Blog chatter on the CBC’s selective poll reporting makes it to the Toronto Sun;

Did you know that an Environics Research poll released last week found that a startling 73% of Canadians surveyed believe Prime Minister Paul Martin is either “very responsible” or “somewhat responsible” for AdScam?

Yes, actually. Most people who surf blogs did.

But you wouldn’t know any of this from the highly selective reporting of this poll last week by the CBC, which commissioned it, and by other media, who, incredibly, portrayed it as a positive finding for Martin. (For alerting me to this controversy, I’m indebted to blogger “Michael” of Winnipeg, who first wrote about it Sunday on his website, bluemapleleaf.blogspot. com.)

Kudos to Nealenews, who is headlining the article at the moment. The CBC has been skewing their reporting (or lack of it) so heavily for the Liberals, you’d almost wonder if they have something to hide.

I’ve been up since 5 am for no reason at all, other than my sleep patterns are completely disrupted from three days and nights of waiting on an expected litter of puppies. The wee darlings arrived by c-section yesterday, giving my VISA card a case of the bends.
So, there are sometimes sensible explanations for small dead animal postings made at 2 am – namely, small live animals.
Listening to the local news this morning, I caught an item about a businessman in Regina named “Craig McMillan” who’s pulling some crafty scheme to the evade the smoking ban. My ears perked up. You see, that was the second time I’d heard the name “Craig McMillan” this morning.
The first time was at just past seven o’f*ckingclock, when the phone rang with a call from someone who said they were looking for the guy.
As I said, I was already up. Somewhere out there is a reporter who just missed an excellent two word interview.

When assigned to cover a war zone, you’d hope that the colleagues watching your back aren’t carrying knives.
h/t The Corner.

Keeping an anxious nation* updated on continuing developments in the “Summer Weather Comes Early To Saskatchewan” story as it unfolds;

“Winter Weather Lingers Late In Saskatchewan”.
After a front moved in with high winds from the northwest all day Saturday, Saskatchewan residents were greeted this morning by rain, which has now turned to snow. Winter storm warnings were issued late last evening for the southwest. The sun rose at ….

Today’s weather here underscores the absurdity of the CBC’s attention to “breaking records”. The fact is this – there is no such thing as an “unusual” temperature on the prairies in the month of April. Or May. Or September or October or November. The only constant is inconsistancy.
Like the rest of the national media, The People’s Network is oblivious to this. For all the purported claim to “bringing Canada to Canadians for the low, low cost of $1billion dollars a year!”, Western viewers are resigned to seeing our presence on the national networks largely confined to residents jogging in January, snowbound in June or standing in a feedlot.
As someone snarked the other day, it’s a good thing that the grain elevators are coming down in Saskatchewan – it may finally force CBC reporters to look for different backdrops.

This is the number one story across much of the nation.

(Apr.10…original G&M cover has moved, so replaced with another from the same day)
This is the front page of the CBC website this morning.

This is your explanation.

Update – A reader writes: “Our pals at the CBC, who stand on guard for We, waited until 9:17 tonight to post today’s bombshell that has testimony linking adscam directly to the PMO.”

The Pulitzers are out. Generating the most buzz is the winner of the Murders Orchestrated For The Camera category.
(details of selection criteria)

In the fine tradition of “Fake, But Accurate”, CBS erroniously reported on March 28th via their website that Terry Shiavo had died (Radio host Glenn Back grabbed a screen capture (pdf).) – then quietly removed the story absent retraction, correction or apology. (And some claim that bloggers lack “journalistic ethics”…)
One wonders how a news organization with as many resources as CBS could manage to jump the gun so badly on the number one news story of the day – perhaps someone finally noticed the Kinko’s fax number on the leaked “death certificate”?
hat tip OTB

“Bush’s spread lacks Southfork flash”
An actual headline, from the Globe and Mail – a proud member of the Canadian media establishment that is far too sophisticated to view the world through the distorted lens of American TV.

This may be Texas and President George W. Bush may like to walk with a bit of a regional swagger but his new house is no Southfork, the over-the-top pile of the Ewings on TV’s Dallas. Instead, it is a low-slung building with a large wraparound porch that appears to fit effortlessly into the landscape.

None of the rest is worth bothering with. Waste of electrons.

Sean at Pol:Spy has done a bang up job of unravelling the James Roszko grow-op story. For all of the “my illegal pot smoking didn’t kill those police officers – someone else’s stolen trucks did” defensiveness in the media and punditry in the confusing days following the murders, it seems the initial report was closer to the truth. The quonset was outfitted with water tanks, a $30,000 generator and close to 300 plants – with nary an engine puller to be seen.
Once the “only twenty plants” meme took hold, it appears that the major media outlets simply did their investigative journalism while reading someone else’s paper over the morning coffee. Quite the little echo chamber they turned out to be.

Andy Barrie of CBC radio has advice for a Canadian who takes issue with having to support a left wing network with tax dollars. Leave. (Which reminds me – when I get home, I must remember to call the CBC afternoon request line and get them to play a little Toby Keith.)

Jeffrey Schuster revisits the looting of the Iraq National Museum in the days following the fall of Saddam Hussein, and how foreign journalists grabbed misinformation fed them by “museum officials” – Baath party appointees – without skepticism or verification, and ran with it.

By the end of the day on Saturday, April 12, then, the major outlines of the story had been set by the journalists in Baghdad. According to the officials who had been located and interviewed on the museum grounds, most if not all of the collection had been removed by looting Iraqis. Again, according to a handful of Iraqis on the grounds, the American forces, who could have prevented this catastrophe, did nothing. Writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, Paul McGeough, who linked the museum story to his wider anti-war stance, did not hesitate to cast the first stone. “After witnessing three weeks of attacks on Baghdad and almost a week of looting – especially of the Iraq National Museum,” he writes, “questions about where the criminality lies become blurred.”

The numbers of artifacts lost inflated as one report followed another, and academics joined the chorus. The “170,000” items of antiquity lost from the undefended museum were worth “billions of dollars”. It was an “act of violence against humanity”, “a tragedy that has no parallel in world history”. No latitude was given to a US military occupied with battling the murderous Saddam Fedayeen – the “no war for oil” chorus rewrote the pages of their songbooks. The charge that “lives are more important than oil” was replaced with “pottery is more important than lives”.

Some reporters, like McGeough, used the situation to take a cheap-shot at the US administration. Others, like Burns, were simply “disposed to believe the worst.” And still others were unable or unwilling to fact-check some of the basic points of the story, the most crucial being the figure of 170,000 coming from Nabhal Amin, a former official who was not privy to all of the procedures that had been implemented over the preceding months to safeguard Iraq’s antiquities. The academics, however, probably come off with the largest stain on their reputations. That members of a professional class who swear by the tenets of critical thinking and the presentation of evidence at every turn would be the first ones to accuse the US military without waiting for a proper investigation tells us a lot about the state of current political discourse in academia. There were few apologies and when they did come they were uttered through clenched teeth.

Via the German blog, Medienkritik.

Mick Stockinger notices something odd in a CNN report on a US Senate vote over oil drilling in Alaska.

The picture’s caption reads: “Musk ox graze in an area proposed as a possible site for oil exploration inside Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”

Hmmm. Considering that the proposed drill site is on the coastal plain and that the Brooks range is nearly over the horizon, at the southern edge of ANWR wilderness area, I would say that this is a flat-out lie.
[…]
There are actually two kinds of deception going on here. The site may well have been included in a 1987 proposal to congress, but it bears no relevance to the current ANWR drilling proposal. Captioning the photo makes me very suspicious that this is no inadvertant mistake or simple sloppiness. Aside from the equivocation on which proposal is being discussed, I believe CNN inserted this photograph because it has a much more appealing esthetic than the coastal plain where the facility is actually proposed to be built. Tundra just doesn’t tug at the heart strings the way snow- capped mountains do.

Via Michelle Malkin.

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.