Island of Sorrow

Further to my recent column on Haiti, and the lack of Canadian media attention to it, two things.

1. It's not too late to catch tonight's Haiti: Democracy Undone, a documentary on CBC News: Correspondent on Newsworld at 10 PM and 1 AM ET. Trouble is, it doesn't deal with Canada's role in this human rights nightmare. In fact, the program description says:

On the eve of the elections in Haiti, CBC News: Correspondent investigates the role of the U.S. government in the ouster of President Aristide.

What's more, the material in the program is dated. But it's better than nothing.

2. The good news is that CBC Radio already has Connie Watson on site, and tomorrow The National is sending Washington correspondent Neil MacDonald. But will they report on how Canada joined forces with France and the U.S. to oust a democratically-elected government?

More on Canada's actions in Haiti here. And of course, in my last post here.

Hit the JackoPot

With Michael Jackson back home alone -- we hope -- those crazy cut-ups at Gawker have come up with all kinds of headlines we might see in tomorrow's papers.

My faves?

BEAT IT: JACKO NOT GUILTY
MJ AND OJ: TOGETHER AT LAST
JACKSON GETS OFF — AGAIN!
JACKSON FREE TO ADDRESS TROUBLING BACK PAIN

Now what will the cable news channels do?

Reality Show

I can remember the day the Côte Saint-Luc library opened. I was in Grade 7, and the place was conveniently located three blocks from home, in the same shopping centre as my parents' restaurant, Deli-Q. That meant I spent a lot of time there, since devouring books was better for me than consuming smoked meat sandwiches, fries and chocolate ice cream sodas.

It was a refuge of sorts, and I remember founding head librarian Eleanor London, tall and willowy, with her long black hair and quiet voice, purchasing controversial books which helped to politicize me. Books such as Authors Take Sides on Vietnam, in which everyone from Hannah Arendt to Tom Wolfe weighed in on the war.

The library is now named after Ms. London and has since moved to its own digs on the other side of the old CPR tracks in the neighbourhood where my family lived for 43 years. I have only been there a couple of times, with my almost 88 year old mother, who counted losing access to the library among her top reasons for not wanting to sell the house and move to an assisted living apartment outside the borough.

It really was, is, the best English-language municipal library in Montreal.

All of which was why I was shocked to find my beloved library in the news this week for shutting down an exhibit of photos by Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist who died in an Iranian prison two years ago.

Shocked but not surprised.

That's because some of Kazemi's photos were scenes from Palestinian refugee camps, a brutal reality not often seen in the mainstream media anymore -- let alone in a library in a neighbourhood that is predominantly Jewish.

There were 23 photos. Somebody complained. Five photos were deemed offensive, including one of a child holding grenades. More complaints followed.

As Montreal's French-language Le Devoir reported,

Borough manager David Johnstone told Radio-Canada that the resident who complained didn’t appreciate the political tone of the exhibition which, in part, illustrated the Palestinian Intifada. Johnstone said consideration of the borough’s large Jewish population played a role in the decision to pull the controversial photos.

(SNIP ...)

Kazemi’s son, Stephan Hachemi, thought the decision to pull the five pictures violated the spirit of his mother’s work and refused to let the exhibition continue.

He said that the show should continue in its entirety or not at all.

Hachemi said pulling the five photos was "scandalous, a discriminatory act, racist, an attack on freedom of the press which violated the spirit and the work of my mother."

Johnstone said that Hachemi should respect the fact that a public institution is free to set its own policies."Those five photos are too politically charged for our community.

Robert Libman, the mayor of the borough, said: "We support Stephan Hachemi’s fight for justice" in shedding light on the killing of his mother in Iran.

However, 30 minutes after the exhibit opened, "we received a complaint and the next day we received many complaints," Libman said. "The five photos caused problems and we took them down.

"The exhibit drew parallels between the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq and Israel."

Now, in fairness, I have not seen the photographs or the exhibition so I am in the dark here. But I can imagine, having seen other photos by Kazemi, other photos from other photographers and other scenes from the West Bank. Plus I have been there, and seen for myself.

Yesterday, the incident landed Canada on the international Index for Free Expression hit list.

Today Pen Canada launched a protest:

"Freedom of expression is at the core of our democracy. When community leaders take the easy way out and respond to complaints by censoring material that some may find controversial, our whole society loses," said PEN Canada National Affairs Chair Christopher Waddell.

"Instead of the removing pictures someone didn’t like, community leaders need to explain how our society is strengthened by allowing debate, discussion and the expression of diverse points of view."

Mayor Robert Libman claimed that some of the exhibit photos from Afghanistan, Iran and the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza were "too politically charged for our community." But banning them sets a dangerous precedent, Waddell emphasized. It only encourages those around the world who wish to restrict freedom of expression.

PEN Canada notes that, by their very nature, libraries must be centres for openness, discussion, debate and controversy. They are the very last places anyone should find censorship and restrictions on freedom of expression.

PEN Canada is also concerned that the decision in Cote-St-Luc has international implications. Censoring Kazemi’s work in Canada and implying it is unsuitable for Canadian audiences lends support to those in Iran who killed her in the first place while in police custody after being arrested while taking pictures of a demonstration outside an Iranian prison.

It's funny to think of one's childhood haunts in such a context.

I would like to believe that my friends who still live the Luc will not remain silent on this.

But I'm not holding my breath.

Some things just don't get talked about much anymore.

Survey Duh-partment

The University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center has published yet another survey in a long train wreck of surveys from various like- and high-minded organizations, revealing that the media and the people ''differ about partisan bias, accuracy and press freedom.''

So what else is new?

Among the findings:

* Of the 673 journalists surveyed, 16 per cent thought it was "a good thing" if some news organizations presented a "decidedly political point of view in their coverage of the news."  Meanwhile, a whopping 43 per cent of the 1,500 members of the public polled thought it was a good thing.

So much for people wanting objectivity.

* Nearly twice as many journalists as members of the public (86 per cent to 45 per cent) said that news organizations "get their facts straight."

But their opinions are right on?

* On the issue of press freedom, and whether the government has the right to limit the reporting of a story, 92 per cent of journalists said "never'' or "rarely" while 46 per cent of the public answered the same. An astonishing 14 per cent of the public maintains that the government "always'' has that right.

And they'll go to war to defend America's right to censor the press.

The study also got into political beliefs:

Thirty-one percent of those in the journalists’ sample called themselves liberal, 49 percent said they were moderates and just nine percent said they were conservatives. In the public generally, 24 percent said they were liberal, 33 percent moderate and 38 percent conservative.

That means that, once again, the right will beat up on the so-called liberal media for being liberal.

In doing so, the right will neglect to mention this finding from Annenberg:

Journalists offered several areas of self-criticism on subjects that were not put to the general public. Eighty-one percent said the news media had done a poor job of reporting on terrorism before the attacks of September 11, 2001. Fifty-nine percent said the news media had done a poor job of reporting on the Bush Administration’s justification for the war in Iraq.

And even more important:

The journalists were also critical of one element of their political coverage, with 58 percent agreeing with the proposition that if one side in a campaign is being more deceptive than the other, journalists usually just say that both sides are deceptive, thereby giving the impression that the deception is at similar levels.

This was all too apparent during last year's presidential campaign when, during the post-debate discussions, the media fact-checked each side equally, in the sense that, although Bush-Cheney made far more errors or mis-statements, the post-mortems would only list a couple -- and then ''balance'' them off with a couple from the Kerry-Edwards side.

Which is also deceptive.

Snews and you lose

Wish I had come up with this turn-of-phrase.

Recently, I encountered the term "WPN" (for "what passes for news"). I'd like to propose a related term, "Nuzak." It's a functional description of how WPN fits into the life of the average Joe, who never reads a newspaper except for the sports section.

Nuzak is like Muzak. It runs in the background. It's a New York Times headline on the way out of the house. It's CNN at the airport. It's Fox News at home while Joe is really doing something else. The purpose of Nuzak is to be mildly interesting and possibly entertaining without telling Joe anything that would disturb him personally...

This does not mean that Nuzak can't be unpleasant, or that certain stories are off-limits because they are horrific, or gruesome, or disgusting. Nuzak can report all such things, but the important thing to Joe is that the events are someplace else, happening to someone else, that he personally is okay, and that there's nothing for him to be disturbed about.

The author posits that Nuzak is how the administration uses the media to lull Americans into thinking all is well -- in Iraq, with the economy, the environment etc. -- when it isn't.

I am not sure I totally buy that. For example, when there are sensational reports of missing kids or violent crime, people become more fearful.

Besides, if the media -- and I am talking mostly TV -- did their jobs and reported on what is really going on in Iraq, or talked about the cost of the war, I think people would be scared witless.

There's an old saw in the news business that viewers check in to see that their world is okay, and that they need to be reassured.

Trouble is, ignoring the really tough stories, and ending with a cute ''kicker'' about a local kitty-up-a-tree, serves nobody but the advertisers.

Blonde Bombshell

Kate MacMillan is a particularly nasty right wing blogger who has trashed me many a time. She is so bitter and twisted up about Belinda Stronach's defection to the Liberal Party that she has posted what appears to be her cell phone number.

When I tried calling it, I got a voice mail that sounded much like her, with a message directing me to another phone number where a male voice said it was her ''personal'' line.

Notes MacMillan:

If her move today is successful in shoring up Liberal support in Ontario through the next election, we'll lose this country.

Not much of a trade for a phone number.

UPPITY DATE: The National had a rather testy exchange between anchor Peter Mansbridge and "Minister Stronach."

Mind you, if I had every whackjob in the country calling my cell phone, I'd be a little crabby too.

Later in the show, a political panel seemed to be stacked with Conservative opinionators, including National Post columnist Andrew Coyne and former Brian Mulroney aide Hugh Segal, now president of the Institute for Research on Public Policy. It's hard to judge the political affiliations of Faron Ellis, a prof at Lethbridge Community College, but he sure sounded conservative. Only the Star's Chantal Hebert didn't have a political axe to grind.

Looks like CBC went way out of its way not to appear to be biased towards the Liberals.

Incidentally, Coyne claimed, as some conservative bloggers did today, that reporters were laughing at the prime minister today and not with him. I beg to disagree in an earlier post.

Weapon of Mass Deception

It's been 10 days since the damning Rycroft memo was published by the Sunday Times. It made huge waves on the other side of the Atlantic in the run-up to the British elections.

But the corporate media in North America continue to underplay, or ignore, it -- even though it's the real ''smoking gun'' in the cache of lies used to justify the attack on Iraq.

As the 2002 top-secret British foreign policy document makes plain, U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were talking "regime change" the year before the invasion:

Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

and

But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

According to FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting):

The New York Times (5/2/05) offered a passing mention, and the Charleston (W.V.) Gazette (5/5/05) wrote an editorial about the memo and the Iraq War. A columnist for the Cox News Service (5/8/05) also mentioned the memo, as did Molly Ivins (WorkingForChange.com, 5/10/05). Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler (5/8/05) noted that Post readers had complained about the lack of reporting on the memo, but offered no explanation for why the paper virtually ignored the story.

In a brief segment on hot topics in the blogosphere (5/6/05), CNN correspondent Jackie Schechner reported that the memo was receiving attention on various websites, where bloggers were "wondering why it's not getting more coverage in the U.S. media." But acknowledging the lack of coverage hasn't prompted much CNN coverage; the network mentioned the memo in two earlier stories regarding its impact on Blair's political campaign (5/1/05, 5/2/05), and on May 7, a short CNN item reported that 90 Congressional Democrats sent a letter to the White House about the memo-- but neglected to mention the possible manipulation of intelligence that was mentioned in the memo and the Democrats' letter.

Not even the Star reported on it.

Until now.

UPPITY DATE: Coverage may be improving.