TORONTO — Increasingly, there are three things I dislike about our modern mainstream news media. First, is the growing penchant to create scandal where none exists. Second, is the ubiquitous assumption that audiences are stupid. Third, is the mounting evidence that maybe we are.
Who needs a real scandal when we can make […]
TORONTO – The January issue of Golf Digest is on the newstands now and it is a fine illustration of the perils of magazine publishing and its long lead times. The cover story (illustrated above) is 10 tips Obama can take from Tiger. Ahem, as they say in the biz.
“Ahem,” […]
TORONTO — Cable TV customers of Canada’s Rogers Communications Inc. will now be able to access their paid TV content through the Rogers web site and view it online. Rogers announced the new online service that further merges the TV and Internet worlds this week, and Coffee learned about it from ITBusiness.ca.
As an update to […]
TORONTO — Further to my post on Monday, I’d like to elucidate some of the “why” behind my unsolicited (and unrequited) advice to Tiger Woods. I advised then, and reaffirm now, that Tiger shouldn’t follow the reams of PR advice being proffered by experts in the media.
The show gets weirder
In a truly Alice in Wonderland […]
TORONTO — This just in… Michael Jackson is still dead. Meanwhile, in the first news story that threatens to knock MJ off the tabloid covers, Tiger Woods is still not talking about his mysterious midnight meandering early Friday morning that ended with him briefly in the hospital and, less briefly, on every newscast in […]
DUBAI — I had an unusual chance on Wednesday to watch the back end of U.S. president Barack Obama’s press conference on health care. He answered a number of questions
with answers that were, for a politician, unusually lengthy and detailed. The last question was off-topic, asking for his opinion of the hoopla surrounding the arrest […]
DUBAI — An article in today’s Los Angeles Times provides good evidence that the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan “gets it” when it comes to counter-insurgency warfare there. The article announces a new U.S. military policy to forego body counts in future press releases.
For some time now, ISAF and U.S. military spokespeople have touted the […]
LIMBO — So what?
I mean, really. So, what?
You’d think the Earth had stopped spinning on its axis, if all you had access to was American “news” media. Note that I put quotation marks around “news” because there’s not much news on American “news.”
As soon as rumours began circulating about Michael Jackson’s death, all the major […]
CAIRO – Just a very quick post to comment on a brief moment, well in fact about five minutes, of unusual oddness. Not to be confused with run-of-the-mill oddness, mind you, which abounds in my circles these days.
As I returned to my hotel room, the message light was flashing on the telephone. This, on its […]
CAIRO — Egypt is gripped by swine flu. Well, as gripped as a country can be where there is not a single solitary case of the H1N1 virus. Yet.
On arrival at Cairo International Airport, which is slightly larger than the airport in Kelowna B.C., I was greeted after being disgorged like undercooked fish from the […]