This is about half of a column I wrote today. It carries on from my last column. The new, full, feature-length thing can be read here.
This morning I trudged through a few pages at Toronto Star’s online morass (emphasis on the ass), and found further confirmation.
Kathy English is the Star’s public editor. The public editor position “encompasses the roles of reader advocate and guarantor of accuracy, serving as a liaison between the Star and its many readers, both print and online”, according to the Star.
On May 3, 2008, Kathy English wrote in an editorial column called “Clearly, this column is my opinion”:
“But sound journalistic practice still demands a clear distinction between news and opinion so that readers understand what is opinion and what is reporting in the newspaper. Articles that contain opinion or personal interpretation should always be clearly identified.
“While the Star strives for this in the use of various design elements (such as a columnist’s “logo”) intended to denote opinion, my communications with readers tell me these devices are often inadequate for readers unschooled in our design shorthand. That’s why the clearest way to tell readers that an article includes a writer’s views is to label it as opinion.
“In recent weeks, there has been some blurring of news and opinion in articles that have not been clearly labelled…”
Kathy English writes later in that same column that the Tor-Star’s editor-in-chief, Fred Kuntz, recently wrote a memo to senior editors like her, saying, ”[W]e have to be upfront with opinion and label it as such. This is a matter of being transparent with readers, which speaks to our credibility as a newspaper.”
Well that was so May of 2008.
Today, I was a little confused—and I’m arguably good at dissecting news and analyzing the media’s presentation of it. On their front online page, they present—as news (see picture at right)—this story, as written by a “Staff Reporter”, under the heading of “NEWS”:
When Playboy ruled the world
Playboy, like its founder, is getting rickety. A lament for a heyday more glorious than we knew
Jan 04, 2009 04:30 AM
Brett Popplewell
Staff Reporter
I’m not a fan of cheap porn and I don’t have a fetish for bountiful airbrushed women. But I am an admirer of Playboy.
Not so much the magazine found at the newsstand but in the basement of BMV, a book store on Bloor St. W. where you can buy back issues from 30, 40, 50 years ago. What attracts me? I read it for the articles…
That doesn’t read like “news” to me. Or look like “news”. Of course I’m only talking about “the article” and not the sexy photo which is attached to that “news” story of the barely clad Playboy Playmate complete with Hefner’s dinosaur-aged great-grandfatherly hand on her maybe 25-year-old butt.
The “staff reporter”—a 25-year-old kid—goes on to inform us Canadians the “news” about the “neo-cons” and the “news” about how he’s woefully lost in that “neo-con” generation’s “innocuous grip” (I’d like to know where that “neo-con” “grip” is coming from because although I’d love to, I’ve yet to find it anywhere—particularly amongst all the porn and gay pride displays and abortions and the lewd and lascivious media which increasingly dominates our liberal or “progressive” media and culture generally, today, but I’m sure glad he finds it “innocuous”).
He writes:
So where does that leave people like me? I am 25, and part of a generation that is characterized by the rise of the neo-cons. For which hard-core pornography became an uncensored commodity online; for which the old lad magazines were replaced by sexually explicit raunchy rags, devoid of journalistic aspirations. A generation that has no Gore Vidal, no Norman Mailer or Gay Talese.
I am lost in this era’s innocuous grip.
And so I cling to the past, and quench my appetites with the classic writing, journalistic glory and the odd, tenderly unwrapped female body in the pages of a vintage Playboy.
Clearly not news, but rather another opinion disguised as “news”—this time to promote one person’s vision of “journalistic glory”, as found in Playboy magazine! Values such as these also happen to be near and dear to the hearts and minds—and other important organs—of the liberal-left.
But even from a technical standpoint, there’s no separation from the Toronto Star’s “news”, and commentary or opinion. The computer (HTML) coding of the internet page on which that article appears is: <title>TheStar.com | News | When Playboy ruled the world</title>, making it appears on Web browsers like yours as a news story —it says it right there in your browser: “NEWS”. This image is taken from my own computer screen:
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By contrast the coding for the commentary by Kathy English and her “Clearly, this column is my opinion” piece presents like this:
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Why it’s a technological miracle that we “unschooled” are so confused with these confounded labels and media articles! Ironically, though not intentionally ironic, on January 3, 2009, Kathy English wrote an editorial column:
Readers, now you be the editor
Journalism is a job of many judgments. It is the art of selection in which, every day, hundreds of decisions must be made by the writers, editors, photographers, designers and others who create this “daily miracle.”
That cliché, which suggests some divine intervention in the production of your daily newspaper, is one I’ve long been fond of. But, in fact, there is little godliness in the way a newspaper is produced each day. Creating a newspaper and its website (“history in a hurry”) is a wholly human endeavour…
Yes it is largely human. God is very much into freedom for humans—he’s a bit of a “neo-con” that way. He allows us all to make our own judgments and engage in the art of selection. It’s up to us to “make decisions” and use our “judgment” and decide how we behave, and there is obviously no God intervening and guiding the Toronto Star staff into new heights of objectivity and professionalism. No “divine intervention” prevents them and their editors and journalists and photographers and designers from being horrible at their jobs and presenting opinions—and their agenda—as “news”.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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