Snippity snap! CJR fires a dart at the Ottawa Citizen
I follow the Columbia Journalism Review's online work via its RSS feed, and the publication rarely reports on happenings north of the U.S. border. Today, however, it posted some Canadian content from the magazine's latest issue.
Unfortunately, one of our largest daily papers -- and the big media company that owns it -- comes off looking pretty backward. CJR haded out one of its negative "Darts" to the Ottawa Citizen after the paper basically ran promotional copy as front page news:
Dart to the Ottawa Citizen for a little Canadian logrolling. When the Canwest media conglomerate launched a proprietary wire service and relocated the anchor of Global National, its nightly news program, to Canada’s capital city, the Citizen flooded the zone. On its front page, the paper ran a serious-faced color photo of the newscaster graced by a ray of light, under the words “Ottawa becomes news capital of Canada.” Of the lead article’s 768 words, more than four hundred were puffy quotes and glosses from Canwest corporate honchos—the CEO and president and the chairman of the board, among others. Inside, the paper recounted the anchor’s premiere day with a “great man”-style tick tock: drinking coffee, doing a publicity interview, buying long underwear. Another article tallied the boldface names that dropped by the premiere party. Online, the articles were paired with extensive photo galleries. And a video interview. Easy to miss in all this glowing coverage was any editorial disclosure—save one slight, circuitous mention tucked at the bottom of a throwaway fact box—that the Citizen, too, is owned by Canwest. Graham Green, the Citizen’s executive editor, declined to comment on the coverage but offered this: “I think the Columbia Journalism Review has lots of things you could be looking at.”
A stellar quote from Green: It's barely grammatical and delightfully hostile. Just the image we want to project to the world.
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Hey there. Thanks for stopping by. I'm a freelance journalist and author in Montreal, Canada. I serve as an associate editor for PBS MediaShift, a website that reports on trends in new media and journalism. I edit RegretTheError.com and wrote a book of the same name. I'm also the co-author, with Michael Calce, of Mafiaboy: How I Cracked The Internet and Why It's Still Broken. Both books are listed to the right.
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