April 14, 2003
These words were constantly used by the media in relation to describing who was, or who should have been, fighting the war with Iraq. But the meanings that were ascribed to these words were not their plain meanings. The word "unilateral" describes actions or things that are one sided or done by one country. Similarly, "multilateral" is a term that describes more than two parties or countries. The U.S. led coalition was consistently described as unilateral, despite the fact that the coalition was made up of over 40 countries. The definition of "multilateral" is now used to mean, not several nations, but United Nations supported.
Why doesn’t the media just describe the countries in the coalition as acting without the United Nations, instead of referring to the war as a unilateral action? It appears to be an attempt to make it appear that the United States is acting alone against Iraq. Or perhaps the media gets squeamish about repeating the fact that the current hostilities were undertaken without the blessings of the United Nations.
He’s the guy
It was nice of Toronto’s Citypulse News to actually find one Iraqi Canadian that was happy to see Saddam toppled. On the day that Baghdad fell, and the story was about the residents of Baghdad who now felt free to criticize the regime, City felt it necessary to only show one Iraqi Canadian who was pleased with Saddam’s fall. Other Iraqi Canadians were interviewed in order to present the same anti-American types who were moaning about the millions of innocent civilians that were killed, etc. Despite airing both viewpoints, the news clip left no doubt about which side of the issue City was on.
Toronto Star wins award
The Toronto Star is the recipient of this years' Mitchener Award for meritorious public service journalism. Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson presented the award to the paper on April 10, for the Star’s series on race and crime. The series concluded that blacks in the city of Toronto were racially profiled by Toronto police and received harsher treatment at the hands of the police.
In presenting the award, Clarkson is quoted as congratulating the journalists involved in the series for "the finest levels of integrity, hard work, and doggedness."
Regarding their hard work and doggedness, the Star, by its own admission, put in Access to Information requests, obtained data from the Toronto Police databank and then gave it to an academic to analyze. Although it must have been tiring to fill that Access to Information request form in, and then deliver the data to an analyst, it could hardly be referred to as "doggedness." There is a school of thought that holds that retrieving information from a computer does not qualify for investigative journalism.
As for the Star’s integrity, the Toronto Police Association is suing the Toronto Star for libel, claiming that the analysis of the data was flawed. While the courts have not yet decided the matter, it has yet to be decided whether or not the paper’s series was done with integrity.
There is also the issue of whether or not is was proper for Canada’s Governor General, the head of state, to state that the Star’s series was done with integrity when that integrity has been challenged and is now before the courts.
…Since records have been kept
A recent article appearing in Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported on a compendium of climate studies. A team from Harvard University studied more than 240 scientific studies that dealt with the earth’s climate. The scientists concluded that present weather conditions are not the warmest, nor are we subject to the most extreme weather changes. The Harvard study concluded that global temperatures in the period known as the "Medieval Warm Period," between the 9th and 14th centuries, were significantly higher than they are at the present time. The result of the Harvard findings puts a damper on the popular conclusion that recent increases in global temperatures are the result of man-made activities.
Many studies and articles about global warming that are found in the media, contain the phrase "since records have been kept" to conclude that global warming is a recent occurrence. What these media reports hardly ever say is that records of global temperatures have only been kept since the 1880s, a relatively insignificant period of time in the earth’s history. All that can be gleaned from those stories is that current global temperatures are higher than they were at any time after the end of the 19th century. The current study has examined temperatures going way back by the examination of proxies such as tree rings.
One must be mindful of the time period that is being used in media reports of climate change before the current state of global temperatures can be ascertained. More often than not, the time period is not given..