage in their decisions, the question arises as to whether Kirton is simply too lazy to bother with basic fact checking, or whether truth takes a back seat to his own bias?

A transcript worth reading. Jeff Jarvis (Buzzmachine) does the blogosphere proud, as expected.

JARVIS: We didn’t fire him, the bloggers. CNN did. I agree it doesn’t fit the crime, because we don’t know the crimes that are in CNN’s heart here. Something else happened here that we don’t know. The story’s not over. We have to see that transcript from Davos. There’s no reason for that to be hidden still, and CNN has to realize that they have to tell us more of what’s going on.
The problem here is that by just asking for the truth, knocking at the doors of the news temple and saying, tell us what’s go on, we’re being portrayed as a lynch mob. We’re not. We’re citizens wanting to know the truth. It used to be the job of journalists to report that. So let’s get to the truth, let’s get to the facts. I think if Jordan had come right out and said, I’m sorry, I blew it, I was wrong, I didn’t mean to say that, he wouldn’t have made any more friends that he has now, but he still would be at his job.

The NYT is unhappy and shows it by lashing out at bloggers with manipulative editing. Which of course, means it’s business as usual.

In the wake of Eason Jordan’s departure from CNN, this flashback from New York Times correspondant John Burns exposing the deep corruption in the media. With a near certain attempt underway by some in the mainstream press to transform Jordan from conspiracy theorist and propogandist into a “victim of the right wing blogosphere”, Burns’ words bear repeating. Originally published in September of 2003.

Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that [Iraq] was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay.
There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.
In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people’s stories — mine included — specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper.

Read it all.

When a distinguished author, one-time Chief of Staff to Brian Mulroney, and Globe and Mail columnist finds himself in the midst of a flamewar with a lowly “potty mouth” blogger, what does he do?
Why he does what any trained journalist and former Ambassador to Israel would do! He draws on his formidable academic credentials and experience to rally his loyal supporters.
Screenshot of comments thread:

Breaking news via Drudge – after nearly two weeks of blogosphere driven pressure to keep the story alive, CNN’s Eason Jordan has finally resigned;

CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan quit Friday amidst a furor over remarks he made in Switzerland last month about journalists killed by the U.S. military in Iraq.

Early reaction from Powerline, who predicted on Feb.7th that “Eason Jordan is finished”;

I don’t know, of course, what tipped the balance, but I wonder whether it might have been this: Larry Kudlow’s interview with three influential Senators, George Allen, Jeffrey Sessions and Norm Coleman, all of whom knew about the story, in contrast with many “mainstream” reporters who have been asked about it in recent days, and were incensed by it. This detail may have been telling:

Senator Coleman was not ready to open up an investigation, but he indicated it was worth looking at.

Senator Coleman is, of course, the Chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Larry notes that these and other Senators had to get their awareness of the Jordan affair through blogs.

James Joyner has been compiling a list of blogger response.
update
Howard Kurtz finally writes the column he should have the first time round, though still highly sympathetic to his co-worker at CNN.

Day-after media coverage of Chretien’s testimony before Gomery;

“…golfballs …. took out golfballs … golfballs … signed golfballs … Clinton’s golfballs … Bush’s golfballs … law firm golfballs … golfballs… “

Now, I ask you – if a commercial artist in the middle of rural Saskatchewan can spot a an intentional ploy to divert media attention from the denial, the obfuscation, the excuse making that passed for testimony from Chretien at the Adscam inquiry, why did every media outlet in the country fall for it?
Legitimate reporting would have ignored the made-for-tv stunt. Competent editorial review would have discarded that portion for more relevant testimony. Intelligent journalists would have recognized that Chretien wasn’t playing Gomery – he was playing the media as fools. And today, they look like fools, fawning over his cleverness, his craftiness, his successful attempt to one-up Justice Gomery.
Not one of them – not a single one – stopped chuckling long enough to ask whether it’s a wise tactic to attempt to embarrass and humiliate the judge who will be ruling on your involvement in a $100 million theft of public funds – and who may yet have the last laugh.

As the blogosphere continues to hammer at MSM stonewalling over the the Eason Jordan – Davos story; Michelle Malkin has useful updates here and here. Most interesting tidbit – copy of an email to Mickey Kaus, from Howard Kurtz;

I have a story in tomorrow’s paper. Had you been kind enough to check earlier, I would have told you that I flagged it for The Post on the day that I was crashing on CBS naming Bob Schieffer as Rather’s temporary replacement and said we should pursue it. Two other Post reporters pursued it, spoke to Jordan and decided not to write anything based on the fact that what was actually said was in dispute. I had nothing to do with that decision. I’ve since picked it up, done additional reporting and filed my story.

That sort of calls out for a “harumph!” emoticon.
update – The “narrowly focused” Kurtz piece is now online. Captain Ed is profoundly unimpressed and wonders why Kurtz – who reads his blog – didn’t mention that Jordan’s words at Davos were part of a long-standing pattern of unsubstanciated accusations against the military.

It took Kurtz over a week to finally get around to publishing this article on Eason’s Fables. In that time, it appears that Kurtz did as little investigation as possible on Jordan. My readers and I found all of Jordan’s earlier commentary within 24 hours, and we only have very limited access to Nexis and full-time jobs doing other things than media analysis. Worse than that, all of this information has been repeatedly presented on my blog — in fact, it was all presented on my blog today, and we know Howard Kurtz read my blog sometime this afternoon. Why didn’t Kurtz ask about his remarks in Portugal from three months ago, or about his identical accusations against Israel two years ago? Why didn’t Kurtz press Jordan on the entire story? Only Kurtz can answer that, and I doubt he will have much more to say to anyone about Eason’s Fables from this point onward.

As Glenn Reynolds noted a few days ago,

A story in today’s Christian Science Monitor asks, “Are bloggers journalists?”
Perhaps we should start asking if journalists are journalists.

Indeed.

Powerline is reporting that Jack Kelly of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has finally broken media silence on the Eason Jordan story that has been the buzz of the blogosphere for several days*;

The scandalous remarks of Eason Jordan, CNN’s top news executive, last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the failure of the major media to report them suggest the distortions are deliberate.
Mr. Jordan told a panel that the U.S. military had killed a dozen journalists in Iraq, and that they had been deliberately targeted. When challenged, Mr. Jordan could provide no evidence to support the charge, and subsequently lied about having made it, though the record shows he had made a similar charge a few months before, and also earlier had falsely accused the Israeli military of targeting journalists.
Mr. Jordan’s slander has created a firestorm in the blogosphere, but has yet to be mentioned in the “mainstream” media.
Gee, I wonder why not.

Jeff Jarvis has been following it closely too – apparently a tape of Jordan’s statement is on its way from the event organizers, at the request of Sisyphus.
Updates: The Washington Times
is commenting, and Captains Quarters is catching other “cracks in the dam” of the mainstream media.

Still on the other side.

Via Mystery Achievement