Flight 111 and might-have-could-have-possibly-maybe

Friday’s much-hyped Fifth Estate documentary on the crash of Swissair Flight 111 generated much arcing and sparking about its cause but—in the end—no incendiary device, no hard evidence the tragic 1998 accident was anything but. That said, the story raised questions that deserve better than read-the-report, cone-of-silence non-responses from the RCMP and the Transportation Safety […]

The Senator, the Herald and the obituary

Senator Keith Davey died last week at 84. Davey was a Liberal backroom wizard, famous for wresting electoral triumph from the jaws of political ignominy. In 1963, for example, he helped Lester Pearson become prime minister. In 1974, he helped transform Pierre Trudeau’s then-floundering minority government into a renewed majority. Most famously, in 1979, he […]

Welcome to the rat days of summer

When did we realize we had finally entered the deeps of the news-challenged rat… er, dog days of summer? Was it when that story about the number of rats per city block in Halifax—75; You count ‘em, I’ll pass—made CBC Radio’s marquee World at Six news show last week? Or perhaps it was when we […]

Much truth in "The Truth…"

Our All The President’s Men Part page-turning thriller, part indictment of contemporary pack journalism, part thoughtful meditation on the human cost of the passion for truth, Journalist Harvey Cashore’s The Truth Shows Up: A Reporter’s Fifteen-Year Odyssey Tracking Down the Truth About Mulroney, Schreiber and the Airbus Scandal is essential (and entertaining) reading for anyone […]

Mike Duffy… you're no Mike Duffy

To paraphrase a famous American: I knew Mike Duffy, Senator, and you’re no Mike Duffy… I couldn’t help thinking that as I read Halifax Metro’s account this week of Duffy’s inane, ill-tempered and spectacularly ill-informed rant about the King’s College Journalism School. Full disclosure: I teach at King’s. “Kids who go to King’s, or the […]

The sound of stories not being told…

Russell Walker, Chair of Halifax’s Board of Police Commissioners, isn’t happy with me. It has to do with my comments two weeks back about his lack of comment on the city’s startling number of unsolved murders. I’ll save the specifics of Walker’s complaints for another column. Today I want to talk about something Walker said, […]

Media and Mulroney (Nov 15, 2007)

Canada’s media have some answering to do There are still way more questions than answers. The first, and most important, of course, is why did Brian Mulroney, a former prime minister of Canada, accept $300,000 in cash in brown envelopes at clandestine meetings with Karlheinz Schreiber, a shady German-Canadian influence peddler? A second question is […]