We'll probably never know what combination of mental illness, parental neglect, substance abuse, etc, etc, motivated that wretched loser to mow down a couple of dozen pedestrians in Toronto last month. We can only speculate.
And that's what the Sunday Star did this week. He got his name splashed all over the front page by feature writer Amy Dempsey, and then got two more pages inside the first section.
Yup, whatever else he may be, he's not a nobody anymore. Canada's most popular Sunday paper made sure of that!
News value? Zilch.
Message to other budding mass murderers seething with resentment against everything and everybody? Just do it; uncork your wildest murderous fantasies and we'll do our level best to make you famous. We'll track down every friend and relative and former classmate and get them to talk talk talk, and it'll be all about you you you. Sure, you'll spend the rest of your life in jail, but your name will be a household word!
That may not be responsible journalism, but at least it'll give the circulation numbers a brief boost.
Showing posts with label Sunday Star. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sunday Star. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 15, 2018
Sunday, August 27, 2017
Is the mission of a free press to elucidate or obfuscate?
This story from the Washington Post (August 23) has found its way into my Sunday Star today, four days later. Only the title has been simplified for the benefit of the Canadian readership; Was the cost of defeating Daesh in Mosul too high?
Writers Kareem Fahim and Aaso Ameen Schwan never get around to answering their rhetorical question, because, by gosh, it's just too hard to figure out what the cost was. Nobody seems to know how many civilians have died in Mosul. We are provided with a reassuring quote from a US Army spokesman about "how we apply rigorous standards to our targeting process" and of course even one civilian casualty is too many.
The best estimate they can come up with is 1,429 civilian dead, sourced from the Iraqi military. Had they tried a little harder and spent five minutes with Google, they might have happened upon this story from PRI citing an Amnesty International report that came out a month and a half before their story, that claims 5,805 civilian casualties.
Or they might have stumbled over this story by Patrick Cockburn in The Independent. Citing Kurdish intelligence, Cockburn speaks of 40,000 deaths in Mosul.
PRI, Amnesty International, Patrick Cockburn, and The Independent are all legitimate (although Western) sources who are quoted without hesitation when their reportage suits the narrative we're trying to spin. When it doesn't, they can be safely ignored.
In a similar vein, a story by Ann Hui in the Globe and Mail last week included the audacious claim that China has more journalists in prison than any country in the world. Say what? Even a pot-addled hillbilly from the backwoods of Bruce County knows that's a crock of shit!
I fired off an appropriately miffed letter to the editor providing a link to more recent information than what their reporter apparently had access to. Within a few hours I got a reply from the Globe's "Public Editor," Sylvia Stead.
Well, by golly, the reporter had made an oopsie and mistakenly used statistics from December of 2015 for a story written in August 2017. That's an honest mistake of course; major news platforms use outdated stats all the time when it suits the narrative they're spinning. We must never be allowed to forget that China is a totalitarian state with no press freedom.
To their credit, they printed a correction of sorts the next day - China no longer had the most journalists locked up. They could have gone a little further and pointed out, given the latest available stats (and if I can find them, Ann Hui could too), there are currently about five times as many journalists in the prisons of our NATO ally Turkey (population 90 million) than in the Peoples Republic of China (population 1,400 million), but I guess that would be asking too much.
It would undermine the narrative. As we all know, NATO is a force for freedom and democracy while China is an evil dictatorship.
It's worth fudging the facts to preserve such an essential truth.
Writers Kareem Fahim and Aaso Ameen Schwan never get around to answering their rhetorical question, because, by gosh, it's just too hard to figure out what the cost was. Nobody seems to know how many civilians have died in Mosul. We are provided with a reassuring quote from a US Army spokesman about "how we apply rigorous standards to our targeting process" and of course even one civilian casualty is too many.
The best estimate they can come up with is 1,429 civilian dead, sourced from the Iraqi military. Had they tried a little harder and spent five minutes with Google, they might have happened upon this story from PRI citing an Amnesty International report that came out a month and a half before their story, that claims 5,805 civilian casualties.
Or they might have stumbled over this story by Patrick Cockburn in The Independent. Citing Kurdish intelligence, Cockburn speaks of 40,000 deaths in Mosul.
PRI, Amnesty International, Patrick Cockburn, and The Independent are all legitimate (although Western) sources who are quoted without hesitation when their reportage suits the narrative we're trying to spin. When it doesn't, they can be safely ignored.
In a similar vein, a story by Ann Hui in the Globe and Mail last week included the audacious claim that China has more journalists in prison than any country in the world. Say what? Even a pot-addled hillbilly from the backwoods of Bruce County knows that's a crock of shit!
I fired off an appropriately miffed letter to the editor providing a link to more recent information than what their reporter apparently had access to. Within a few hours I got a reply from the Globe's "Public Editor," Sylvia Stead.
Well, by golly, the reporter had made an oopsie and mistakenly used statistics from December of 2015 for a story written in August 2017. That's an honest mistake of course; major news platforms use outdated stats all the time when it suits the narrative they're spinning. We must never be allowed to forget that China is a totalitarian state with no press freedom.
To their credit, they printed a correction of sorts the next day - China no longer had the most journalists locked up. They could have gone a little further and pointed out, given the latest available stats (and if I can find them, Ann Hui could too), there are currently about five times as many journalists in the prisons of our NATO ally Turkey (population 90 million) than in the Peoples Republic of China (population 1,400 million), but I guess that would be asking too much.
It would undermine the narrative. As we all know, NATO is a force for freedom and democracy while China is an evil dictatorship.
It's worth fudging the facts to preserve such an essential truth.
Sunday, September 25, 2016
Weekend in Wiarton
The Korean is now charging me $5.25 for the Saturday Globe and Mail.
That's a high tariff to get the latest insights from the likes of Renzetti, Saunders, and Wente. God knows they're not compelled by the Korean Korner Store Mafia to pay $5.25 to read my shit.
That makes the Sunday Star a veritable bargain; not only do I get the Toronto-centric pundits, but for less than three bucks I get the creme de la creme of the NYT punditocracy thrown in to boot, with that marvellous NYT insert that shows up every Sunday in my Sunday Star.
Ya, for less than three bucks I get world-class bullshitters like Friedman, Cohen, Brooks, and Douhtat.
I'm rapidly coming to a place where I'm going to skip the Saturday Globe, save $5.25, and just go to the world-class guys on Sunday.
Which leaves me with a bit of a problem; how to fill the time I used to spend turning the pages of Canada's national newspaper of record?
Newspaper wars may be what they are, but we're still stuck in Wiarton. Picked up my Saturday paper and headed to Dockside Willies for breakfast...
WTF?...
The place was packed! As in so packed there was no place to open up your weekend paper! Billy-Bob with the jacked-up Ford pick-up has a raging success on his hands! Who'd a thunk it?
Back when the place was known as Coal-shed Willie's I don't recall ever having to walk out the door because it was too busy.
Fuck success!
So we headed back up the hill to the Top Spot. No view of the bay, no outside patio, but really good straight-up breakfasts every day all the time.
Mind you, they could be succumbing to the siren call of success too... I notice their famous Sunday breakfast buffet has now migrated to include Saturday... the thin edge of the wedge, to be sure.
But at least you can still find a booth in which to unfold your weekend newspaper.
That's a high tariff to get the latest insights from the likes of Renzetti, Saunders, and Wente. God knows they're not compelled by the Korean Korner Store Mafia to pay $5.25 to read my shit.
That makes the Sunday Star a veritable bargain; not only do I get the Toronto-centric pundits, but for less than three bucks I get the creme de la creme of the NYT punditocracy thrown in to boot, with that marvellous NYT insert that shows up every Sunday in my Sunday Star.
Ya, for less than three bucks I get world-class bullshitters like Friedman, Cohen, Brooks, and Douhtat.
I'm rapidly coming to a place where I'm going to skip the Saturday Globe, save $5.25, and just go to the world-class guys on Sunday.
Which leaves me with a bit of a problem; how to fill the time I used to spend turning the pages of Canada's national newspaper of record?
Newspaper wars may be what they are, but we're still stuck in Wiarton. Picked up my Saturday paper and headed to Dockside Willies for breakfast...
WTF?...
The place was packed! As in so packed there was no place to open up your weekend paper! Billy-Bob with the jacked-up Ford pick-up has a raging success on his hands! Who'd a thunk it?
Back when the place was known as Coal-shed Willie's I don't recall ever having to walk out the door because it was too busy.
Fuck success!
So we headed back up the hill to the Top Spot. No view of the bay, no outside patio, but really good straight-up breakfasts every day all the time.
Mind you, they could be succumbing to the siren call of success too... I notice their famous Sunday breakfast buffet has now migrated to include Saturday... the thin edge of the wedge, to be sure.
But at least you can still find a booth in which to unfold your weekend newspaper.
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