Shaping the News, The Alexander Panetta Way

From the beginning I suspected that something very strange was afoot regarding the
Michaëlle Jean seal eating story. Oh sure, you can always expect protests from PETA type activists on the Radical Left, but beyond that I just sensed that this story was being overblown.

This was absolutely confirmed today during Rex Murphy's Cross Checkup show on CBC Radio 1, which you can listen to here. Considering that their core audience is Left and "Further Left" (I'm being polite) I didn't know what reaction to expect from such Canadians across the country. Other than missing a few minutes at two junctures to answer phone calls, I caught the entire two-hour show. Of what I listened to, everyone but one was an adamant supporter of Mme. Jean's actions. Read this sampling of e-mails and you'll see more of the same. I was shocked, in a good way, by this tremendous support for her.

On the show, more than a few people suggested that this was a media contrived story. What precisely they meant by this, I do not know for certain, but at the very least one could construe that the story was slanted unfairly.

I did a little digging and the name "Alexander Panetta" of the Canadian Press kept on popping up. He was clearly the CP reporter assigned to cover her tour up there. Here's one snippet from the many stories he wrote:

Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean was awarded a certificate yesterday for her respect of Inuit culture, after images of her eating a bloody chunk of raw seal heart raised eyebrows around the world.

The emphasis is mine. One has to wonder if this was a news story or the caption of an upcoming horror film?

Panetta's latest story is another interesting case. The headline reads, "Clarkson unimpressed with Jean's seal-eating", which was extracted from the first paragraph: "At least one person's unimpressed by all the fuss over the seal-skinning adventures of Michaelle Jean: her predecessor as Governor General."

The word "unimpressed" has several meanings but when presented without any further explanation, most reasonable people would conclude that Adrienne Clarkson was "not impressed" or "not approving" of Michaëlle Jean's actions. Yet read the story all the way through, and that's NOT AT ALL what she said or meant.

I did some more digging and found this from July 2006. The writer there challenges Panetta's truthfulness and professionalism, indicating a similar pattern of deception.

Turns out there's more. Back in October 2006 both Kathy Shaidle and Kate McMillan had a run-in with Panetta here and here respectively.

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Alexander Panetta: Poster-Boy for the Downfall of the Canadian MSM

In the past few years he had ample opportunity to clean up his act but instead his tradition of highly biased, inaccurate reporting continues unabated.

Sad. And pathetic. Any wonder why polls continue to show journalists near the bottom of the list of trust and respect?

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Update: This posting was kindly linked to by Kate at SDA here. Some of the comments therein are absolutely priceless. Pay particular attention to the running debate by SDA regular 'EBD' and someone claiming to be an actual MSM reporter. The latter got caught in logic trap and EBD lit him up big time.

Through the comments, we learned of yet another example of Panetta's reputation as a spinmeister.

Alexander Panetta is, in essence, a columnist. If his writing was clearly published as editorial content then I'd have NO PROBLEM with it whatsoever. But it's published as "news" and, as such, violates the most important tenets of journalistic integrity. Yet none of his bosses, nor the newspapers that print his work, seem to care.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

There's an old adage, "Be careful what you wish for." Too bad for the newspaper and TV journalists that they did not heed this wise advice. The vast majority of them clearly wanted Barack Obama to win. More than a few of them shelved their journalistic ethics in order to push their guy over the top. That's not speculation, that's a fact.

Just a few months later, it appears that many of them are going to lose their jobs, directly because of Obama's policies. Kate McMillan, at SDA, explains why.

Absolutely delicious irony. Too bad so many are going to be hurt by their shortsightedness though.

What I'm Reading

Mark Steyn : The End of the World as We Know It

Barbara Kay : The Left's need to believe in utopian tyrannies

Lorrie Goldstein : How to go green, Soviet-style

George Jonas : And God created morons

Jonathan Kay : 9/11 truther extraordinaire

Further Blatant Media Bias: The Boston Globe

Michael Graham reports

A Few Thoughts on Newspapers

A favourite writer of mine, Amy Alkon, posted this piece on her blog. Here's the comment I left her:

If a food manufacturer were consistently putting out a product that made people sick, would they be allowed to continue "as is"?

If a courier company consistently delivered packages late and damaged, would people continue to give them their business?

If an engineering firm consistently erected bridges that collapsed, would they be allowed to continue their work "as is"?

My PROBLEM with the MSM is that their "News" is no longer N-E-W-S. Most every story I read has a significant bias to it, which makes me immediately distrust the writer and the story.

Editorials can be slanted any which way the writer(s) want but not news.

The day that journalists once again decide to follow professional ethics then I will support newspapers again. Right now they're neither professional nor ethical.

The Obama Love Affair Starts to Fade

The Washington Post's Kathleen Parker was absolutely deliriously in love with Obama from the early days of time (ie. 2007). That has now ended with her latest piece entitled So Far, Amateur Hour. Look for her to be ostracized by the Obamabots by week's end!

Letter Published

The National Post published the letter I recently wrote.

The Los Angeles Times' Journey Down into the Abyss

It wasn't long ago that we learned that the Tribune Company, which owns the Los Angeles Times, filed bankruptcy protection. I did some research to discover their astonishing drop in circulation:

Patrick Frey, who blogs under the moniker "Patterico", just did a comprehensive analysis of the abysmal track record of the Los Angeles Times in 2008. It's an absolutely fascinating read and a wake-up call for all American newspaper publishers. But will any listen? Some cynically say there's no need because now with Obama in power such newspapers can apply for a financial bailout and become official state-owned mouthpieces, akin to Izvestia and Pravda in the old USSR. They won't have to change their editorial policies and shoddy journalism one bit, as they've been acting as unofficial propaganda arms of the Democrat Party for years.

Canada's Free Speech Fiasco: The World is Watching

From The Australian, Janet Albrechtsen writes the following:

... the West is killing free speech slowly - by more subtle means - through state-sponsored censorship under the grand name of protecting human rights.

The insidious role of human rights commissions was exposed in June when Mark Steyn and Canadian magazine Macleans were hauled before the Canadian Human Rights Commission for islamophobia.

While the complaint was ultimately dismissed, the fact that words warrant oversight by a state tribunal points to a rank attitude to free speech where a person is required to spend copious amounts of time and money defending words and ideas.

The same thing had happened in April, when the Ontario Human Rights Commission dealt with complaints against Steyn and Macleans. And in January, when conservative commentator Ezra Levant had to defend his publication of the Danish cartoons to the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission.

As Steyn wrote of his experience of heavy-handed state censorship, the media "seems generally indifferent to a power grab that explicitly threatens to reduce them to a maple-flavoured variant of Pravda ... As some leftie website put it, 'defending freedom of speech for jerks means defending jerks'. Well, yes. But, in this case, not defending the jerks means not defending freedom of speech for yourself. It's not a Left-Right thing; it's a free-unfree thing".

America: The Internet Surpasses Newspapers for the First Time

Here's an interesting graph just released from the Pew Research Center:

The Downfall of the Mainstream Media

Little did I know how incredibly prescient I'm getting in my old age. What am I talking about? Well, I happen to be one of those "nuts" who believes that it's critical for all of us to participate in our democracy if we wish to keep it strong & vibrant. I spend (waste?) too much time on this blog and elsewhere speaking out about threats to our democracy, often seemingly to little end effect.

For a long time many thought they could depend upon the mainstream media to act as our proxies in this regard - to keep politicians and business leaders and union leaders in check. How naive we were to think that the majority of those in the media would accept this responsibility and follow even a minimal set of journalistic ethics.

I firmly believe that 2008 will be the year that historians refer to as the one in which the mainstream media and journalism finally showed us their true colours and then soon after fell apart.

Today it was announced that the Tribune Company, which owns 10 daily newspapers and 23 TV stations in the U.S., filed for bankruptcy protection. Two of their most prominent newspapers are the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. What does this have to do with my prescience?

Last Friday, I read this "news story" (not editorial, but news) about Canada's constitutional crisis, published in the Los Angeles Times. I was absolutely outraged at the egregious bias Ms. Baum exhibited and callous disregard for the end effect to my country's democracy. So I sent her the following letter. Read the last paragraph carefully and contrast it with the Tribune Company announcement:


Dear Ms. Baum,

I live in Vancouver, BC and am not a member of any political party. But I have paid very close attention to what has transpired in Ottawa this past week. It deeply saddens me to see such one-sided reporting from a foreign newspaper on a very critical issue in my nation's history. If you're not clear about what I'm referring to, let me provide you some examples from your editorial ... I mean "unbiased news story" :

• "Harper's moves were seen as cynical and out of touch at a time when Canada is feeling the sting of the global economic crisis." - You do not attribute this sentence to anyone in particular so the reader can only conclude that it is the general feeling of all Canadians.
• "[Harper] also hammered away at the prospect of "separatists" getting their hands on the levers of federal power. The attacks, in turn, angered many Quebecers, furious that the Bloc Quebecois representatives they had elected were being dismissed as illegitimate." - Why is the "S" word in quotation marks? The Bloc Quebecois members are indeed separatists. If you don't believe me, just ask one. Their primary goal of being in Ottawa is to separate Quebec from Canada. That's not my opinion, it's a fact. Furthermore, you failed to mention that when Prime Minister Jean Chretien "hammered away" at the separatists he was hailed as a hero. Why is Harper now the villain? May I suggest it's because the name of his party doesn't start with an "L".
  
• "The cost to the country may be greater than to any one party. By demonizing the Bloc Quebecois, Harper has awakened Canada's ghosts of regional grievance, reviving the national nightmare of a fracturing country." - Stephen Harper has awakened the proverbial ghosts? No Ms. Baum, Stephane Dion and Jack Layton have awakened those ghosts. Mr. Harper simply reminded all of us about the dangers of bringing a separatist party into government.
  

Further to your piece, it would have been nice for your non-Canadians readers to learn that recent polls indicate:

1. 68% of Canadians support the GG's decision
2. 62% of Canadians are "very angry" with the Coalition
3. The Conservatives' support has climbed from 38% to the mid 40's

But don't let these facts get in the way of your own agenda!

You have no idea how deeply it troubles me, and undoubtedly millions of others, how little respect writers like you have for the once great profession of journalism. At one time there was a clear distinction between "news reporting" and "editorials". Pieces like yours will serve as perfect examples to historians as to how even a moderate adherence to journalistic ethics became unimportant to "journalists" in the early part of the second millennium. And as a direct result of this, people lost faith in their media outlets to report the news accurately. That loss of faith is killing your profession and ultimately will see you without any employment as a result one day too. Let me proactively offer you my condolences.

Prescient Steyn

The powers at be in Canuckistan have already toyed with the idea of banning Mark Steyn's writing throughout the frozen tundra of North America. Now in an Obamanation some extension of the Unfairness Doctrine may very well attempt the same.

Shut off from all traditional revenue sources I would recommend he borrow Johnny Carson's old Carnac the Magnificent hat and start a new gig as a fortune teller in a traveling circus.

Today, Steyn republished the first article he ever wrote for the National Post on October 29, 1998. To say it predicted the future would be the understatement of this new millennium. Here's one key paragraph:

I’ll bet those B.C. students protesting against Suharto would approve of the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission’s ruling that Hizzoner was guilty of discrimination. But the trouble with letting the state restrict free expression in the interests of nice cuddly causes like gay liberation is that you make it a lot easier for them to restrict free expression in the interests of non-nice causes like Suharto. In Canada, we’ve let the state go too far in policing dissent. Our official niceness has led, inexorably, to official intolerance – or to put it in culinary terms: If you cook up something that bland, it’s bound to get covered in pepper.

Free Speech: Canuckistan Provides the Example for Obamanation

Though the Calgary Herald begs to differ ... while it still can.

Letter to the Seattle Times

I just submitted the following to the Seattle Times:

I'm just finishing up a week long visit to your wonderful city. The food, the sights, the people - everything was superb! Well, except for one little thing. The direction signs to your highways are amongst the worst I've seen in any North America city. For example, imagine you're on Denny Way by the Space Needle. Head west and strictly using the signs, try to find your way onto Hwy 99 South. You'll find it impossible. Is there a thriving trade in Hwy 99 signs I'm not aware of? Similarly, finding one's way out of downtown onto I-5 is pretty much hit and miss. If you're a pedestrian and keep seeing a car with out-of-state plates circling and circling, know that it's yet another lost tourist!
Robert Werner
Vancouver, BC

Quote of the Day

"The reason all Canadian newspapers are so bland is that there's a high price the publishers have to pay to print anything controversial."

Mark Steyn, interviewed on the Michael Coren Show

The London Daily News

John Kaponi, a well regarded citizen of London, has launched a new online newspaper called The London Daily News. If you want to learn what is really going on in one of the world's most prominent cities then this is the place to go!

Incidentally, John can often be heard reviewing the news of the day on BBC London Radio, Sunday - Thursday at 6pm PDT (9pm EDT). I found it absolutely fascinating to listen to such discussions from the other side of the earth.

New Vancouver Business Writer

Having been away from Vancouver for awhile, I just learned that a good friend & colleague of mine, Fiona Walsh, is now writing a bi-monthly column for Vancouver's Office Journal newspaper. Her first article is called "Sales Pitch : A car dealership for women? It’s about time".

Fiona's a really smart person and so dedicated to the art of selling & marketing. If you'd like to learn more about her, just click here.

Pavlov's Son

My mom is getting funnier as she gets older. I don't mean "more odd", I mean FUNNIER, as in a greater sense of humour. Here's a perfect example. Back in mid-February our friend in Boynton Beach, Florida, Maria, took us for a tour of a nature preserve. On it, we drove right up beside this VERY LARGE alligator. Maria & my mom were insistent that I step outside to get a closer photo. Yeah, right!

Fast forward to this morning. I was "doing my business" and catching up on some newspapers my mom had given me. I turned the page and saw that she had written the following: "Remind you of something, Robert?" I looked down and there was a photo of an Asian man in a dentist's chair. No reminder there. I looked further down the page. There was a photo of a large alligator!!! Yikes, I almost jumped off the toilet in fright!

Undoubtedly she would be most pleased with herself to get this reaction out of me!!!