Media, media analysis
Journalism was always the career I wanted, almost from the time I learned to read and write, and I was fortunate to get into it while still in my teens. I became a reporter, columnist, and editor, worked for several newapapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Toronto Star. I covered sports, politics, organized labour. I enjoyed my work, most of the time, because the managing editors and publishers gave me a lot of freedom and rarely rejected or censored my reports.
Winston Churchill once described democracy as “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” That was in a House of Commons speech back in 1947. He was aware of how people could be persuaded to vote for incompetent or even unprincipled politicians. He had seen Hitler democratically elected in Germany, and public brainwashing later refined to a sinister science by Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels.
OTTAWA--"After the dot.com bubble burst, who trusts Bill Gates to point out the road ahead?" asks Vincent Mosco, holder of the Canadian Research Chair in Communication and Society at Queen's University and contributor to Seeking Convergence in Policy and Practice: Communications in the Public Interest, Vol.2. In this new publication examining communication policy over the last 10 years, many other well-known scholars and researchers are also asking "Who trusts the Canadian government?"
Wih the rise of “networked” society, we have seen the emergence of democratic social movements with a distinctly global orientation. Such movements are increasingly informed by, and dependent upon, information technologies and computer-mediated communication for their organizational activities, their ability to disseminate information, mobilize action, and further develop net-based “cyberactivism.”
It’s a post 9-11 communications world. E-mail is polluted with obnoxious spam and data-eating viruses. Governments are nervously trying to bring order to the chaos through regulation — the very instrument that was labelled during the ‘90’s as offensive to progress. The “information wants to be free” rally cry of early Internet libertarians has been replaced by the “information needs to be monitored” cry of the new surveillance society.
From privacy issues to intellectual property, from universal access to union activism, the essays contained in this book challenge the rush to deregulate and disconnect communications from the public interest. This collection offers a reality check on the state of communications policy and how we can work to make it more responsive to public rather than commercial interests.
The media-literate student should "be able to make conscious critical assessments of the media, to maintain a critical distance on popular culture, and to resist manipulation."
Canadians who care about democratic diversity in their daily newspapers should support the striking journalists at the Calgary Herald. Their struggle for reasonable job security and against managerial interference in news decision-making has much more than local significance.
It's hard to miss the explosion of media stories regarding miraculous new pharmaceuticals. But given that medicine can both help and harm, how reliable is the information that Canadians -- including patients and health care professionals -- receive from our country's mainstream newspapers?
Nobody in Canada had ever researched this question before, so no one really knew how well the media -- one of the most trusted and valued sources of information about health care -- was doing its job.