Yule Heibel's Post Studio © 2003-2010

Full spectrum mess

Heard part of a fascinating report on CBC Radio tonight, Anna Maria Tremonti interviewing Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Myths, Facts, and Lies, an analysis of U.S. military strategy abroad. The book has enthusiastic endorsements for the way it lays out the history surrounding 9/11, and positions the current Gulf War in the context of a larger US strategy. In the interview, Mahajan spoke of Iraqi civil protest now taking shape, directed against the American occupation as well as against accepting a lousy civilian status quo. As an example, he mentioned a group called the union of unemployed, and suggested (tongue in cheek) that something comparable might be a good development in the US. Sure enough, when I googled union of unemployed iraq, I found many links, all of them pointing to apparently volatile politics, populist grassroots communism, and just the sort of thing the State Department can work itself up over and dig a deeper trench about. Sort of like Vietnam.

Pulling bylines for freedom

A Quebec labour tribunal just handed down what’s being called a landmark decision: “‘journalists have the right to withhold their byline as they see fit’ because our names belong to us, not the company,” as the Toronto Star’s Antonia Zerbesias writes in Bylines more than just a name. This is good news in an age of not-at-all-good corporate media ownership. Here in Canada, most city dailies are owned by CanWest Global, which is controlled by Winnipeg’s philanthropically-minded Asper family. In December 2001, the journalists of the Montreal Gazette, another Asper-owned paper, went on a byline strike to protest the imposition of national editorials. The journalists saw that the Asper family uses the cross-country chain of newspapers they own to further their private agendas. These Asper-sponsored editorials — 3 per week — could furthermore not be contradicted by any other editorials in the papers. It was a kind of media Gleichschaltung of the sort happening with frightening regularity these days, and the Gazette’s reporters protested by collectively pulling their bylines. But two days later, they were ordered to reinstate them. And they were given a gag order, forbidden to talk to other journalists about what was going on. Democracy in Canada, eh? But now the Quebec tribunal has ruled that the reporters do own their names, …and can pull them, signalling protest. As Zerbesias puts it:

Now, before you start thinking this is fine for us keyboard-punching scribes but what does it have to do with you, consider that, sometimes, all that stands between you and the corporate media suits, is us.

If this ruling is applied to the rest of Canada, and it might well be if used as a precedent in other cases, then journalists will have a way of calling attention to what we feel is something that doesn’t belong in the paper. Like, say, a blatantly self-serving story about the company that owns the paper.

In a merged and converged media time and place like Canada, where there seems to be too much of that going around, that is not only in the reporters’ interest but also in the public’s.

3 rings, and an (inter)net

Haven’t you ever wondered why 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything? Haven’t you wondered what the question is?

I know! I know the question! At the library tonight, I browsed around in the November 1956 issue of Encounter, the magazine funded by the CIA-controlled Congress for Cultural Freedom in a bid to win Western Europeans’ hearts and minds during the Cold War. Encounter was the kind of magazine in which Albert Camus frequently published, but which would never publish Jean-Paul Sartre. Lots of smart stuff in its pages, but lots of directing, too. When I flipped it open to Dwight Macdonald‘s article, Amateur Journalism; Notes of an American in London, I had to stop and read. Tomorrow I’ll blog about Macdonald’s theses, which are really pertinent to blogging in some ways, but first this: among other things, Macdonald describes letters to the editor (which incidentally seemed a lot like comments threads in blogs) that debate topics over the course of days and even weeks. Topics ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, and included a discussion of the reason that circus rings are 42 feet in diameter.

Get it? The answer is 42 because obviously the question is, “how big is the ring?” Monty Python’s Flying Circus — another clue? Douglas Adams was only 4 1/2 when Macdonald described that circus ring discussion, but maybe he knew, maybe he knew. Life’s a circus. That’s all you need to know. That, and how to walk a tightrope. Piece of cake.