Category Archives: politics

Is this time different? What can we learn from #MeToo and #NeverAgain

Posted by on | culture, politics, United States

At first blush it is tempting to just assign #MeToo and #NeverAgain to the growing pool of hashtagged social movements that happen to get their teeth into the media cycle for an extended period of time. They both benefit from being related, in one way or another, to the infinite-scroll train wreck that is the Trump presidency. And most importantly, both are at the spearpoint of what looks to be rapid and in many ways shocking social change.

But these two movements are interesting for another reason: They force the question of why this is happening. Or to put it more forcefully, why is this happening now? After all, in both cases the triggering events or circumstances are far from unprecedented. Harvey Weinstein had been threatening, harassing, and abusing women in Hollywood for a very long time. And in the case of the Parkland shootings, it is unfortunately far from the first time a student in the United States has gone into a school and massacred some students with a semi-automatic rifle.… Continue reading

The problem with “critical” studies

Posted by on | education, politics

When I was an undergraduate, I believed that the prevalence of positivism in the social sciences – the idea of studying social phenomena in an “objective” or “value-free” manner – was one of the great evils in the world. Not only was it an illusion, but it was a harmful one, because beneath the guise of objectivity there lay a hidden agenda, namely, an interest in domination. Treating people as objects of study, rather than as subjects, was not politically neutral, because it generated a type of knowledge that just happened to be precisely of the sort that one would need in order to manipulate and control them. “Objective” social science, in other words, was not value-free at all, but rather a tool of oppression.

The alternative to this, warmly recommended at the time, would be a new form of social science, one that was explicitly guided by the “emancipatory” interest of human reason.… Continue reading

First do no harm: Why Melanie Joly was right to stay out of the news biz

Posted by on | journalism, politics

The “Creative Canada” policy framework announced last week by Melanie Joly seems to have left no one happy, but the reaction in the news media and its interested observers has been most interesting. Despite the fact that Joly declined the invitation to empty a few wheelbarrows full of cash onto the doorstep of suffering Canadian news organizations, opinion was soon sharply split between those who saw hope that she was planning to do so by stealth, and those who feared she was planning to do so by stealth.

For the most part, these responses have been little more than occasions to grind well-worn axes, and it’s not worth going over them here. But for background reading, if you are interested:

McMaster commmuications prof Sara Bannerman arguing in The Conversation that the government is ignoring the crisis in Canadian journalism.

Communications prof, Marc Edge, arguing in Policy Options that Joly was right to do so.… Continue reading

Happy Birthday, Bill 101, or How Camille Laurin inadvertently saved Canada

Posted by on | Canada, multiculturalism, political philosophy, politics, Quebec, Uncategorized

I led a double life in the 1960s and ‘70s, growing up in Snowdon, which was then a largely Anglophone, lower middle-class neighborhood in the Western part of Montreal. We were pretty much the only French-speaking household in the area. My mother, a Hungarian Jew, had spent her adolescence in France (long story), had acquired French citizenship which she passed on to me (Thanks, Mom), and more importantly, had developed a very strong sense of French identity, and perhaps even of French cultural superiority. I therefore attended Collège Stanislas, an educational gulag which, though it did everything it could to stifle any creative spark that might have been flickering among its pupils, did instill upon me a strong grasp of the rules of agreement of the French language. My friends at school were for the most part French Canadian. There were a few anglos – but we lived in French. I was fully attuned to French pop culture.… Continue reading

What if Donald Trump is an authentic douchebag?

Posted by on | culture, politics, United States

There was always a bit of the locker room in the old Mencken line about democracy being the theory that  “the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard”.  But from “grab em by the pussy” to “I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” Trump and his allies have finally brought that locker room insight square into the Oval Office.  

So while it doesn’t make for family-friendly newspapers, if there’s one good thing that might come out of the gong show inside a dumpster fire on a train wreck that is the Trump presidency, it will be to kill until it is dead the idea that what we really need from our politicians is more authenticity.

It’s been the dominant meme of American politics since at least the 2000 election, when Al Gore was widely ridiculed as being a wooden, poll-driven phony, in contrast with Dubya’s Tex-folk posing.… Continue reading

What the failure of Star Touch teaches us about a media bailout

Posted by on | journalism, politics

The Toronto Star announced yesterday that it was shuttering its flagship Star Touch tablet app, laying off 30 employees and eating something north of $20 million in investment costs.

This comes a week after a group called “News Media Canada” — basically a legacy news media lobbying group — pitched the feds on a plan for the government to give the industry $350 million in support that would include funding 35 per cent of newsroom costs.

Clearly, the failure of Star Touch proves the need for the bailout money, yes?

Actually, no, it proves the exact opposite. Star Touch is exactly why the feds need to leave the news business to its death throes.

Some quick background: Star Touch was an attempt to recreate the walled garden of print in a digital format, to provide a closed environment where readers would come and stick around, paging through the heavily designed and curated app.… Continue reading

*All The President’s Men* for the Trump era

Posted by on | journalism, politics, United States

If you’re looking for guidance on the current media-political climate in the United States, I highly recommend you pick up a copy of All The President’s Men, the book-length account of the Watergate investigation by Woodward and Bernstein. This is one of those I-can’t-believe-I-haven’t-read-it-sooner books, something I really should have been handed the day I walked into the newsroom at the Ottawa Citizen almost a decade ago. (The movie is great too, but it only covers the period from the break-in until Nixon’s re-election in ‘72, so it misses what is arguably the most interesting stuff. It’s also a bit jarring to read the book knowing that Deep Throat was Mark Felt, the #2 at the FBI at the time.)

Aside from its value as analogue journalism-porn (See also: Spotlight) in many ways, it will make you feel better about what’s going on now. History doesn’t repeat itself but it definitely rhymes: America has seen shit-show presidencies before and survived.… Continue reading

Why you should read “Should we change how we vote?”

Posted by on | elections, politics, public policy

Last summer, a lot of us expected that roundabout now the Liberal government would be either introducing legislation to change the electoral system, or making preparations for a national referendum on a proposal to change the electoral system. That’s because Justin Trudeau promised, during the 2015 campaign, that the upcoming election would be that last one held under the “first past the post” electoral system, and by summer 2016, it was clear that time was running out on the government’s ability to make good on that pledge.

Hoping to both intervene in the government’s decision-making process and contribute to the public debate, Daniel Weinstock, Peter Loewen, and I organized a pair of conferences last fall, one in Ottawa and Montreal. We also arranged for MQUP to publish a “quickie” book out of the conference, one that would do a shortcut on the usual academic press publishing timelines and get something out in time to contribute to the anticipated debate we would be having this spring.… Continue reading

American Nakba

Posted by on | politics, United States

I’ve recently been writing a paper on the topic of stigmatization (available here), which includes some discussion of the rather acrimonious left-right debate over the “culture of poverty,” and the extent to which the lower classes should be held responsible for the various self-destructive behaviours that they tend to engage in. This had me reading some conservative cultural criticism, which led me to David Frum’s How We Got Here: The ‘70s. I was vaguely aware of this book when it came out, but never got around to reading it. After checking it out from the library I found myself quite looking forward to it, because Frum has been a consistently interesting voice on the American scene in the past 5 years or so (since he was expelled from his post as movement conservative). Thus I was quite surprised by just how bad the book is. Part of this I suppose is due to the fact that it was published in 2000 (i.e.… Continue reading

Why it is a problem when journalists jump into politics

Posted by on | journalism, politics

When columnist Michael Den Tandt announced this week that he was joining the PMO, just a a few weeks after he resigned as a political columnist for Postmedia, there was a fair amount of chatter in the usual places about the bad optics of the move, what we could conclude about his work and about the profession as a whole, and whether, in this economy, this is the sort of thing we should have any scruples about.

Some throat clearing:

a) I worked at Postmedia with Den Tandt, and though I never met him we did have a few exchanges. I thought he was a very strong columnist, and think his departure from Postmedia is a loss for the company and the profession.

b) This is a bigger issue than Den Tandt regardless. Lots of journalists have jumped to the Liberals, just as a lot jumped to the Tories when they were in power. … Continue reading