Paywalls: A real 'fiscal cliff' for a plunging news industry

As was so famously observed, or not, by Phineas Taylor Barnum, the 19th Century American self-promoter, showman, scam artist and newspaper publisher better known as "P.T.," "There's a mark born every minute."

We refer not to the minuscule group of newspaper readers who have actually paid online subscription fees to the likes of the Globe and Mail, but to the credulous newspaper publishers who have been persuaded by technological hucksters and scamsters to invest millions in "paywall" schemes in hopes of resuscitating the lost era when readers actually paid for news.

National media's political coverage declining, resembling sports reporting

The fast-paced environment in which journalists are working today has negative implications on political coverage and in many ways “resembles sports reporting” which is alienating the public, say experts.

“When a reporter doesn’t have the time, knowledge or background to deal with the complexity of an issue, there are still two ways he or she can tell the story—by focusing on conflict or personality,” Carleton University journalism professor Chris Waddell wrote in a new book, How Canadians Communicate IV: Media and Politics. “Assisted by new technology, these two approaches have become the staple of political reporting and that has helped to alienate the public from politics and public policy.”

Defiant Levant stands by Spanish slur

A sharp rebuke from the country’s broadcast ethics regulator hasn’t chastened Sun News Networks’ Ezra Levant, who said there’s no reason for him or his network to apologize for an on-air Spanish slur that roughly translates into “go have sex with your mother.”

Mr. Levant railed against Chiquita Brands International in December, after it said it would stop using fuel from Alberta's oil sands. Mr. Levant challenged the company's ethical record, but the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council was more concerned with a portion of the show when he stared into the camera and told a company executive "Hey you, yeah you, Manuel Rodriguez. Chinga tu madre."

Harper's omnibus bill is a product of the democratic process

In the end, both sides got the job done.

Now that the Speaker has limited the opposition attempt at a filibuster, the Tories’ omnibus bill should clear Parliament this week or next. The Harper government’s agenda remains intact.

But the NDP, Liberals and Greens succeeded in raising the alarm. Anyone following Canadian politics must surely know the plethora of changes to a host of acts contained in the bill.

Illogical leaps of logic on the oil sands and economic growth

Federal NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair is clearly a man who chooses to enrage rather than engage. In advance of his visit to Alberta’s oil sands last week, he declared that “their model for development is Nigeria.” That he had never been to either Nigeria or to the oils ands was clearly no impediment to that astonishing pronouncement.

Nevertheless, his Alberta hosts did their best to show him the great strides industry has made in reducing the environmental impact of oil-extraction operations, as well as the restored mine sites where wood bison and other wildlife now roam.

Mr. Mulcair would have learned that the entire disturbed area of the oil sands is 100 square kilometres smaller than the footprint of the City of Toronto and comprises just one-10th of 1 per cent of the Alberta northern boreal forest. He would also have learned that the oil sands produce only 5 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Mulcair is right that Alberta must respect the environment

Alberta is not Nigeria, and New Democratic Party Leader Thomas Mulcair said one thing on that subject in Ottawa and another this week on a visit to Alberta. It may have been good politics, but it’s not the mark of a leader with aspirations to be prime minister.

Mr. Mulcair’s explanation for why Canada’s manufacturing sector is in trouble is simplistic (Canada has “Dutch disease”), features a bogeyman (perhaps more than one) and a victim or two. But Mr. Mulcair is a canny politician. He vowed to steer away from socialist bromides and he has. He said Thursday after a tour of the Alberta oil sands that he is impressed by their massive scope. He favours development of the resource – in a sustainable way. His attack on the oil sands in the House of Commons this spring (“their model for development is Nigeria”) and on government for failing to protect the environment, and on all of them together for sending the Canadian dollar to new heights, thus undermining the country’s exporters, gives voters an enemy to detest without offering a traditional socialist explanation.

Never mind the Dutch, we need a cure for Greek disease

Federal NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair alleges that Canada is suffering from the so-called Dutch disease – a divisive and misleading diagnosis that is readily disproven and hopefully will be rejected by Canadians east and west.

According to Mr. Mulcair, the strong demand for petroleum produced from oil sands is largely responsible for the high dollar and the decline in manufacturing jobs, especially in Central Canada.

The facts, however, (as pointed out in a recent study by the Institute for Research on Public Policy) are this:

    Exchange-rate movements are being driven by high demand for all commodities, not just oil, including strong demand for the output of the mining sectors of Ontario and Quebec.
    Fifty-five out of 80 factory sectors in Canada are either unaffected by or even benefit from the high dollar, with no appreciable damage being done by a strong dollar to the food, auto, aerospace or heavy-industry sectors.
    The decline in manufacturing jobs in Canada is primarily a result of low multi-factor productivity and intense international competition, particularly from Asia.

Why The Media Has the Quebec Protests All Wrong

I've been watching the student protest movement closely from day one. I studied its emergence from a singular tuition hike issue to a movement that has now grown to reflect a deep-seated anger and distrust of the status quo; a movement that's now engulfed the entire province and threatens to topple a government.

More than 100 days into all this and I still have trouble formulating a concise and thorough explanation of what's going on -- for myself and for others. Few people, if any, can claim to have all the answers to this explosion of emotions, this eruption of resentment. This is a generation vexed. They've managed to successfully transfer some of that outrage to older generations.

Jean Charest and the implementation of Bill 78 -- an unnecessarily draconian and arrogant law that temporarily poses serious limitations on the right to protest and assemble (i.e. it becomes illegal for more than 50 people to gather and protest) -- managed to do the rest.

All the Media Money Can Buy

Shorn of our media’s preoccupation with personality conflict, tabloid gossip and cliché, the fundamental shape of American politics looks pretty simple these days. Campaigns cost money. The people with the money to pay for them are extremely wealthy. And in exchange for their money, they want more money. They get it by ensuring that the politicians who are elected write laws to their advantage (and, lately, that the politicans also appoint judges who will keep it all secret).

According to the textbooks, to say nothing of the First Amendment, the job of the journalist is to expose these arrangements. And this does happen. But it is rare. Far more frequently, we find journalists running interference for the people behind these schemes, sometimes ignoring the central role that money plays in pretty much every calculation, and sometimes attempting to sell the notion that all this is actually a good thing.

It’s Official: Watching Fox Makes You Stupider

People who work at Fox News might like to think that they are despised by real journalists only because they are conservative and most journalists are liberal. Anyone who read the admiring obituaries of William F. Buckley Jr. in mainstream and liberal outlets would know that is nonsense. Journalists, both liberals and ones with no ideology in particular, are quite capable of respecting conservative pundits and reporters who deserve their respect.

But Fox does not. The reason is not because it holds a set of values that others may not share. And that is only partially because it claims to be “Fair and Balanced” when it is neither.

Rather, it is because it fails the fundamental test of journalism: are you informing your audience? According to a new study by Farleigh Dickinson University, Fox viewers are the least knowledgeable audience of any outlet, and they know even less about politics and current events than people who watch no news at all.

Is Canada grappling with Dutch Disease?

Conventional wisdom says that Canada is fighting a crippling bout of Dutch Disease.

Canada’s petro-infused currency, which has risen 55 per cent against the U.S. dollar in the past decade, continues to linger around parity with the greenback. That is clobbering exports, making Canadian auto plants uncompetitive and hammering the manufacturing heartland of Ontario and Quebec – or so the thinking goes.

But the conventional wisdom is wrong, according to three researchers who will publish a study Wednesday that largely debunks the Dutch Disease theory, which has become a frequent talking point amid rising tensions between the oil-rich West and battered factories of the East.

JP Morgan dilemma: a nightmare with CEO Jamie Dimon, and a bigger nightmare without him

NEW YORK, N.Y.—JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was expected to face tough questioning at the bank’s annual shareholders meeting Tuesday over a $2 billion trading mistake that has cost one of his senior executives her job.

Shareholders, however, are unlikely to call for Dimon’s head. For them, facing the crisis without him might be a bigger nightmare than the trading loss itself.

“When a bank is dealing with this sort of a challenge, you want someone of his calibre to shepherd it through,” said longtime JPMorgan shareholder Michael Holland, chairman and founder of money manager Holland & Co.

That has not been a universal opinion since Thursday, when Dimon disclosed to analysts that the bank had made a bad bet with so-called credit derivatives. Since Dimon made the announcement, almost $20 billion in market value has evaporated.

A web of privilege supports this so-called meritocracy

Shortly after Mitt Romney's failed 2008 campaign for the Republican nomination his son Tagg set up a private equity fund with the campaign's top fundraiser. One of the first donors was his mum, Anne. Next came several of his dad's financial backers. Tagg had no experience in the world of finance, but after two years in the middle of a deep recession the company had netted $244m from just 64 investors.

Tagg insists that neither his name nor the fact that his father had made it clear he would run for the presidency again had anything to do with his success. "The reason people invested in us is that they liked our strategies,'' he told the New York Times.

Class privilege, and the power it confers, is often conveniently misunderstood by its beneficiaries as the product of their own genius rather than generations of advantage, stoutly defended and faithfully bequeathed. Evidence of such advantages is not freely available. It is not in the powerful's interest for the rest of us to know how their influence is attained or exercised. But every now and then a dam bursts and the facts come flooding forth.

Dial M for Murdoch

A successful politician must be able to deny the obvious: “I am not a crook” or “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” It was the British courtesan Mandy Rice-Davies, testifying during the 1963 scandal over her friend Christine Keeler’s simultaneous affairs with the British War Minister John Profumo and a Soviet naval attaché, who is credited with the definitive response to such lies. Told that her own lover, Lord Astor, denied ever having met her, she supposedly replied, “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?”

Prime Minister David Cameron told the BBC in April that “the idea there was some grand bargain between me and Rupert Murdoch—that is just not true.” The devastating May 1 parliamentary report, which concluded that Murdoch “is not a fit person” to run a major public company, offers a vivid example of why political connections have always been so important to the media mogul’s business model. The very phrase “not a fit person” is a clear signal to Ofcom, the British broadcasting regulator, which has the power to take away Murdoch’s broadcasting franchise here. Yet the sharp divisions among the select committee—whose five Conservative members all voted against the report, which passed thanks to the one Liberal Democrat and five Labour members—have blunted the report’s force while at the same time underlining just how much was at stake when Murdoch gave Cameron’s party his backing.

Government isn't obliged to bankroll its critics

It is a given that virtually everything the Harper government does is for reasons of partisan advantage.

It is also a given that in the pursuit of its own partisan advantage, it often seeks to deny the same to its opponents. It does not follow that it is always wrong to do so.

Were the government to ban opposition parties or to censor the press, it would be in clear violation of constitutionally guaranteed liberties, not to say basic norms of liberal democracy: it is difficult to think of any circumstances that would justify such draconian measures, and if there were, it would be the circumstances, not the motive — it would not be sufficient that the government "meant well."

So, too, its refusal to provide Parliament with the information it demands, whether in the matter of the Afghan prisoners or the F-35s, cannot be defended, and would not be redeemed by honourable motives. Ditto its abuse of the power of prorogation, or its habitual invocation of time allocation to shut down debate, or the vast omnibus budget bill now before the House, among a very long list.

Rupert Murdoch: I was the victim of phone-hacking cover up

Rupert Murdoch used his testimony before a U.K. inquiry on Thursday to portray himself as the victim, not perpetrator, of a cover-up over phone hacking — a twist that could certainly anger those suing his company for invading their privacy to sell newspapers.

The 81-year-old media magnate apologized. He said he had failed. He noted that the corporate cleanup of the British phone hacking scandal had cost his New York-based News Corp. hundreds of millions of dollars and transformed its culture.

“I failed, and I'm sorry about it,” Mr. Murdoch said, adding later: “We are now a new company altogether.”

Mr. Murdoch's two days of testimony, which began Wednesday, marked his attempt to corral the scandal that has rocked Britain, tainted senior politicians, prompted top police commanders and media executives to resign and affected large swathes of his media empire.

It boiled over in July after it became clear that journalists at Mr. Murdoch's now-shuttered News of the World tabloid routinely broke the law in pursuit of scoops, with Murdoch-friendly police and politicians turning a blind eye to a litany of abuses including illegal espionage and bribery.

James Murdoch Lightly Grilled

According to SEC filings, James Murdoch’s base salary as chief executive of News Corporation’s Asian and European operations was $3.4 million. He was also eligible for a performance bonus of between $6 and $12 million. And a further signing bonus of 400,000 shares of company stock—presumably to secure his services from the many rivals bidding for the talents of the Harvard dropout and failed hip-hop record producer.

Those figures are worth bearing in mind when considering Murdoch minor’s response to the admirably precise summary of Robert Jay, the attorney acting as lead inquisitor to the Leveson Inquiry into the culture practice and ethics of the press, which was set up in response to the scandal last summer over revelations that reporters on the News of the World had hacked into the voicemail of various celebrities, politicians and figures in British life. At the time the hacking took place James Murdoch was busy running the British broadcaster BSkyB, but one of the first tasks he faced when he took over News International, the family’s British newspaper interests, in December 2007 was to settle a lawsuit by Gordon Taylor, head of the British football players’ union, whose phone had been hacked. The Taylor claim was significant because it exploded News Corp.’s claim that phone hacking, which first hit the headlines here with the January 2007 arrest of News of the World royal correspondent Clive Goodman, had been limited to a lone “rogue reporter.” And in agreeing to a settlement of over $ 1 million James Murdoch was paying way over the odds, leading to suggestions that the payment was “hush money” to keep the scandal under wraps.

Meet the Media Companies Lobbying Against Transparency

News organizations cultivate a reputation for demanding transparency, whether by suing for access to government documents, dispatching camera crews to the doorsteps of recalcitrant politicians, or editorializing in favor of open government.

But now many of the country's biggest media companies, which own dozens of newspapers and TV news operations, are flexing their muscles in Washington in a fight against a government initiative to increase transparency of political spending.

The corporate owners or sister companies of some of the biggest names in journalism—NBC News, ABC News, Fox News, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Politico, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and dozens of local TV news outlets—are lobbying against a Federal Communications Commission measure that would require broadcasters to post political ad data on the internet.

As we have recently detailed, political ad data is public by law but not easy to get because it is kept only in paper files at each station. The FCC has proposed fixing that by requiring broadcasters to post online the details of political ad purchases, including the identity of the buyer and the price.

(ProPublica has been inviting readers and other journalists to send in the files to be posted as part of our Free the Files project.)

Rupert Murdoch to testify about his political influence in UK

LONDON—He was long considered one of the most important power brokers in British politics. Now, with his influence shriveled by Britain’s phone hacking scandal, media mogul Rupert Murdoch is returning to the U.K. to face questions about his ties to the country’s most senior politicians.

It could be an uncomfortable few days for Britain’s ruling class.

Murdoch is “not somebody you’d like to get into a battle with,” said Steve Fielding, the director of the Center for British Politics at the University Nottingham. “I don’t think he thinks that he has very much to lose.”

Rupert Murdoch’s appearance before Lord Justice Brian Leveson’s inquiry this week is expected to focus on the network of personal and professional ties that have bound his newspaper and television operations to some of the most senior politicians in the United Kingdom.

Those ties have frequently come under criticism, with many observers saying British politicians were scared of crossing Murdoch because of his company’s domination of the British media landscape.

NBC Fires Producer of Misleading Zimmerman Tape

NBC News has fired a producer who was involved in the production of a misleading segment about the Trayvon Martin case in Florida.

The person was fired on Thursday, according to two people with direct knowledge of the disciplinary action who declined to be identified discussing internal company matters. They also declined to name the fired producer. A spokeswoman for NBC News declined to comment.

The action came in the wake of an internal investigation by NBC News into the production of the segment, which strung together audio clips in such a way that made George Zimmerman’s shooting of Mr. Martin sound racially motivated. Ever since the Feb. 26 shooting, there has been a continuing debate about whether race was a factor in the incident.

The segment in question was shown on the “Today” show on March 27. It included audio of Mr. Zimmerman saying, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”

But Mr. Zimmerman’s comments had been taken grossly out of context by NBC. On the phone with a 911 dispatcher, he actually said of Mr. Martin, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” Then the dispatcher asked, “O.K., and this guy — is he white, black or Hispanic?” Only then did Mr. Zimmerman say, “He looks black.”