Old Boys Club

Update: Looks like public reaction actually forced a positive change for once as apparently the Greens will now be included in the debate. I may have to reduce my cynicism meter from 9.8 to 9.7 (out of 9) - although I still think we need to establish some sort of objective criteria for who is included/excluded from televised debates during elections.

----
Dear Unelected and Unaccountable Media Consortium,

During the 2006 Canadian federal election, you stated that the Green Party was excluded from televised debates because they did not have an MP in the House of Commons. As we head to a 2008 Federal election, the Green Party now has an MP in the House of Commons and you are now saying that they can not be included in the debate because, "it is better to broadcast the debates with the four major party leaders, rather than not at all."

I am trying to decide which is worse, a) that you continue to lie about the true reason the Green Party is excluded from the debates (do you really expect us to believe that if there was a televised national debate, the other political parties would rather allow the Green Party to have the floor to itself for 3 hours of prime-time television than participate?), or b) that whatever your true reason is, you felt that it was better to claim that you had to exclude the Green Party because you were blackmailed by the other federal parties.

My conclusion is that, absent your establishing clear criteria for deciding which parties will be included in the debates, this matter should be decided for you by Elections Canada.

In the meantime, your credibility as anything other than a defender of the status quo and established interests continues to dwindle.

Yours truly,
Declan.

Things You'll See During An Election: Part 1

#1: Trivialities

There is a sense in Canada that both the media and the citizens have an obligation to care about politics in general, and elections in particular. The reasoning is that the policies enacted by the government have important impacts on people's lives and since we shape these policies through (among many other, often more important ways) the votes that we cast during an election, we should attempt to make an informed decision.

However, it requires some effort to try and determine both what set of policies are best and which vote will likely result in the closest approximation to said policies being enacted. Additionally, many people find discussion of policies and their impacts quite boring.

Faced with this situation, the media and the citizens generally respond much like a group of schoolchildren tasked with homework who would prefer instead to gossip about their classmates and teachers.

To take just one example, City TV (Vancouver) was running a poll this morning on which politician you would most like to have as a friend on facebook. Less obviously, but just as trivially, you will see endless coverage of tactics and strategy and much forecasting of results, almost none of which has any bearing on which policies will bring the best results or how citizens should use their vote to encourage good policies to be enacted.

Of course, the one difference between students gossiping and the media focusing on politics related trivia is that the students are under no illusions that gossiping is getting their homework done, whereas much of the media actually seems to believe that polls about facebook friends and the like actually discharges their duty to cover politics and inform citizens in a responsible manner.

Freedom

Just a little thing, but when a media organization of the stature of the New York Times can't/won't point out that 2+2=4, we've got problems.

For A More Efficient Media

Note: This post is part of my spring cleaning project and was initially started around the time of the B.C. transit plan announcement.

Hello dear media member. I have heard your concerns, growing more desperate with each passing year. Things are moving so quickly these days, tight deadlines, staff cutbacks and an accelerating hyper-media culture have left you without enough time to do the deep, insightful reporting that you are really capable of, and instead your media outlet is meeting its content requirements with bare bones wire copy and the latest celebrity shenanigans.

What you need is a way to improve your efficiency! Here's a thought: one of the biggest topics the media covers is government and what is government always doing? It is always raising money and spending money. So if you could make your stories on the topic of governments raising and spending money more efficient - if you could automate them somehow - think of the time savings!

Well, I've been conducting a thorough review of media stories on governments and money and I've noticed something remarkable. At first glance, every story looks different: A panel recommends government institute a carbon tax at the federal level, someone wants to increase spending on transit at the provincial level, the Conference Board of Canada suggests allowing municipalities to levy sales taxes, another province is spending money on film projects - how can we bring automation to this bewildering array of diverse topics?

Here's what I noticed, every story on government finances, whatever the topic, whatever the level of government, whatever the media outlet, always includes one block which looks the same. Let me demonstrate with a few examples culled from a quick google news search. You could do the same search yourself any day and get plenty more where these came from:

"The Canadian Taxpayers Federation wants the province to reconsider nearly $20 million in annual subsidies for the commission, which operates bus, freight, passenger rail and high-speed Internet services in northern Ontario."

...

"Reaction to the proposed carbon tax is mixed. While the Vancouver Board of Trade has described it as a "smart" policy that will be "neutral to the pocketbook of the individual consumer and business," Retail BC predicted that the tax will disproportionately add to the cost burden of retailers. In a similar vein, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation described the tax as "anything but neutral for individuals, businesses and industries," and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business suggested that the carbon tax would effectively cancel out other tax relief measures included in the 2008 Budget."

...

"The provincial government is offering paid leave for thousands of public service employees it believes want to volunteer for the 2010 Olympic Games. ...
The plan was attacked by Maureen Bader, B.C. director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, who said the province's Olympic spending is already out of control.

"It's not necessary. There are already a number of people voluntarily giving up their time."

...

"The government's promise of spending prudence, however, was greeted with skepticism by the head of a tax watchdog group.

"Under the Conservatives, spending has increased by 14 per cent," said Canadian Taxpayers Federation federal director John Williamson, noting that program expenditures have increased from $175 billion a year in the final year of Liberal rule to what this year will likely be more than $200 billion for the first time ever.

"If Mr. Flaherty's pledge to be fiscally 'responsible' is to mean anything, he must . . . match his tax-relief freeze with a corresponding spending freeze," Williamson said. "Increasing spending while shunning tax cuts will mean the Conservative government has put the interests of the bureaucracy ahead of ordinary taxpayers."

So now let your imagination run wild - let's say you program two shortcut keys into your word processor: The first one, say CTRL-C-T-P-Up Arrow is used for stories where governments are raising taxes (or considering raising taxes, or offering new taxes, etc.) or spending money on any item, whether it be improving the environment, public libraries, emergency preparation, or whatever. This keyboard shortcut will insert the following text into your story.

"Mr/Mrx X [program macro to randomly select a name from a list of CTP spokespeople, there is no difference between any of them, so this is not a problem] criticized the move saying that this move could only lead to a heavier soul-destroying, life-crushing burden of taxes applied to ordinary, everyday, hardworking Canadian Taxpayers."

In cases where taxes or spending are being cut, you simply hit CTRL-C-T-P-Down Arrow and get the following text:

"Mr/Mrs X said the move was a step in the right direction but far more needed to be done to lighten the crushing, family threatening, puppy stomping, tax load being borne by ordinary, everyday, hardworking Canadian taxpayers."

So c'mon media, think about how many stories about Britney you could write up if you followed this easy method of saving time on stories about government programs and services.

It's true, if you wanted to really be radical, you could leave the Taxpayer Federation references out altogether. After all, I think everyone in the country can predict what they are going to say with regard to any story (Tax up: boo, Tax down, yay, No change in tax: who cares) so it's not exactly news is it.

Let's face it, you're just needlessly padding your stories with empty content that doesn't say anything new to anybody and wouldn't be missed by a soul if it didn't appear. But I don't want to rock the boat, so if you just want to maintain the current feeble status quo, but be more efficient about it CTRL-C-T-F-Up Arrow and CTRL-C-T-F-Down Arrow is the way to go.

Belabouring the Obvious

Tim Lambert writes a post entitled, "Don't Trust Anything You Read in the National Post" To be fair, Tim has an international audience and perhaps this is news in foreign countries, but for us Canadians, he's not exactly breaking new ground here, is he.

Gwyn Morgan

I find it somewhat disturbing that someone who is either this dumb or this dishonest is considered one of our great national businessmen.

My favourite bit of lunacy (among many) from the column:

"Both history and logic about consumer behaviour tells us that when the price of something has already reached expensive levels, adding a little to that price has no real impact on consumption."

Seriously, wtf? Never mind the tortured grammar ('logic about'?), how do we define 'expensive levels', how do we define 'adding a little', how do we define 'real impact' If history is so clear, perhaps a historical example would help, if the logic is so clear, spell it out for me, because I'm not following. Is he saying it would work if the price wasn't at 'expensive levels', or that adding 'a lot' to the price would make a 'real difference', but adding half of 'a lot' makes no difference?

Ah screw it, why am I responding to this dishonest clown as if he puts any thought into or even means his words. You know what, forget it, don't even follow the link I put in above. Do something more constructive. Read this. Or go for a walk.

Good Reporting

Here's a link to an excellent article in the Globe and Mail which provides some insight into the interaction between organizational culture, mathematical modelling and risk taking at financial institutions. In case you are interested in that kind of thing.

A few quotes since it will be paywalled soon enough:

"In all financial institutions, there is a daily battle between the risk takers and the risk managers. The takers push for bigger positions to make bigger profits, while the managers push for prudence and caution.

But as their warnings of potential loss were proved false each day by the soaring financial markets, many risk managers lost the ear of management teams focused on the vast profits generated by the people in the business of creating the structures. That led banks to take bigger and bigger bets."

...

"But some of the fault also lies with risk managers who relied too much on their tools, the statistical models, which were rapidly eclipsed by the rapid innovation in financial markets that begat complicated structures such as CDOs, so-called CDO squareds and structured investment vehicles (SIVs).

“Risk management tools are blunt instruments, which calls for prudence,” said Louis Gagnon, a former Royal Bank of Canada risk-management executive who now teaches business at Queen's University. “If you know you are driving your car on a foggy evening, you are supposed to go easy on the gas, but it's not necessarily what happens.”"

...

"Along with correlation, another term has come to haunt risk managers: “tail risk.”

It's an odd name for the statistical chance that returns on any given investment will fall outside the normal probability of events. (When plotted on a graph, the statistically probable events are grouped in a bell curve, but there's a long tail of improbable events that trails off to one side, hence the name.)

In other words, most of the times markets behave normally. But every so often they don't. Those abnormal events fall in the “tail” of the risk curve.

Many risk managers, especially those at banks, use the normal probability concept to develop a yardstick called Value-at-Risk (VaR), which measures the amount a position taken by traders could lose on any statistically “normal” day. Normal is defined as a move of less than three standard deviations from the mean, and the assumption is that normalcy will reign for all but one day in a hundred, or even a thousand. That's when the tail comes into play.

Most banks look back three or four years to determine the likelihood of loss – meaning that just before last summer's blowup they were looking only at years of unnatural calm. Markets fooled the models.

“The tail events happen far more often than we would predict,” Mr. Gagnon said. “But what are the predictions based upon? The normal distribution of events.”

As a result, VaR failed investors. For example, CIBC had a daily VaR in the third quarter of 2007 that averaged $9.9-million, according to the bank's quarterly investor presentations. Yet three times in that quarter, as the credit crunch picked up steam and the bank booked writedowns, it lost more than that in a single day, including one loss of $120-million."

Because it's different here / this time / etc.

Via the comments at Vancouver Condo Info, here's a funny article from the CBC on how B.C. is protected from any fallout from the economic problems, with the biggest concern being that people might lose a little confidence because they see all the negative headlines.

"On Tuesday morning the main Canadian index, the S&P/TSX composite, was up 337 points to 12,467 by 11 a.m. ET after it had tumbled 605 points on Monday, while the U.S. market opened with a nosedive after being closed on Monday for a holiday.

Mutual funds and other investments are taking a hit, but B.C.'s economy is relatively protected, say economists.

"We have this commodity and construction boom of epic proportions which is keeping the western provinces essentially at full employment," Aron Gampel, the deputy chief economist of Scotiabank told CBC on Monday."

So the U.S. is going into (is already in) a recession, but it won't affect B.C. because of the commodity boom (and these commodities are being sold to who, exactly?).

Meanwhile, how long will 'a construction boom of epic proportions' last when house prices drop in B.C. like they did in the U.S.?

Consider this chart of U.S. housing starts.

--

"SFU business professor Lindsay Meredith sees no black clouds on B.C.'s economic horizon. And he predicts consumers — especially cross-border shoppers — might actually benefit if retailers in the U.S. begin slashing prices."

So, if people cross the border to do their shopping somewhere else, that will be *good* for the B.C. economy? OK then.

I've heard of 'every cloud has a silver lining', but sometimes it seems like the media in B.C. thinks that clouds are actually made of pure silver. The fact is, sooner or later we'll see the impacts of a U.S./global slowdown here in B.C.

For example: Canfor closing two mills in Fort Nelson, B.C. ... "The PolarBoard oriented strand board mill and the Tackama plywood mill are closing indefinitely, with the firm blaming poor wood product markets"

Citizen Journalists?

Readers will likely know Antonia Zerbisias as the proprietor of the blog, Azerbic, but may not realize that she also has a regular column in the Toronto Star newspaper. In a recent edition of said column, she talked about the idea of citizen-journalism:

"We're a long way away from true participatory journalism. ... Not until "citizen journalists" do the tedious slogging through court records. Not until they attend news conferences and do interviews. And maybe not even then.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for citizen journalism. I have been agitating for it at the Star a long time, urging editors to hire or link to local bloggers, open up the process and let readers in.

Give the people access.

Because the bottom line is, journalism is about access. Access to information. Access to newsmakers. Access to the airwaves. Access to the means of distribution. And last but far from least, access to pictures."

Now as I see it, there are three stages of providing information to people (i.e. doing 'journalism'): Information gathering, information transcribing and information distribution.

The first step of gathering information has been vastly democratized by the internet. Whether it is the federal budget, the latest Statistics Canada report, the latest think tank study, the movement of the stock market, the latest poll or election results, the weather forecast or the stories on the newswire, this information is available to the citizen as never before. My long, slowly moving process of adding dropdown boxes to my sidebar has been an attempt to group together all these 'sources of information' for easy reference.

Of course not all useful information is published on the internet. Paid journalists typically have access to more information sources such as personal conversations with contacts on their 'beat', attendance at ceremonies, speeches, conferences etc., greater access to prominent people for interviews as well as being on the receiving end of press releases from various organizations.

The one advantage citizen journalists have (as a group) is strength in numbers. It is simply more likely that a 'citizen journalist' will be in the right place at the right time to experience / get a photo of a tornado or a terrorist attack. It is also more likely that a 'citizen journalist' will have specialized knowledge on some topic. Why read columnists in the Star or Globe regurgitating Michael Geist's take on the latest developments in intellectual property in Canada (of course Geist has his own column in the Star as well), when you can read what he has to say for himself directly? Why read some columnists interpretation of the latest news on global warming when you can get a take from an actual climate scientist at RealClimate?

The second step is to sift through all the information available, figure out what is important and make sense of it. Of course if you are just taking pictures of a tornado with your cellphone and sending them off to the local paper, this isn't so important. But if you a blogger (or a podcaster or a videocaster) then your ability to choose topics and to write (or speak) well is the most important aspect of what you do.

Typically, journalists have some sort of training in their field such as attending journalism school, being sent on courses by their work, learning from colleagues at the office or what have you. But, based on what I've seen, I'm not really convinced that this consistently translates into superior writing. I'm guessing that if I focussed on writing a couple of fairly short pieces a week, and was supported by an actual editor, you could slip my columns into most newspapers and nobody would say, 'hey that guy's writing isn't up to the usual journalist standard, he must not be trained as a journalist!'. And there are many, many bloggers out there who are much better writers than I am.

With video or audio transmissions there might be the odd issue with production values, but for the written word this doesn't seem to be much of an issue. Most blogs I know are just as easy on the eyes (if not more so) than your typical online 'mainstream media' outlet. Even for audio and video what barriers are left are falling fast.

So I don't think there really any significant obstacles to citizen journalism in the transcription step. If anything, many citizen journalist sites (Hullabaloo comes to mind) probably thrive because they are so much better written than most of what you find in the mainstream media.

The third and most troublesome area is distribution. Things are starting to open up with digital TV and radio but there is still a lot of inertia from the era when bandwidth limitations meant that only a chosen few companies had access to transmission of audio and video, and production costs ensured that the whole operation had to be staffed by salaried employees. Similarly, the natural convenience of having print information bundled together into an easy to handle package led to the formation of newspapers and magazines which again led to the hiring of full time staff members devoted to providing content.

Not having a non-journalist 'day job' is of course a big advantage in that it gives you a lot more time to both gather and transcribe information. I think an important milestone has been reached in that, in the U.S., blogging has become popular enough that some of the most popular bloggers are actually able to make a living at it. Of course, over time, we may find that the blogging world solidifies and starts to become as structured as the mainstream media. Perhaps in the future a blogger will start out their blogging career by submitting trial posts to the big name group blogs and hoping to get taken on as a writer for them. Or perhaps big 'brand name' sites like DailyKos will aggregate content, giving more exposure to anything which is recommended by enough readers.

Or perhaps blogging will be just a fad and will fade away leaving the same old mainstream media plugging along as always, just now online as well as on paper (or on air), but I somehow doubt it. Individual bloggers will come and go of course but I suspect there will always be lots of people interested in putting their thoughts out there for the world to see. And, as the old concentrated distribution models break down, the mainstream media will be able to afford fewer correspondents, fewer staff writers, fewer editors - that is, they will be less competition for citizen journalists and they will drive readers to seek out bloggers who are writing about the specialized topics people are interested in.

I myself first came across Jim Elve's BlogsCanada site because I was searching for information on the Green Party in the lead up to the last Federal election and couldn't find anything more than a couple of 'Hey the Green Party exists' columns in the mainstream media. I'm guessing this desire for specialized information is only going to continue to increase as new generations grow up expecting google to have both an answer for every question and an insightful (or at least animated) discussion of every topic.

So it's nice that people like Zerbisias are working to get the barriers knocked down a little faster but, given the trends in access to information, access to transcription tools and ability to distribute content widely and cheaply, I'd say the days of the citizen journalist are coming sooner or later, no matter what anybody does (short of destroying economic and technological progress that is). The biggest risk (as I see it) is that this new generation of citizen journalists may not have the same skillset (or resources) to follow trails, sniff out deception, dig up the truth and follow a paper or money trail that today's career, professional journalists do. And that means that stories which require a lot of background work may never get written. It's a risk, but I'm optimistic. It's a big world with a lot of people and I'm guessing that there will be those willing and able to do this kind of forensic reporting no matter what the structure of the market is.

It should be interesting to see what happens anyway - especially since I'm not someone who currently makes a living as a journalist.

Analysis You Just Won't Find in the Mainstream Media

For you city dwellers trying to decide which of three newly launched free daily papers (Metro, Dose, 24 Hours) to take for your next transit trip (personally I figure accepting a paper just encourages the people handing them out, but that's one man's opinion), see here for a *very* thorough comparison. If I ever do give in and accept a free daily at least I'll be making an informed choice (and going with Metro - unless I'm in a mood for trivia in which case Dose is apparently the way to go).

Blog on Blog on Blog

Via Colby Cosh, this is an interesting piece on the Canadian blogging community which, you may be surprised to learn, consists almost entirely of moonlighting mainstream media journalists. That aside, a couple of comments:

1) The author (Samantha Israel), argues that the idea that blogs can be self-correcting is wrong because, as she says, "I've been corrected by a reader only once".

So let's make it twice - her comment (further down) that, "The [mainstream media] certainly bit back when it revealed that Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who averages more than 350,000 visitors a day to his Daily Kos political blog, was paid US$12,000 to promote Howard Dean's campaign for the Democratic nomination." is in fact misleading, bordering on spreading a lie (IMO).

In fact this information was "revealed" by Markos himself as soon as it happened and prominently displayed on his blog, as some 'lazy' Internet research will tell you quite quickly.

2) There is a long discussion of editing and how it differs between the mainstream media and blogs. On a not-so unrelated note, here is the headline from today's Vancouver Sun: Lung cancer in women reaches epidemic level

I appreciate that newspapers have a duty to serve the public interest by taking minor issues and making them seem really scary and important through the use of large fonts in order to make money by selling papers, but some respect for the language would be nice. The steady increase of lung cancer rates isn't good but it isn't an epidemic (it's not even contagious). Perhaps they just meant it in the sense of "Widely prevalent" but, besides also being untrue, that would be a bit misleading given that we're talking about a medical condition here. And just what is the 'epidemic level' anyway?

Anyway, I'm criticizing because - well, that's what I do here - but the article on blogging by Israel was interesting and worth a read all the same.