What to do when the boss has a dumb idea

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 - 0 Comments

A few days before the 1995 Quebec secession referendum, the Montreal Gazette’s publisher, a wonderful man named Michael Goldbloom, took it into his head to run a front-page editorial in French explaining to the province’s majority why we were pretty sure No was the way to vote this thing. Several staffers sat around marvelling at this vision: a front-page editorial in the language we didn’t usually publish stuff in, signed by the boss of all of us. We huddled around a computer terminal, poring over his gentle, insistent argument.

There was a mistake in Michael’s French.

I forget what it was. Subject-verb agreement, or something similarly trivial. We sat around trying to figure out who would tell the big boss he needed to give his French a quick edit. “I’m not going to do it,” said one wide-eyed reporter. A few others voiced similar sentiments. Fix the boss’s French! Finally I said we were being silly. He’d be angrier if we ran this thing with the mistake than if we helped him fix it beforehand, and I was the guy who told Goldbloom he needed to add an ‘e’ to his adjective or whatever. Of course he fixed it immediately, thanked me offhandedly and didn’t think twice about it. But that instinct — the unwillingness to stand up to one’s employer, even if it might objectively do everyone some good — well, we’ve all seen that before.

And so we come to Jonathan Kay’s excellent column about the folly of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. It’s possible to read it and still believe a human-rights museum in Winnipeg would be an excellent idea, but that’s not the likely conclusion. Your likely takeaway would be that this thing had White Elephant written on it from the start.

Anyway, there was about a second’s gap between the voice in my head saying, “Hey, Jon, good column” and the voice saying, “I notice you didn’t write this during the decade when people named Asper ran the paper.” Continue…

This is why we can't have conspiratorial things

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 2:57 PM - 10 Comments

Jonathan Kay explains why we don’t have any good conspiracy theories.

In recent months, conspiracy theories have dominated the political discourse in the United States: Millions of Republican “birthers” believe Obama is a foreign-born, communist Muslim, or that his health-care plan is a plot to send grandma before a “death panel.” In such a climate, it is impossible to have anything approaching a rational political discourse, which is why the U.S. is so gridlocked over how to reduce its massive debt.

The Canadian political climate is far healthier, and less overheated. In Canada’s recent election campaign, we fretted about how “shrill” things got. But, by American standards, the conflict here was mild: Sure, the Tories made a big deal about how long then Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff had lived outside of the country. But they never once accused him of forging his birth certificate.
Nine candles and ten months

By Paul Wells - Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 11:56 PM - 0 Comments

This excellent article in the Globe and Mail, bearing the fingerprints of no fewer than five reporters, details CanWest’s difficulties and suggests two possible solutions: the Aspers, and apparently Leonard more than the others, might take the company private; and the company might cut the National Post loose. Senator Jerry Grafstein is listed as a possible buyer.

This news has already inspired the usual snickering from the usual suspects. It’s unfortunate that, along with the rest of their yeoman labour on this CanWest story, the Globe‘s armies weren’t also able to do what Richard Pérez-Peña, a very fine New York Times reporter working these days on the media beat, was able to do singlehandedly: put the troubles of one media corporation into a little perspective. A lot of media companies are in profound trouble — Pérez-Peña cites several cases of market capitalization falling by more than 90% in a year and a half. So several of the English-speaking world’s most venerable news outlets could be bought for a song tomorrow, if only any buyer could believe they won’t simply decline in value still further. Continue…