Month: September 2016

Reporting Monsef’s Story Without Context is Irresponsible Journalism

September 29, 2016

BREAKING: The Globe and Mail learns that refugee claimants fleeing from conflict zones have more complicated histories than those who have settled in one peaceful state for centuries.
Last week, the Globe reported that the Peterborough Member of Parliament, Maryam Monsef, was born in Iran, not  Afghanistan like  her mother led her to believe. This was promoted by some outlets as a sort of earth-shattering revelation, with undertones that maybe, just maybe, she knew about it all along and chose to say nothing for political gain. But the Globe’s report has a lot less of an impact on Monsef’s so-called “political narrative” than the tone of the coverage would lead you to believe.
While breaking the story, Robert Fife wrote, “This revelation contradicts a key narrative that Ms. Monsef has built ever since she entered public life as a local politician in Peterborough, Ont., and when she ran for Parliament in the 2015 election.”
The Toronto Star’s Tonda MacCharles wrote, “The dramatic life story and political narrative of the woman hailed as Canada’s first Afghanistan-born cabinet minister, Maryam Monsef, shifted dramatically,” later adding that Monsef’s attempt to clear up the confusion was instead a “process of incorporating the newly revealed details of her background into a revised political narrative.”
But Monsef’s “narrative” has hardly changed since the revelation. It’s still true that she:

lost her father to the war,
was never an Iranian citizen,
is an Afghan citizen,
spent two and a half years in Afghanistan directly before fleeing, and
left in 1996 after the Taliban captured Herat, her home at the time and where her parents married.

The only difference is that Monsef was actually born about 200 kilometres from where she thought she was, and only because her family was fleeing violence.   
Monsef wrote in a statement that her mom didn’t tell her the truth because “she did not think it mattered. We were Afghan citizens, as we were born to Afghan parents, and under Iranian law, we would not be considered Iranian citizens despite being born in that country.” The plight of Afghan refugees in Iran is well-documented, and the conditions they endure make Monsef’s story a far cry from some elaborate hoax.
Going beyond the specifics, though, Monsef’s case is not unique. Much has been written about the lost personal histories of Afghan refugees in particular. The executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, Janet Dench, told The Canadian Press, “Constantly you hear stories of how people, as they’re growing up, the veil is lifted on certain things and they realize that certain parts of what they’d been told may have been to protect them.” She added, “Seems to me that’s part of the refugee experience.”
Yet the Globe article — and many others — failed to make this clear. There were no interviews with scholars, experts, or even refugee organizations which could have contextualized Monsef’s story. The result was that Monsef’s case was inaccurately portrayed as a unique form of deception, instead of an unfortunate but overwhelmingly common by-product of migration.
This failure to contextualize is especially troubling given that xenophobic fear-mongering is becoming the norm. Monsef has already faced a vitriolic response with critics, connecting the dots the Globe report put in place, calling her a professional victim, and former Peterborough MP, Dean Del Mastro, claiming she “scape goated [sic] her mother.”
Politicians have also jumped in, with Michelle Rempel, a Conservative MP, using the opportunity to criticize Canada’s immigration system, and giving credibility to journalists who promote bizarre conspiracy theories that undesirable Muslims are getting into the country and slowly taking it over.   
Journalists can’t control the reaction their story garners but they also aren’t oblivious to the backlash stories will create. The Globe article was irresponsible journalism, which has served as a cheap political point for xenophobes across the country.   
***
@DavideMastracci

Is This The Worst Cartoonist In Canada?

September 28, 2016

The most famous editorial cartoon in Canadian history is pretty basic. It was printed in the Montreal Gazette in the fall of 1976 and depicts the two leaders of Quebec politics of the time, Liberal leader Robert Bourassa and Parti Quebecois leader René Lévesque, the latter of whom had just been elected the country’s first separatist premier.
“Okay everyone, take a Valium,” says the Lévesque caricature, stubby finger pointing at the reader.
The cartoonist was Terry Mosher, who uses the name of his daughter Aislin as his preferred nom-de-plume. “Everybody take a Valium” became an instant meme of Canadian politics in the 1970s and helped cement the 34-year-old Mosher’s rising reputation as one of the great chroniclers of the Canadian story. As the decades went on, and he stayed at the Gazette, Aislin slowly became one of those guys a certain sort of person in the eastern provinces would effortlessly dub a national treasure.
Good old Aislin, they’d say, right up there with Pierre Berton and Peter Gzowski. They showered him with awards and prizes, including a spot in the Canadian News Hall of Fame and an Order of Canada in 2002. They made a documentary about him that won a Gemini. His 47th book came out recently.
The career of Terry Mosher is a wonderful case study of how far mediocracy can take you in Canada. Strip away all of Aislin awards, praise, and reputation, and you’re confronted with an inescapable reality: his cartoons aren’t very good.
Nearly 40 years after the Valium cartoon, the 73-year-old Mosher is still at the Montreal Gazette. To say he is still “drawing,” however, would be charitable, given these days his cartoons often consist of little more than a jumbled assortment of Google image search results with some crude text slapped on top (possibly in MS Paint).
But don’t take my word for it. Feast your eyeballs on some recent Aislin classics:

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Editorial cartoons don’t always have to be funny, but, as one of my friends put it, Aislin’s comics always contain a joke: “this got published.”
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by Canadian editorial cartoons and spent hours at the library poring through old collections. I was impressed by some of Mosher’s work in the 1970s, not for the humor, which was often uninspired and obtuse, but his beautifully grotesque caricatures and the elaborate fountain pen cross-hatching in which they were rendered.
But as I gradually waded my way through his collections, which he seemed to churn out at a rate of at least once a year, it became obvious that as he aged his talents were either starting to fade or he was just getting lazy. His drawings became cruder and sloppier, and eventually hand-drawn art was rarely seen at all. His commentary drifted away from offering any pretense of political insight, and instead descended into sub-Andy Rooney hot takes on the weather, sports, and (of course) These Damn Kids. Today Mosher is, by any objective standard, producing some real garbage, but insulated by endless nostalgia and praise, he seems to suffer no professional consequence for it.
I’ll cheerfully confess to sour grapes. I tried for many years to make a go at being an editorial cartoonist myself, only to find that there is virtually no market demand for what is now, increasingly, regarded as a dead art. Newspapers are hemorrhaging cash and have zero interest investing in something no one cares about. Cartoonists are being fired, not hired.
But it’s important to realize the ignoble death of Canadian editorial cartooning was not natural or inevitable. Millennials tend to regard editorial cartoons as stiff, unfunny, and clichéd, and they’re usually correct in doing so. For decades, a Canadian editor’s preferred approach to editorial cartooning was to hire a single white guy and let him draw until he died, senility be damned. This was the same model used by newspaper strips, and it certainly appeased a certain segment of the boomer readership who feared change above all else, but had the simultaneous counter-effect of informing the generations beneath that Canadian newspaper cartooning was not a remotely meritocratic enterprise. Seeking competent satire, they learned to look elsewhere.
Old cartoonists like Mosher are endlessly feted with praise about their bravery and savagery, “cutting the powerful down to size with their acidic pens” and so on. It went into particularly high gear in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. But the sad reality is that most of the editorial cartoonists employed in Canada today are neither heroic nor clever. Increasingly, they’re barely even coherent. What they are is merely one more culpable party in the decline of traditional media, whose leading players have done their best to ensure their absence will not be noticed, let alone mourned.
***
@JJ_McCullough

CANADALAND’s Position On A Government Bailout For The News Business

September 12, 2016

The Liberal government has contracted a think tank called the Public Policy Group to research the possibility of providing subsidies or other considerations to the collapsing news industry.
CANADALAND accepted an invitation to participate in the research project by attending a roundtable discussion between media owners. We were also asked to provide a written statement articulating our position on the proposals discussed. Here’s what we sent them:
Dear Public Policy Forum,
At the request of Taylor Owen, the following is a statement of our position on the possibility of public policy intervention in the Canadian news industry.
I am the publisher of CANADALAND, a small digital news organization that specializes in podcasts. Podcasts drive our revenue. We sell advertising on our podcasts, and we direct listeners to our crowdfunding page largely through our podcasts.
We produce the most popular Canadian podcasts for Canadian listeners. Our shows are focused exclusively on Canadian topics, with an emphasis on media, policy, culture, and public life. We do original and investigative reporting and have broken many national news stories in the few years we’ve been around.
Increasingly, we have competition: the Globe and Mail just launched a podcast. The CBC has many and sells ads to the same companies we do. Maclean’s, The Toronto Star, The National Post, The Walrus: all of them have dabbled in podcasts or are currently publishing competing podcasts.
We welcome the competition. Canadian advertisers are still largely in the dark about the medium and there are plenty of listeners to go around. New entrants could evolve the medium and help establish podcasts as an industry in Canada, as it is now in the US and abroad. Many legacy media podcasts, most notably the CBC’s, pre-date our launch, and we rose above them by virtue of our content. On an even playing field, we are winning.
What we do not welcome is government subsidies for our competitors. Too often in Canada, tax breaks, funding and other programs intended to help small startups and innovators like ourselves get hijacked by legacy players. It’s a trivial matter for a newspaper to launch a digital lab or project for the sole purpose of tapping these funds, leveraging their brand and status to take the lion’s share of the subsidies. At this point, with their efforts underwritten by the government, our competitors could conceivably undercut us on advertising rates and push our revenues down to the point where we would no longer be profitable. We run our organization on a budget lower than the annual salary of one top Postmedia or CBC executive. As sustainable as we are, we are also vulnerable to market interference.
In short, we are asking that no subsidies or considerations of any kind be made available to Canada’s legacy news organizations.
We support the removal of obstacles preventing philanthropic organizations from practicing journalism.
We support a review of the CBC’s mandate and support a prohibition of advertising on CBC’s podcasts and other digital content.
We take no position on the creation of subsidies directed exclusively to benefit legitimately independent small digital media companies.
I will point out that we do not ask for or expect subsidies for CANADALAND.
Sincerely,
Jesse Brown
Publisher
CANADALAND.news
***
jesse@canadalandshow.com

We Found Out How Much the CBC Really Pays Mansbridge

September 6, 2016

He gets over $1.1 million per year and a pension of over $500,000 from the CBC for the rest of his life