‘The company does not love you’: the editorial cartoon after Roy Peterson
From his termination at The Vancouver Sun to his role in the community of illustrators, we remember the "Great Cartoonist"
By Shannon Clarke “They’re not going to like this,” thought copy editor Cheryl Parker as she walked Roy Peterson’s last cartoon through The Vancouver Sun newsroom in 2009. The caricature showed Peterson dressed as Father Time, holding a newspaper with the headline “Newspaper terminates editorial cartoonist” and a sign that read, “The End Is Nigh!” Parker took it […]
Do Rob Ford reporters have a transparency problem?
Recent Ontario Press Council hearings called out the use of anonymous sources in the coverage of Toronto's mayor, leaving readers questioning journalism’s trustworthiness
By Luc Rinaldi On a summer afternoon in August 2011, Globe and Mail investigative reporter Greg McArthur sent an email to his editor with the subject line, “Ideas.” Inside, he suggested: “A portrait of Rob Ford as a young man—who is Rob Ford, really?” Alongside freelancer Shannon Kari, McArthur called Ford’s high school classmates and hunted down yearbooks. […]
Benghazi and the case for an ombudsman
Image via USA Today. At the end of last night’s 60 Minutes, Lara Logan kind of apologized for an earlier report on the Benghazi attack that has been shot through like Swiss cheese. As Craig Silverman and Jay Rosen have pointed out, Logan’s 85-second segment did not sufficiently address the many problems with the original […]
Falling revenues and falling axes: layoffs at Rogers Media
For the bean counters in Canadian media, it just keeps getting worse. Rogers Media—a division which includes the corporation’s radio stations, TV channels, magazines and baseball team—announced yesterday that it has laid off 94 employees, or about two percent of its workforce. The announcement comes just six months after Rogers laid off 62 workers. Consumers […]
Gawker had the story first. So what?
Edison did it first, but Westinghouse did it better—just as Gawker did it first, but the Toronto Star did it better. After reading this email exchange between Gawker features editor, Tom Scocca, and Star publisher, John Cruickshank, about the Rob Ford crack video, you have to think that being compared to the most prolific inventor […]
The Fords vs. the truth: an unfair fight
Never has an unfair fight gone on for so long. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and his brother, councillor Doug Ford, want you to believe that they are the victims; that they are trying to fight for “the little guy” in the face of fierce opposition from the left, the unions and—of course—the media. Doug Ford […]
Rob Ford’s poll numbers and the convenient narrative
Nearly as shocking as Toronto police chief Bill Blair’s press conference last week were the results of a poll which suggested that Mayor Rob Ford’s approval ratings had gone…up? Yes—from 39 percent to 44 percent, according to a poll conducted by Forum Research a few hours after Blair’s press conference. This counterintuitive bump has been […]
‘It’s real, and Ford is in it’: did the Star spike the football?
“We do not have a vendetta against Mayor Ford,” Toronto Star editor-in-chief Michael Cooke told the Ontario Press Council in September. “We simply don’t.” Does Cooke’s boss know that? On page two of Friday’s Star, publisher John Cruickshank high-stepped into the end zone, taking shots at the mayor, his brother and the “Ford acolytes” who […]
