This is a pretty cool piece of flash… http://beck.cnnbcvideo.com/

It’s a good study with significant social relevance. And Maclean’s Magazine wrote an article about it. ²

But the comments on this Maclean’s article tell the story of racism in Canada, as much as the research itself. This comment by “Julie LaFlamme” might constitute hate speech. Apparently she thinks all people with racialized minority names are immigrants. Wow. And apparently she thinks it’s acceptable to discriminate on the basis of race. Wow. And apparently Maclean’s thinks this kind of comment is acceptable. Heck.

Comment by “Julie LaFlamme” to MacLean’s article on 22 May 2009:

So this is a surprise? Funny I thought that if a company was paying its employees a fair wage, submitting their taxes on time, and generally behaving in an acceptable way, it could consider the type of employee it would choose to hire also based on the ability to fit in with the culture of th business ( how many .A.S.P.s do you see working at retail establishments in Chinatown?)
If people don’t want to hire immigrants, why should they be obligated to interview them? This is taking political correctness just a little too far. Why should an immigrant get a job over a natural citizen, whose parents & grandparents have built the country up.
I am so tired of catering to immigrnats – who seem to think nothing of trying to bring their conflicts & screw-ups from their old homes here with them.
Hopefully those who work in immigration will grow a set & start doing their jobs screening undesirables who end up being citizens of convenience, not contibutors to our society.

Well the answer to that question is too long ¹ for this post. So instead what I’ve tried to do here is outline a few of the challenges facing the modern journalist by summarizing six challenges of publishing in this modern context.

Six challenges

First of all, newspapers are a businesses. They have clients. And their clients are businesses that want to advertise. But they lose these clients when the newspaper promotes views and says things that don’t align with the bottom line interests of said clients. So an oil company based out of Calgary, for example, has a fiduciary duty to be opposed to policies that limit their profitability. That in turn means that they can’t spend money on advertising with broadcasters or publishers that promote policies that hurt their profitability. And that means that journalists have to write in ways that don’t make their editors choke on their ties.² I call this the challenge of compliance.

Second, this is happening in an internationalized context where newspapers are losing market share and profitability because of “the google”, or the “interweb”. So the pressure on journalists to say something of more interest and value than say, a blogger, is immense. I call this the challenge of attention.

Third, issues are complicated. Climate science is complicated. Social policy is complicated. Police brutality is complicated. Did so-and-so “die”? Or were they “killed”? This is sometimes a very tricky business. And given the possibility that someone with money or an agenda might sue you for libel, it’s easier to just write about the sports. In a complicated world it can be very hard to find out the truth or reasonable approximations of it. I call this difficulty, the challenge of integrity.

If finding the truth and understanding complex situations is difficult, try doing it on a timeline. And that’s the kicker: publishing for a newspaper means saying something on time. The traditional newspaper has a press that runs on a rigid schedule for economic reasons and reasons of scale. And because newspapers, and the old people that read them, hate trees and don’t understand the interweb-thingy, they still produce content on this rigid schedule. This is the challenge of production.

Fifthly, the pressure for journalists to understand a situation, produce some engaging copy, say something non-threatening for their advertisers, not get sued by a person in the story, get it to print on time all the while bearing the weight of the future of the newspaper, is intense. The financial future of all the staff is on their shoulders and the weight must be spine-crushing. After all, if Canwest fails to avert their bankruptcy and the whole empire tanks, the Aspers won’t lose their retirement savings or their house. Contra a common capitalist myth, it’s actually the employees that bear most of the real risk of the Canwest empire crumbling. Employees that have moved their families and invested in mortgages or are carrying the debt of their journalism degrees can’t afford for Canwest to go broke. So all of the myriad staff that it takes to design and print a newspaper, distribute it and find advertisers all rely on the content produced by the reporters. That’s a lot of pressure. The reporters are accountable to their fellow employees in a major way. I call this the challenge of positive-thinking-will-hopefully-keep-this-boat-floating-until-we-all-pay-our-mortgages.

And finally and perhaps most significantly, journalists need to worry about their own jobs. I actually don’t know this for certain. But this is the word on the street. Journalists, apparently, are losing there jobs. And, apparently, it’s not just Canwest that has been losing employees. So it turns out that reporters need to keep their editors very very happy. So, in deference to the first challenge, I also call this the challenge of compliance.

In Summary

1. The challenge of compliance (for editors)
2. The challenge of attention
3. The challenge of integrity
4. The challenge of production
5. The challenge of positive-thinking-will-hopefully-keep-this-boat-floating-until-we-all-pay-our-mortgages.
6. The challenge of compliance (for reporters)

This guy knows things about the future of journalism. Actually, he also has some good tips on just writing a blog. ³

If you’ve waited a little while and it’s still not working, try this.

Of course, that wasn’t enough to convince me of his points of view and eventually he said, “Meteorologists can’t predict the weather next week, how can scientists claim to predict global warming?” Now when he said this, some kind of alarm bell starting to ring deep down in my brain stem. Maybe he was just a little too slick. Or maybe, since I was so often speaking from a script, I was in a heightened state of script awareness. So at that point, I fell out of my own script and stuck out my hand and introduced myself. And he introduced himself. His name was Tim Ball.

We had an animated conversation about peer reviewed publishing, the dimensions of relative objectivity in science, global cooling, and socialism. Actually he accused me of being a socialist. And that was when my moment of glory came to pass in the form of a question I would ask in return. See, when he accused me of being a socialist I was provoked first to a moment of confusion – it just struck me as a non sequitur. But after the confusion, came clarity. And I asked him, “Do you work for the Fraser Institute?”

I still remember that moment and I remember exactly where we were standing – corner of Government and Yates in front of Eddi Bauer.

His eyes widened a little and he stepped back. Pointedly, he said no. I told him that equating concern for global warming with socialism sounded like something the Fraser Institute or the Heritage Foundation might do. He mumbled something and walked away. I quickly made some notes about the exchange, including writing down his name and went on with my day.

But that night I did a name search online for ‘Tim Ball’. Then I did a name search for ‘Tim Ball’ on the Fraser Institute website. And maybe he wasn’t an employee but I did find his name on lot’s of their communications. I was so excited! I met an important person who was clearly a hired gun for climate change denial and made his cover on one try! It was easy.

But unfortunately, many reporters and journalists have found him convincing over the years. Unfortunately, many so-called journalists continue to find him interesting. As of today, he’s still listed on the Fraser Institute website:

This is how his bio reads on the Fraser Institute website:

Dr. Tim Ball, one of the first Canadians to hold a Ph.D. in climatology, wrote his doctoral thesis at the University of London (England) using the remarkable records of the Hudson’s Bay Company to reconstruct climate change from 1714 – 1952. He has published numerous articles on climate change and its impact on the human condition. Dr. Ball has served on numerous committees at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels on climate, water resources, and environmental issues. He was a professor in the geography department at the University of Winnipeg before retiring. He has written a regular column on weather in the agricultural magazine. Country Guide, for 14 years. He is currently working as an environmental consultant and public speaker based in Victoria and has written, with Dr. Stuart Houston, 18th Century Naturalists on Hudson Bay, a book on the science and climate of the fur trade (McGill-Queens University Press, 2003).

But this is how he’s described in James Hoggan’s recent book, Climate Cover Up, The Crusade to Deny Global Warming:

There are few “skeptical scientists” with as little actual expertise and as much ambition as the Canadian geography professor Dr. Timothy Ball. Never a climate scientist per se, Dr. Ball quit his position as an associate professor at the University of Winnipeg in 1995, apparently ending an academic career that featured a lifetime output of just four peer-reviewed journal articles, none of which addressed atmospheric science. Yet ten years later, Ball-the-climate-expert seemed to be everywhere – on the radio, in the newspapers, on the lecture circuit, even testifying before a committee in the Canadian parliament.

Turns out that Tim Ball is paid by the Friends of Science that is funded through the University of Calgary Science Education Fund, set up by Barry Cooper who is friends with Stephen Harper, which is funded by the Oil patch. He’s also connected to the National Resources Stewardship Program, Tom Harris with APCO Public Relations, High Park Advocacy Group, Canadian Gas Association and the Canadian Electricity Association. He’s effectively a paid mouthpiece with fewer credentials than he and the Fraser Institute claims he has. But I met him and he’s quasi famous and so I guess I met an almost famous guy! And I made him. That was my moment of glory.

Then I scored the articles, on a scale of -10 to +10, on the following criteria:

How many soundbites are from libertarian, big-business think tanks? How many soundbites are from published scientists who work in the field of climatology? How many soundbites challenged the scientific consensus that climate change is caused by humans? How many soundbites encouraged or supported the notion that Canada ought to meet it’s carbon emission reduction goals? How many soundbites create confusion about the fact of climate change? What is the educational and informational value of this article? Is it evidence based?

Conclusions

All scores range from -10 to +10, where a positive score is a good article and a negative score is a bad article. This score is than multiplied by the word count to factor in the relative volume of the article. The scores are then added. If the sum total is a positive score than the Calgary Herald has been publishing good and informative articles. If the sum is negative, than the Herald has been publishing bad articles.⁴

Only three article scored in the positive end of the spectrum. Interestingly, the articles that were better in terms of their content were generally the shortest articles. There is one exception to this: the first article (and the shortest at only 117 words) scored a minus five. The average article length was 578 words. After factoring for the article length, the final average value of the articles from the Calgary Herald on the topic of climate change, on a scale of -10 to +10, is -4. Which sucks.⁵

The total negative points by the seven bad articles came to: -27369
The total positive points by the three good articles came to: 5404
The grand total is: -21965
The average value of each article is: -2197
The average article length: 578 words
The average value of each article: -4

In the article, Hutchinson asks the question, “is gps making us dumb?” People model their spatial surroundings with varying skills and capacities. Crucially, contra traditionalists who will argue that there is a racial or gender component to these skills, it looks like these mental mapping skills are trainable. So if you exercise your brain, it gets stronger. And if you rely on your gps a lot, well, you might just get dumb. Okay, it’s nowhere near that clear. But read the article anyway! It gets me excited to think about the way we think. Metacognition! Yeah.

On one critical note, I think Hutchinson is wrong to say that Edward C. Tolman was the first academic to argue that we carry maps around in our head. Kenneth Craik published The Nature of Explanation in 1943 and while he might not have actually used the word “map” (although that’s worth checking) I do know that he posited an array of mental structures to make sense of the way that “thought models, or parrallels, reality.”¹ Sounds like the spirit of cognitive maps to me – especially given that he was writing in an era marked dramatically by behaviourism. That said, I failed to include Tolman’s 1948 paper in my citations. Even though it’s about experimenting with rats, I should have cited it and it would have made for another fun way to show how people that are less obsessed with language actually find super-productive ways to further our understanding of the human mind.

Take climate change for example. The fact of climate change, by itself, is not perceived as a threat by Big Oil and their bottom line. But public opinion and the subsequent possibility of government taxation and regulation is a perceived threat by Big Oil and their profit margin. So organizations like the Conference Board of Canada, C.D. Howe and the Fraser Institute step forward to disrupt public opinion.

The first step is to get air time. To do this they call up their media buddies with the National Post or Cross-Country Checkup. Either by getting quoted directly or by influencing the analysis of the overworked, job-threatened and under-educated reporter, the underlying message and the framework for that message gets public exposure.

The second key ingredient is to pretend to be trustable. This happens through the use of expert titles and heavy reference to the number of researchers and academics employed by the think-tank. Crucially, they’re usually economists or communications people, but they never say this. The representative will generally pretend, and Rex Murphy will pretend along with him, that they are all experts in climate change science. Add to this the years of branding by the National Post and Cross-Country Checkup that they’re impartial and authoritative news sources serving our democracy and you get a potent recipe for believability. And this brings me back to why I think Rex Murphy is a jackass. He creates a call in show, branded for everyday Canadians, but brings in well paid representatives from right-wing think tanks to represent the wealthiest and biggest businesses in the country. He poses as a show for the people. But it’s not.

With this access to a trusting public ear the key message has propogated: climate change and it’s causes are uncertain. The underlying message has been confusion. The result is a public opinion that we shouldn’t jeopardize our mortgages and our jobs and our habits of consumption. This brings me to the December edition of FOCUS and a great article by Gene Miller. Rex Murphy has perhaps too eagerly defended Big Oil and too eagerly added his voice of dissent to the environmental movement. Rex calls the movement Big Green. Miller says:

“Big Green?” Those the ones associated with Big Feminism, Big Peace, Big Anti-Land Mines, Big Racial Equality and Big Anti-Child Slavery?

…you sound like the South before Lincoln, or the British before Gandhi. You sound like the flatearthers in Calgary. You sound like some gaseous table-pounder bellowing about how good-paying jobs in the oil-patch now are worth more than some speculative issues that maybe our great grandkids will have to deal with—woo-woo stuff like the bankrupting relocation of coastal infrastructure around the globe, global loss of freshwater, global loss of arable land, global desertification, the migration north of a couple of billion people, and the end of national boundaries and the nation-state. Deal or no deal, Rex?

Actually, we won’t be getting our energy from Alberta within 25 years anyway (my guess); and red deer will wander through the silent, empty office canyons of downtown Calgary. (Take oil out of the Calgary economic equation and the city folds like a suit from Kresge’s.) The world by then will be operating on a mixed-source energy regime that conspicuously excludes oil.

Miller is great. Partly what makes his article such a great example of a solid communications strategy is that he first focuses on the environmental and moral considerations of ignoring global warming. He then reconsiders his argument from an economic perspective for the sake of those that only understand these issues through the lens of economy. Stephen Harper and Rex Murphy seem to think that the economy has greater reality than our environment or climate. Miller, acknowledging their psychological impediments, attempts to parse his message in a way that they will understand.

Someone says, “that’s so gay.” But they mean, “that’s not good”, or “that sucks”, or “that’s bad”, or “that’s ugly”. Using the term this way is super hateful. ThinkB4YouSpeak is a really cool social marketing campaign that, among other things, appears to disagree with the SouthPark approach of using “fag” and “faggot” in reference to annoying and inconsiderate people, i.e. not in reference to gays. The have some cool posters to this affect and they have a cool twitter counter on their home page that keeps track of how many people, per day, tweet “that’s so gay”. Hmmm, I tried to embed it but it’s a little finnicky so if you want to see it, go check it out.

Oh yeah, they have some fun ads too. :)

http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/#clip230779

This is an interesting kind of repositioning. Now I know that some people don’t like it when I stretch the meaning of “branding” or “positioning” to include, well, everything. But it’s fun and sometimes instructive. And words have constellations of meanings not unlike the kind of things we more conventionally consider to have a brand. So let’s imagine for a minute that the word “fag” has a brand.

In this episode of South Park, they point out that the meaning, or brand, of “faggot” has changed considerably over the last couple of centuries – it was sometimes used in reference to old women, sometimes in reference to feeble people. I actually don’t really know if this is true. But it’s plausible. The more contemporary, and slanderous, associations with gay folk is not a necessary part of the brand. There’s usually very little about a brand that is necessary. This is the physical sciences – it’s the social sciences and meaning is just, well, made up.

But shifting the current brand of an idea like “fag” is really a gargantuan task. The campaign we see in this episode of South Park is effective because gay folk, and well, everyone else, start to use the term to refer to inconsiderate and annoying people, and not gay people. As the term gets redeployed, we witness the repositioning of the concept “fag” against, not with, gay.

Of course, it’s just a cartoon. I’m not saying it’s okay to deploy the term. As I’ve said elsewhere, sometimes you can be responsible for more meaning than you make, so we gotta be careful. But it’s interesting nonetheless. Thank you South Park.

I checked today and we’re currently posted right beside David Suzuki’s own call to Harper! Can you tell I’m a fan of David Suzuki?

In case you’re interested, here is where you can find the report that the Suzuki Foundation co-authored with the Pembina Institute. Let me summarize for you: 1. the current Canadian plan to deal with climate change is not working, 2. there is a way to do something that does work. The report also lays out a detailed and thorough plan but I won’t summarize that. The idea is that if we change our climate by more than 2°C (or Kelvin) from the pre-industrial levels we’ll face a harsh reality. To prevent that, industrialized countries need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to 25% lower than the 1990 levels. Here’s the kicker: we need to do it by 2020. But what is amazing about the Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina institute is that they actually show how we can do that, while maintaining a vibrant economy. It requires strong political leadership to do it. So let’s make that happen, shall we?

P.S. if anyone needs help taking video of their phone call to the PM or posting their video to Youtube, you’re welcome to contact me, and, time and space depending, I will endeavor to help you.

Brandalism: Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It belongs to you. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

This, from a graffiti artist. Interesting. I won’t analyze his work here, but I will present some of it. I like it.

He has some advice on painting with stencils and here’s some of it:

The easiest way to become invisible is to wear a day-glo vest and carry a tiny transistor radio playing Heart FM very loudly. If questioned about the legitimacy of your painting simply complain about the hourly rate.

When explaining yourself to the Police its worth being as reasonable as possible. Graffiti writers are not real villains. Real villains consider the idea of breaking in someplace, not stealing anything and then leaving behind a painting of your name in four foot high letters the most retarded thing they ever heard of

Mindless vandalism can take a bit of thought.

In case you’re wondering, his book does have a copyright notice, but it’s prefaced by this:

Copyright is for losers©™

It’s of interest to me because the flame is a symbol. That’s it.

I mean, really, if someone took it, you could just light another one and keep running. Do people think there is something magic about combustion? The fuel runs out – you have to keep filling it up. It’s not like we live in an age where it’s hard to light. But the effort that gets put into protecting the flame, is really part of a larger brand management strategy designed to protect and create the symbolic meanings surrounding the Olympics. It’s not that different from the superstitions and the symbolic meanings surrounding Christianity. Except of course that this Greek flame hearkens back to a polytheist era of Gods and Goddesses.

My initial concern about seeing her at the Royal Theatre was that it might be too much, well, sitting. But I wasn’t feeling super high energy last night and it turned out to be just the right amount of sitting for me. Going in we were asked not to take any photos but this cell phone photo is surly fair use by virtue of it’s ultra low resolution. Anyway, if you want to see some really awesome photos from last night, check out Keri Coles’ blog.

Anais Mitchell opened. We bought her cd. Found this rather endearing home video of her asking Leonard Cohen out for dinner. Wrote him a song and everything.