Journalism

Gerald Caplan is one of my favorite columnists. He is smart, caring and introspective.  It's a pity he writes for the Globe & Mail, which I call the Glop & Pail now because it definitely is no longer a newspaper-of-record.

Now we have him on record pimping for Canada's own Big Pharma.  And he drops a few names along the way.

I'm as cynical as anyone about the decline of newspapers and the sad state of affairs that defines journalism in Canada these days. There seem to be far more columnists than journalists in the media and way too much boot-licker journalism.

But there are exceptions to this. Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher of the Ottawa Citizen are two of them.  Their work on the 2011 Election fraud stories have been dogged and brilliant.

Up until recently, Canada exported industrial asbestos, a known carcinogen, to developing countries. It's use is banned in Canada and many other places because of the risk of cancer.

But in Québec, the land of political pandering. Christian Paradis is the federal member of parliament for the area, a cabinet minister and one of the very few Conservative MP's in Québec.

It's time for a discussion on hypocrisy by our politicians and, more importantly, by some of Canada's mainstream media enablers.

The blog title is little oblique. There was this Russian writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. He won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1970.

I decided to add this great YouTube video as an update. Can't wait till Stephen Harper uses his prodigious musical abilities to preform a cover of a Freddie Mercury song at the next CPC convention.

One surprise in this last election was the blanket support the mainstream media gave the Harper Government™.

It shouldn't be a surprise. The Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) spent a small fortune in advertising on their year-long Michael Ignatieff character assassination campaign.

And the Harper Government™ served up of buckets taxpayer dollars to various media organizations to promote the phony Canada Economic Action Plan.