For the second time this week, I’m taking my lead from The Atlantic (it’s the best magazine in the world right now, making even The New Yorker appear precious and overwrought). Unsurprisingly, the two articles that stirred me to blog were both (a) about the Web and (b) rife with fundamental, flummoxing misperception. I’ve already written about Mark Bowden’s piece on the Web-induced demise of The Wall Street Journal. Now for the big kahuna: Nicholas Carr’s take on Google. Titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” this cover story has been sticking in bloggers’ craws all week, inspiring them to pee on hydrants to mark their view on the current state of media, the Web and the human condition. Carr’s view is clear: the hypertext world of Google is slowly eroding our capacity for sustained contemplation, thereby flattening our collective intelligence. One thing is also clear: the piece has an enormous blind spot.
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In the debate over Google’s effect on humanity, everyone is missing one big issue
Christie Blatchford and Tim Hortons: Barometers of all things Canadian
Sometimes it’s best just to report the facts as you know them and leave the opining to your betters. Here, for example, is Christie Blatchford in this morning’s Globe reporting on the goings-on at yesterday’s terrorism trial in Brampton:
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As long as the CBC is losing things…
OK, so CBC lost Hockey Night in Canada’s theme music. Now, having set that happy precedent, perhaps the Ceeb brain trust might, for the sake of good taste and our collective sanity, consider losing this jacket (and maybe even the guy in it).
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Pot calls kettle black in ongoing feud between print and Web journalists
The July-August issue of The Atlantic includes a piece by lead features scribbler Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down) on the recent goings-on at the Wall Street Journal. In it, Bowden writes a predictable lament regarding the demise of long-form, responsible journalism in newspapers. The cause? The Web, of course, and Web-enabling buccaneer capitalists like Rupert Murdoch. All of which is fine, after a fusty Luddite fashion. But when Bowden gets up on his hind legs and announces that the Web “has yet to develop institutions capable of replacing print newspapers as vehicles for great in-depth journalism, or conscious of themselves as upholding a public trust,” I tend to get a little pissy. My debunking, after the jump.
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Fallout continues after Conrad Black’s contentious appeals hearing
The fallout from Lord Black’s contentious appeals hearing included the now-familiar bumptious rebuttal from his Lordship, backed up by the usual ventriloquism offered up by George Jonas of the National Post. In all this, there was the assertion that judges Posner and Sykes were, as Black put it, “essentially part of the prosecution.” Whatever his motivation throughout the hearing, Posner was by turns caustic, sarcastic, incredulous and dismissive. Afterwards, Andrew Frey noted that it’s an appeals judge’s job to be skeptical and that it was unlikely that Posner would come off the bench and give him a hug.
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How Mark Steyn got Canada on the cover of the New York Times
Whenever our home and native land gets a mention in the mighty New York Times, we feel that concomitant frisson of recognition. For a moment, we’re a little closer to the centre of things. Today we made the front page above the fold, and not in a way that was especially flattering. The subject, in part, is the discrimination complaint before the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal involving a piece Mark Steyn wrote for Maclean’s. I’ve written before about this sorry situation and expressed my opinion that the sooner we put paid to this sort of frivolous prosecution, the better. While Times legal reporter Adam Liptak takes seriously the Supreme Court’s efforts to balance speech rights with other societal concerns, he appears to imply that the situation in B.C. is the bridge too far. His argument, after the jump.
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Peter Munk interview at Indigo goes awry due to rowdy audience member
Balzac’s neatly turned observation that “behind every great fortune there is a crime” has developed into a veritable shibboleth of the activist left. One thing is sure: if you make or inherit a great fortune, it’s a lock you’ll be accused of a great crime. Gates is a monopolist, Murdoch a closet fascist, Thomson a virtual polygamist, and don’t even get me started on all those Russians. Tuesday night in Toronto I saw this phenomenon in action. Peter Munk, whose Barrick Gold Corporation has developed into one of the great Canadian money-spinners of recent times, was interviewed on the stage at Indigo Books. His interlocutor was his daughter, Vanity Fair contributor Nina Munk. The subject of the chat was supposed to be a new book by Munk the Younger and Rachel Gotlieb that is titled The Art of Clairtone and celebrates the design innovations of Peter Munk’s long-defunct stereo company. The evening went more or less as planned, with Nina asking Peter straightforward journalistic questions concerning the content of her book. And then, in a moment, things went haywire.
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A three-sheet salute to The Walrus’s Ken Alexander
The word went out last night: Ken Alexander—perpetually described (yet again this morning in the Globe) as “colourful, chain-smoking and tempestuous,” or some such code for irascible and sodden—is calling it quits after four years of editing The Walrus. In short order, the periodical essentially replaced Saturday Night as Canada’s national magazine of high-end, long-form magazine journalism. It was this shift—exacerbated by Alexander’s studied old-money indifference to forelock tugging and civility—that brought down the wrath of the established journalistic orders (see Robert Fulford in the pages of Toronto Life). Over the course of Alexander’s tenure, The Walrus simultaneously attracted and repelled talent. The result was an earnest, ambitious, if somewhat worthy publication.
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Bernardo tape released to the media, but not without pointless proviso
One of the surreal aspects of our 24-hour real-time media universe came into precise focus this morning in Justice David McComb’s fourth-floor courtroom at 361 University Avenue. He ordered that copies of Paul Bernardo’s interview with police regarding the Robert Baltovich case be released to the press. The order was carried out over a couple of hours, rendering the logistics in this matter chaotic, if not absurd. While a gaggle of press vultures (including this stooped reporter) hung over his shoulder, Iain MacKinnon—the lawyer who argued on behalf of CBC, CTV, CanWest and Rogers—burned copies of the original onto DVDs in order to make good on the court’s order. He even used his own laptop.
Canada’s other national anthem sold to the highest bidder
After a 40-year run on CBC, Hockey Night in Canada has lost its theme song to CTV. Composer Dolores Claman—who had held out for a better licensing deal from CBC and then turned around and sold the rights in perpetuity to its competitor—said, “I am very moved by how so many Canadians have taken the hockey theme to heart. We are so pleased the song has found a new home.” What sentimentality. She made a smart financial decision. At any rate, the fool in all this is the CBC’s bumbler-in-chief, Richard Stursberg. He’s in charge of the national broadcaster and allowed its arguably most recognizable icon to slip through his fingers. Nice work. At least he’s still got George Stroumboulopoulos.
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Two rich white guys face a higher power
Here are a couple of stray observations on a steamy Toronto Monday. Friday night, Peter C. Newman won a National Magazine Award for his magisterial take on the Conrad Black trial in the pages of Toronto Life. From the podium, he thanked the man himself. Mr. Black noted in the pages of Saturday’s Post that, to his mind, this “outpouring of sentimental celebration…is a nostalgic re-enactment of the leftist ritual of self-indulgent historical myth-making.” He was writing about the 40th anniversary of student rioting in France, but as an expression of his likely take on Newman’s triumph, it’ll do just fine.
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Margaret Wente “reports” on the misery of latte lovers
Writing a regular column for a major newspaper is unbelievably hard work. And far be it from me to gainsay the efforts of someone who manages to crank out that much content several times a week. The best columnists appear to be satisfied with ignoring the currency or “newsworthiness” of their observations in favour of broader themes that, irrespective of the news, make the column relevant.
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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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Lesson #18,330,424 from the Conrad Black trial: Simplify
For as long as he remains a guest of the United States—and perhaps right to the gates of Paradise—I suspect Conrad Black will hear ringing in his ears the following exchange between Judge Richard Posner and Andrew Frey recorded at Black’s oral appeal to the Seventh Circuit (I’ve edited the exchange for the purposes of clarity):
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Just another day at 361: Paul Bernardo to the left, Livent to the right
A courthouse is, by definition, a Petri dish of the absurd. The courthouse at 361 University Avenue was no exception yesterday as a hearing into the hows and wherefores of releasing the Bernardo tape took place simultaneously with (and not five yards away from) Brian Greenspan’s continued dismantling of Gord Eckstein at the Livent trial. Several members of the fourth estate hopped back and forth between the two, and the attendant vertigo was almost too much to bear.
The Livent trial was more of the same as Greenspan the Younger confronted Gordon Eckstein with the defence’s contention that in his efforts to frame Gottlieb and Drabinsky—and in anticipation of the inevitable trial—he created a so-called “Nuremberg file” full of false and forged documents that indicate that he was only following orders. The broad implications of “Nuremberg” in this context slightly boggle the mind (I think I’ll let it go at that).
Finally, at 4 p.m., Brian finished off the Greenspans’ cross-examination. All told, it clocked in at six days. Within seconds, Crown prosecutor Bob Hubbard was on his feet waiving the need for re-examination. Given the character beating Eckstein had taken, the press gallery agreed that the Crown must be very confident of the persuasive power of their documentary evidence. Afterwards, I asked Brian Greenspan if he was taken at all aback at the Crown’s willingness to let Eckstein’s cross stand without rehabilitation. “I’m neither surprised nor unsurprised,” he replied with a certain seen-it-all-before sang-froid. There’s still a way to go, but this was among this trial’s first “whoa!” moments.
Across the hall, judge David McCombs, whose demeanour might charitably be described as ponderous, mulled over a decision on how best to release the tape of Paul Bernardo’s interrogation regarding his possible involvement in the murder of Elizabeth Bain. At one point, the judge, clearly thinking aloud on the various scenarios this event might entail, talked about unsealing and releasing the tape to the press, who would make it available to the public “consistent with its ethical obligations.” This, as opposed to the court setting certain limitations on the tape’s availability.
Leaving aside the idea that the distribution of the tape’s contents might somehow be “limited” once it is made available for broadcast, the use of the terms “ethical obligation” and “press” in this context, and in the same sentence, set Olympian standards for naive credulity.
• Media to get Bernardo jailhouse video interview Ontario judge calls ‘boring’ [CP]
• Livent lawyer hits back at witness [Toronto Star]
• Judge to release taped Bernardo interview [CTV]
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