Yes, the media is out to get Rob Ford. It’s politics. Most hacks are not militantly left-wing, though their political assumptions are broadly statist. What almost all successful reporters have, no matter what their political inclinations, is a sixth sense about good copy. They can smell blood from miles away. Even the most right-leaning member of Ford Nation, who has a slight tinge of journalistic ability, can sense Rob Ford is a headline generating machine. More than that he generates the right kind of headlines: Cheap, simple and easy to understand.
He’s a big fat white guy who keeps getting himself into trouble. The man is an elected Fox sitcom.
That’s why he has to go. Hopefully to be replaced by someone with his values but also with a modicum of common sense. When faced with allegations, whether absurd or serious, the instinctive reaction of the Mayor has been to whine like a petulant child and to blame a vast-left-wing conspiracy. It never seems to have occurred to the Mayor, who has a penchant for self-pity, that this same media complex is also besieging Tim Hudak, Stephen Harper, Jason Kenney, John Baird and Danielle Smith. Whatever you think of those politicians, each is enough of a professional to deal with the media they’re stuck with, rather than wish for a media that has never existed.
For the good of Toronto, Rob Ford needs to go.
Richard Anderson, “He Needs To Go”, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2013-05-29
May 29, 2013
QotD: It’s time to go, Rob
“One imagines this isn’t the response the administration was expecting”
In the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto talks about the surprising recent uniformity of opinion among media outlets:
Hey, kids! What time is it? “TIME TO GO: HOLDER OK’D PRESS PROBE,” shouted the always subtle homepage of the Puffington Host last Thursday evening. It was in response to the news, broken by NBC, that Attorney General Eric Holder had participated in “discussions” about “a controversial search warrant for a Fox News reporter’s private emails.” That’s in contrast with the Associated Press phone-log subpoena case, from which Holder told Congress he had recused himself.
The New York Times‘s reaction, while not as breathless, was more dramatic. The paper’s editorial appeared a week ago tomorrow — before Holder’s involvement had publicly emerged — under the headline “Another Chilling Leak Investigation.” The editorial was straightforward and reasonably argued. That may not sound like a great compliment, but this is the New York Times editorial page we’re talking about.
The editorial was remarkable as much for what it didn’t say as for what it did. There were no snide asides about Fox News, or qualifications along the lines that “even Fox” has First Amendment rights. Nor did the Times editors take any shots at George W. Bush, congressional Republicans or any other familiar antagonist. They simply defended Fox News‘s right to engage in news-gathering and denounced the Obama administration’s assault on it.
One imagines this isn’t the response the administration was expecting.
May 26, 2013
Reporting (and omitting to report) certain news items
Mark Steyn on what was top of the issue-sheet for journalists discussing the Woolwich murder and the Swedish “youth” riots:
For the last week Stockholm has been ablaze every night with hundreds of burning cars set alight by “youths.” Any particular kind of “youth”? The Swedish prime minister declined to identify them any more precisely than as “hooligans.” But don’t worry: The “hooligans” and “youths” and men of no Muslim appearance whatsoever can never win because, as David Cameron ringingly declared, “they can never beat the values we hold dear, the belief in freedom, in democracy, in free speech, in our British values, Western values.” Actually, they’ve already gone quite a way toward eroding free speech, as both prime ministers demonstrate. The short version of what happened in Woolwich is that two Muslims butchered a British soldier in the name of Islam and helpfully explained, “The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day.” But what do they know? They’re only Muslims, not Diversity Outreach Coordinators. So the BBC, in its so-called “Key Points,” declined to mention the “Allahu akbar” bit or the “I”-word at all: Allah who?
Not a lot of Muslims want to go to the trouble of chopping your head off, but when so many Western leaders have so little rattling around up there, they don’t have to. And, as we know from the sob-sister Tsarnaev profiles, most of these excitable lads are perfectly affable, or at least no more than mildly alienated, until the day they set a hundred cars alight, or blow up a school boy, or decapitate some guy. And, if you’re lucky, it’s not you they behead, or your kid they kill, or even your Honda Civic they light up. And so life goes on, and it’s all so “mundane,” in Simon Jenkins’s word, that you barely notice when the Jewish school shuts up, and the gay bar, and the uncovered women no longer take a stroll too late in the day, and the publishing house that gets sent the manuscript for the next Satanic Verses decides it’s not worth the trouble … But don’t worry, they’ll never defeat our “free speech” and our “way of life.”
One in ten Britons under 25 is now Muslim. That number will increase, through immigration, disparate birth rates, and conversions like those of the Woolwich killers, British-born and -bred. Metternich liked to say the Balkans began in the Landstrasse, in southeast Vienna. Today, the Dar al-Islam begins in Wellington Street, in southeast London. That’s a “betrayal” all right, but not of Islam.
May 23, 2013
Pollster finds about 1/3 of Canadians trust the media
However, as Richard Anderson points out, they prefer to trumpet the finding that only eight percent of Canadians trust what they hear from bloggers:
According to the referenced survey only 8% of Canadians trust bloggers.
Which begs the obvious question, indeed so obvious that the professional pollster quoted above didn’t bother asking it: Have 8% of Canadians even read a blog?
Those of us who comprise the mostly unpaid army of bloggers are perfectly aware that we are a niche. Really thousands of little niches. Most people do not get their news or commentary from blogs, or at least from blogs not affiliated with an MSM outlet. It’s why we call the MSM the MSM, they’re the mainstream and we’re the outsiders. So when you ask Bob and Mary Canadian do you trust bloggers, a term they’re probably only vaguely familiar with, they’ll say no.
Does anyone trust something they know almost nothing about?
What’s impressive is that the MSM has trust ratings in the 32-33% range, despite decades of incumbency and powerful distribution networks. When most people are very familiar with your product, and still think you stink, that’s a huge credibility issue. Bloggers are doing this for the hell of it and some spare change. The MSM is doing this for a living. If upstart amateurs have one-quarter the trust level of professional journalists, that says far more about journalists than bloggers.
Pollsters, ironically, scored lower than journalists.
May 20, 2013
Neil Reynolds, RIP
Although he was much better known for his career in journalism, I first got to know Neil Reynolds when he joined the Libertarian Party of Canada to contest the 1982 by-election in Leeds-Grenville. Here is his obituary from the Kingston Whig-Standard:
Neil Reynolds is being remembered Sunday night as one of the top editors in Canadian newspaper history, and for being the person responsible for turning the Whig-Standard into a great small-city daily that won national awards and international recognition.
Reynolds died on Sunday in Ottawa. He was 72.
“He was the great editor of Canada from the mid-’70s to the early-2000s because of his ability to improve papers,” said Harvey Schachter, who became editor of the Whig after Reynolds’ departure in 1992.
Reynolds had been city editor of the Toronto Star in 1974 when he suddenly left to return to Kingston and take on an editing job with the Whig-Standard. By 1978 he was planning to move on when publisher and Whig owner Michael Davies offered him the top newsroom job.
Reynolds promptly hired Schachter, Michael Cobden and Norris McDonald to fill out the editors’ ranks.
“The Whig was really the start,” said Schachter. “Why the Whig stood out is he took it from a pretty mundane paper to being the top small-town paper in North America.”
Reynolds’ political career didn’t last long, as he joined the LPC in 1982, held the party leadership for a year, then returned to full-time journalism. His Wikipedia page says that his 13.4% of the vote in that by-election was the highest percentage of the vote achieved by an LPC candidate.
May 17, 2013
Toronto mayor denies crack cocaine allegations
I woke up to some fascinating news … Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford is alleged to have been videotaped while smoking crack cocaine:
The U.S. website gawker.com published an article late Thursday alleged it had been offered a video of Ford “smoking crack cocaine” — and the Toronto sellers were hoping to get six-figures for the video.
“First of all, I’ve spoken to the mayor yesterday and secondly, he denies any such allegation,” Ford’s lawyer Dennis Morris told the Toronto Sun Friday.
Morris wasn’t sure if Ford would address the allegations Friday.
“We’ll just have to see how that unfolds,” he said.
Asked if the mayor plans any legal action, Morris said they’re at the “bottom rung of the ladder of anything of that nature now.”
[. . .]
In the wake of the gawker.com story, the Toronto Star published a story Friday morning by two reporters who state they were shown the alleged video earlier this month and alleging Somali drug dealers are shopping the video around.
While I’m far from a Rob Ford fan, I do find this story to be hard to believe. Ford has managed some awesome face-palm moments during his term in office but I can’t credit that any politician would put himself into this kind of situation. Either way, Toronto politics have been much more interesting since Ford was elected.
Update: Here’s the Toronto Star story:
The footage begins with the mayor mumbling. His eyes are half-closed. He waves his arms around erratically. A man’s voice tells him he should be coaching football because that’s what he’s good at.
Ford agrees and nods his head, bobbing on his chair.
He says something like “Yeah, I take these kids . . . minorities” but soon he rambles off again.
Ford says something like: “Everyone expects me to be right-wing, I’m . . .” and again he trails off.
At one point he raises the lighter and moves it in a circle motion beneath the pipe, inhaling deeply.
Next, the voice raises the name of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau. The man says he can’t stand him and that he wants to shove his foot up the young leader’s “ass so far it comes out the other end.”
Ford nods and bobs on his chair and appears to say, “Justin Trudeau’s a fag.”
The man taping the mayor keeps the video trained on him. Then the phone rings. Ford looks at the camera and says something like “that better not be on.”
The phone shuts off.
Update the second: Popehat calls it the “most wonderful legal threat ever”:
Various journalists are claiming they have seen a video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack.
This led to the most darling legal threat ever from a lawyer named Dennis Morris — who has represented Ford for some time — to Gawker
[. . .]
This is delightful, like that video of the kitten freaking out when it sees a lizard.
First, nobody ever governed themselves accordingly based on a threat from a hotmail account. Second, are you using some sort of comma-based operating system? Third, what the fuck are you talking about?
This sets a high bar.
May 14, 2013
Peter Worthington’s final column
It was suggested that Peter Worthington write his own obituary:
If you are reading this, I am dead.
How’s that for a lead?
Guarantees you read on, at least for a bit.
When the Sun’s George Gross died suddenly in March 2008, at age 85, there were few of his contemporaries left alive to recall the old days, when he was in his prime and his world was young. I was one of the few who knew him then.
After attending his funeral I half-facetiously remarked to the Toronto Sun’s deputy managing editor, Al Parker, that I had been around so long that no one was left who knew me back then, and I had better write my own obituary.
“Good idea!” said Parker with more enthusiasm than I appreciated.
I mentioned it to my wife, Yvonne, who approved.
So here it is, not exactly an obit but a reflection back on a life and a career that I had never planned, but which unfolded in a way that I’ve never regretted.
QotD: Litmus testing political scandals
Dear friends in the media.
Come on.
I mean, come on.
You and I know what’s going with the Benghazi thing. Let me share something that I first put into play during the “was Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account hacked” debate, but that comes from watching the Lewinsky scandal, the where-did–Mark-Sanford-go scandal, the why-is-David-Wu-dressed-in-a-tiger-suit scandal, and a wide variety of wrongdoing committed by politicians:
When there is evidence of scandalous or bizarre behavior on the part of a political figure, and no reasonable explanation is revealed within 24 to 48 hours, then the truth is probably as bad as everyone suspects.
Nobody withholds exculpatory information. Nobody who’s been accused of something wrong waits for “just the right moment” to unveil information that proves the charge baseless. Political figures never choose to deliberately let themselves twist in the wind. It’s not the instinctive psychological reaction to being falsely accused, it’s not what any public communications professional would recommend, and to use one of our president’s favorite justifications, it’s just common sense.
Jim Geraghty, “The Mask Is Ripped Off of ‘Hope and Change'”, National Review, 2013-05-14
May 13, 2013
Peter Worthington, RIP
680News reports on the death of Toronto newspaperman Peter Worthington yesterday:
Well-known journalist Peter Worthington, the founding editor of the Toronto Sun, has died. He was 86.
The Toronto Sun reported Worthington died Sunday night at Toronto General Hospital, where he had been admitted with a staph infection.
Worthington enlisted in the Canadian Navy when he was 17 and served in the Korean War before becoming a journalist.
As a former staff reporter at the Toronto Telegram, he covered the Vietnam War, and was in the Dallas courthouse parking garage in 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby.
He also reported on conflicts in the Gaza Strip, the Portuguese Colonial War, the invasion of Netherlands’ New Guinea by Indonesia and was in the northeast frontier of India when Chinese forces invaded, the Sun reported.
After the Telegram folded in 1971, Worthington, J. Douglas Creighton and Don Hunt founded the Toronto Sun.
I met Peter Worthington in 1982 when he attempted to enter politics as a Progressive Conservative. After he was defeated for the PC nomination, he ran as an independent candidate in a lively but ultimately unsuccessful by-election campaign. In 1984, he secured the PC nomination, but lost at the polls (he joked with supporters after the election that it took real skill to lose in the middle of a PC landslide — Mulroney took 211 of the 282 seats in parliament in that election).
May 12, 2013
Influenza: the trade-off between virulence and contagion
Matt Ridley explains why the breathless claims that this or that flu outbreak could rival the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 should not be taken too seriously:
Here we go again. A new bird-flu virus in China, the H7N9 strain, is spreading alarm. It has infected about 130 people and killed more than 30. Every time this happens, some journalists compete to foment fear, ably assisted by cautious but worried scientists, and then tell the world to keep calm. We need a new way to talk about the risk of a flu pandemic, because the overwhelming probability is that this virus will kill people, yes, but not in vast numbers.
In recent years flu has always proved vastly less perilous than feared. In 1976 more people may have died from bad reactions to swine-flu vaccine than from swine flu. Since 2005, H5N1 bird flu has killed 374 people, not the two million to 7.4 million deemed possible by the World Health Organization. In 2009, H1N1 Mexican swine flu proved to be a normal flu episode despite apocalyptic forecasts.
No doubt some readers will remind me that, in the story of the boy who cried “Wolf!”, there eventually was a wolf. And that in 1918 maybe 50 million people died of influenza world-wide. So we should always worry a bit. But perhaps it’s not just luck that has made every flu pandemic since then mild; it may be evolutionary logic.
Of course, just about every story about influenza you’ll encounter goes the Chicken Little route:
There’s no mystery as to why we talk up the risk every time: All the incentives point that way. Who among the headline-seeking journalists, reader-seeking editors, fund-seeking scientists, contract-seeking vaccine makers or rear-end-covering politicians has even a modest incentive to say: “It may not be as bad as all that”?
May 2, 2013
April 30, 2013
Tory (and media) fear of UKIP can be gauged by the level of abuse directed at them
Patrick Hayes on the vitriol being sent UKIP’s way by the Conservatives and by the mainstream media:
Nutters. Nutcases. Loonies. Morons. Crackpots. Cuckoos. Oddballs. Fruitflies. Fruitloops. Fruitcakes. When it comes to slang used to suggest that members of the right-wing libertarian UK Independence Party (UKIP) are mentally ill, mainstream politicians and the media have lobbed the entire urban dictionary at them.
UKIP’s latest diagnosis came at the weekend from polo-necked Conservative minister Ken Clarke. In light of the upcoming local elections, Clarke dismissed UKIP as a ‘collection of clowns’, full of ‘waifs and strays’ not sufficiently ‘sensible’ to become local councillors. His comments echoed UK prime minister David Cameron’s oft-quoted remarks from 2006 when he dismissed UKIP as a bunch of ‘fruit cakes and loonies and closet racists’. Cameron has refused to retract these comments, adding earlier this year that he still thought UKIP was full of ‘pretty odd people’.
Almost since its launch in 1993, politicians have chosen to paint UKIP as the successor to the Monster Raving Loony Party, full of — as Michael Howard, Cameron’s predecessor as Tory leader, put it — ‘cranks, gadflies and extremists’. The message is clear: on no account should UKIP be taken seriously as a political force. It deserves only ridicule. After all, how could any party that calls for the abolition of the smoking ban, or for the UK to leave the EU, be considered to be of sound mind? If you support UKIP, you need your head examined.
April 26, 2013
The sky is falling! The sky is falling! The PC is dying!
Matt Baxter-Reynolds challenges the Chicken Littles of the tech reporting world:
There are two problems with the statement “the PC is dying”. The first problem is that people like their PCs, and hearing that something that they have affection for is dying, or it isn’t relevant, or it’s going away, can be inflammatory.
The second, bigger problem, is that people when hearing this look at the PC that is today and has been a useful tool oftentimes for decades, and rightfully regard the statement as just being non-sensical. It’s patently untrue.
The idea of waking up one morning and finding a world bereft of PCs is silly. Most people reading this couldn’t do their jobs, studies, or hobbies without having access to a PC.
What is meant by “the death of the PC” is that the relevance of the PC within people’s lives is being diluted by compute devices that are not PCs and the ability to use them for activities that are rewarding yet do not require PCs. This has in fact been going on a long time (e.g. SMS), it’s just that we’ve reached a tipping point over the past few years where the whole world seems to be full of smartphones and tablets and everyone is now talking about it.
April 12, 2013
Conor Friedersdorf: “Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story”
In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf explains why the Philadelphia horror story should be front-page news, but isn’t:
The grand jury report in the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, is among the most horrifying I’ve read. “This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy — and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors,” it states. “The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels — and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths.”
Charged with seven counts of first-degree murder, Dr. Gosnell is now standing trial in a Philadelphia courtroom. An NBC affiliate’s coverage includes testimony as grisly as you’d expect. “An unlicensed medical school graduate delivered graphic testimony about the chaos at a Philadelphia clinic where he helped perform late-term abortions,” the channel reports. “Stephen Massof described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, ‘literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.’ He testified that at times, when women were given medicine to speed up their deliveries, ‘it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.'”
One former employee described hearing a baby screaming after it was delivered during an abortion procedure. “I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” she testified. Said the Philadelphia Inquirer in its coverage, “Prosecutors have cited the dozens of jars of severed baby feet as an example of Gosnell’s idiosyncratic and illegal practice of providing abortions for cash to poor women pregnant longer than the 24-week cutoff for legal abortions in Pennsylvania.”
Neuroscience or neurotrash?
In The Register, Andrew Orlowski reports on the sad state of published neuroscience articles:
A group of academics from Oxford, Stanford, Virginia and Bristol universities have looked at a range of subfields of neuroscience and concluded that most of the results are statistically worthless.
The researchers found that most structural and volumetric MRI studies are very small and have minimal power to detect differences between compared groups (for example, healthy people versus those with mental health diseases). Their paper also stated that, specifically, a clear excess of “significance bias” (too many results deemed statistically significant) has been demonstrated in studies of brain volume abnormalities, and similar problems appear to exist in fMRI studies of the blood-oxygen-level-dependent response.
The team, researchers at Stanford Medical School, Virginia, Bristol and the Human Genetics dept at Oxford, looked at 246 neuroscience articles published in 2011 and and excluded papers where the test data was unavailable. They found that the papers’ median statistical power — the possibility that a study will identify an effect when there is an effect there to be found — was just 21 per cent. What that means in practice is that if you were to run one of the experiments five times, you’d only find the effect once.
A further survey of papers drawn from fMRI brain scanners — and studies using such scanners have long filled the popular media with dramatic claims — found that their statistical power was just 8 per cent.
Low statistical power caused three problems, the authors said. Firstly, there is a low probability of finding true effects; secondly, there is a low probability that a “true” finding is actually true; and thirdly, exaggerating the magnitude of the effect when a positive is discovered.
