Spectator

Posts with category ‘Internet’


So Long. Farewell. Auf wiedersehen. Goodbye.

This is my last post for Spectator, as I am moving onward and upward, or backward and downward, depending on your point of view. I’ve gotten a real kick out of the past 16 months, first blogging about the Conrad Black trial, then more broadly on whatever it was I’ve spent the past five months mouthing off about.

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Magazine maven Bonnie Fuller poised to market her toughest brand yet: Herself

The gap between Canada Day and the star-spangled Fourth is a good time to reflect on the differences, similarities and absurdities that define the decidedly imbalanced relation between our “two great nations.” (My colleague Andrew Clark, The Guardian’s man in New York, full of ill-informed good cheer, saluted our national day thusly: “Happy St. Canada’s Day. Hope the turkey and cheesy fries go down well.”) And while I’m sure it was inadvertent, The New York Times did devote rather a lot of space—the lead feature in last Sunday’s business section—to one of our own: the inevitable Bonnie Fuller. The writer was David Carr, the Times’s go-to guy on the media biz, who contends that Fuller—whose peripatetic risings and fallings in the New York magazine world are the stuff of endless clucking—is to our celebutante-inebriated culture as Einstein was to quantum theory. (That’s a, er, rough analogy, but you get my drift.) To wit: “Through nearly two decades of vision and relentlessness, Ms. Fuller created a way of objectifying the A- and B-list that turned celebrities into not only our ‘friends,’ but also American royals, unelected gods who walk among us.”

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John Macfarlane grabs The Walrus’s tiller

Take this with however big a grain of salt as you like. John Macfarlane, the man who hired me to write this blog and who used to edit Toronto Life, is taking over as co-publisher and part-time editor of The Walrus magazine on an interim basis. As I’ve suggested here before, The Walrus is a decidedly good thing. Thousands of Canadian magazine readers were cut adrift when Saturday Night went under, and they washed up on Ken Alexander’s shores. That said, though, the fact remains that the editorial and managerial life of The Walrus has been somewhat, how to say, stormy under his regime. Macfarlane will bring a steady hand to the tiller while the magazine rides out its co-founder’s departure and the current economic unpleasantness. A smart move all the way around.

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Received wisdom not yet in place for the Internet

Lately, I spent some time talking to a guy whose job it is to advise another guy (one with more money) exactly what the future holds for the media. In that kind of job, it’s important to have forceful, reasoned views that point the way to concrete action. Why else would the latter pay the former to tell him what to do with his money? As required, the former went out and did scads of research into the future of the Internet—most importantly how to “monetize” content, which is the question pretty much everyone’s asking at the moment. At one point, he patted a stack of papers in front of him and announced that research shows people don’t want to watch TV on the Internet; they want to watch TV on their TVs. He said this in an effort to buttress his argument that people don’t “migrate” from one media to another (radio to TV, TV to the Internet, the Internet to another solar system, etc., etc.). Why then is The New York Times reporting that Google—one of the experts on how to monetize the Web—has just signed a deal with the creator of the cartoon Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane, to provide Web-only distribution for original material?

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Satirists of Canada: Your day has come!

The past few days have seen a considerable improvement in the climate for free speech in this country. First, the Canadian Human Rights Commission pitched out the egregious complaint filed by the Canadian Islamic Congress against Maclean’s (and Mark Steyn). And now, the Supreme Court of Canada, courtesy of the good offices of Justice Ian Binnie, reconfirmed the importance of and extended the purview of what counts as fair comment. A read-through of Binnie’s opinion—which spoke for the court’s 9–0 rout reversing a B.C. Court of Appeal decision that favoured anti-gay activist Kari Simpson over shock jock Rafe Mair—reveals a veritable free speech manifesto:

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In the debate over Google’s effect on humanity, everyone is missing one big issue

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For the second time this week, I’m taking my lead from The Atlantic (it’s the best magazine in the world right now, making even The New Yorker appear precious and overwrought). Unsurprisingly, the two articles that stirred me to blog were both (a) about the Web and (b) rife with fundamental, flummoxing misperception. I’ve already written about Mark Bowden’s piece on the Web-induced demise of The Wall Street Journal. Now for the big kahuna: Nicholas Carr’s take on Google. Titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” this cover story has been sticking in bloggers’ craws all week, inspiring them to pee on hydrants to mark their view on the current state of media, the Web and the human condition. Carr’s view is clear: the hypertext world of Google is slowly eroding our capacity for sustained contemplation, thereby flattening our collective intelligence. One thing is also clear: the piece has an enormous blind spot.

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As long as the CBC is losing things…

OK, so CBC lost Hockey Night in Canada’s theme music. Now, having set that happy precedent, perhaps the Ceeb brain trust might, for the sake of good taste and our collective sanity, consider losing this jacket (and maybe even the guy in it).

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Pot calls kettle black in ongoing feud between print and Web journalists

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The July-August issue of The Atlantic includes a piece by lead features scribbler Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down) on the recent goings-on at the Wall Street Journal. In it, Bowden writes a predictable lament regarding the demise of long-form, responsible journalism in newspapers. The cause? The Web, of course, and Web-enabling buccaneer capitalists like Rupert Murdoch. All of which is fine, after a fusty Luddite fashion. But when Bowden gets up on his hind legs and announces that the Web “has yet to develop institutions capable of replacing print newspapers as vehicles for great in-depth journalism, or conscious of themselves as upholding a public trust,” I tend to get a little pissy. My debunking, after the jump.

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Bernardo tape released to the media, but not without pointless proviso

One of the surreal aspects of our 24-hour real-time media universe came into precise focus this morning in Justice David McComb’s fourth-floor courtroom at 361 University Avenue. He ordered that copies of Paul Bernardo’s interview with police regarding the Robert Baltovich case be released to the press. The order was carried out over a couple of hours, rendering the logistics in this matter chaotic, if not absurd. While a gaggle of press vultures (including this stooped reporter) hung over his shoulder, Iain MacKinnon—the lawyer who argued on behalf of CBC, CTV, CanWest and Rogers—burned copies of the original onto DVDs in order to make good on the court’s order. He even used his own laptop.

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Conrad Black looking to teach, rewrite history

He haunts us still. Conrad Black—newly minted instructor of American history at Coleman Federal Correctional Institute—takes his case before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals this Thursday, with the help of his able appeals lawyer, Andrew Frey. Oral arguments are limited to a half-hour on both sides, with yellow and red lights aflashin’ to ensure a timely disposal of the arguments. Steve Skurka has a piece on the National Post’s Web site that neatly summarizes the case on both sides.

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CityTV celebrates Ted Rogers’ 75th birthday by flouting journalistic standards

Canada’s idea of a media mogul (i.e., bland and ruthless), billionaire Ted Rogers (number 173 on the Forbes list, with seven-odd billion dollars), turned 75 years old on Tuesday. Rogers still makes news, and his pursuit of an NFL franchise for Toronto is one of the big business and sports stories of the moment. So when CityTV’s Web site decides to cover its owner’s birthday, while it’s a stretch, it does not beggar all credulity. If you were expecting a bland, pleasantly inoffensive statement of fact, much in keeping with the man himself, then you’d be wrong. CityTV provided a jaw-dropping hagiographic blow job that makes Mark Steyn’s coverage of Conrad Black look like All the President’s Men.

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Toro rides again

Wednesday saw the launch—or, more precisely, the relaunch—of Toromagazine.com. Toro, you might remember, was a National Magazine Award–winning men’s magazine distributed through subscriber copies of The Globe and Mail between 2003 and 2007. Toro was beautifully designed and well written, covering a lot of journalistic ground in unexpected ways (Gare Joyce’s profile of Michael Ignatieff was, and probably is, the most original take on Macbeth along the Rideau to date). And it did all this without ceding any ground as a stylin’ men’s mag. It was a community of writers, editors, designers, illustrators and photographers (of which I’m proud to say—full disclosure—I was one). The contributors were likely names that, if you’re Canadian, you’ve heard before: Derek Finkle, Graham Roumieu, Charles Foran, Mark Kingwell, Mark Schatzker, Russell Smith, and the wonderfully monikered sex columnist Bebe O’Shea (actually playwright Claudia Dey).

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Drabinsky trial inspires various takes on the F-bomb

The word fuck had a red-letter outing in yesterday afternoon’s Web reports of the goings-on at the Drabinsky trial. All told, the king of all obscenity found its way into three stories eight times, with only the Globe daring to spell it out in full, while the Star and Post opted for the more genteel f**k.

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Yanks trump Canucks on bloggish hockey coverage

OK, this isn’t exactly earth-shattering news, but if you care at all about hockey in the frozen north, it’s a bit of a head scratcher. Throughout the International Ice Hockey Federation championship final on Sunday, it was the New York Times that offered the only live blog during the game.

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Montrealer Autumn Kelly marries into the royal family tomorrow, and the press’s reaction is as classy as ringette

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What is it about the Anglo-Canadian fascination with aristocracy that puts everyone in a flap at the first sign of pretense? When Conrad Lord Black of Crossharbour was sent down for thievery, Canadian and British papers hadn’t spilled that much ink on a single story since D-Day. And this morning arrives an e-mail from the reliably snarky Andrew Clark, The Guardian’s business correspondent in NYC. He begins in typically deadpan prose: “I am rejoicing at the new link between our two nations which will be forged at tomorrow’s royal wedding. No doubt you will be glued to the BBC World Service.”

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Toronto Star editors asleep at the switch

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Star on the march—the annals of editing: in an otherwise tedious exercise in dull normal reportage (Shania Twain is getting separated blah-dee-blah), an editor at the Toronto Star (or was it a writer looking for a buyout?) inadvertently added a line for the ages. The piece appeared this afternoon on their Web site and will surely be taken down by the time you read this. In the interest of amusement and giggles, though, we’ve saved it so that future generations might know the truth.

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Conrad Black’s spirits downgraded from ‘happy’ to ‘healthy’ despite attending prison seminars on American politics

A smattering of news on the Conrad Black front this morning. Last evening, Patrick Fitzgerald et al. responded to Andrew Frey’s pleading that the Hollinger four’s conviction be set aside in a 127-page brief. June 5 has been set as the date for oral arguments before the 7th Circuit with a final decision expected in the fall.

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Requiem for a newspaper: The Wall Street Journal falls into the Murdoch trap

Flipping the Rolodex of descriptors this morning, I pause at P for “plus ça change” and W for “waddya think was going to happen?” Rupert Murdoch has pulled the wool yet again. The Times and the Journal have been full of stories this week suggesting that the WSJ’s new owner is interfering with his newspaper’s editorial independence—first by foisting changes so that it might compete more directly with The New York Times (more politics, shorter stories), then by firing the ancien régime editor Marcus Brauchli, who wasn’t moving fast enough to make those changes. And this time, Rupe’s chinless, coupon-clipping victims (the Bancroft family) are so thoroughly bumfuzzled that it barely merits the usual blah blah blah about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then…oh, you know the drill.

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Thomson Reuters would like its employees to stop blogging, socializing

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In case you’d forgotten or ever cared, 40 per cent of The Globe and Mail is owned by the Thomson family through their holding company Woodbridge. Woodbridge also owns, as the result of last year’s multibillion-dollar merger of Thomson Corporation and Reuters, 53 per cent of the new (and aptly named) entity Thomson Reuters. Lately, this new enterprise has started rolling out its new brand, including a near bottomless, fancy-pants Web site and a full-page ad on A6 of Monday’s Globe. Here’s an excerpt from the Web site:

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Gaffe of the Week: Tory hacks caught on tape!

This morning’s on-line version of The Hill Times offers a thorough and thoughtful summary of what, for lack of a better handle, I’ll call the Sparrow’s Folly. I am referring, of course, to the ill-fated effort of the PMO’s media machine to spin the RCMP’s investigation into alleged election finance malfeasance. In events that sound remarkably like the embarrassing jokes told by your Uncle Lester after several too many at Christmas, three Torys—a flack (party spokesman Ryan Sparrow), a hack (Tory campaign director Doug Finley) and a lawyer (Paul Lepsoe)—held a secret briefing in an Ottawa hotel for selected journalists (this after changing the location to put other ink-stained hounds off the scent). They were found out, confronted by the excluded journos and forced to flee down a fire escape. I’m not making that up. Promise.

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Rays of sanity in an otherwise crazy campaign

A few days ago, in response to my post on the Clinton-Obama debate in Philadelphia, the following note from Princeton politics professor Peter Meyers was forwarded to me. It read in part:

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Is Martin Newland’s freshly launched paper The Guardian or Pravda? They report, you decide

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Martin Newland, Ken Whyte’s former deputy honcho at the National Post and head honcho at The Daily Telegraph during the reign of Lord Black of Coleman FCI, is starting up the latest thing: a big-time daily newspaper financed by United Arab Emirates petro-dollars. The Times of London reports that:

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Dispatches from the surreal calamity of last night’s Democratic leadership debate

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Last night, in a massive Philadelphia museum devoted to the American Constitution, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hammered away at each other—gladiators in the great Democratic political contest. The debate itself, part of the run-up to the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, took place in a smallish TV theatre and was moderated by ABC correspondents Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Outside that small room, though, in a massive cathedral of spin, looking out 30-foot-high windows at Independence Hall, a thousand journos banged away at laptops, murmured into microphones and adjusted their ties and blouses before the camera. This horde represented an array of newspapers, Web sites, blogs, and radio and TV stations bearing a Dadaesque constellation of acronyms from throughout the world—ABC, NBC, CBS, WLS, WLAY, WABC, WDKA, WSYR, BBC, CNN, C-SPAN—most of which were repeated out along 6th Street, where satellite trucks stretched into the distance like a futuristic trailer park and news helicopters floated above. It was American madness pure and thick, and I wandered through it, as Leonard Cohen would say, like a lost Canadian.

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Litigiously yours, CanWest

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Recently, I reported on efforts by The Wall Street Journal to buy up copies of a parody version of their publication titled My Wall Street Journal. Despite the slightly sinister implications, the whole absurd fiasco was essentially found comedy. Not so hilarious is the lawsuit against a parody version of The Vancouver Sun brought by the Aspers, owners of media behemoth CanWest. The parody satirizes the Sun’s avowedly pro-Israel editorial bent. In addition to the folks who actually produced the thing, the Aspers are going after a Palestinian activist named Mordecai Briemberg. Here’s his description of his liability in the matter:

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Wall Street Journal’s parody paranoia proves that truth is stranger (and funnier) than fiction

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Here’s a reason to get up this morning. A who’s who of New York satire—including Richard Belzer, Andy Borowitz, Tony Hendra, Joe Queenan and writers from The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live and The Onion—has, of late, created My Wall Street Journal, a parody of its sober namesake. The front-page headline? “Bush Abolishes Death, Taxes; Move Will Benefit McCain.”

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Can Rupert Murdoch steal the thunder of Microhoo?

Whatever you might imagine Conrad Black is up to today—washing floors, dishes or laundry, mowing a lawn or teaching a fellow inmate to speak French—spare a moment to empathize with the resentment and envy his Lordship must feel at the prospects of his tormentor and vanquisher Mighty Murdoch. I’ve argued before in this space that it was Rupert who knocked over the first domino leading to the great man’s demise. This morning in The Globe and Mail, Black biographer Richard Siklos (whose sage counsel led my thinking in this regard) writes about the many complex scenarios revolving around the current Internet-based plays that will shape the broader media landscape for the foreseeable future.

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Edward Greenspon locates the cornerstone of democratic society—it was under his desk

From the sensational annals of staggering self-importance, we find Globe editor-in-chief Edward “Don’t Call Me Eddie and for God’s Sake Don’t Call Me Ted” Greenspon in an on-line town hall talking about the vital differences between blogging and journalism:

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American election predictions from Conrad Black

The Globe reported on its Web site yesterday that Lord Black of Crossharbour has sent a Dear Paul letter to Paul Waldie (the Globe’s lead Conrad reporter), assuring him that, despite his current condition, he continues to assert his stalwart, undying commitment to being, well, himself.

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Conrad Black ignored by the OSC, embraced by the New York Sun

Sure it’s well worn, but to my mind it forever bears repetition: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Karl Marx certainly knew a thing or two about capitalism’s foibles didn’t he? Just ask Conrad Black. There he sits in a tropical hoosegow, and still the poor guy has to fend off the Ontario Securities Commission, which, having deferred to just about every American regulatory body save the Nevada State Gaming Commission, has postponed—yet again—a hearing into the malfeasances of Hollinger Inc et al.

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Jim Himes provides much-need realism, free beer

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It’s 8:30 p.m. in Stamford, Connecticut, and the reclamation of America is progressing one stultifying trivia question at a time. Forty-something Jim Himes—slim, energetic, whip smart, democratic and electable—is running for Congress in the Connecticut 4th District. He needs support and money, and what better way to find those than by sponsoring (with free beer and pizza) a pub trivia night upstairs at Bradford’s, an ersatz pub on a twee shopping drag. If you happen to know who went on from the Governor’s mansion in Hartford to become U.S. ambassador to India then, buddy, your night is made. Mine, not so much.

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Clinton, Obama, McCain star in Sheila Heti’s presidential dream team

I’m in New Jersey at the moment, preparing to gorge myself on a revealing slice of the American political pie. Before I get started, though, I thought I’d try a Canadian appetizer—a phenomenon affecting in a minor key the political scene down here. I speak of Sheila Heti, the whimsical Toronto novelist and all-around cultural entrepreneur whose blogs I Dream of Barack, I Dream of Hillary and I Dream of McCain have generated a mountain of press down here. Heti transcribes, more or less verbatim, the nocturnal imaginings of her readers and turns them into blog posts describing dreams of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain. These dreams are not of the political variety—or at least not as “politics” is conventionally understood. To wit:

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E-mail now among Conrad Black’s luxuries

Conrad Black’s recent missive to the Canadian Press, much bruited upon by this blog over the Easter weekend, reveals the weirdly Janus-faced attitude that the United States adopts toward the free speech of the two million of its own citizens (reportedly the highest rate of incarceration per capita of any nation on earth) it now imprisons.

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Photo shoot for Toronto Star–owned magazine results in lion attack, bloody lung

It’s Easter for many of us, and let’s face it: we’re looking for a laugh. In that spirit, I offer the latest in unconscious self-parody from those laughmeisters at the Toronto Star (motto: All the news that’s unintentionally hilarious). Yesterday, in seeking to promote its latest throwaway publication, Desi Life (“the Star’s award-winning bimonthly magazine about the GTA’s South Asian community”), the Star ran a news item accompanied by an ad for the new issue that tells the heartwarming tale of the mag’s latest cover shoot. Apparently—or perhaps, evidently—the photo session was interrupted when a 180-kilogram (397 pounds) lion mauled the subject (one Gitanjali Kolanad, martial arts instructor), breaking four of her ribs, bruising her lung and putting her out of work for a month.

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David Frum compliments lefty bloggers—watch for flying pigs

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The January-February issue of National Interest, a mainstay of America’s neo-con commentariat, has two aspects of note. First, it is the last issue listing Conrad Black as a member of its advisory council. The reason for his departure, other than the obvious, may include the fact that his decidedly former pal Henry Kissinger is the publication’s honorary chairman. The second aspect, much as it galls me to say, is an intriguing piece on the influence of the blogosphere on American foreign policy debates written by former White House speech scribbler and big-time Conrad Black apologist David Frum.

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Spitzer coverage hints at war between The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal

If you didn’t spend at least part of day two de l’affaire Spitzer with your nose buried in the pages or, to bend the analogy, the Web sites of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I have to ask: does your blood run red? This story has it all: intrigue, hubris, venality, corruption, a wife spurned and, yes, hookers. Yet if you read carefully, another story starts to emerge: the Spitzer coverage represents the early days of an all-out newspaper war—the Journal vs. the Times—for the hearts and minds of Americans generally, and New Yorkers specifically.

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British invasion: Can The Guardian and the BBC win over American readers?

One of the hoarier shibboleths dug up by the fuss over the NAFTA leaks is the inevitable palaver over the asymmetrical relationship between “them” (Americans) and “us” (Canadians). We all know that song—they don’t pay enough attention to us, they take us for granted, and when they do pay attention, it’s only to patronize us and/or dismiss us (Gawker defines Canada as “the large mass of semi-arable land blocking Montana’s view of the Arctic”). We all know it’s much worse than that: they simply don’t think about us except to do and say all of the above.

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The ongoing irony of Conrad Black

For those among you who are fans of lead-weight irony (and who among us isn’t?), I give you John Willman today on the Financial Times’ Web site, FT.com:

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Obama, Clinton and Saturday Night Live in the hall of mirrors

Coverage of the American election is turning into a hall of mirrors. It’s created an infinite reflection of the media covering the media covering the media, ad infinitum. Take yesterday’s piece in The New York Times by Katherine Q. Seelye titled “News Coverage Changes, and So Does Tone of the Campaign.” Seelye reports that since a skit on Saturday Night Live taking the piss out of the press’ fawning coverage of Obama aired two weeks ago, scrutiny of Mr. Obama has increased:

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Best of the Black coverage (or, Conrad quaffs America cocktails)

As the Black coverage continues raining down cats and dogs, I can’t help but think that this is the storm before the calm. There’s something all too ephemeral about the endless recitation of grim prison factoids: the mandatory shirt tuck, the khaki trousers, the steel-toed boots, lights out at 11, maximum 15 minutes on the phone, only five books, three magazines and one newspaper at a time, pedophiles for roommates, starchy food, 12 cents an hour…this too shall pass. And then there will be a silence into which everything else will flood—Britney, Obama, Cadman, Schreiber and on and on and on. Amid all the noise, I have found several highlights of today’s coverage (listed below). One item in particular intrigued me. It’s an entry by Michael White on his politics blog at The Guardian. In it he demonstrates the British gift for taking away with the right hand, then taking away more with the left:

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Mark Steyn defends Black’s breast-cupping gesture

Writing on his Maclean’s blog today, Mark Steyn—playing Cohn to Black’s Joseph McCarthy—enlightened the passing multitudes on the injustice of it all. In doing so he offered the following: “As for the various papers around the world, they’re not in such great shape under their new owners. ‘You have to have a feel for it,’ Conrad said to me a couple of months back, making that little motion he does with his right hand that makes it look either as if he’s re-tuning an ancient radio or cupping the breast of a passing waitress.”

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Just how accurate is Michael Clayton?

If the recent success of Michael Clayton is any indication, the public perception of lawyers breaks down into four archetypes, each represented by a character in the movie: brutal (Sydney Pollack), disappointed (George Clooney), psychotic (Tom Wilkinson) and criminal (Tilda Swinton). It’s probably no coincidence that Clayton’s only Oscar went to Swinton. A piece on the film and its effects on legal culture in last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Law Blog reprised a review from Slate:

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Welcome to Spectator

A little over half an hour into Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane takes control of the moribund New York Inquirer and fires the editor. On completing his fourth draft of the front page of his maiden edition, Kane turns to his soulmate and dramatic critic Jedediah Leland and reads to him a prospective declaration of principles for the paper: “I’ll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly. I will also provide them…with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings.”

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