Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Our responsible media, yobs, and banning things for your own good.

Ever had one of those days where there are so many things that you want to comment on that you just can't possibly get to them all? Today is just such a day; I currently have so many tabs open in Firefox that I am getting memory warnings.

So to clear things up:

Our responsible media: Dan Gardner's May 16th story on PM Harper being the love child of Nixon and Dubya. Aside from it being a ridiculously biased piece of crap, why is it listed under news and not opinion? Does DG have some kind of proof of his allegations or does the the Ottawa Citizen not know the difference between news and opinion?

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The Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt bemoans that all 19 recipients of federal research grants were men and jumps into the Harper hates women schtick. One problem: Originally, 41 Canadian universities submitted 130 proposals. Forty of them were shortlisted and the universities were then invited to submit specific candidates for the chair positions. None of the 40 candidates put forth by 17 Canadian universities were women. That's right, it was the universities themselves that made the choice, not the government. Sorry Susan, but you didn't do your homework and you got burned. I guess she is going to go after the universities now for their obvious anti-woman bias. Ya right.

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The Calgary Herald goes after a blogger, makes up quotes, and then edits the fake quote without letting its readers know.

Sara from Choice for Childcare was the topic of attack for Naomi Lakritz of the Calgary Herald who wrote in her article The result of Munsch's admission of his problems has been to stigmatize them even more, as in Landriault's response, which can be summed up as: "He's mentally ill and he took cocaine and drank! Evil man! Get him and his books away from my children!"

Again we have one small problem. Sara NEVER said any of that stuff between the quotation marks. Sara took a little beating in the comments on this but guess for some reason the above quote is no longer in the online article and it has vanished down the memory hole without any acknowledgment made to the readers that the article has been edited or why.

It now reads: "The result of Munsch's admission of his problems has been to stigmatize them even more, as in Landriault's response, which can be summed up as: "He took cocaine and drank! Get him and his books away from my children!"

Hmm, I wonder why they did that?


Related: I made a comment at Sarah's about why the author used quotation marks for something that obviously was never said/written and was subsequently called a "yob" on another blog for doing so .

P.S. You need to read the comments at Sara's latest piece. Honestly, these people are about as smart as a sack of soup. I particularly like Ardvark's take on this:

Ardvark said…

..as in Landriault's response, which can be summed up as: "He's mentally ill and he took cocaine and drank! Evil man! Get him and his books away from my children!"

What kind of writer uses quotation marks for something that clearly was not said?

The kind that prefaces those quotes with "which can be summed up as" to make it clear they're paraphrasing? Christ, I'm getting tired of having to explain stuff to these yobs.


Don't you just love it when you get called out by some sanctimonious know it all who ends up being totally wrong on what they called you out on. (Another 200,000+ links on why quotation marks are NOT used when paraphrasing)

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Lets ban it! This is getting way out of hand already.

Pakistan bans Facebook because they don't like free speech.

Ontario bans Dan Akroyd's vodka because they are thinking about the children who if left to their own devices would be drinking vodka from human skulls 24/7.
(related: Dan Akroyd donates wine to our troops)

Los Angeles bans future business with Arizona because AZ wants to uphold the law in their state and in turn Arizona wants to ban electricity from going to LA because LA are being a bunch of knobs. ( actually I like Arizona's threat to LA but only because it shows how stupid these bans can be. In fact California may have to ban/boycott itself. )

Rumour also has it that the LA Lakers are going to boycott their playoff games against the Phoenix Suns. I mean if you are really serious about this LA why not go all the way and forfeit the series.

Update: Speaking about that 'tough' Arizona law. It turns out the existing federal law is tougher!



5 comments:

hunter said...

Egg on Susan's face! She is so blinded by her hate of Conservatives, that she will write anything negative about them without doing any research.

Hire the best person, period.

CanadianSense said...

The lack of fact checking, basic research is a growing problem for the media. The internet is being used against the media establishment in detecting bias now. The refusal of newsrooms to research makes them suspect including their entire organization.

How many ommission of detail, mistakes are tolerated per story?

Anonymous said...

The law in california is the best one i think.I guess theres a reason why folks call em leftards eh?

Jen said...

Delacourt, taber etc are tabloid reporters which they are good at and guess what-they are both women and when you are the best at this job why should another take it from them.

When you ask Delacourt etc a simple question: " what has the prime minister done for this country both here and international that got him great reviews from foreign and our nation which he presented to the world as the best, makes you hate him so much that you will try everything in power to unravel what he has for this nation?"

i gues I will never get the answer however, AA, it is about time we put questions out there for those reporters to answer.

CanadianSense said...

Dang, my comment may have been lost.

Great post.

The media is sloppy and seems unconcerned with mistakes.

The Internet has changed the rules and allows us to do basic research and has exposed the lazy work ethic or bias.

The Genie is out of the bottle and the press need to do a better job.