Why is so much journalism crap?

Stephanie Nolen is no unpaid intern. In fact, she's a respected veteran in the journalism profession.


In today's Globe and Mail she's got a two-page feature about the horrific gang violence gripping El Salvador. By the time I finished the story, I was convinced that there is indeed an epidemic of gang violence in the country.


Here are some questions that Nolen carefully avoids:


Is the gang violence in El Salvador related to gang violence in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala?


Is the gang violence related to the militarization of the police forces?


Is the gang violence related to the "war on drugs?"


Are these latter two questions related to American meddling in these countries for the past 100+ years?


In two pages, our reporter doesn't go anywhere near these obvious questions. Instead, you turn the page under the impression that gang violence just spontaneously erupted after a few illegal immigrants were repatriated from the US.


That's very shallow journalism.

Dear Pakistan; US drones are good for you

It's got to be one of the most egregiously unctuous opinion pieces of the year. Writing in the Globe and Mail, Canadian journalist Stephanie Nolen offers up the view that America's drone campaign in Pakistan is secretly appreciated by the Pakistanis.  

I suppose if we open the floodgates of baseless speculation we could postulate many scenarios in which the victims appreciate being victimized.

North America's native peoples deep down were grateful for the genocide perpetrated on them by European settlers. It afforded them the opportunity to embrace a superior culture.

Polish Jews were thankful for how the Warsaw ghetto brought them together. It allowed them to evolve a sense of community that would have been unattainable otherwise.

Gazans appreciate the blockade and the wars that accompany every Israeli election cycle because it gives them the opportunity to plumb new depths of human resilience.

And so on...

This is of course the logical continuation of that Nations of Virtue characteristic that we and we alone know what's best for everyone else.

It is a logic freighted to its core with the baggage of 500 years of racist imperialism.

We are the good guys and you are the primitives.