Toronto Life: Spectator

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Posts with category ‘Radio’


Satirists of Canada: Your day has come!

The past few days have seen a considerable improvement in the climate for free speech in this country. First, the Canadian Human Rights Commission pitched out the egregious complaint filed by the Canadian Islamic Congress against Maclean’s (and Mark Steyn). And now, the Supreme Court of Canada, courtesy of the good offices of Justice Ian Binnie, reconfirmed the importance of and extended the purview of what counts as fair comment. A read-through of Binnie’s opinion—which spoke for the court’s 9–0 rout reversing a B.C. Court of Appeal decision that favoured anti-gay activist Kari Simpson over shock jock Rafe Mair—reveals a veritable free speech manifesto:

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The newsworthiest breast in Canada

At this time last week, l’affaire Bernier was taking wing and sending a Canadian news story flying around the world: “Over the course of 72 hours in midweek,” reported the Globe, “Ms. Couillard was the subject of thousands of articles and 821 TV reports in no fewer than 61 countries.” Moreover, “she took sole possession of a remarkable six per cent of all U.S. news coverage.” But in the blogosphere—where currency is the, uh, currency—sometimes it takes a solid week for a particular issue to come into focus. Take, for instance, John Barber’s “satire” of this coverage in last Saturday’s Globe. It was printed under the slug “Analysis” and titled “Thousands of articles, 821 TV shows, 61 countries and one breast.” That “breast” is the first of seven mentions (eight, if you count the cutline) in the piece, accompanied by two instances of the more ribald “knockers.”

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Cue the madness—Drabinsky and Gottlieb are now on trial

After a mere decade of delays and distractions, former theatre impresario and alleged fraudster Garth Drabinsky will finally see the inside of a Canadian courtroom. He and his Livent Inc. partner Myron Gottlieb are facing criminal charges before Ontario Superior Court Judge Mary Lou Benotto—she of the tainted blood trial. Reporting on CBC Radio this morning, Mike Hornbrook pointed out that it’s considered “Canada’s largest ever prosecution of corporate fraud”—a good thing, too, considering the Americans were ready to prosecute these two as long ago as 1999. Unlike their former board member Conrad Black, Gottlieb and Drabinsky had the good sense to hole up in Canada and wait for the RCMP to conduct its investigation (an indictment took three years). As for the subsequent delay in the case coming to trial, Drabinsky can thank (in part) a certain aforementioned peer of the realm: the Crown was only too happy to accommodate Eddie Greenspan’s crowded calendar as he flew about the continent defending Black.

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Dispatches from the surreal calamity of last night’s Democratic leadership debate

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Last night, in a massive Philadelphia museum devoted to the American Constitution, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hammered away at each other—gladiators in the great Democratic political contest. The debate itself, part of the run-up to the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, took place in a smallish TV theatre and was moderated by ABC correspondents Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Outside that small room, though, in a massive cathedral of spin, looking out 30-foot-high windows at Independence Hall, a thousand journos banged away at laptops, murmured into microphones and adjusted their ties and blouses before the camera. This horde represented an array of newspapers, Web sites, blogs, and radio and TV stations bearing a Dadaesque constellation of acronyms from throughout the world—ABC, NBC, CBS, WLS, WLAY, WABC, WDKA, WSYR, BBC, CNN, C-SPAN—most of which were repeated out along 6th Street, where satellite trucks stretched into the distance like a futuristic trailer park and news helicopters floated above. It was American madness pure and thick, and I wandered through it, as Leonard Cohen would say, like a lost Canadian.

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CBC execs: low on reason, high on the hog

Yesterday’s Toronto Sun reported on its freedom of information requests that dug up the following on the expenditures of senior CBC executives:

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Welcome to Spectator

A little over half an hour into Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane takes control of the moribund New York Inquirer and fires the editor. On completing his fourth draft of the front page of his maiden edition, Kane turns to his soulmate and dramatic critic Jedediah Leland and reads to him a prospective declaration of principles for the paper: “I’ll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly. I will also provide them…with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings.”

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