Pie Palace

Years ago, I contributed policy to the Green Party of Canada on media. In it, I stated (words to the effect of) “media is a business like no other, it has a responsibility to be profitable, but more importantly, it has the responsibility to hold our public offices to account.” The policy items were my rough attempt to discourage the rise of large media conglomerates, and to support regional media outlets.

Yesterday, one of CTV shut down evening newscasts in Ottawa, and did similar things in Barrie, London, and Victoria. In doing so, they have cost Ottawa yet another media outlet, and yet another avenue for paid journalists to keep our politicians, bureaucrats, and corporations honest. Coincidentally, kottke.org has linked to a story describing how the cuts to Baltimore’s daily newspaper has made the police force less accountable:

Half-truths, obfuscations and apparent deceit — these are the wages of a world in which newspapers, their staffs eviscerated, no longer battle at the frontiers of public information. And in a city where officials routinely plead with citizens to trust the police, where witnesses have for years been vulnerable to retaliatory violence, we now have a once-proud department’s officers hiding behind anonymity that is not only arguably illegal under existing public information laws, but hypocritical as well.

And this isn’t just an American problem. As the Dziekanski enquiry is proving, Canadian police reports can sometimes differ dramatically from reality. Without an engaged, and well funded press, there will be no one to hold these officers to account.

What solutions do we have? A CRTC-mandated carriage fee for cable broadcasters? Preferential tax treatment for smaller news organization? Increased funding to public broadcasters? There are solutions, but we, as an electorate have to wake up to the fact these cuts don’t just cost jobs, they are a danger to our public institutions.

CBC’s Canadian doctors should face regular testing: medical school head is a great example of poor journalism. The gist of the article is simple: a doctor has recommended that Canadian doctors should be periodically recertified. The journalist has found another doctor else who says “No! doctors shouldn’t be retested.” Without talking to the journalist, we can’t tell if that was to create a sense of conflict, or to make the story more “balanced.”

There are three problems here:

1. The No doctor’s statement:
   

   What we do every day is not really a book learning thing, [...] To say, in fact, that because you pass an exam makes you a good physician every 10 years is absolutely wrong.

   is exactly refuted by the CMAJ editorial:
   

   In Quebec, investigators found that family physicians’ scores on their certification examination and Medical Council of Canada Qualifying Examination were related to provision of quality care after 4–7 years in practice. More recently, Holmboe and colleagues found that physicians’ scores on the American Board of Internal Medicine’s Maintenance of Certification examination was associated with higher rates of performance in care for Medicare patients.

   which goes on to cite the studies in question.
2. The Yes doctor, Wendy Levinson has qualifications as a medical instructor, and appears to study how patients interact with their doctors and is a chair at department of medicine.
3. Meanwhile, the No doctor, Howard Conter does not appear to have any any relevant publications or appointments.

News stories like this are important. They get people to think about how healthcare is delivered in Canada, and how that can be reformed. It’s a pity that the story took the form of “she said, he said” instead of dipping into the empirical studies behind the editorial.

Elizabeth May on CBC Radio One - Calgary

I’ve been involved in four elections as a Green so far, and I have to say that I have a weirdly confident feeling about this election. The Greens are getting pretty good coverage nationally, and in our riding. We’ve (just) gotten into the national debate. People are asking, left, right, and centre for Green signs. In Ottawa-Centre, we’ve already gotten more volunteers than we had last election.

Congratulations to everyone who sent an email, made a call, and signed the online petition. You’ve shown that the electorate can take on a media consortium, and can make politicians do the right thing.

Photo Credit: ItzaFineDay.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dwarf (back)

I really shouldn’t be surprised:

The Green Party isn’t being included in the debates because three of the four establishment parties don’t want the Greens there. I’m surprised that they cared enough to threaten to pull out.
(Update: Edited for style)

The election has begun. And we’re already being let down by our media and our current Prime Minister. Let’s consider a line of questioning on CTV Newsnet coverage (around the 7:30 mark).

Let’s consider the exchange from two angles:

First, there’s the consistency angle. As much as Harper dislikes the Senate, he happily appointed Conservative insider Michael Fortier to the Senate in 2006, and then appointed the unelected Fortier to his cabinet. If Harper feels so strongly about the Senate, why is he appointing unelected people to the senate?

Second, let’s consider Tom Clark’s response. Instead of calling the Prime Minister to task on his inconsistency, he happily skates over the statement and instead asks Harper about hypotheticals (and later asks Harper to promise that he won’t get personal).

It’s easy to see why voters become cynical. The Prime Minister has ignored the spirit of his 2006 election platform, and isn’t being held to task for it. In a rare interview, a journalist has the opportunity to take him to task, but opts instead to drop the name of his media outlet, and ask an essentially meaningless question. Reporters have a responsibility to their viewers – they shouldn’t let a politician get away with this kind of dishonesty.

This is going to be a long election.
(Update: Fixed spelling mistake in title)

I have a fair amount of free time, and I’m vaguely interested in what happens in my city, so a CBC report on a community group’s recommendations for the city’s budget caught my eye. The community group is called the “Community Budget Advisory Team“. The CBC story made CBAT sound like a bunch of neocons on a picnic, so I asked the All Seeing Eye of Google to direct me to the CBAT website, and the report.

The CBC’s analysis wasn’t wrong, per se, but it certainly didn’t stick with the spirit of the report. In my brief skimming, it appears to be a relatively standard “users should have to pay” rant, but with a fair number of good ideas included. First, I’ll diff what CBC said against the report:

It wants the city to consider user fees at libraries, and consider shutting some branches – Not quite.
The suggested plan concentrates on redistribution, based on forecasted growth and transit growth over the next 10 years. In addition, CBAT does advocate improved reporting of library costs, and asking the province to change the library laws to allow fees to charging user fees. The user fees thing doesn’t sound like such a good idea, IMHO.

It’s calling for a reduction in transit spending, or higher fares, and a hold on new bus purchases – True, to a point.
CBAT suggests fare increases in tune with cost increases over the next five years, or a reduction in costs. Interestingly, it also advocates adding more concessions to OC Transpo bus terminals. This seems like a remarkably good idea: lots of people spend lots of time at bus terminals. Extending the concessions to include more corner-store-like services would certainly be helpful, and probably turn a healthy profit for the bus company.

The 68 page report contains a number of good ideas that are ignored in CBC’s report:

• Make IT pay it’s way: spending and purchases that are supposed to provide a cost-savings should demonstrate a cost-savings; while considering outsourcing IT entirely. (page 19)
• Reduce overtime. Or at least report it as a separate item on budget documents. (page 16)
• $23m of budget spending is on new busses for OC Transpo that are apparently unnecessary. This constitutes half of the $40m that CBAT could purportedly save (according to the CBC). This is probably worth following up. Are those busses necessary? By whose numbers? Could their acquisition be delayed with little or no extra cost?
• The city’s budget makes little or no reference to the Ottawa 20/20 document.

CBAT has produced an interesting document that contains some good ideas. The CBC report makes it sound like CBAT is suggesting some kind of hack-n-slash hatchet job, which doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead of covering the nuances of what CBAT suggested, and some of the good ideas, the CBC reporter decided to paint CBAT as a bunch of terrifying money-grubbers.