In Pakistan, a disaster of epic proportions has unfolded. The Times of India reports it will take years for the country to recover. Yet media coverage has been relatively muted. In a Global Journalist panel discussion, journalists working in the region agree coverage of the flood lacks urgency. To illustrate the situation closer to home,…
Harvey Cashore has a new book on the stands about the Airbus Affair. It’s called : The Truth Shows Up: A Reporter’s Fifteen-Year Odyssey Tracking Down the Truth About Mulroney, Schreiber and the Airbus Scandal. I have reviewed it in the July/August issue of the Literary Review of Canada. Here is a portion of that…
When Omar Khadr’s trial resumes, the issue of interrogation methods and torture techniques will once again be canvassed. Not well-known is the role played years ago by a Manitoba professor in the field of sensory deprivation, a technique that figures prominently in various manuals of interrogation.
The credibility of what is called “citizen journalism” took a big hit this week, according to Eric Morse, a former Canadian diplomat who is now vice-chair of the Security Studies Committee at the Royal Canadian Military Institute in Toronto. In a column in the Ottawa Citizen Morse criticized those who reported as fact information contained in…
On Sunday three prominent publications published stories based on thousands of pages of classified U.S. military documents on the war in Afghanistan. The material came from WikiLeaks, a three-year-old, volunteer-run website whose mission is to provide a safe way for whistleblowers to make information public that someone in power didn’t want us to see. This…
The release of classified information about the Afghan War by WikiLeaks and three news organizations is being described by some as a new form of “assymetrical” journalism. In a column in The New York Times, David Carr says the collaboration between WikiLeaks, a whistle-blower Web site that specializes in publishing classified or secret documents, and three traditional…
As military officials, world leaders and politicians debate the impact of the release of tens of thousands of raw classified field reports on the Afghan war, journalists and those who study the media are debating the impact of the release on the news business. The records released were included in a classified archive obtained by…
An excellent analysis of the role of social media in news coverage is presented by Antonia Zerbisias in the Toronto Star on July 11. She aptly describes how Twitter became a news sources for untold numbers of people as journalists on the front lines used social media as an instant news wire, sending valuable, pertinent…
BBC radio Scotland airs an interesting program pitting an old hack journalist using traditional tools against a younger new media journalist loaded with technology. The idea is to see which one gets the better, more credible story. The results are aired on the radio. The programme ‘Old Hack, New Tricks’ will air today at 11:30am…
“Put in simplest terms, the troubles in Thailand are a classic clash between the rural poor – who live in places like Chiang Mai – and rich urbanites in Bangkok.” So concluded a report carried across Canadian newspapers this Saturday.It’s not that simple, of course. But neither is the Thai landscape so complicated that western…