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The experience of attending a movie prescreening, for example, is quite different from being a guest on a cruise for example, writes the Globe’s public editor.

In the stories about Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s cancer diagnosis, many people are talking about his “fight” and his “battle” against the disease and noting his strong personality. But are these militaristic metaphors really helpful to people across the country who are dealing with various forms of cancer?

A reader wrote to us this week confused about the star rating system used in The Globe and Mail.

Generally, Canada’s courts have been in favour of openness and have ruled in favour of the media’s social and moral duty to report openly on matters of public interest. So why is it that the media must continue to do battle?

The complainant, Kathleen Ruff, felt very strongly that by leaving out key details about the treatment of Omar Khadr CBC was “hate-mongering” and biased in its coverage.

The complainant questioned the use of the husband of a reporter in a story about problems with the renewal of New Brunswick health care cards.

Journalists covering and writing about these events have an obligation to provide as much information and as many relevant perspectives as possible to help citizens come to their own conclusions about a complex and complicated long-running story.

There is, in fact, a very real appetite for negative content. Audiences read it, which is why there’s so much of it. But the exponential increase in the volume of content available to us, coupled with the hall-of-mirrors repetition of the worst sorts of news, requires us to be discerning news consumers.

Support for a national council to be launched in 2015 appears to be consolidating across Canada, writes Toronto Star public editor Kathy English.

The Globe’s questions are not online polls, but surveys of readers’ views.