Comment 17049

By MediaWatch (anonymous) | Posted January 10, 2008 at 18:29:40

Good discussion all around. I think that Ryan lists fairly what RTH tries to do but it does more than that, of course. In trying to support your admitted bias, you also take great pains sometimes to overly criticize opposing points of you, even though you say you welcome them. And that too is part of the discourse.
Also, you may really want to study the nature of editorial freedom versus corporate responsibility in the news media. I would submit to you that there really is a division of powers between the Publisher's responsibilities and the Editor's and columnists and reporters responsibilities. In fact, locally I see a real slant by the reporters on the left side of the political equation. (It wasn't always so witht the Spec, by the way.) As for TV, I'm afraid that the talent pool and editorial freedom is quite shallow here, unlike say the CBC with grander budgets to explore or W5, Fifth Estate type programs.

Not that I'm overly capitalistic about things, in fact almost the opposite. But we do live in a capitalist society and the honest pursuit of money is not a bad thing in our world. And just because The Spec has to meet some financial obligations to its staff and shareholders should not and does not diminish its independence to tell stories.
No, the journalistic faux pas that I see and transgressions have to do with lazy journalism that only tell part of the story rather than the whole story. The Spec issue on the airport was one such lazy story. It created a scenario of secretiveness which in the final analysis did not hold water. That story was lazy in that it didn't go back to first principles in explaining the context of the story. It was a bit of an axe job. I love axe jobs, by the way. It's just that we must call a spade...er an axe an axe when we see one.
The same thing was done by that journalist on the port if you remember and McMaster Medical school (this may have been another journalist but the same tactics were used).
So, I'm all for freedom of the press, but I am also for responsible freedom. But most of all I'm for informed media consumers.

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