Patrick Watson vs CTV: the case of Conrad Black

Patrick Watson (1980) vs CTV (2007): the case of Conrad Black: The Canadian Establishment and governance.

Throughout the trial of Conrad Black I wondered why Patrick Watson‘s articulate and well-researched CBC documentary entitled the Canadian Establishment (1980), was not viewed on CBC. Conrad Black was known for a strong and effective offensive tactics when dealing with his image management in the press and until the guilty verdict became publicized the media was discouraged from entirely objective coverage. This may change now that the jury has revealed to their decision. CTV coverage reveals a pro-Black bias describing him as stoic, proud, even …onian, in the face of this trial, almost agreeing with Conrad Black that he is somehow above the law. However, he did glare and skowl at the jury when they gave their decision. They describe how he helped every community he was a part of. They admire his rise from his university education to an emerging career with the press to the circle of the uber-wealthy. They expect him to stand up to this and continue to argue for his own innocence. He was found guilty of obstruction of justice where he removed evidence from his Toronto office and of email fraud which hold a combined possible sentence of 10 to 65 years. Charges of racketeering were dismissed. Nonetheless he stole millions of dollars from Hollinger, and continues to feel no remorse. There appears to be a strong empathetic response to the potential of his doing his real jailtime in an American jail where he is actually going to have to do work such as laundry. There is speculation and some relief that since he is so ‘astute’ in terms of money that he will have provided for himself and his family, Barbara Amiel, their son and daughter, Alanna in some ‘legal’ fashion. CTV journalists are comparing the American and Canadian legal systems in terms of fairness and approaches to access to jury information. They mused about whether American courts would be harsher on Black and his co-accused than their Canadian counterparts who would be more influenced by Black’s position of power, wealth and prestige. They seem to admire Black for his intelligence and his ability to write and do research and imagine him using his minimum security prison to study and write. Although others argue that an American minimium security prison is not an exclusive club prison like those in Canada and Black will not have access to a computer. CTV interviewees describe Black as someone very concerned with his place in history. CTV journalists look for ‘silver lining’ in his situation. They wonder how Black will survive from now to his sentence hearing by Judge … in November. He is no longer a Canadian citizen since he abandoned it to become a British Lord. This means he has no rights to go to Canadian jails which are considered to be friendlier to the uber-wealthy. Black is expected to begin quickly to appeal the jury’s findings. This will not be stalling the sentencing hearing.

What makes Watson’s (1980) revelations so compelling at this time is the way in which he reveals Black’s roots as outsider on Bay Street until he was able to take advantage of widows of Establishment members to get his toe in the door. While Black’s father had some wealth through his brewery, his family lacked the prestige and power of the Canadian Establishment. According to Watson, it was during the era of Conrad Black that the Establishment shifted towards an even more self-serving attitude of entitlement. His business ethics predates that of the mean-spirited arrogance of the financeers in the 1990s. He seems to embody that which is dysfunctional and unsustainable in a social world corrupted by extremes of wealth and poverty.

My own concern with Black was the role he played as media mogul in obstructing access to an objective press, a keystone of democracy. Like the the New Brunswick-Bahamas Irvings prior to their ethical turn, mass media moguls adopt Friedman’s motto that their sole responsibility is to make money. Black claimed that he hoped to provide more of a pro-business, economic efficiency viewpoint to counteract the perceived social justice bias of the media (Flynn-Burhoe).

Do we secretly admire white collar criminals and their brilliant lawyers? Conrad Black and three others are accused of stealing $60M from shareholders to fatten their 5- and 7-figure salaries. Prosecutor Jeffrey Cramer claimed in his opening statement that media mogul Black failed to provide the public with objective accounts of world affairs.

read more | digg story

CTV News. 2007. Conrad Black. July 13, 2007.

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2006. “Media and Objectivity: a Selected Timeline of Social Events.” >> papergirls. December 6.

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007.

“Is the Mass Media Coverage Biased in Favour of Conrad Black?”>> papergirls. May 9, 2007.

Watson, Patrick. 1980. The Canadian Establishment. CBC.

“Patrick Watson.” Museum TV Archives.

Nessun Dorma by PavaPotts: humility and ectasy, from selling cells to elevating souls

In the mythopoetic language of the aria Nessun Dorma from the Italian opera Turandot by Giacomo Puccini’s (1858-1924) the nameless prince seeks to enrapture the cold-hearted judge. Lew (1997) described the opera’s “underlying theme of the law: La legge è questa” which is “almost like a magic spell.” The Unknown Prince enters the contest and wins. But he wants something more authentic in his relationship with the princess than simply solving her riddles. The aria Nessun Dorma refers to a sleepless night through which his judge, the vinegar-souled princess, seeks to deprive the prince of his prize. He sings of a secret hidden within him, of dissolving the silence and finally of conquest. See Lew (1997).

Knox described how the Idol judge vinegar-souled Simon Cowell could not help smiling as he listened to Paul Potts’ rendition of  Nessun Dorma. His smile broke his face in half.

Journalist Jack Knox (2007) described 36-year old Welsh mobile-phone salesman, Paul Potts as the “classic underdog” looking like he “had been beaten all [his] life. ” Potts according to Knox was “poor, dumpy, shlumpy, overweight, slump-shouldered, with a gut-over-the-belt frame.”

The story of Paul Potts sharply contrasts with that of Joshua Bell, one of the world’s greatest violinists, who played his multimillion-dollar Stradivarius for spare change, incognito, outside a bustling Metro stop in Washington in a social science experiment. Commuters hurried by and only a rare few stopped to listen and were enraptured including one mesmerized very young child who tugged at his mother’s hand as she rushed to her next appointment (Weingarten 2007).

Location, location, location.

If Paul Potts had chosen to sing Nessun Dorma in that Metro stop in Washington in April 2007 would he have melted the hearts of vinegar-souled passersby? One thing is for sure, from now on, thanks to a combination of the popularity of Idol-style shows, Youtube and email if Potts were to sing for busy commuters he, unlike Joshua Bell would not go unnoticed.

to be continued . .

Notes

The Prince
Nessun dorma, nessun dorma … Tu pure, o Principessa, Nella tua fredda stanza, Guardi le stelle Che tremano d’amore E di speranza.	No one sleeps, no one sleeps… Even you, o Princess, In your cold room, Watch the stars, That tremble with love And with hope.
Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me, Il nome mio nessun saprà, no, no, Sulla tua bocca lo dirò Quando la luce splenderà, Ed il mio bacio scioglierà il silenzio Che ti fa mia.	But my secret is hidden within me; My name no one shall know, no, no, On your mouth I will speak it* When the light shines, And my kiss will dissolve the silence That makes you mine.
Chorus
Il nome suo nessun saprà E noi dovrem, ahimè, morir.	No one will know his name And we must, alas, die.
The Prince
Dilegua, o notte! Tramontate, stelle! All’alba vincerò!	Vanish, o night! Set**, stars! At daybreak, I shall conquer!

From Lew (1997).

The copyright for the Italian libretto of Turandot has been held by G. Ricordi & Co. since 1926 (Lew 1997). aria Nessun Dorma

 

Keywords

urban ethnography, moral mathematics, slow world, everyday.life, digg.com, digg story, youtube

Webliography

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007. “Pearls before Breakfast: Story Dugg by papergirls.” >> papergirls. Uploaded May 16, 2007.

Knox, Jack. 2007. “Internet’s Idol’s Story Gives Hope to Us All.” Victoria, British Columbia: Times Colonist Sunday Edition. June 24, 2007. p. A3.

Lew, Mark D. 1997. “Turandot: Commentary on Symbolism, Poetry, and Nessun Dorma.” Last Updated September 29, 1999. Accessed June 24, 2007.

Weingarten, Gene. 2007. “Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour?” Washington Post. April 8. Page W10.

Taxonomy, empty lots, roadsides

Louise was breathless with excitement and it didn’t help that Reba was pulling at the leash. As usual I was on my knees pulling out Swamp grass and clover from around the heather. She was so proud of her beautiful Labrador Retriever who had just found a trail hidden among the overgrown bushes at the end of an empty lot off Wilmot Road. It was just a few minutes from our hill-side homes overlooking Cowichan Bay. The lot was not really empty as it was completely overgrown with clover, daisies, Swamp grass, wild blackberries and dozens of other plants many of which I had been battling as weeds for the last 18 months in the garden. Here they flourished and were stunningly beautiful swaying in the breeze.

Suddenly the quiet was broken with industrial size squawking. It reminded me of the sound of raptors in Jurassic Park. As we zigzagged through patches of thorny plants we could see huge heron nests that seemed to be balanced precariously atop Alder trees that were too thin and fragile for this weight and responsibility. The loud squawking seemed to increase and decrease in lulls which I thought at first was due to our arrival or maybe even an attack of an eagle. But as I stood silently watching I could see the adult herons incessantly leaving the nests and returning with food for their offspring. The young were rowdy and ungainly and the branches thrashed as they competed for food. One graceless young heron perched precariously on a branch that bent and swayed under his weight.

All around us underfoot were trunks of trees cut long ago to clear the land to the edge of this ravine tucked in behind Pritchard. The ravine meanders with branches leading into Cowichan Bay estuary somewhere near Wessex Inn.

Roger Tory Peterson¹ reminded us that the majority of flowers that grow in vacant lots and along roads in North America are aliens. Hundreds of wayside plants came from Europe. Some came from gardens but most came unseen as seeds mixed in with shipments from across the sea. The first known station for a foreign plant is often at seaports or along a railroad track. In the prairies certain flowers came at first to airfields. In 1968 Peterson had already noticed that the best place to find remnants of the disappearing prairie flowers was along the railroad right-of-way. Roadsides are relatively poor because of mowing and plant-spraying operations. Even coastal marshes have lost their flowers through ditching and draining (1986:x11).

Flowers are rooted to earth, often separated by broad barriers of unsuitable environment from other ‘stations’ of their own species. “Therefore over the centuries, subtle differences have often developed with strains that are so marked that botanists have given them varietal names. Others are ignored because they would overburden an already complex taxonomy. Or a flower, from the same seed, may be depauperate in a sterile soil or where lack of competition has favoured it in some way. Familiar flowers than can look unfamiliar. Some hybridize (Peterson 1968:xii).”

“What of the future of rare native wildflowers? Because of the attrition of habitat, some are in a precarious position. Bogs along the southern margins of glaciated country are becoming fewer and orchids requiring bog conditions are harder to find. When a forest has been cut, its shade-loving orchids may also disappear, and half a century or more may pass before succession makes the forest suitable again for them. How can they return? […] Can seeds remain viable in the soil for half a century or more, until succession renders their habitat suitable again? We know little about this (Peterson 1968:xii).”

We entered the trail that Reba had shown us and there was a third space of semi-tropical rain forest. This hidden treasure is tucked away in the village of Cowichan Bay. A small stream, that dries up in the summer, winds through this hidden ravine. It is a corridor of towering douglas fir, cedar trees and arbutus trees with dense foliage that is tucked in between developed areas on either side. Sword and maiden-hair ferns and a wide diversity of wildflowers grow in the cool, moist mini-ecosystem. A few villagers have maintained a trail with an almost invisible entrance at the end of a clearing on Wilmot. I am not sure that it is precisely located on the Flickr map but the coordinates are (48°44’23.86″N, 123°37’39.45″ W).

This is linked to my Flickr and to my Google Earth Community and will be linked to Youtube, Facebook and Google Video.

Notes
1. I usually try to separate my own phrasing from that of an author whose works I am citing. In this case these words are a blend of direct quotations from Peterson’s Introduction and my own editing to shorten and summarize. His phrases and wording are so exact, poetic and appropriate that I wanted to enhance their metaphorical quality by keeping them intact. If I included all the “” the result would be too cumbersome.

Bibliography

Peterson, Roger Tory. 1968. “Introduction.” in Peterson, Roger Tory, McKenny, Margaret. 1968. A Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-central North America: A Visual Approach. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Peterson, Roger Tory. 1968. “Survival.” in Peterson, Roger Tory, McKenny, Margaret. 1968. A Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-central North America: A Visual Approach. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
p. xii.

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007. “Taxonomy, empty lots, roadsides.” >> Speechless. June 18.

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007. “Taxonomy, empty lots, roadsides.” http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddp3qxmz_304fp4w32 June 18.

Digitage Web 2.0

Logos from Web 2.0 are caught in the web somewhere between NASA photos of deep space, science fiction landscapes of our inner space, the synapses of the brain, the virtual space that is not abstract, imagined or really real.

Web 2.0, is a term coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2004 for a series of conferences on a revivified Internet. O’Reilly (2005) in what is now considered to be his seminal article claimed that, “If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005). He contrasted Web 1.0 with Web 2.0 by citing examples: DoubleClick vs Google AdSense, Ofoto vs Flickr, Britannica Online vs Wikipedia, personal websites vs blogging, domain name speculation vs search engine optimization, page views vs cost per click, publishing vs participation, content management systems vs wikis directories (taxonomy) vs tagging (”folksonomy”) and stickiness vs syndication. The conceptual map his team devised provides a sketch of Web 2.0 showing social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.

Although some argue that it does not exist as anything more than geek jargon, for this new user, it is a promising and surprising paradigm shift in the Internet and in software development. I began blogging using Web 2.0 freeware in September 2006. Numerous users like myself have access to sophisticated, ever-improving software technologies since the cost of development is shared among enthusiastic nerds and geeks (in a good way). Freeware on Web 2.0 is not proprietary by nature but is capable of generating huge profits because of the viral way in which users share in the development, marketing and growth of the product while improving connectivity and in content in the process.

Note: June 2007. This image was included in Weinreich’s slideshare album with a layer of text he added:New Generation Social Marketing. He had to resize the image to the PowerPoint format. It is credited to me in the transcript. It is fascinating how digitage such as this has a potential for producing offshoots. I am investigating the potential of slideshare for managing teaching, learning and research digitage (slides) in one place. I started to put them in my Flickr albums. Since I first created this image I have begun to use YouTube, Google docs, iGoogle and Facebook so there are several layers of text orbits to be added . . .

Key words: slideshare, academic, blog, blogging, collaboration, presentation, web2.0, powerpoint, slides, sharing presentations, slideshare, academic, collaboration, presentation, web2.0, powerpoint, slides, sharing presentations, Tim O’Reilly, wordpress.com, vastation, synaptic gasp, swicki, synapses, synaptic cleft, synaptic gap, rapture of the deep internet, photoshop, neuroscience, neural architectonics, mind-brain, googleearth, gather, frimr, flickr, digitage, delicious, cybernarcosis, cyberdelirium, cyberdeliria, creative commons, consciousness, bricoleuse, blogspot, blogging, art and science, technology, mind, Adobe Photoshop

Selected webliography

Tim O’Reilly, 2005. “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software”. Uploaded 09/30/2005. Accessed January 6, 2007.

Connectivity, Youtube, Google Videos, Google docs and more

In my ongoing investigation of connectivity innovations in Web 2.0 I have uploaded shaky (longtake) videos to a YouTube oceanflynn account using the Canon PowerShot A550’s basic video clip capacity. As YouTube background I used a Flickr image adapting Escher’s rippled reflections and Davidhazy’s macro shots of water drops. Flickr images cannot be used directly with YouTube so I used the .jpg url of that image from my Speechless @ WordPress uploads. YouTube seems to limit uploads to one a day? The tags are limited and so are categories. I use travel. Uploading is very fast and easy. There may be fewer views of my slow world videos than on Google Videos. There is more room for descriptions on Google Video. I think the full upload time is longer. Both are seamlessly integrated with WordPress through a simple html-like code using [] brackets instead of <> youtube = and googlevideo =

I am using Google docs as a space for note-taking related to my YouTube and Google Videos. It allows me to add images seamlessly with no problems formatting. I appreciate the ‘remove coding’ icon so I can keep coding as plain as vanilla. It helps me keep track of bibliographies and webliographies although these are also on delicious. Google docs also allows for lots of tags (folksonomy is the key to connectivity). Although these docs are often a mess of collaged text, urls and images, they help me keep track of information such as First Nations preferred names for places, evidence of benign colonialism, etc.

I uploaded some digital images from our two excursions this weekend to oceanflynn @ the Google Earth community.

I have bookmarked the YouTube videos on the social bookmarking site, ocean.flynn delicious

video.google

googlevideo

I’ve also subscribed to this at my Google Reader as .rss feed. http://del.icio.us/rss/ocean.flynn/youtube

del.icio.us/ocean.flynn/first.nations

http://del.icio.us/rss/ocean.flynn/first.nations