Posts Tagged ‘News Media’

Has the Liberal leadership race started?

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

The news media is panicking.  They are concerned that the Liberal Party of Canada has no contenders for its upcoming leadership convention scheduled for sometime in 2013.  They figure Bob Rae is the logical winner because he is the interim leader. When Rae took on the interim leadership, he promised to not run at the upcoming convention. Do they think the Liberal Party would want someone who did not keep his word?

There is no question but Bob Rae is doing a good job as interim leader.  He is keeping the caucus focused, he is speaking out effectively for the Liberal Party and he has kept the party in a position of de facto opposition while the official NDP opposition fights its own leadership contest.  He has impressed a lot of people with his skill at the interim job.

But that is all it can be. There is a solid core within the Liberal Party who would never accept him as full-time leader.  It is not just the fact that he was NDP Premier in Ontario in the 1990s but he showed a serious lack of political sensitivity back then and it is not something that people can really learn. You have got it or you have not got it.  Bob, nice guy that he is, has not got it. He makes a great interim leader.  That is as good as he gets.

Bob Rae sees himself as a career politician. And he is. In that regard, he is very much like Bob Nixon, Leader of the Ontario Liberals back in the 1960s and 1970s. Bob Nixon was Treasurer in the Peterson Government in the 1980s. He brought the same love of the political scene to his work for the party as Bob Rae. The difference is that Bob Nixon is probably the best Premier of Ontario that we almost had.

When the media think that Bob Rae has some kind of a lock on the Liberal Party leadership, they just show how little they know about the party. Do they really think that Martha Hall Findlay is out for the count? She is one of the smartest and most determined women in Canadian politics and if she ever gets the kind of political management of her campaign that she needs, she could be almost unbeatable for the leadership.

If the media people have never heard of MP Dominic LeBlanc from New Brunswick, their research on up and coming Liberal leadership prospects is sadly lacking.  LeBlanc needs to spread his wings and get out and meet his party more often but he carries large credentials and four winning elections in his party pack.

And we have not even considered MP Justin Trudeau, who is wisely holding himself off from being a contender.  A lot can happen in the next year and many Liberals are waiting for him to answer the call.

We could keep going and come up with five or six good potential candidates.  The leadership of this party is no small prize.  It is a party Bob Rae is helping to rebuild and he will earn our approval for that—just not the leadership.

-30-

Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  peter@lowry.me

Tags: , ,
Posted in Federal Politics, New | Comments Off

Babel media spar during summer’s dog days.

Friday, August 5th, 2011

The dog days of summer are actually rooted in the past but today it an excuse for the media to produce some really cornball material.  It is as bad on television as it is in newspapers.  They all act as though they have nothing to write or talk about.  It is getting so bad that one of the two chain newspapers that ill-serve Babel wrote an extensive editorial about its print competition.

Talk about the skillet calling the frying pan black!  This is the blunderer complaining about the incompetent.  The Torstar publication, a free distribution grocery and furniture store wrap, the one we call Babel Backward, ran an editorial by Torstar Chairman John Honderich.  Entitled Accountable to no one, the editorial complains bitterly about Sun Media, owner of the Barrie Examiner, quitting the Ontario Press Council.

The Ontario Press Council is near and dear to the Toronto Star which helped create the Council.  It has made Torstar look good over the years while other people get to arbitrate when someone claims to have been wronged by the publication.  It cuts down on cost of lawyers to handle the law suits and usually resolves any incorrect utterance with a deep and moving apology.  And who cares?

Sun Media, the print media accumulation of Pierre-Karl Péladeau’s integrated media empire, has dumped all links to other media through such cooperatives as Canadian Press and the Canadian Newspaper Association.  It was very amusing to hear that one of Péladeau’s executive’s accused the Ontario Press Council of being ‘Politically Correct.’  It is hard to imagine Péladeau understanding what that term means.  It certainly does not apply to his flagship newspapers Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec—publications that could make Rupert Murdoch blush!

What Péladeau is creating across his media empire is best described as editorial anarchy.  Conrad Black, no matter how much we hated him, at least brought a level of discipline to the newsrooms when he owned newspapers.  Talking to one of the few real reporters at the Sun Media outlet in Babel, we once remarked that the Canadian Press Style Book had stopped spelling a farmer’s plow or a snowplow as ‘plough’ more than 50 years ago.  He laughed and told us that the publisher did not care and the reporter liked spelling it the old way. ‘So there!’

John Honderich should try to read some of the sorry excuses for newspapers that Torstar produces across Ontario.  The newspaper industry is not dying because of the evolution of electronic media but because of the greed and uncaring attitude of the Canadian newspaper industry’s corporate ownership.

-30-

All material in this blog is copyright © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  peter@lowry.me

Tags: , , ,
Posted in New | Comments Off

“Let business do what business does best!”

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

One of the many mantra of the political right wing is to pay obeisance to potential supporters in business.   They believe that if they tell business that there will be less regulation, business owners will reward them with political donations.  This is why the phrase “Let business do what business does best” rolls so easily off the lips of right-wing politicians.  They might not know what those words really mean but they say them anyway.  It sounds good.

They are obviously not aware of the extremes of that statement as happened in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s under fascist rule.  The rampant corruption among the corporations that were effectively running Italy at the time would have embarrassed the most backward of third world countries.  All anyone conveniently remembers is that the trains did run on time but they never consider the cost.

What causes these thoughts to surface is a business page story today about the extra vehemence of people who used to believe in a business.  This would not surprise psychologists who understand how easily a strong feeling of love can become a stronger feeling of hate.  Any marketing person can tell you that you can spend millions building ties between customers and your company and one careless corporate act can turn these supporters into enraged enemies.

There was a time in North America when business actually discussed the concept of corporate social responsibility.  They never understood that either.  Today, they tout their donations to various causes and call that social responsibility.  Nobody wants them to stop giving to charity but it is incongruous in a climate of outsourcing staff for cheaper labour costs.

There was a list published recently of Canadian businesses that are considered socially responsible.  It was a short list.  Someone asked us where Bell Canada might make it on that list.  We suggested that of the top 500 responsible companies in Canada, Bell Canada might be number 898.  Bell Canada is hated by many consumers and the company could care less.

Bell discovered many years ago that its publics were all in Ottawa.  They were politicians and regulators.  The company realized if it could create a tension between those two groups it could pull off just about anything it wanted to.  We understand that the company has more people in its government relations office in Ottawa than its total consumer relations office at its headquarters in Montreal.

Bell pulled the greatest coup in Canadian corporate history when it decided to buy complete control of the CTV network.  CTV has become the stick that Bell can hold over the head of any government to get what it wants.  It no longer needs us stupid consumers.

-30-

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  peter@lowry.me

Tags: ,
Posted in New | Comments Off

Kai Nagata’s “mad as hell, and he’s not going to take this anymore!”

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

Kai Nagata meet Howard Beale.  Kai Nagata used to work for CTV at the network’s Quebec City bureau.  Howard Beale is fictional.  He was played by the late Peter Finch in the 1976 movie Network. They both have their rants.  Howard Beale’s rant was a one-liner.  Kai Nagata did not have an editor for his rant and it ran on for some 3000 words.

But if you think the Beale character was pissed, you should read what Nagata has to say.  Rife with youthful idealism, Nagata scolds both CTV and CBC for their management of what they think is news and their political biases.  He regurgitates all over the recent Will and Kate show on both networks and questions the gushing excesses.  You get the feeling that the subservient treatment of the royals was the final straw.

We were particularly amused by his comments about the clash of cultures between CTV News and its new Bell Canada bosses.  Konrad von Finckenstein and his Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) cohorts were warned of what would happen if they allowed the Bell Canada takeover of CTV.  This is just the start.

Regrettably, there is nothing really new in Nagata’s rant.  He only had about ten months in Quebec City and one tends to question whether he really had enough experience to be in that position.  His complaint about the sexualization of television reporters is hardly new.  Again we wonder if he felt he had somehow passed the sexual measurement by his bosses.

What Nagata complains most vociferously about is the directions of the Harper government.  While we can hardly disagree with him about that, we wonder what that has to do with his job in Quebec City.  The Quebec National Assembly will hardly be a front-line effort by CTV news while its friend Mr. Harper is running the country in Ottawa.  If anything, Quebec would be a good place to work and gain experience for that period.

The only concern in that last statement was something Nagata said in his rant that still has us puzzled.  He said about his posting to Quebec City that it is a good place to learn French.  We simply cannot believe that CTV News would send someone to report from the National Assembly who was not completely fluent in both Canada’s official languages.  Nobody is that pretty on air!

-30-

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  peter@lowry.me

Tags: , , ,
Posted in New | Comments Off

#98– Surviving the communications age, part 4.

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

The curse of having been an editor is that you always have a critical eye for language as it is used in daily life.  You try to explain that misspellings and bad grammar can be impediments to communication.  They cannot always be forgiven.

Take the most common confusion about convergence.  Everyone wants to talk about convergence without understanding if they are using the word correctly.  The easiest way to explain convergence is that you have two trains racing toward a point where the two tracks intersect.  If both trains meet at the point of convergence concurrently, those trains are going to converge.  When they converge, it is most likely that both trains will be derailed by the impact.

But that is not what people mean.  They are actually referring to a confluence.  A confluence is a point where two rivers meet.  At a confluence, the two rivers become a bigger river and continue their journey to the sea.  This is why when people talk about the convergence of technologies, they are referring to the two technologies working together.  They are really talking about a confluence of the technologies.

Probably the largest and most incompetent company in Canada in this regard is Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE).   The company is involved with a number of technologies that are undergoing a technological confluence.  BCE refers to them as their converging technologies.  We can hope that, when BCE’s latest technologies come together, it is a confluence and not a train wreck.

The company has taken control of  Canada’s largest television network: CTV.  The company intends to sell CTV’s content development over the BCE’s wireless cellular network, as well as its satellite television and Internet services.  This is a failure of the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) in doing its job.  It means the Harper Conservative government has allowed BCE to completely disregard the public interest in favour of monopoly practices.  It is a complete reversal of what the CRTC was originally intended to do for Canadians.

It means that the CRTC now belongs to the media companies.  It serves their interests and not the interests of Canadians.

In the original model, 40 years ago, the radio and television networks were independent entities that provided content to a national network of independent stations that served their individual communities.  Technology has changed and so has the model.  Today, the national network no longer needs the network affiliates that were its customers.  The network goes directly to the consumer.

The original concern was that then strong newspapers would try to own the networks to utilize the synergy of their news gathering strengths.  The CRTC was supposed to ensure that Canadians had a variety of opinions and no one business interest could create a monopoly situation.  Nobody expected that when the television networks had swallowed their affiliates, they would then start to take control of the country’s print media

The Harper government and its version of the CRTC are a serious failure for Canadians.

- 30 –

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to   peter@lowry.me

Tags: , , ,
Posted in New | Comments Off

Babel and its second-hand news media.

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

You listen to the put-downs, the sly digs, the knowing slurs, the mindless jokes and say little but enough is enough. So I live in Babel. It’s not a second-class town. It’s not just where the military from Base Borden come to drink and whore. It’s not just a bunch of big box stores to serve the cottage bound. This is a city that deserves to be treated as a city in its own right. It’s not a poor cousin to the big smoke, south on Highway 400.

And our lousy local news media need to understand that.

Not that we ever did anything to deserve the media that we have in this city? The ‘A Channel,’ owned by CTVglobemedia, is the runt of the litter. It is not only a pitiful excuse for a television outlet but if it was not a competitor of the pretentious CFTO in the big smoke, CTV would put it up for adoption. The radio stations are owned by a variety of broadcast chains whose executives could not find the city on a county map. They sell a demographic to advertisers based on a computer selected sound. Nobody makes the mistake of referring to their employees as talent. One of the stations pays its broadcast people so poorly, half of them, on air, sound like they refer to their station as “f…in 93.”

But it is print media in Babel that is on the shoddy side of disgusting. Start with the Examiner. That is what they call it. It examines nothing. The publication has been through more rapacious hands than a Dunlop Street hooker on a busy Friday night. It is currently operated by a Markham company called Osprey that is, in turn, owned by those printing company people at Quebecor in Montreal. The Osprey concept of chain control is so distant that you yearn to return to those caring days of that kindly, philanthropic publisher Conrad Black. Their idea of editorial staffing is determined by their parsimonious approach.

The other major print publication is operated by Metroland, a wholly owned subsidiary of Torstar, a company better known for its Toronto Star newspaper. Mind you, any similarity between their local Babel publication and a real newspaper is purely coincidental. I like to call it the Babel Backward. It is distributed free, twice each week, as a wrap for grocery chain advertising, pizza delivery ads, furniture store flyers, etc.

The latest insult to journalism by this direct-to-recycle rag was a front-page story in the June 16, 2009 edition. It was by-lined by a staff reporter who normally spends her time fawning over the local city counsellors. While headlined that (Liberal leader Michael) ‘Ignatieff looks for concessions,` the story was really about her favourite member of parliament and big-time advertiser in her biased publication, the ubiquitous Mr. Brown. It was a plaintive whine about why the constantly campaigning Mr. Brown does not want an election. He knows how easily he can lose.

While there is frustration in Babel over the local media situation, there are few solutions. Creating long-term alternative media would be a very expensive proposition for anyone foolish enough to take on the deep pockets of the chain media that have dragged us down. The media down the road in the big smoke will continue to dominate as more and more Torontonians escape the city for the easier life here in Babel.

- 30 -

Tags: ,
Posted in New | Comments Off