I guess I put this off longer than I wanted to, but it’s probably time to clear the air regarding me and my journalism career. A number of people have cast aspersions on my integrity lately, implying my opinions are somehow shaped or formed by journalism school, going as far as to suggest that what I write has to do with trying to get a job in media. Those comments are not just wildly off-base, but they’re actually personally hurtful.

First of all, I didn’t really know I was going into journalism until I was laid off from the construction site at the end of November 2009. I had always been interested in writing and journalism, but I was also a high school dropout and a construction worker, so my options seemed relatively limited. Being laid off gave me an opportunity for the first time to wonder if I still had the opportunity to change my life and do something with my writing.

Before I started journalism school last September, I didn’t have any delusions of grandeur. Although the National Post picks my stuff up now and then, it isn’t as though I’m going to finish school and go work on their editorial board. Actually, the truth is that in about a month from now I’m probably going to be looking for work at any newspaper that will have me, whether that’s in a big city paper or a town of 2,000 people.

A bit about journalism school for a moment. Although there’s some political stuff in it, most, if not all, pertains to the manner in which journalists are expected to conduct themselves. And as far as the people in my program go, I’m probably the only one who’s interested in politics at all. Sure, some of them probably lean to the left, but then again so do most people in Canada. And if it seems as though most journalists lean to the left, that’s probably because writing and media is an occupation that attracts a greater number of people from that demographic. (It’s not high finance, after all)

The idea that journalism school is some kind of brain-washing camp or echo chamber for the left, is patently ridiculous. In fact, it’s so misguided that I can’t really begin to describe it. Would every single person in my program be happy to be offered a job at the CBC? Of course they would. As they would CTV, the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun, the Toronto Star or Canadian Press. They’re in school to get a job, not to join a political movement.

So, do people really think I’m going to join the media and conform to some kind of imagined left-leaning editorial directive? To be quite honest, I’m more worried about the getting hired part first. Beyond that, I’m concerned about the perception of a political pundit trying to back his way into journalism after having written politics for four years. It usually happens the other way around for a good reason. For the same reason some people mistrust any CBC reporter who offers an opinion, it’s possible that people won’t trust a reporter who’s done the same thing in the National Post.

But people who think I’m being changed by journalism clearly don’t understand me. When I went to Afghanistan, I got to spend time around journalists, some of whom have been doing this for 30 years. It’s not as easy as it looks.

You can’t just present a story based on what you think is right. You can’t just grab the facts you think are relevant or talk to the one person you think should be listened to. You can’t dismiss a story because you don’t like what a person is saying, even if it’s something you disagree with. When I went to report on George Galloway and was barred admission on my media credentials by rabble blogger Derrick O’Keefe because he accused me of being a propagandist, I didn’t turn around and submit a story about leftwing censorship. Because that’s not the mandate of a journalist, nor is the story about me.

Writing for journalism is hard. If you don’t think so, you try it for a day. Try picking a story, finding the most important part about it, interviewing all sides to it, finding the right balance, gathering the background information, ensuring all your facts are correct, and then writing 350 words using the correct newspaper style and spelling. And then try doing that several times a day, and know that you’re expected to do that every single day you want to call yourself a journalist. It’s hard.

I just finished writing a 2,300-word business article for a trade magazine. It doesn’t matter what I think or what I believe. I had to gather facts and information and opinions from the business world, and my credibility and integrity depends on the fairness, accuracy and truth of every single word of that article.

So there’s my rant. If you think my opinions are being self-censored or influenced by my getting an education in journalism, you’re free to believe that. But don’t tell me about it. I’d rather you and I just go our separate ways, because I don’t think I can respect a person who can’t show me — and my chosen profession — the respect I deserve.

Don’t try reading the above text. It’s too small. But a friend sent me a tip that I’ve appeared in the women’s magazine, Women of Influence, on page 10. Well, a reference to my article in the National Post has anyway. Click on the above image, wait for it to load, and then click to page 10. Apparently my article on a female conservative leader went over well in some circles.

As for other writing, I interned as a reporter at two community newspapers during Christmas. Some of you already know that. Most of the writing is fairly localized but I have a few I’m pretty happy about. If you want to check them out, that would be great.

Langley Advance: Player-coach goes to the dogs – in a good way (Dec. 28)
Langley Advance: Amy honoured through scholarships (Dec. 21)
Langley Advance: Band answers the call of metal-hungry kids (Jan. 7)
Coquitlam Now: Gemologist focuses on helping miners (Jan. 7)

I suppose I haven’t really spent any time to sit down and write what I’ve been doing for the past couple of months, although casual and regular readers will probably know I’m in journalism school.

I finished my first term back in early December, and since then I’ve been interning at the Langley Advance and Coquitlam Now newspapers. This hasn’t given me a lot of time to really write or respond to comments.

I also visited Afghanistan in late September, early October, and I never got a chance to really share more than a few thoughts and impressions of the trip. I did want to take this opportunity to thank those who helped me with that experience. I don’t want to embarrass anybody by calling out their full name, but I’m sure you’ll recognize yours when you see it.

Dave, thanks for helping me when you heard about my opportunity. Tony, I appreciate your ongoing attention to the mission in Afghanistan and supporting my visit there. John, you’ve helped me to get through some of the self-doubt and fears about tackling this new occupation. And thanks to Mark for the assistance and the phone call before leaving to Afghanistan. I also appreciated the advice from those who had already been there.

Finally, thanks to Roy and Fred who really stepped up and made the trip possible.

Anyway, back to the headline of this blog entry, my newest National Post article is rather related to the Afghan story.

While Canadians were concerned about jobs, health care and the lagging economy, the opposition parties were busy pressing the federal government on the subject of Afghan detainee documents, according to an Ottawa Citizen analysis of question period transcripts from 2010.

The analysis shows the opposition asked more about Afghanistan, specifically about detainees, than any other subject in 2010. Although the Liberals also hounded the Tories on questions about the G8 and G20 summits and Rahim Jaffer, the NDP and Bloc Quebecois were absolutely overflowing with questions about Afghanistan.

This flies in the face of what public opinion polls say are the true concerns of Canadians, which relate mainly to the economy. Read More »

…

In which I speculate what could lift Canada from its present state of political paralysis:

How many times in the past five years have you heard this one: The Conservative Party enjoys a small lead over the Liberal Party according to a recent federal poll.

It isn’t just a political stalemate anymore, since the chess metaphor implies an understanding of the impossibility of completion, leaving no alternative but to abandon the game. Yet in Canada we continue, day in and day out, moving the king back and forth between the same two squares.

If Canadians were disengaged in politics before this impasse, it’s difficult to quantify how apathetic the past half-decade of minority governance has made us. No matter what happens, or what anybody says or does, nothing can seem to shake the country from this paralysis.

Continue reading…

The important part here is that I’m not recommending a woman be chosen over more qualified candidates, as might be inferred from my suggestion. Nor am I saying that women only vote for other women. But I do wonder if there’s a “Christy Clark” for the federal Conservative Party.

The following opinion piece I submitted to the National Post deserves some qualification, but I’m pretty certain that anybody who has had the frustrating experience of dealing with a climate change preacher can sympathize. I wrote the article only because I made a comment, a joke really, on twitter about global warming going on vacation in Vancouver. You see, it’s been recently bitterly cold and snowing on the wet coast and that’s fairly unusual weather for us.

Of course to a climate change zealot, not unlike other religious fanatics, jokes about their faith are unwarranted and unacceptable and generally precipitate lectures about our ignorance. This is, of course, what happened to me yesterday. As I tried, uselessly, to explain to my critic, it isn’t that I don’t accept your argument. It’s that I’ve heard it before, thousands of times, once from the pulpit of a scissor lift, and I really don’t want to hear it anymore.

Shouldn’t citizens have that right? To be free from religious persecution?

Here’s the article:

There are three kinds of people on the internet you can’t have a conversation with: abortion activists, religious zealots and global warming activists.

Abortion activists, on both sides, are as polemical as polar bears and penguins. It doesn’t matter what side you might lean toward, the other side doesn’t want to hear. They believe so fervently in their cause they will judge you largely on how closely your own views align with theirs.

Read more…

The story below is from the Canadian Journalism Project, an effort “of The Canadian Journalism Foundation in collaboration with leading journalism schools and organizations across Canada.”  Note the viewpoint of those whom the author chooses to quote about Ms Blatchford.  You wonder what is wrong with journalism in this country (thank goodness for the headline)?

Waterloo protesters silence Blatchford

The University of Waterloo called off a speech by Globe and Mail columnist Christie Blatchford last Friday night after a small group of protesters accusing Blatchford of racism occupied the stage.

Blatchford was there to talk about her book Helpless: Caledonia’s Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy, and How the Law Failed All of Us. As readers of her Globe column will know, Blatchford has been vocal about the problems faced by residents of Caledonia, Ont., during the aboriginal land dispute there.

The protesters labelled the views she expresses in the book as racist. The Kitchener-Waterloo Record quoted one protester, Dan Kellar, as saying Blatchford’s book does not explore issues central to the aboriginal occupation, such as historic land claims and treaties. “You can’t take these things out of context,” Kellar is quoted as saying. “To ignore the history is a dangerous thing to do, especially when she is so well-regarded.”

The Record quoted Blatchford as saying her book was intended to look at the situation in Caledonia through “a very narrow prism” around the rule of law and lawlessness.

The Globe’s own review of the book, by Ryerson School of Journalism interim chair [that tell you anything?] Suanne Kelman [see here], says: “Do not look here for a balanced view of the conflict. Blatchford, nobody’s fool, proclaims at the outset that her book will not examine the validity of the native land claim, nor trace the sorry history of Canada’s relations with its First Nations.” But the review goes on to say the book “does a service to everyone” by documenting how government inaction in the face of the protest hurt Caledonia residents.

Tallula Marigold, who was identified as the protesters’ media representative, was quoted in the Wilfrid Laurier University student publication The Cord: “We don’t want people who are really, really racist teaching [the people we love]. And we don’t want that person to have a public forum because it makes it dangerous for others in the public forum.”

University of Waterloo officials said they chose not to proceed with the talk because it appeared Blatchford would not be able to speak, and, according to Michael Strickland, assistant director of media relations, “We also had no interest in providing a photo op of our security dragging three people off the stage.”

Free speech? Who cares?  Waterloo student Mohammed Shouman does, a lot: a letter of his to the University’s president you should read (via SDA).

Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt, the first of four at the National Post’s “Full Comment”, from the book itself (not, how delightfully ironic and telling, in the Globe and Mail):

Christie Blatchford: If the suspect wasn’t white, the police learned to walk away

Earlier:

Caledonia and…a conservative?

Update: With considerable comment from Publius:

U of W Issues Apology to Christie Blatchford

Mark
Ottawa

…myself at the CDFAI’s 3-Ds Blog: Diplomacy, Defence, Development, thanks to the good graces of Jack Granatstein.  My first post at the CDFAI,

Mark Collins on a New Good Thing in Afghanistan

is based on this one here.  Unambiguously Ambidextrous gets a nice mention.

Some other contributors to the 3Ds are Colin Robertson, Hugh Segal, Douglas Bland, David Bercuson, and Mark Entwistle.  Along with the National Post’s using material from Adrian and me I’d say we’re doing rather well.

Scary thought update: At the 3Ds I am amongst some of our greatest and goodest.

Mark
Ottawa

A very rare lull in homework has allowed me to comment in the National Post on the media’s coverage of the new Asia Foundation survey for Afghanistan. Unsurprisingly I’m not pleased with what the media decided to pick up on as the important story. Rather than focus on the positive signs in the survey, the Canadian Press picked support for negotiation with the Taliban as the big story. But there are serious concerns that such an arrangement would be beneficial for the people.

In reporting the news journalists are often faced with the task of gathering enormous amounts of information and then deciding the most important or relevant bits to pass on. Often the important parts are buried deep in the raw information.

When it comes to the 232-page document released by the Asia Foundation about their Afghan survey, the same problem poses itself. What The Associated Press decided was critical in the survey is that 43 per cent of Afghans strongly support Karzai’s negotiations with the Taliban.

Read the whole thing…

National Post alumnus Paul “Bad Boy” Wells has some intriguing, almost conservative, thoughts:

…Today’s competitive landscape leaves room for a paper that would be less frantic than its competitors, especially the poor, lost Globe. Its front page would try less desperately to be liked by everyone. Such a paper would realize a newspaper isn’t going to look like the internet and shouldn’t try — just as William Thorsell realized in 1990, when he edited the Globe, that newspapers’ attempts to look like television were simply making them look needy. It would cover news according to its own sense of what matters, not its fears about what the reader doesn’t have time for. Those are broad criteria but somewhere within them is a paper, different from today’s Post, that would also be distinct from the rest.

As for “Canada’s National…”:

The Canadian Forces’ future, or, why the Globe and Mail is not a newspaper

No sink or swim, or, the Starification of the Globe

Mark
Ottawa

I think that I, along with a lot of other people, had a lot more confidence that Jason Kenney was going to come away from his Australian fact-finding mission with a little more bread and butter than the limp offering he’s dishing up:

The federal government has come up with a plan to deal with “mass arrivals” of asylum seekers from places like Sri Lanka, the country of origin for 492 people who arrived here last month on a barely seaworthy vessel. The “tough new rules” to deter human smugglers are based on designating a new class of asylum seeker in order to differentiate between a single claimant and the mass arrivals.

So what do these new hard-hitting rules entail? What sort of sweeping changes have been made to deter these human smugglers from crash-landing in the ports of British Columbia with boatloads of would-be beneficiaries of Canadian health care and welfare?

Read the National Post to find out.