On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Listening to this installment of CBC Radio's Ideas as I type this entry:

Touring ten drought-stricken states in India transformed the acclaimed journalist Palagummi Sainath - showing him a devastating situation mostly ignored by his fellow journalists. "I felt that if the Indian Press was covering the top 5 percent, I should cover the bottom percent." He also believes the media around the world is, for the most part, imprisoned by profiteering and political constraints. A conversation with Saint Francis Xavier University's Coady Chair in Social Justice for 2015, along with excerpts from Palagummi Sainath's lecture, Media and Democracy.

And yet maybe not so weird.

http://canadalandshow.com/article/qa-paul-watson-pulitzer-prize-winning-journalist-why-he-just-resigned-toronto-star
http://www.arcticstarcreativity.com/blog/2015/7/6/on-resigning-from-the-toronto-star
http://www.arcticstarcreativity.com/blog/2015/7/8/on-war-and-the-god-fight
http://www.arcticstarcreativity.com/blog/2015/7/8/on-the-truth
http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/As+It+Happens/ID/2671299115/

One more reason why we need (more) independently-owned news services in Canada:

http://canadalandshow.com/article/postmedia-kills-cartoon-gags-staff-sun-deal

From Mark Bourrie and the Hill Times. Not sure how long you have before it goes behind a paywall...

http://www.hilltimes.com/books/news/2014/12/15/harper-clampdown-media-cuts-make-for-staged-predictable-hill-news-bourrie/40529

Okay. I've occasionally been caught doing some of the work in public over the last couple of decades in between other jobs.

(Specifically, I did courtroom art for CBC TV's Ottawa station on an irregular basis for a few years. Also, op-ed cartoons on occasion for the Algonquin Times during my second term as a full-time student at the paper's host college. Also, for local weekly newspapers. And you know about my writing contributions to spacing_ottawa.)

So perhaps I'm expected to have at least a semi-informed opinion on this issue. Probably a bit of bias as well in my comments on the subject.

The other day, one of the New York Times' editorial people was blogging in public as well, and happened to ask one of those questions that seemed to have already been answered on several other occasions over the centuries by predecessors with access to different mixes of technological tools. Some of you have mentioned it in passing or in detail, and I noticed that.

Arthur Brisbane phrased the question in this particular way, though: Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante?

(Please note well that Mr. Brisbane offered some additional clarification shortly afterwards.)

I am inclined to think that fact-checking of subjects' and interviewees' claims is very much a part of Doing the Work of being a reporter or journalist. Or even a columnist, the point of whose soap-box is to give you their informed opinion.

And mariness pointed out in passing that fact-checking even happens as a matter of routine amongst fiction writers.

(Others amongst you reading this will, I trust, disabuse us both of this notion if she's wrong?)

I could in fact stand to be more vigilant myself about this discipline. Especially since I still hope to make any part of an honest living from my writing, be it in fact or fiction.

I am not inclined to see the journalist/reporter as a dying or doomed breed, myself. Like Brooke Gladstone - I urge you to look closely at her graphic documentary/opinion, The Influencing Machine, illustrated by Josh Hartung, for some historical perspective on that line of work, by the by - I believe we're in for some interesting times on that front. But we're not going to see the profession die off.

Oh no. We're not going to be that unlucky. Or that stupid. Not from what I've seen in many quarters of the Internet, or the print, video, and radio media forms for that matter. Some of you here on my friendlist at Livejournal have been helping to make that fear a moot point, and to the good.

Keep doing the work.

I'll try to do the same on my end. Whether it's in my fact-writing or my fiction work.

Now...let the arguments flare up here, too. Okay?

Don Newman just announced his retirement plans.

The article goes into what detail it can about the background of the decision. I'm sure there's other resources elsewhere covering his career as a whole in better detail than I can here.

I just hope that Politics continues, with as solid a lead newshand as Newman has been over these years so far.