June 2007

Your monthly media supplement of seven recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch.

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1. Is CBC’s new populism perverted?
Why youth fans like me are tuning out
By Elaine Corden
The Tyee
June 21, 2007

Ideally, user participation makes an outlet like the CBC more democratic. But as we all know, the ideals of a democracy can be easily subverted, and an organized and vocal minority can quickly become the most powerful voice in a debate.

http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2007/06/21/CBC/

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Thanks to Marc Spooner for this photo of a sign spotted on the overpass at the intersection of Albert St. and Sask Drive, Regina, on the way to North Central.

As he points out, it’s a perfect advertisement for the functional and economic apartheid that sullies this fine city.

Briarpatch Magazine invites submissions for our November 2007 “precarious labour” issue. This issue will provide a critical lens on the most pressing issues facing Canadians at work, and the struggles of various sectors of the workforce for dignity, fair pay, and job security.

Briarpatch Magazine presents readers with accurate, accessible, engaging information about the world we live in, and provides the tools, strategies, and inspiration to assist in the fight for a better one. Briarpatch promotes a structural understanding of social and environmental problems and supports grassroots efforts to address them.

(Please note that queries for this issue are due on July 10, with first drafts due August 10.)

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by Kate Harries
Straight Goods
June 04, 2007

Last Thursday, during the media sessions when the Ipperwash report was released in Forest in southern Ontario, on at least two occasions, reporters pointedly asked aboriginal leaders if they consider themselves Canadian.

It appears that this is some kind of loyalty test — of the unfortunate kind that immigrants are subjected to, but one that seems very strange when the immigrants are asking the question of the original inhabitants.

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What a difference a single word makes. This article only scratches the surface of the absurdity of the US’s efforts to try a child soldier for attempting to kill a soldier of an invading army — who was at that very moment trying to kill him. Never mind that the New York Times, among other fine news establishments, refers to this child soldier as a “terrorist” with a straight face.

Generally speaking, it is illegal for ordinary people to kill other ordinary people. But the laws of war recognize that during an armed conflict, combatants on one side are supposed to try to kill combatants on the other side. If they are later captured, the opposing forces can detain them until the end of hostilities but can’t try them for murder. They have “combatant immunity”: If they killed opposing combatants, they were just doing their job.

What, then, is an “unlawful enemy combatant”? The Bush administration has long been fond of tossing around the phrase, but until the 2006 military commissions law, it had zero legal meaning.

[...]

Reading between the lines, it appears that the judges thought that the Bush administration wanted to have its cake and eat it too: declare all terror suspects “enemy combatants” in a “war on terror” and also try them for actions such as seeking to kill U.S. troops in that war. But you can’t have it both ways; under the laws of war, if Al Qaeda suspects are combatants, it’s not unlawful for them to kill U.S. troops.

[Full article.]

City For Sale?

WITH TILMA, PROFIT IS KING—AND THE KING IS NO FAN OF DEMOCRACY

by Chris Kirkland
Planet S
June 7, 2007

In a recent editorial urging the province to sign on to the Trade, Investment, and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA), Saskatoon’s CanWest daily derided critics of the deal as “the usual anti-trade and protectionist suspects.” You know, the type of nasty folks who love to use “scare tactics.”

Well, I’ve never met Theresa Dust, Saskatoon’s City Solicitor. Nor, for that matter, have I ever met Sean McEachern, a policy analyst for the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association (SUMA). I’m fairly sure, however, that neither the City of Saskatoon administration nor SUMA are organizations rife with “anti-trade and protectionist suspects,” determined to do everything in their power to destroy capitalism.

[Full article.]

By Murray Dobbin
June 8, 2007
TheTyee.ca

If the machinations going on in this country regarding so-called “deep integration” were instead a communist conspiracy to take over the country (you will, of course, have to try hard to imagine this) the news media would be blaring the story.

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[In light of our latest issue's partial focus on media in war zones, this article serves as an important reminder of the many ways that reporters can be silenced. -D.O.M.]

By Judith Matloff, Columbia Journalism Review
June 7, 2007

The photographer was a seasoned operator in South Asia. So when she set forth on an assignment in India, she knew how to guard against gropers: dress modestly in jeans secured with a thick belt and take along a male companion. All those preparations failed, however, when an unruly crowd surged and swept away her colleague. She was pushed into a ditch, where several men set upon her, tearing at her clothes and baying for sex. They ripped the buttons off her shirt and set to work on her trousers.

“My first thought was my cameras,” recalls the photographer, who asked to remain anonymous. “Then it was, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be raped.’ ” With her faced pressed into the soil, she couldn’t shout for help, and no one would have heard her anyway above the mob’s taunts. Suddenly a Good Samaritan in the crowd pulled the photographer by the camera straps several yards to the feet of some policemen who had been watching the scene without intervening. They sneered at her exposed chest but escorted her to safety.

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Your monthly media supplement of seven recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch.

Subscribe/unsubscribe to the B-List: http://www.briarpatchmagazine.com

1. Iraq: Send in the Clown
by Emine Saner
The Guardian
May 17, 2007

“It is hard to imagine how Jo Wilding’s kidnappers reacted when she told them what she was doing in Iraq. They were in Fallujah, a city under siege in 2003 - and this British woman was claiming to be a clown, in a circus she had brought to a country in the middle of a war.”

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/17/1274/

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contents

Community Radio & the Frequency of Struggle
by Sharmeen Khan
Challenges & opportunities on Canadian airwaves.

PropAfghanda
by Anthony Fenton
The battle for Canadian hearts & minds: If maintaining Canada’s Afghan occupation requires a “perception war” on Canadian soil, then are Canadians now the enemy?

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