Ryerson Review of Journalism, 2005

“Jennifer Dettman, executive producer, helped create the show’s concept by targeting audiences with Stroumbo’s youthful personality. “I suppose that’s cool,” says Stroumbo, “because for the longest time, getting people under the age of 15 engaged on a Newsworld program was rare.” Doyle, on the other hand, argues that no program on television should be so outlandish and different that it alienates a portion of the viewers by age group. But Stroumbo denies that the show is doing that. “People say the show is aimed at getting younger viewers,” he says. “But if it were, why would I interview a holocaust survivor?”“

“In the meantime, Stroumbo sticks to advice he learned early in his career from Canadian radio guru Bob Mackowycz: Never talk down to your audience, and fuck ‘em if they don’t get it.”

Look at Peter Kent.
What does he know?
And why should only CTV people like Duffy and Wallin get into the Senate? Where’s Patrick Watson? Not savvy enough to rate? In truth, probably more so than anyone else.
Why doesn’t the CBC just take over the country, and put an end to getting its butt kicked all the time for being “lefties”?
Rise up, CBC.
Rise up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nosey camera guy interrupts George’s attempt to fly the friendly skies

And if you do go to each of these three pages, you’ll find them to be a very quick read.
That’s because the bio’s are identical on each page.
It means that the bio prepared by the CBC which is used for marketing and public relations (some might wish to say propaganda) is the same one that appears, word for word, on the Wikipedia entry for Jian.

Where advancing outside interests is more important to an editor than advancing the aims of Wikipedia, that editor stands in a conflict of interest.
A Wikipedia conflict of interest (COI) is an incompatibility between the aim of Wikipedia, which is to produce a neutral, reliably sourced encyclopedia, and the aims of an individual editor.
COI editing involves contributing to Wikipedia in order to promote your own interests or those of other individuals, companies, or groups. Where advancing outside interests is more important to an editor than advancing the aims of Wikipedia, that editor stands in a conflict of interest.

~ WIKIPEDIA

This begs a few simple questions.
Can you trust a Wikipedia entry that’s written by the individual’s employer and their promotions department?
Can you subsequently trust that employer or that individual?

Wikipedia’s entry for Jian is the most extensive, given as it is to repeating the same thing twice:

- “He is also a writer whose editorials and opinion pieces have been published in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, and The International Herald Tribune.”
- “Ghomeshi’s opinion pieces have been published in the Sunday Washington Post, The National Post, The International Herald Tribune.”

But for anyone interested in reading the editorials that Jian wrote for The Guadian, The Washington Post or  The International Herald Tribune, they’re going to find these very difficult to locate.
We can only hope that Jian will be more helpful with his citations in future updates.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let’s not start with the obvious (the “brooding hipster” host), that would be too easy.

Instead, let’s talk about how this doesn’t seem to be much different then any other documentary about World War 2 that I’ve seen, except instead of one or two boring hours this docu-series goes on for six boring hours.  Is this really necessary, I mean REALLY ?  The content is interesting, but that doesn’t give any credit to the producers because the quality is lacking.  This could easily be something I watched in history class years ago when I was in highschool.  The same black and white clips, the same experts with accents from England sitting in front a boring grey backdrop.

Speaking of backdrops, George is standing in a set that looks like it’ s the same set Diane Buckner stands in front of on the Dragon’s Den.  I wonder why they choose George ?  His young voice seems like a mismatch for this particular topic, and it seems to be the only difference between this documentary and the one’s I’ve watched in highschool.  I chuckle to myself as I think, is George learing about the war as he narrates ?  It must be hard for him to sound like an authoritative figure on this subject, when we watch him try his hand at comedy five days a week on The Hour.  I turn to Twitter to gain real-time perspectives on George’s hosting abilities, most of the feedback is good, but this one Tweet made me laugh -

“Is anyone else watching Love, Hate and Propoganda doc on CBC hosted by @strombo? So creepy. Especially since @strombo’s voice is so calm…”

Looks like other people were taken aback by his casual, laid back delivery.

At least he tries to look serious.

His lack of authority summons up a  kind of  “learn a-long with George” feeling, but then again he is just the narrator and he has a nice sounding voice.  George explains why he signed on in an interview stating ” “I initially didn’t really see where I could bring something different, because so many documentaries have been done really well before,” Stroumboulopoulos said. “But then the idea came of dealing with propaganda, and how the war was sold, and how the world came not just to the brink of madness but to a colossal state of madness, and it was all through messaging.”

Really now ?  Do you really think the other documentaries didn’t pursue the topic of the propaganda used to sway a country to want to exterminate a whole race of people ?  I would say, most of the documentaries heavily focus on this fact because it is the most unbelievable, unimaginable thing to fathom that Hitler could persuade people to commit such heinous crimes.  That one man could gain such mind control over a nation to begin one of the most brutal genocides in history.  The mind control aspect of this war is in fact much more interesting than any other aspect that pertains to the WWII many would argue.  Has George been hiding away with Anne Frank ?

George goes on to say  “There was just a lot of stuff I didn’t know.”  Yeah,  no kidding.

CBC’s radio music service is redundant and useless, particularly when private broadcasters are already regulated to provide Canadian content.
We don’t need the government to give us Radio 2 and 3 when they’re nothing more than a Muzak track. If these channels were self-supporting then we might actually see evidence of a broadcaster giving the audience what it wants instead of telling them this is what’s good for you.

We need more diversity, more experimentation, and more progress in public affairs than simply importing traditional, conforming media on to the web.
And it’s becoming more apparent all the time that eventually we’ll have to do it ourselves.

As the country went wild with jubilation, CBC News had nothing.
Not even the smallest effort to be part of the excitement.
A giant expensive broadcasting facility in Vancouver sat idle.
No man-in-the-street interviews, no commentary, nothing LIVE from Vancouver or anywhere.
In fact it seemed as if the CBC went out of its way to make sure that no one was distracted from watching CTV.
A brief mention at the top of the hour, and it’s on to The Passionate Eye and the old standby – The Royals!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.